Chapter 52
Chapter
Fifty-Two
Five Weeks After Thorne’s Final Stand
Dawn had not yet broken, yet a thin seam of gold stretched across the horizon. Sun rays bled through the darkness in crooked lines, spreading like veins over the metal-colored water, bright and jagged, as if cracking the entire world apart.
Selene stood at the rail, fingers curled around the wood. Behind and around her, Warian Bay bristled with motion. Dockhands shouted, rigging creaked, and boots thudded on planks slick with seawater. Gulls wheeled overhead in air thick with tar and salt.
One ship in particular was nearly ready to cast off with Omar and his family aboard. She and Augustus had said their goodbyes the night before, and they’d been the hardest yet. In only a few short weeks, they’d become family. They owed Omar their lives.
Although Omar would say differently. He’d owed Cassia his, and with the end of this war, he’d fulfilled his oath. That didn’t stop him from accepting an entire ship as payment, however. Or making them honorary members of his family.
“Compass-Rose,” he’d called her last night—a nod to the symbol on navigational charts. Then, to Augustus, “Keep holding her steady, Keelheart. She’ll take you where you need to go.”
Omar now waved from the ship before shouting orders to his crew.
They weren’t why she’d come, anyway. Every step here had been driven by sheer reluctance.
Roman and the Drynopians were aboard, returning to the Trayterre Isles.
The air at Selene’s back shifted, and a chill prickled down her spine. She hadn’t heard his steps, but she recognized him all the same.
He was still a storm that struck. A tide meeting flame. The hush before a battlefield scream.
Roman would forever be the world holding its breath before breaking.
Selene clenched the rail until her nails bit wood. “I thought you were already on the ship.”
“You never said goodbye. I thought… I’d hoped you’d come. And here you are.”
She turned to find him dragging a hand roughly through his thick, dark hair. He wasn’t smiling, but the weight of him bent the very air around him.
Heat flared in her chest, sharp like fury and longing, and she hated it. While everything else had been going on, any emotions she had toward him had been easy to ignore. Since their return to the pirate city, it was like being stuck on the island all over again. She didn’t know which way was up.
“I don’t know why I came,” she admitted, heart pounding like drums out of sync.
She’d woken before dawn, restless, listening to Augustus’s deep breathing in the dark. All the while, watching the sky change outside their window, a tug in her chest she couldn’t name.
Roman’s mouth curved knowingly. “Don’t you?” His blue and brown eyes seemed to brighten as the sun rose higher at her back. “You’ve tried so hard to hate me, but you can’t. And now that I’m leaving, you’re finally curious why.”
“Or…I never properly thanked you.” Selene fidgeted against the railing and stared at his boots as men rushed past with coiled ropes. “Augustus wouldn’t be alive if—”
“I do nothing for him.” Roman closed the space with a single step, caging her between his body and the rail. He knuckled her chin up, and his warm breath washed across her lips. A thumb swept high along her cheekbone. “I do everything for you.”
Selene’s mind screamed retreat, but her body hummed with memory. Gods, she could hardly breathe. “Don’t you dare kiss me,” she whispered, even as her gaze fell to his mouth.
He swept a tongue across his lower lip, slow, deliberate. “No… I don’t think I will.” His jaw tensed, breath flaring from his nose. “Not until you’re mine again.”
Roman stepped back, and his sudden absence left her swaying. His fists hung heavy at his sides as he stared out at the ship that would carry him away. The sails snapped, catching the growing light.
Selene sucked in a deep breath and swallowed hard to wet her dry throat. “I don’t understand any of this. If I ever loved you, if we’re meant to be, then why aren’t we?”
“Only you know the reasons you left.” Roman’s gaze lowered. “You just…vanished. I waited for you to come back again and again, and then, after centuries, you walked right onto our island.”
“I came on a hunch, based on information—”
“It doesn’t matter how you returned, only that you did.”
He reached for her again, but she shifted away. With a sigh, he dropped his arms.
“Eva— Selene. Come with us. I’ll speak with Aspasia. She can help you recover your lost memories.”
“I’m not interested in the past. I thought I was, once, but I’ve learned to cherish what I have now.”
“You’re content rising again and again, just you and Michail? You’re alone—”
Selene stopped him with a raised hand. “It’s not just the two of us. Not anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a long story, but there was an incident inside the Ethereal Mountain, and ever since, I’ve been sensing a connection to some of the unborn in Perean. I recognized one of them as a close friend who’d died.”
