29. Zari
Chapter twenty-nine
Zari
“ Z ari? Zari!” At the sound of her name, Zari blinked, her eyes fluttering open to the dim light filtering through the leafy canopy above.
She stirred, the cool forest air brushing against her skin.
Had she dreamed the voice? Her hand reached out, fingers grazing the damp earth where he had sat beside her. The space was empty.
This time, Yansin was nowhere in sight.
He was gone, just as he’d said he would be.
Her heart dropped, a sharp ache of loss spreading through her.
“Zari!” Hazelle burst through the tree line, pushing branches away with her hand. She’d changed out of her Rhydonian clothes, and no glamour hid any of her fae features. Still, nothing in Zari feared her. Instead, she smiled back at the blonde, glad of her safety.
“Hazelle!” Zari called back. “You’re alright!”
Behind her, Daeden melted from the shadows with the silent grace of a predator.
Though his expression was gentle, something in the way he held himself made Zari’s skin prickle.
Even with his quiet demeanor, the raw power of an Oathborn warrior was impossible to ignore, and she couldn’t help but feel a flicker of fear stir deep within her.
One more figure emerged from the tree line: Tivre, attempting to juggle two pinecones as he walked. Only he looked unsurprised to see Zari .
“We found you! I thought I’d spotted a fire nearby.” Hazelle threw her arm around her. Her long blonde hair, now freed from its bun, brushed over Zari’s cheek as Hazelle squeezed her tighter. “I am so glad you’re safe.”
Daeden, too, embraced her, murmuring his own glad tidings. Tivre remained out of reach, muttering something about how her hair looked like a bird’s nest.
“I am glad to see you all,” Zari managed, her mouth dry and cottony because of the lack of sleep. Her hand reached out once more to the empty space where Yansin had been. Something else was missing, too.
Zari’s eyes widened. “The sword, Hazelle, I’m so sorry.
” A petty thief, Yansin had called himself, and proven himself to be.
She was a fool after all for trusting him.
Still… she found herself spinning a lie to protect him, not wanting Daeden sent to hunt him down.
“When I was interrogated by the soldiers, they found it and confiscated it.”
“You are safe. That is what matters.” Hazelle tucked her arm through Zari’s, seemingly unconcerned. “I brought the sword to you to show you that you’d have family on the isles, but it is more important to have you!”
Her chest tight, Zari stared down at her Oathborn mark. It should have been Annette that Hazelle said those words to. A selfish part of Zari whispered that Annette already had a family—a husband, children—people who loved her; unlike Zari, who had been alone for so long.
“The sword was important to you, though. I am so sorry.”
“It was dear to me because it was my sister’s. But we have other swords; we do not have another Zari.” She squeezed her a bit tighter, as if Zari might vanish into smoke. “We have a whole armory on the South Star Isle, don’t we, Dae?”
While they’d talked, Daeden had busied himself putting out the dying embers. If his perceptive nature detected any sign she might not have traveled alone, he did not mention it. “We do have a well-stocked armory, yes. Liyale’s blade will not be so easily replaced. Rosefang was a moon-forged blade.”
“What about my mother’s blade? ”
He shook his head. “Hers was a Stellaris’s blade, as is the one you wear. Fine weapons, but not for us.”
It took Zari a moment to realize the us meant her and Daeden. Once more, her false Oathborn identity nipped at her heals, an unruly dog that refused to sleep. “What’s the difference?”
“An Oathborn’s sword is dedicated to the Maiden, forged in a fire which has burned since the first Oath was given, and cooled in water that once held the Crescent Blade itself.
” Daeden’s free hand had moved to rest on the pommel of his own sword, as if it brought him comfort. “They are unmatched in their crafting.”
“I wish we had Celene’s sword,” Hazelle muttered. “Even if Duskstar wasn’t a moon-forged blade, it still was a beautiful thing. It sounded like the goddesses sang each time she drew it.”
“Let us hope it is upon that blade the Traitor dies,” Daeden scowled, a level of anger Zari had never seen before crossing over his face. “If not the deserving blade of an Oathborn.”
With that, he shouldered the extra bundle and then started to walk ahead. Tivre had already left the little clearing, his bright white head of hair making it easy to track his movements as he paused and inspected various pinecones.
When Zari began to walk, her legs felt stiff and sore.
She was grateful when Hazelle matched her pace, and asked her, “Those names… they were your sisters, right?” It hadn’t been too hard for her to follow the conversation, at least as far as the names were concerned.
As for the fae beliefs in goddesses, their magic, their traditions, all of that made her head spin.
“Would you like to tell me about them?” Zari asked what she’d wished someone would have about her father.
Her grief had been solitary for so long.
Her extended family had been all too happy to take his land and his money, but wanted nothing to do with his memory.
The government took his name and used it for a commemorative statue. They offered nothing to her in return.
Hazelle fidgeted with her empty sleeve, her fingers running over the edge of the fabric.
“The other Stellaris, and even the Queen, used to envy my mother for her three daughters. They said that she must be blessed beyond measure by the goddesses. Yet, the war took her life, my father’s, and both my sisters’. Leaving only me, the least blessed.”
“Don’t say that! I think you’re wonderful.” Indeed, if other Rhydonians met Hazelle, surely, they would not fear the fae. No one would want to lead a war against one as kind as her.
“If you’d known them… they were magnificent . Liyale was incredibly brave, and Celene was so elegant. She was trained as a mage, as well as to be my mother’s heir.”
“Were they close in age to you?”
Hazelle tilted her head, pondering. “Celene was older, a lot older than me, but Liyale was a peer to Tivre, so yes. We were not that far apart.”
