5. Isla
5
ISLA
T he word lie hasn’t stopped echoing inside my skull since my father asked the question long minutes ago.
A question I’ve yet to answer, too shocked to form the syllables of Behati’s name. If Taytah’s advisor lied to get me to travel to Glace, what about her promise to watch over Shoshair?
As I finally enter my parent’s suite after them, I wet my throat. “Dádhi, can you ask Shoshair if she’s all right?”
“Her illness was a ruse to keep you in Luce,” he mutters, clapping the heavy wooden door shut. “But you already know that.”
I roll a lock of hair around my unsteady fingers. “I do but…but I sort of made her truly ill with a fungi elixir. Long story short, she had an adverse reaction to the tonic, and I panicked and brought her to Shabbe. Behati healed her and promised to take care of her, but…” Shame has my eyes darting to the floorboards, which are the same deep-gray as the walls. “Please check on her, Dádhi?”
After a tremendously long beat, he says, “She’s fully recovered.”
I bat my lids. “Is she very cross with me?”
He sighs. “No.”
“…What about the two of you?”
“We’re not angry; we’re—” He looks toward my mother for help finishing that sentence, but my mother is adrift in some contemplation that’s bent her brows and glazed her eyes. “Fallon?”
She snaps out of her daze. “Was it Behati?” she asks. “Was she the one who mentioned a mate?”
“Obviously, since Meriam’s here,” he grumbles as though Behati and my great-grandmother were accomplices in a grand plot to torment him.
“Why would Behati lie about this?” I ask.
“Because if she’d told you the true reason your mother and I wanted to keep you in Luce, you wouldn’t have made the trip.”
Goosebumps riddle my skin. “What is the true reason?”
My father strolls deeper into the room, toward an emerald velour armchair in the corner, and drops onto its tufted arm. After stretching his legs out in front of him and hooking his ankles together, he finally replies, “A prophecy.”
“From how worried Mádhi looks, I’m guessing the prophecy has nothing to do with me finding a mate?”
“No.”
“Well, rip off the bandage already.” When neither speaks, I ask the question sprinting through my mind. “Do I perish?”
“Of course not.” My father’s voice snaps like lightning.
I glance at the swatch of blue beyond the skylight, expecting it to deepen, at any moment, to gray and marble with one of his temper-made storms. Sure enough, the sky is acquiring a steely luster, but is it my father’s doing, or is this the weather Konstantin mentioned earlier to deter me from leaving?
“Well, that’s a relief,” I finally breathe out.
“You kill someone,” he says. “A Glacin royal.”
Although the thought of hurting Konstantin did graze my mind earlier, I wouldn’t actually have gone through with murder.
Holy Cauldron, what if my Crow magic hadn’t been stifled, and my iron talons had come out, and I’d inadvertently dug them into the king’s throat?
My complexion must be bleak because my mother takes ahold of my shoulders and gives them a gentle squeeze. “The prophecy could be irrelevant, since the person you were foreseen killing is already dead.”
“Yet Daya says the prophecy endures, Fallon.”
My mother’s face pivots in my father’s direction. “We saw the sword go through her ribs.”
In spite of the ringing in my ears, I latch on to the pronoun my mother has just used: her not his . I don’t murder Konstantin—somewhat of a relief. Nevertheless, I murder someone close to him who’s already dead? I run through the female side of his family tree until I come up with two candidates: his mother and sister.
I clutch my elbows, wincing when the sharp bones rub against my scorched palms. I let them fall back along my sides, but not before my perceptive mother spots the blisters and sets about healing them with a sigil.
As the bubbled skin smooths, I ask, “Who does the Cauldron see me offing? Konstantina or Alyona?”
“Alyona.” My father’s answer intensifies the thudding at my temples.
“Could she have been resurrected?” I ask.
“Not even my mother—the most powerful Shabbin alive—can resurrect a body twenty-five years later,” Mádhi murmurs.
I drop onto the brocade-covered bench at the foot of their bed. “But the Cauldron can, can’t it?”
The look my parents exchange tells me they’ve already considered it.
I frown. “Though, why would it resurrect someone who abhorred its creations?”