Roman’s silence pressed heavily, broken only by the clatter of a dropped crate on the dock. Finally, he said, “You’re sensing others? Only a Mother can do that.” Then, almost to himself, he said, “The dronsian is yours.”
“I wouldn’t say he’s mine, exactly. I can hear him, and he’s my friend. Why else would he be around?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought maybe the gods were watching out for you.”
Selene loosed a sharp laugh. “The gods? All they’ve done is lure me into danger for their own ends.” She straightened to go, dodging a young boy sprinting by. “Safe travels, Roman. I wish you well. Truly.”
Roman seized her wrist, and his voice cut through a nearby snap of canvas. “If the gods have given you this power, you can’t ignore it. You need to talk to another to understand your role.”
“Another? Like Aspasia?”
“Yes.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
His eyes flicked between both of hers, then lowered. With obvious reluctance, he said, “There are two others. I don’t know where they are, only that they set out from Perean long ago.”
Selene yanked her wrist free, skin hot where his fingers had pressed. “You mean to tell me there are more of us out there?”
“Three factions, all guardians of the stones.”
Images passed through Selene’s mind, as clear as if she stood right there. Marble stone remains on an old dais. Her blood feeding those strange, drinking veins.
Noi’s blood… The veins beneath her dying body…
They’d acted the same.
Selene didn’t know how or why, but none of it was right. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. And there was some distant part of her soul that knew exactly how this started.
“Aspasia broke the Llinunae Stone,” she said, lifting her gaze to his. “She moved it. Why?”
“She had her reasons.”
“You never questioned them?”
“It’s not our business to question her motives.”
“Like you never questioned why she chained up her dronsian? Turos despises her. There’s something wrong with her.”
Omar’s shout rose from the ship, commanding the final gangplank from the dock.
Someone bellowed Roman’s name.
He flinched, and his gaze flicked from her to the ship and back. Finally, he stepped away, hesitation carved in every line of his face. He scanned her one last time, his mismatched eyes burning.
Selene remained at the rail, heart thudding, frustration balling her fists. She’d been a fool to stall this conversation, and now it was too late.
“You can’t trust her,” she called to him.
Roman kept moving, shaking his head, mouth dipped in a frown. “Maybe not, but I trust you. And you can trust the others. Turos will know how to find them.”
“I don’t even know who I’m looking for.”
“Drakaa was the first. If anyone has the answers, it’ll be her.”
A breath shot from Selene. She knew that name. She’d almost died in her temple. “She’s alive?”
Roman’s strides were long and purposeful now that more men had joined in to call him to the ship. Lines creaked as canvas snapped full.
Roman vaulted the gangplank and bounded onto the deck. At the railing, the sea churning below, he waved.
Selene raised a hand and watched until he was a blur, and the dock shifted under her feet as another came to stand beside her, steady as stone.
“Did you hear any of that?” she asked without looking up.
Oskar nodded once. “I’m ready whenever you are.”
Augustus rolled his tunic sleeves to the elbow as he strode toward Taran Phya’s old office. Cobblestones still bore the soot of torch fires. Shutters hung broken over boarded windows, untouched five weeks later.
People cleared the path ahead, wary, refusing his eye. They didn’t just distrust him. They looked at him like a stranger. And, if he were honest, the feeling was mutual. These same people watched his humiliation in The Crossroads and raised not a finger to help him.
Now, Phya was gone, and Thorne’s head was rotting on a spike in the center of town for everyone to see.
The Triarius Fleet had carved through these streets and took everything Phya built within hours. And Mettius, scarred and disfigured, had stepped into the power vacuum with a viciousness no one dared to resist.
Augustus had stayed out of it. He and Selene had remained aboard the Entia until the smoke had cleared, then found a room on the outskirts of town.
And now he stayed. Not because Warian Bay felt like home, but because his father wasn’t in any physical state to hold it alone.
Augustus paused outside the tavern that housed Phya’s old office. Triarius men guarded the entrance, their eyes tracking every movement with tense shoulders. They stepped aside for him, but moved right back into place the moment he was clear.
Inside, the tavern was quiet. Calm. The few patrons seated inside greeted him with silent nods. Toward the back, Felix and Pavle went a step further and gave a two-fingered salute.