Maren
Selena’s brows pinched at the sight of the knife in Pheolix’s hand. “Put that away.”
Nori stiffened. “You’re a drone?”
Pheolix’s mouth quirked. “I am indeed.”
Seated around Selena’s table, no one said a word, and it wasn’t until the fine hair along the back of my arms began to rise that I’d realized the air had changed in the room.
Strained and quietly ringing with a sense of lurking threat, like we’d taken a wrong turn and found ourselves in a cave filled with hidden vipers.
A lethal mistake waiting behind each potential step.
Olinne pressed her spine into the back of her chair, distancing herself from him. Aitne froze in place, eyes wide. Nori placed her hands on the table, ready to push to her feet.
“Prove you are,” my Oculos challenged, though she didn’t sound as though she wanted him to. “Eclipse us.”
Across from them, Cebrinne slouched, eyeing the inked shape of Cypria with exasperation. Selena tucked the corner of her jaw into the crook of her fingers, lips curved, and even Aegir watched with subtle amusement, the green in his eyes somehow less sharp.
Pheolix sat a little higher. His unseeing eyes hovered across the line of our faces. “If I kill Selena’s plants, she’ll make me sleep on the balcony outside.”
Selena waved a hand, unconcerned. “Just keep it to the table.”
The temperature dropped a few degrees, and Selena’s apartment suddenly felt much smaller than it had before. Like wooden walls, shrinking ceilings. Aitne sent me a nervous glance, a soft chill lacing across my shoulders.
I tensed, a strain in my wrists and fingers as I waited for something to happen. Nothing did, and yet my nerves fired like I was under attack. I sat in expectant silence, my body teetering between the need to run or fight.
No one spoke as the table grew colder. I pulled my hand from the wooden surface to flex my fingers, the simple movement biting against the stretch of my tendons.
A ring of condensation framed the print of my palm, and I frowned, looking down at it before becoming aware everyone was, once again, watching me.
“Is he going to do anything?” Kye asked, still leaning against the wall with darkened eyes, face bright and warm against the white wall. My own skin was not so vivid. It paled with cold, the nail beds of my fingers a thin shade of blue.
“Drones freeze the air,” I guessed aloud, flicking my gaze at Aegir and Selena for confirmation.
Nori’s chin lowered. “Try calling to water.”
I did, and nothing answered. I pushed harder, and Pheolix’s mouth twitched.
“You won’t break it,” the drone said.
Olinne pointed a finger at him. “Do not trust him, my Queen. Drones have no mind of right and wrong. They have no morals, no honesty, no meaning to their lives. They are loyal to the master that made them, and that master does not sit at the table with us. They—”
“Not him,” Cebrinne said dully. “He’s just an idiot.”
Pheolix smiled at bare air. “I’ve missed you, Ceba.”
She scowled in return.
Aegir cleared his throat. “Two hive heirs and a gnat,” he continued, a gleam of nostalgia in his eye. “Thaan intended for me to choose one as a cordae, then use them to trap me.”
Pheolix’s knife spun in his fingers. “I was the obvious choice.”
“But Cebrinne and Selena had called upon Theia already,” Aegir said. “They’d already been handed the prophecy, in which the moon revealed the existence of two crystals. One from the abandoned tunnels of Paria, and the other”—he gestured to my neck—“hangs right in front of me.”
I didn’t move, though my fingers itched to find it then, a gentle weight against my chest.
Aegir ran his hand down the short length of his beard. “I might have killed the three of them, but at our first meeting, Cebrinne gave me an answer to a question I’d been asking for years.”
My brow crept up my forehead. “Which was?”
The Videre opened his hand. “A way to kill Thaan.”
I sent my focus across the table to Selena. “The entry from your journal only mentioned one stone.”
“Well, I assume you only read a single page.” Her fingertip slid over a river that spilled into the Anatoly Sea. “There was a brief point in time where I hoped we might find the other.”
“And what would you have done with them, had you found both?”
Aegir turned his head to study Selena. She exhaled slowly. “We never got that far. The Scale of Safiro is unreachable except for one person. The child of the moon.”
The Calderian wind scratched quietly at the tower windows, and even through the walls, the taste of sea salt and damp rock tingled over my tongue.
Somehow, even though we’d just returned from the Sylus Mountains, even though they hadn’t seen each other in over twenty years, I couldn’t shake the notion that Aegir, Selena, Pheolix, and Cebrinne had planned this conversation.
Had practiced it, had honed and shaped and molded me so that I would someday find myself here in this seat as they stared, waiting for me to announce that, of course, as the sole person alive who could recover the second stone, I’d be happy to do it with them.
“No.”
Selena’s mouth parted. She glanced at her cohorts next to her, then back at me. “Maren—"
I rose slowly from my chair, my fingers splayed wide. Around me, Diara and my Naiads rose as well. Kye and Hadrian leaned forward off the wall. The Stone of Safiro tipped forward, swinging gently through the air as I leaned over the table, my words sharp. “I am not your weapon.”
“Maren.” Selena hurried after me in the hallway, reaching for my arm the way she had when I’d accused her of keeping secrets and stormed out of her apartment.
The familiarity of it, distinct in my memory, jarred something loose in me.