After a beat of silence, I suggest, “Iron has a similar appearance to pewter. Perhaps Konstantin made a show of his sister’s death to appease his people, but didn’t actually go through with it? I heard he keeps a portrait of her on his castle wall.”
My father folds his arms, straining the black leather jacket he wears over black leather pants—his usual accoutrement, though tonight, his jacket buttons are made of polished gold instead of stained wood. “The boy was always soft when it came to Alyona.”
Another look passes between my parents; another silent conversation.
“Please tell me whatever it is you’re keeping from me.”
After a beat, my father says, “He had his sister tossed into the ocean after running her through with his blade.”
“Which is a typical traitor’s burial in Glace,” Mádhi counters.
“It’s only a burial if the person is truly dead.”
“Aodhan and a few others surveyed the ocean and shores for days after her body was disposed of,” my mother counters.
My gaze pings between the two before sticking to the golden bands twinkling on my mother’s bicep. “Konstantin owes you a favor!” I gasp. “Ask him if he let his sister live.”
“No,” my parents snap in unison. At least, they’re in agreement on something.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not wasting a bargain on what we can and will uncover for ourselves,” my father says.
“Perhaps I fish her corpse out of the ocean, and that’s why the Cauldron pictures me killing her?” I venture.
My father grimaces. “After two plus decades, there wouldn’t be much left to fish out.”
“Good point.” I massage my now-queasy stomach. “Do you think the prophecy has anything to do with the civil unrest?”
Dádhi’s lids flex. “How do you know about the unrest?”
“Bisnonno told me there’s been many accidents on the railway, and new weaponry called shotguns is cropping up everywhere—principally in human hands—causing quite the carnage.”
“What else did your mother’s garrulous grandfather tell you, khráach?”
I roll my eyes at the absurdity of his query. My father’s always the first one to fill me in on political upheavals. I take it that he’s either jealous Justus beat him to it, or he really doesn’t want me knowing anything about Glace.
“He mentioned it all started when Konstantin issued an edict granting shifters equal rights and privileges as Faeries to entice Crows and Serpents into moving to Glace.”
“Did he also happen to mention that most Glacins believe we prey on human babes and feed off them to preserve our youth and immortality?”
“No.” I scrunch my nose. “Do the Northerners actually believe that?”
“They don’t know any better,” my mother says with a sigh.
“Since Alyona loathed— loathes shifters, it would make sense that if she’s alive, she’s the one stirring up trouble, no?” I ask.
“Or her brother is,” Dádhi mutters.
I frown. “How would that benefit him?”
“Makes it swifter to pick off one’s dissenters. Also, it keeps him from ratifying the ‘land grant law’ that would give humans access to living in pureling neighborhoods.”
My mother hisses. “Not only would that make him cruel but also twisted.”
“No king likes to have enemies.” Though I cannot peer into my father’s mind, the anger that pours off him is so potent that I sense he’s reminiscing about the coup against him and our people, the one perpetrated by Costa Regio.
Unless he’s dwelling on the Mahananda Yudh —or Battle of the Cauldron, as people outside Shabbe refer to the terrifying night when the first Akwale drained the source of all magic to protest Taytah’s coronation.
My mother purses her lips. “Konstantin’s nothing like the other Faerie kings you’ve known. He’s kind.” Under her breath, she adds, “Probably too kind for his own good, really.”
“If the Cauldron sees me unaliving Alyona, and not the other way around, then why are you two so worried in the first place?”
My mother comes to sit beside me and cocoons one of my healed hands between hers. “We’re worried because, if Konstantin intentionally spared her, then that would mean he’s not a true friend to shifters.”
“You broke our obsidian curse, Mádhi.” I smile to show her that I’m not scared—because I’m not. What I am, though, is a tad confused as to why I take Glacin justice into my own hands, but I trust the Cauldron has its reasons.
She strokes my knuckles with her thumb, her sparkly black varnish shimmering brightly in spite of the dull light dribbling from the domed window. “Remember when Aoife went missing for a month?”
I nod. I may have been very young, but I recall with perfect clarity the panic that had swept through the Sky Kingdom when my mother’s best Crow friend up and vanished from my father’s mind link reach.
