Maren
Selena opened her door at the first rap of my knuckles. She stepped back smoothly, meeting my eye with an air that stretched between calm reluctance and gentle confidence. Her gaze flicked to Diara, standing just beyond me, and back. “No cordae, then?”
“He says he’s on his way,” I answered. My spine had locked somewhere down the hall. Every step closer to Selena’s door added to the weight of my limbs. I felt as though someone had caked me in mud and set me inside a kiln. I was one step from the edge of shattering.
“Are you…purposely here without him?” She watched me with muted patience, as if I’d spontaneously found myself at her door with a bottle of wine and troubles concerning my marital bed.
“No.” I pushed past her, waving for Diara to follow me. “Let’s just get through this.”
Like Kye’s friends, Diara had gathered enough on the mountainside to know Naiads were not the same as humans.
We’re sirens, though you might call us witches, I’d told her when she’d asked.
It seemed appropriate, considering the name had followed me my entire life.
Just eat shield weed once a week and—I’d paused, considering my words carefully—avoid looking into the water if any of us are swimming.
Selena followed us back inside, crossing her graceful arms and eyeing Diara with deep apprehension. “Maren,” she finally said. “I’m not sure it’s wise—”
“It is,” I interrupted. Her wall of books covered the northern wall of her apartment, and I let my attention glaze over them, not entirely sure that I was looking for anything specific. “I want someone who has worked in Thaan’s office. Someone well acquainted with his correspondents.”
My aunt waited a beat, watching as I selected a worn spine and flipped the book open against my arm. An old record of communications from the Rivean emissary. Someone named Oberon.
“I’m both of those things,” the Naiad pressed.
I flipped the book shut, shoving it back onto the shelf next to Selena’s old journal. “Yes, but you’ve also lied to me since the day we met.”
Her throat tightened. But she didn’t deny it.
From the corners of the room, I became vaguely aware that everything had gone utterly quiet.
I hadn’t even seen them, but Aegir and Pheolix stood in the doorway of what used to be Thaan’s quarters, Cebrinne peering from around the threshold of the second bedroom.
The stillness here now erupted, a bottle of sparkling volare shaken violently until its cork flew loose.
Diara shifted on the balls of her feet beside me, resting her hands on her hips.
I moved to the center of the room. “What else did Theia say in this prophecy?”
Something in Selena hardened, encumbered with the same porcelain shell I wore. “I assume you spoke with her yourself, since you know now that it exists.”
I resisted the urge to glance at Diara in reluctance. But I’d made my choice. I’d wanted her here. In this room of Naiads—my people—my blood, she was the only one I trusted.
Selena closed her eyes, drawing a heavy breath into her chest. “How did he die?”
She asked the question like it was a penance.
Like stringing the words from her tongue was a small agony, as if the pain of knowing Kye had died in some other timeline tortured her as much as it had tortured me.
The back of my nose and eyes itched with heat; the light in the room had grown a bit hazy, a bit blurry.
I thought the tendons in my neck might snap with the effort it took to speak without choking on my own tongue, though when they did finally leave my mouth, my words dripped with fire.
“When the Riveans burst through the trees. We were only halfway up the mountain, and Kye was at the bottom.”
Selena wouldn’t have remembered how I was torn through the earth as Kazimir’s sword rent Kye’s heart.
How I’d blazed down the mountain with lightning and lava, how I’d screamed and screamed his name into the endless nothing between us, how none of my Naiads could reach me while I buried the world in pain.
She wouldn’t remember that I’d crawled in beside his body and wept.
That she’d bid me to rise, to find the Abyssi, to cross the sea of stars and bring him and Cebrinne back.
Even the tiny details she’d given me before I’d swam to the house of shadow, the Morai candle and the blood betrayal drops, would have left her memory.
None of that had ever happened.
Selena’s shoulders dropped, though they didn’t relax. “I never meant for that, Maren.”
Her voice sounded like it came from somewhere underneath me.
Watery and obscured, the syllables landing in and out of an echo.
She’d never remember the sight of Kye slain in the snow, eyes open and unseeing, a stream of blood dripping from his nose and mouth.
Neither would the rest of them—Nori, Olinne, Aitne.
No one alive had ever seen Kye die, no one but me, yet it was a vision that would flash and churn and descend uninvited in my head for the rest of my life.
“Don’t lie,” I said. “You led me to his death. You knew the path you walked me down.”
“We’ve all lost something in this war.” Cebrinne stepped out of her bedroom, and I turned to face her.
She was the mirror image of Selena. Her hair was a bit darker, a bit cooler, perhaps even a bit silkier.
But there was something untamed hidden in the angles of her face.
Where Selena was smooth and refined, Cebrinne was coarse and wild.
She seemed both young and old, standing there with her chin adrift in the air, and I wondered whether her time in Perpetuum had aged her mortal body.
Was she in her twenties, like me? Or her fifties, like Selena?
As a Naiad, it was nearly impossible to know.
“And what did you lose, that you didn’t get back?” I asked in a lethal whisper that rippled loudly through the room. “What was taken from you that you haven’t recovered?”
She held my gaze without moving, though she blinked several times, like she was fighting to decide whether answering or not would be safer.
“I lost my sister,” Aegir said softly. He turned one of Selena’s shelf baubles in his hand, a hollow sphere of glass blown into a bubble.
“Both my parents. Both my grandparents.” His fingers puffed and shrank comically behind the curved glass as he rotated it.
“What have you lost that you haven’t recovered, Queen Maren? ”
They waited for me to answer, the room a swirling mix of half empathy and half vindication.
Like he’d bested me with a single question, a village elder imparting his wisdom regarding the unfairness of life.
