Maren
The Scale of Safiro waited, Aegir explained, in the deepest tunnels under abandoned Paria in the distant east, a domus Selena had only ever glossed over in my studies.
She’d referred to it as a ghost colony, a dead community.
Hearing this fractured the valley between Aegir’s brows.
He looked curiously at me, and I realized that, once again, Selena had lied.
Diluted my curiosity with the smallest of false truths.
He noticed, I think. The way my lips lengthened, the uptick in my blood.
The remainder of our walk to the stables was silent.
With the location of the stone established, we no longer needed horses. The rivers would lead us east. Still, I ducked into Kolibri’s stall, finding Nori and Olinne already there. The Naiads glanced up in surprise as Aegir followed Kye inside.
Nori shook her confusion first. “We are still waiting for Aitne. Who else is coming?”
“Hadrian and Aren,” Kye answered, earning a derisive glare from her. “And Maren’s friend, Diara.”
“More humans?” my Oculos challenged. “You have an entire siliqua domus at your disposal.”
Kye licked his lower lip in thinly veiled annoyance.
Even without looking at him, I felt Aegir’s smug smile behind my back, a warmth pressing into me that I ignored.
I reached for a small fist of hay instead, offering it to Kolibri, who had flattened her ears and pawed the stable floor in response to Kye’s entrance.
“Paria, however small, is still a living colony,” I said, watching Kolibri’s lips rove across the soft hay before she nipped herself a bite.
“And Naiads are a bit like bees, suspicious of a new swarm in their territory. But they view humans as pests more than adversaries, and if I’m to trespass onto a foreign colony, I prefer my entourage to look like houseflies rather than wasps. ”
“Fancy words,” Aegir murmured. “To simply say you’d prefer to bring a weaker ally.”
Heat blazed from Kye, though he held his tongue. I slanted a narrow look at the Naiads over my shoulder. “The humans I’ve invited cannot be incanted. Kye, Aren, and Hadrian are trained in combat. If your water-call becomes obstructed, could you fight them?”
Olinne rolled her eyes; Nori flexed her jaw. Neither responded. I hid my smile, rotating to slide my hand down Kolibri’s inky-blue neck, watching the shine in her fur vanish and reappear under my hand.
Aegir moved in slowly, not looking at me. He pressed a hand into Kolibri’s shoulder, staring as though he’d just read a letter for the second time and realized a hidden message lay inside.
I watched him, uneasy. Kolibri didn’t tolerate new faces very well, and though he’d ridden beside me in the Sylus Mountains, that was weeks ago now. And he hadn’t come this close to her on foot.
She paused her chewing, lashes long over her dark eyes. But she let him slide his fingertips across her fur and into her mane, combing her silky stream of hair.
“Where did you find this horse?” he asked, breathless.
Kye snorted under his breath. “More like a trotting scourge.”
I darted a glance behind me as footsteps approached, wary of the moment General Senan and his men might appear. But Hadrian and Aren tucked themselves inside the swinging doors of the stall, brows raised at the sight of the Videre beside me. “We found her in Rivea.”
“Do you know what she is?” Aegir asked, his trance breaking as he finally met my eyes.
I sent a questioning look to Nori and Olinne, though they both shook their heads. Like me, their lives had been spent in the Juile Sea surrounding Leihani, the well of their equine knowledge more of a shallow pool.
Diara squeezed through the door, a head of goldenrod curls tamed with a loose braid that fell to the small of her back. Hadrian’s ears flushed, his sight markedly locked on the bundle of hay.
“That’s all of us,” Olinne murmured. “Everyone ready to leave?”
I nodded. “We should go now. Before the general arrives.” I offered Kolibri a final scratch behind the ears and Aegir caught my hand.
“Bring her with us,” he said.
I stepped out of his grasp, tilting my head. “And leave her at the river’s edge? No.”
Aegir shook his head. “With us.”
We started at the sea, just under the tall harbor of Calder City, where beach slanted into salt, cast in shadow from the docks above.
Adolescent humans stood just beyond the reach of waves, tossing rocks to the water.
Olinne sang softly to them, sending them back to the city, and then we were alone.
Aegir led Kolibri into the waves with soft clicks and hums. I stiffened as the waves lapped at her shoulders. I’d seen the sea grow vicious here more than once. Aegir paused, glancing back at us. “You might want to blind them before I lead her further.”