At first, we’d all believed a Shabbin had cursed Aoife into becoming a forever-Crow—something which had been done before—and my grandparents had carried out nonstop interrogations. But then Imogen had caught wind of a conversation between two Faeries in our own kingdom about a new cage.
My mother glamoured Imogen and herself in order to infiltrate the group of antimorphs and be led into a dungeon. There, they’d found Aoife, speared through the chest onto a rod of obsidian welded on both ends to the sides of a cage. Their rage had been so unbridled that, by the time my father arrived with Erwin, the dungeon’s floor, walls, and ceiling were crimson with blood.
They’d freed Aoife, whose body couldn’t heal as long as the volcanic stone was wedged through the organ that sustained her. For weeks after her liberation, Imogen’s sister had remained in a coma. Her convalescence had lasted so long that many feared the spear had caused irreparable damage.
It hadn’t.
Mádhi shudders, no doubt reliving the atrocious memory. “It is time to claim my bargain.”
Is she imagining Konstantin and Alyona dragging me into a dungeon and goring me with obsidian?
“The second we claim it,” my father says, “he’ll know we suspect him.”
“Actually…” My mother’s eyes shimmer with relief. “If he’d never met Isla, then asking him to spare her would’ve been suspicious, but now that she’s no longer a stranger…”
My father’s eyes squeeze as though he’s not quite convinced, but then the severe line of his shoulders relaxes. “You’re right. But I want to work on the wording. I want it to be airtight. Not a single loophole to be found. In case he is the reason Alyona survived.”
“How do I do it?” I ask. “How do I kill her?”
“With a dagger similar to the ones the twins carry on their persons,” Mádhi answers.
I frown. “Why in the world would I use a dagger when I have talons and nifty blood?”
“We’re guessing that something will block your magic,” Dádhi says.
“Like a ward?” I ask.
Mádhi rolls her lips.
Dádhi rolls his harder. “Like an amulet.”
My head jounces. “An amulet?”
“For his coronation, Meriam cast an amulet in the Cauldron and gifted it to him to protect him from being harmed by iron.”
“I still don’t understand why she had to go and make him a hallowed bauble,” my father grouses. “Could’ve given him a new quill and inkwell festooned with precious stones. Faeries love shiny things.” He gestures to the ornamental detailing inside the suite as though it had been crafted by some inebriated sprite with a grudge against sophistication.
I bite my curling lip. So predictable, Dádhi.
“If the Cauldron had found him unworthy, Lore, it wouldn’t have filled the talisman with magic.”
While my father scoffs, not even bothering to mask his disdain for the thief of my mother’s Crow magic, one-track minded me asks, “Do we know where and when I murder the undead sister?”
“In Glace.” My father’s cheeks hollow as his gaze drifts toward the skylight. “During winter.”
“ This winter?” I ask.
“You know prophecies aren’t blueprints, khráach. All we know is that it would come to pass once you reached adulthood.”
“Which I have.”
“Presumably.” Dádhi adds a wink, and though I grumble, “Low blow,” I’m glad for the levity it injects into the atmosphere.
“Speaking of prophecies, tell us more about Behati’s mate one,” he says.
With a sigh, I summarize it for them. “She said that if I didn’t go to Glace tonight and cross paths with him, he’d perish.”
One of my father’s black eyebrows wings up. “And you believed her, why ?”
“Her eyes went white.” I shrug.
“Perhaps it was a new vision?” my mother suggests. “Perhaps Isla truly does meet her mate tonight.”
When my father’s eyebrows snap into alignment, Mádhi not only laughs but also stands from the tufted bench and walks over to him, forcing his legs apart to slot herself between them. “My love, Isla was never ours to keep for always.”
He harrumphs, clearly unwilling to accept that having me didn’t come with exclusive ownership rights.
“I’d love a sibling,” I call out as I stand and head toward the door, imagining Naeva must be pacing like a caged tendu , having expected me quite some time ago. “Perhaps now’s the time? I wouldn’t want the two of you to grow bored if there’s any truth to Behati’s prophecy.”
After murmuring that growing bored with my mother would be a feat, Dádhi asks, “Where are you off to?”
My mother turns in the snare of his arms, a smile still tickling her cheeks.