Like I’d spent the last eleven days sulking and brooding over nothing, and no harm had been done by watching Kye die and fighting to bring him back.
As though I should be thankful to stand where I did, alive and whole back in Calder.
I wasn’t alive. I wasn’t whole.
“I lost my corda-cruor.”
Cebrinne hefted a long exhale. “You returned with your husband.”
“I sold my soul to Darkness to reach the Abyssi,” I replied, my head tilted so far down I glared at her through the underside of my own lashes, “and I traded my cordae to the Fate of Love in payment for reaching Perpetuum.”
The flicker of superiority dropped from each of them. Selena’s hand spread across her chest. “You’re no longer cordaed?”
“You sold your soul?” Cebrinne said in the same moment.
My hands shook, a bright, restless whirring in my blood. I curled my fingers into fists. They looked at me like I’d just told them I’d discovered consumption in my lungs. Even Diara craned her neck to better see the expression on my face.
All at once, I was ready for this conference to end. “Why did you call this meeting?” I ground out.
Aegir opened his mouth, and a knock sounded at Selena’s door.
She crossed the thick static of the room to open it.
I shifted along Selena’s wall, making room for Kye to stand beside me.
But it was Nori and Olinne who followed Selena back inside.
They slowed as they entered, eyes scanning the room as soon as they tasted the unrest in the air.
Aegir waited for them to claim a place and settle, then parted his lips once again to speak.
Another knock. Aitne. She didn’t wait for Selena to let her in, cracking the door wide enough to squint through the hallway at us, ensuring she’d found the correct location.
Aegir waited respectfully for her to skirt inside and stand beside Nori before he cleared his throat.
A third knock. Or rather, the vibration of hinges as someone turned the knob, a slow metal whine flowing once more from down the hall.
The Videre’s teeth flashed as he loosed a gust of frustration. “How many more have been invited to this meeting?”
“Just this one,” I answered.
Kye stepped inside. He hunched in the hallway as he entered, careful not to hit his head against the low ceiling. Diara’s tongue clicked in vague distaste as Hadrian spilled out from behind him. I couldn’t help but share the same feeling, though I’m sure for very different reasons than Diara.
Kye’s eyes found me as though he’d seen me through the walls and knew exactly where I stood.
He moved past Selena on silent, long legs, an air current fanning across me as he leaned a shoulder into the wall at my back.
Hadrian decidedly looked anywhere but in my direction.
Or, more likely, the direction of the female human in the room beside me.
Everything all right? Kye asked.
I gave my head a small shake, unwilling to expand further.
“Is that everyone?” In the office doorway, Aegir raised his brows to the room at large. He opened his mouth.
“One minute, Aeggy,” Pheolix cut in. “I really want to knock on that door one more time.”
Pheolix had changed since I’d last seen him.
The day we’d set out for Winterlight, his skin hung from his thin body, the color of his cheeks a hue lost between yellow and gray, so translucent I could track the veins under his forehead.
His hair had taken on the wilted look of damp straw, and he’d passed through the rooms of Selena’s apartment with one hand sliding along the wall to guide his steps.
He’d looked like a man who had emerged from a dark coffin after having slept for a century, who had forgotten how to move his legs or what the sun might feel like on his face.
Only a month later, he walked with assurance, as though the walls moved around him rather than the opposite.
A red-toned luster had broken through the roots of his scalp, and even the length of his hair seemed thicker, darker.
Everything about him glowed brighter from his skin to his teeth, which were no longer chipped.
I wondered whether he was skilled in healing, if he could somehow rebuild the calcium in his mouth.
The only part of him that remained the same was his eyes, a cloudy pair of ghosts that swerved as he tracked the people who spoke, a trickster’s smile shadowing his lips.
We’d decided to conference at Selena’s table. She only owned two chairs, but eleven of us stood together within her quarters. Seating devices were pulled from all corners of the room: two from Thaan’s table, a footrest from Selena’s reading corner, a bench that belonged to her vanity.
The tallest in the room, Kye and Hadrian offered to claim a place along the wall behind me. Maps were spread across the table, and I was surprised at the span of maps Selena pulled; a full canvas from the northern tips of Rivea to the eastern islands of Cypria and Cressi.
“Twenty-five years ago, almost twenty-six,” Aegir began, tapping a finger over the inked words Venusian Sea, “Thaan sent three Naiads into my waters to lure me into a trap. Two hive heirs and a gnat.”
He paused politely, glancing across the map at me, as though assuming I’d ask him to clarify the words. My back stood tall and proud in my chair, but annoyance scratched against the facade of my ego, that he’d correctly guessed my unfamiliarity with the ocean-born vernacular.
“What’s a hive heir?” I finally asked, deadpan.
“You are, my Queen,” Olinne said softly. “A Prizivac able to take the throne, or one who has taken the throne already.”
The table waited a collective moment. Selena had offered me the chair at the head of the table, facing the various parchments toward me and directing everyone else to take up the seats along the sides and back, a choice I had expected to vex Aegir.
But the Venusian sat on a velvet pouf with his elbows propped against the table’s edge, assessing the mountains limned in ink.
I let my head tilt slightly to the side, unbothered by the thought that my expressionless voice might be considered rude. “And a gnat?”
“A drone.” Olinne shifted uncomfortably, stealing a glance at Nori. “A Naiad without water-calling. I didn’t realize there were any still alive today. Sidra didn’t practice making them, and most ocean-born Naiads wouldn’t trust them. We’ve never met one.”
Pheolix had angled his chair sideways, the backrest wedged along his ribs as he rotated a short knife playfully in his fingers. “You have now,” he said.