“If fae age so slowly, how do you know when you’re not a child?” Knowing the Rhydonian cultural context would delight her, Zari added, “In Rhydonia, girls have their first season at seventeen and are said to be old maids by the time they’re twenty-five.”
“Is one paid to be an Old Maid? It sounds very important.”
Zari laughed, shaking her head at Hazelle’s sweet naivety. “It’s a term for an unmarried woman who’s too old for any prospects. Some would say a blue stocking.”
“Do they force you to wear stockings of certain colors? How marvelously strange. Dae!” Hazelle shouted, waving to her cousin ahead. “When we return again to Rhydonia, I wish to purchase blue stockings to wear! And to meet an Old Maid!”
“You’ve one standing next to you,” Tivre commented with a smirk.
“Why you…” Zari gritted her teeth. “I’m not even thirty!” She seized a pinecone from nearby and lobbed it at Tivre.
“Is it a bad thing to be old?” Hazelle asked. “I thought Rhydonians considered those who are aged to be of great wisdom.”
“Aged men, perhaps,” Zari muttered. For most women, there was the ceaseless pressure to marry before time ran out for their youthfulness .
“We don’t have any interesting words like that.
We merely are adults once we partake in our first Ceremony of the Gated Moon, at either midsummer or midwinter, depending on the timing of one’s birth.
Dae and I are both sunlight-born, so ours is midsummer.
Tivre, were you a sunlight or a starlight child? ”
“I was not given the luxury of knowing such a thing.” Tivre’s tone was so final, the lighthearted conversation withered away.
They walked on, the three fae’s footsteps near-silent and Zari’s loud and clumsy in comparison.
Daeden led the way, his head held high, his strong arms pushing away any tangled vines or branches.
How easily he moved in the thick forest, proving how the Oathborn had been able to sneak up on camps of sleeping Rhydonians and slaughter them.
With that uncomfortable thought in mind, Zari reflected on everything she’d been told about the fae so far. “Hazelle,” she began. “If both your sister and Daeden are Oathborn… does it run in families?”
“Oh, yes.” She brushed aside a particularly large pine bough blocking their way. “But not always, and there are many Oathborn, like yourself, who have no known blood ties to another.”
Had Hazelle’s gaze lingered on her when she’d said that second part? Did Hazelle suspect something? “Is one Oathborn for their whole life?”
“From their first breath ’til their last. Unless…” Hazelle bit her lip, looking ahead as if to see if Daeden was listening. “Unless one breaks their Oath, but such a thing is best not even spoken of.”
Further questions arose within Zari. “How does one break an Oath?”
“I think that’s quite enough story time,” Tivre said, appearing at their side. His emerald-green eyes watched her with suspicion, as if she’d disobeyed his instructions. To have done that, though, it would have required him actually instructing her in how to behave during this con.
“I think I’ll check on Daeden,” Hazelle said, perhaps sensing the tension simmering.
“Do that,” Tivre said. “I’m going to find another pinecone.”
As the white-haired fae was about to veer off, back into the woods, Zari caught his arm. “I’d like a word, if you’d be so kind.”
“I’m never kind,” he retorted.
“How did you meet my father?”
“By saying hello.”
“Must you be so vague?”
“Must you be so nosy? If you must know, General Ankmetta crossed into our camp with a letter, asking if there might be a chance for peace.”
He’d never mentioned that part. “In his letters, he told me of the fae he worked with on the Accords. That was you, wasn’t it?”
Tivre shook his head. “It was not. Don’t you see the more questions you ask, the more you endanger yourself?
” Tivre’s eyes flashed with that crackle of magic that scared her, reminded her he was no mortal man.
“You will meet the Queen, and she will question you. Any wavering, any hesitation, and she will pounce.”
For all that Tivre claimed he served the Queen, he was always quick to make his displeasure known. “Why do you go back to the Queen if you hate her?”
“I would rather serve her and undermine her where I can then be locked in a cell and forced to prophesy at her command.”
If Zari assumed Tivre was like a servant, then she could also picture subtle ways he’d rebel.
Where a lady’s maid who despised her mistress might ruin a gown or prick her with a hatpin by so-called accident, Tivre’s transgressions would be larger.
Perhaps even returning without the Oathborn he’d been expected to find.
Was his reason for agreeing to her deal less altruistic than she’d first thought?
Tivre had told her she could trust him, but Zari didn’t.
Not even enough to mention Yansin to him.
Tivre played fast and loose with the truth far too often.
After all, her own current fake identity, down to the mark on her wrist, was part of a con by him. Zari asked, “Why don’t you want me to learn about broken Oaths?”
“Because,” he whispered, “you, personally, are both immune to breaking Oaths, and free from the dangers involved in meeting an Oathbroken. Both things would utterly destroy our little deception. If an Oathborn makes eye contact with one who broke an Oath, they immediately are overtaken by the relentless urge to kill the Oathbroken. They will not, and cannot, rest until either they or the broken one are dead.”
A terrible magic indeed, to be forced into a reckless, endless battle. Zari recalled the mark on Javen’s wrist and his hatred of the fae. “I think there’s an officer following us that might be Oathbroken.”
“Scowling gentleman with dark hair and the personality of a hungover wolverine?”
“He mentioned your name before I escaped. He said…” Perhaps Tivre did not need to know all that Zari had been warned of. Clearly, Tivre had his own secrets, so fair was fair if she held some of her own back. At least she could be glad Annette’s path never crossed with Javen’s.
“Do not mention to the others that you have spoken to Javen, or this ruse shall end swiftly.”
That answered so few of her questions and generated so many more. “Is Captain Javen a fae?”
“That depends,” he said, as he avoided her eyes, “if being fae is a question of blood or beliefs.”