“Naev’s room. She mentioned Asha packed her several extra dresses, and that?—”
“ She mentioned ?” my father bites out. “Naeva knew you were coming?”
I spear my fingers through my hair, which my impromptu spa session has left a frizzy disaster. “I told Lach when I was on my way. This trip wasn’t premediated.”
“The sky was black…” my mother muses, reminding my father that this isn’t the trip where I get Glacin blood on my hands.
Khráach, don’t tell Naeva or Lachlano or anyone about the prophecy. Not until I understand whether Konstantin suspects his sister is alive or is fully oblivious, all right?
I nod.
“Let her go now.” Mádhi kisses the corner of my father’s tense mouth. “Naev’s room is two doors’ down from ours, laenath. Right beside the portrait of…”
I turn the knob. “The dead sister.”
“Do I keep a portrait of Costa Regio in my home?” I hear my father gripe just as I shut the door behind me and start down the hallway.
“Isla?” My maternal grandmother’s voice has me looking away from the broad skylights pelted by snowflakes that resemble down shaken out of a giant pillow.
I join her beside a door identical to the one I’ve just closed. “Hi, Taytah.”
Her lid-to-lid black eyes snap toward my parents’ suite before returning to me.
“Yes. They know I’m here.”
It takes her a moment to reconfigure her expression from one of shock to one of cheerfulness. “When did you arrive?”
“Not long ago.”
She nods, disquiet nipping at the tentative smile she’s conjured.
A rough intake of air has me twisting around. The horror that strikes my grandfather’s features coaxes a smirk to my lips.
“Evening, Jaytair,” I chirp.
Where my grandmother seemed startled, my grandfather looks about ready to morph into his Crow, snatch me with his iron talons, and haul me back to Luce.
“Isla,” he grits out. “You…came?”
“Surprise.”
“Is your father”—his molars grind—“aware of this?”
“I was just with them.”
“And Lore’s…” Jaytair’s jaw somehow sharpens further beneath the thick covering of bristly black hair.
“…stoked I managed to swing by?” I supply. “Absolutely.”
My grandfather’s gaze swings in the direction of my parents’ bedchamber. And then he’s stalking toward it.
Taytah drapes an arm around my shoulders. “He’s been in a mood since we arrived.” In the crook of my ear, she murmurs, “Too many busybody sprites and Faeries around for his liking.”
I grin, knowing full well how passionate my grandfather can be about his space and his dislike of Faeries. I heard he despises Pointy-ears more than Antoni Greco, which is saying something, seeing as he really dislikes the male Taytah turned into a Serpent after the Mahananda Yudh.
I inhale the honeysuckle and brine aroma that forever clings to her skin, a scent that brings me back to the sundrenched summers spent in Shabbe running—and swimming—amok with Naeva, Lachlano, and Elio. I love that scent as deeply as I love every member of my family.
As my grandfather pounds on my parents’ door, his brown gaze flicking feverishly between it and us, my thoughts drift to Konstantin. If his love for his family is anything like mine, then I’ve no doubt he spared his sister, for I could never kill Naeva, not even if she betrayed me or my people.
A tiny voice inside my head murmurs: What if she gored your father with obsidian and held him hostage in a cage?
I blink to dispel the image, then unbind myself from my grandmother’s embrace to seek out my cousin, whose heart is far too tender for malice.
The sunlight filtering through the snowstorm is so faint that the fire orbs acquire brightness, gilding the Faerie guards stationed along the pilasters.
Did Konstantin inflate their numbers because of the recent unrest, or does he always employ so many? I suppose, had Crows been murderable, Dádhi may have increased security around our castle as well.
I stop walking when I come face to painted-face with a white-haired Faerie, whose resemblance to Konstantin is remarkable. While I would describe the brother’s face as lethal, the more fitting descriptor for Alyona’s is delicate. She’s all porcelain skin and fine bones, with hair as long and white as Konstantin’s and eyes the same shade of gray.
Do you live, Alyona of Glace? And if you do, why does the Cauldron see me killing you?
Before I can make sense of any of it, a hand snatches my wrist and hauls me forward, startling a soft gasp from my lungs.