Some hidden pin, the last thing keeping my composure together. I whipped around.
“Understand that I owe you nothing,” I growled.
“You’re right.” Selena’s eyes shone thick and bright. “You don’t. You don’t owe any of us a thing.”
“Then you’ll excuse me, as I have a colony to lead and a husband with a human lifespan that I don’t intend to waste fighting your war.
” I didn’t miss the way Kye winced, his hand warm at the small of my back, and some part of me broke at having to say the words aloud.
I turned away from Selena again, pulling my arm from her grasp.
“Where will you go, that he will not try to reach you?” Selena called softly after me. “You think you’re safe in Juile? Thaan was afraid to face Sidra. He was afraid of his own past. You are not protected from that fear.”
Long shadows graced the floor behind her apartment door, the others listening. My Naiads waited ahead, almost to the edge of the stairs, a curl of disgust over Nori’s mouth. Hadrian and Diara didn’t move, but Kye laced his fingers into mine. “You don’t have to decide anything right now,” he said.
“He’s wrong. At least listen to our plan,” Selena’s voice was smooth, controlled, gentle.
Yet a desperate hunger burned in her gaze.
“For the first time in twenty-five years, Thaan isn’t in the palace.
He’s not directing the King, not communicating with foreign nations, not sending his fleet after tiny colonies in the mountains.
He’s in hiding, and that makes him twice as dangerous. We have no idea what his next move is.”
“Then I suggest you strategize,” I threw back at her. “After two decades of manipulating others, I’d say you’re pretty adept.”
Selena’s gaze slid to Kye, a silent plea bursting from her seams. “You can’t outrun him. You can’t escape him. I’ve tried.”
I crossed my arms. “Thaan can’t enter the water.”
“And yet he pulled me under the surface when I was a child and forced me to transition. As long as he controls the Naiads sworn to him, he can reach you. You’ll let your husband die, your colony, leave every siren alive to either be killed or enslaved—”
“You know the worst part of being used by someone you trusted, Selena?” I wheeled my way around Kye, facing her completely as the last shreds of my calm snapped like the leash of a mad dog.
I wondered if she’d have the same audacity to speak to him if she could remember seeing him dead.
My arm stretched protectively in front of his stomach, and I claimed a step closer to her.
“It’s that every time I choose myself, every time I voice my thoughts, my apprehensions, I am the problem.
Notice how you sat me down at the head of your table but didn’t ask for my opinion.
I came to Calder with no one to trust after a lifetime of choosing to be alone.
Because that was the best way to protect myself.
And when you held out your hand, I trusted that I could take it. ”
I shifted away, my feet near silent over the stone floor. “Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice”—I angled a finger toward her face—“and you can fuck off.”
Her mouth opened, and exhaustion dumped over me, the sight of her a faster drain on my reserves than trying to command an ocean of water. “I’m more than the collateral damage in your war, Selena,” I said simply.
“Of course you are,” she whispered back. “You always have been. But if you think you’re the only one who has permanently lost something, you’re wrong.” Her hands wrapped around herself, her chest and stomach.
I should have felt something, watching her curl into herself.
But the panels of iron and glass swam sickly behind her, the thrash of the sea against rocks below a tasteless harmony of water and granite.
“You’re trying to appeal to the part of me that once searched for family by accusing me of leaving you.
You’d make me a villain who lets you suffer because I put myself first. At least in all your lessons, you taught me one important thing.
No one plays the victim more than the person willing to wound people they love. ”
I turned then, leaving her standing next to her dancing crane statue as Aegir and Cebrinne watched from the door, her slender throat constricted into a tight knot.
Kye shadowed my steps as I returned to our tower deep in thought, and none of them spoke, but I knew they followed by the soft clacking of their boots, the steady beats of their hearts.
Hadrian closed the door behind Olinne, turning back to face me with a quiet cough, which earned a glance from Aitne. Diara crossed her arms, a stern line sandwiched between her brows, though not as severe as the grunt of impatience from Nori.
Wearing the expression of someone deeply affronted, my Oculos was the one to break our silence. “I never liked that siren.”
“Sidra was safe in Juile,” Olinne said, smoothing the pleat of black byssus silk that lay over her stomach. “She waited a thousand years for Thaan to return. She never would have allowed us to live under the risk of attack.” Aitne nodded.
“To invite us under the guise of Aegir teaching you star-wielding,” Nori continued, spinning to pace into the center of Kye’s sitting room and back.
Kye found my eyes. “Well, Leihani? Should I pack our bags for a life under the sea?”
I shook my head. “No.”
They exchanged glances, all except for Kye, whose gaze never left mine, the edges of his mouth tilting up. I may have fooled them, perhaps, but I’d never be able to fool him. Kye knew too well I couldn’t run from a fight, especially one that threatened the people I loved.
I reached through the swathes of my silk dress and drew it out, holding it up for them to see. Hadrian’s forehead creased as he recognized the leather cover, and I offered Selena’s journal out to him.
“I’m not turning my back on the colonies of the world,” I said. “I’m taking things into my own hands and finding the second stone without Selena.” My finger tapped the soft leather. “Somewhere in these pages lies the location of the second stone. I need this journal decoded as quickly as you can.”