A wave of intolerance rolled from Kye. But I walked behind him, drawing a silk sash from my pocket.
He knelt so I could tie it around his eyes.
Hadrian fumbled with his own sash until Diara rumbled with impatience and took the silk from him, bidding him to turn.
She did the same for Aren before shaking stray curls from her eyes and tying her own.
I thumbed the knife at my hip absently, waiting for Aegir to transition. But he turned back to Kolibri, smoothing her fur where the sea drank her in. “Come now, pretty bird,” I heard him say over the rush of the tide. “Show me your wings.”
She shook her head and whipped her tail the way she did when impatiently pawing toward an open road. Aegir leaned to the side, letting the water carry him a few feet from her, and she dipped her head below an oncoming wave, vanishing.
I started in alarm. But Aegir flashed me a grin from the water, his palms flat over the surface as he watched something below. “Come see.”
Curious, we made our way to him, leaving the humans to shift their weight along the sand.
My sea was cold against my bare feet, but it drew me in, welcomed me home.
I slid into the tide, ducking below to watch a horse streak past in deeper water.
Half of a horse, head and shoulders and front legs—the other half gleamed under a muscular tail, almost as long as my entire body, deep blue and endless.
Wide flukes rippled at the end, so thin it was almost transparent.
“I knew it,” Aegir said when I lifted back to the surface in shock. “She’s a Marequus. A horse of the sea.”
We each claimed a human to tow through the river’s foamy current.
Diara had stiffened when I’d explained the need for it: we could travel further, faster, if the humans simply floated behind us, taking our air every few miles, though I understood her aversion to handing control of her body to someone she barely knew.
Hadrian had simply shrugged, surprising me. I suppose his life had been threatened so many times, the idea of placing it in a stranger’s hands seemed commonplace. When Aegir drew close to blow Naiad oxygen into his lungs, he didn’t bat an eye.
Still blindfolded, Kye waited as my sirens tugged him under before they could take a breath of air.
He floated in the shallow water beside me, the cold already pressing its fingers into my bones.
When we were the final two remaining, he turned toward me, a hand curled around the back of my neck as he drew me close.
His lips were warm, smooth, though his stubble scraped against my chin.
He took me with slow, skillful strokes, tilting his head through the lashes of his mouth and tongue as if savoring something he’d craved for days.
I let my fingers root in his soft hair, boneless as I melted into him, until he pulled back just enough, his thumb skimming the underside of my jaw, that I gently sealed my mouth over his and exhaled.
I didn’t regret carrying him through the torrent, but I wished he could stay with me. Really stay.
Two days into our swim, we cut from ocean to river, and according to Aegir, we weren’t yet halfway, though Kolibri seemed to drag us twice as fast as we’d have traveled without her.
Daylight was spent swimming, but at night Nori sat between Olinne’s legs as they curled under a cloak in the cold, Olinne’s chin tucked over Nori’s shoulder.
The river’s tide was low, the air thick with drizzling rain, the embankment damp enough to hiss against the floating embers sloughing from our fire.
I shivered as well, even under thick furs, pressed against the warmth of Kye’s chest. Aegir and I had called the water out of our clothes and hair as soon as we’d set foot onto land, channeling anything moist back to the river, though the soft rain was slowly nullifying our efforts.
Midnight air nipped at our skin, misted around our mouths, cold enough to steam over our heads.
Diara’s cheeks pinched with winter blight as she stared into the flames, the sharp corner of her bow just visible over her shoulder.
“Do you feel the current in the air?” Aegir asked. Unlike us female Naiads, he wasn’t shivering, though gooseflesh had erupted down his neck and across his arms, his eyelids a shade cooler than they’d been in Calder.
I stretched my hand, feeling against the water. It was everywhere around me, a low cloud that buzzed and burned against my call. And within it, tiny shreds of static.
“It’s plasma,” Aegir continued. “If you look up, you will see burning clusters of it, billions of years away from us.”
At my back, I felt Kye glance at the night sky in the same moment I did. The solitary crackling of the fire in the seconds that followed told me everyone else had as well. Somewhere in the back of my memory, titanic spheres roared, flames scorching me as I ran a trail of glittering dust.
“We can’t control the stars,” Aegir said. “Just as we can’t control the plasma here.”
“How can I call lightning, then?” I asked.