27. Maren
Maren
Istepped back enough to give Kye a single, solemn nod.
Hadrian drove his fingers through his ash-brown roots. Diara’s pale-green eyes widened, her neck stricken.
“My Queen,” Nori began, but I didn’t let her get further than that.
“Take Olinne and Aitne above,” I commanded my Oculos. “The rest of you should follow.”
They glanced at each other like my instruction was unclear, like my words were inaudible, salt and fog stirred under the thrash of the sea.
“Come on.” Pheolix smacked the shoulder of the nearest person to him—Aren, who started. “The water down there will soon be the water up here, and someone needs to walk me back up this thing.”
Aegir shook himself loose of the group, holding a hand out for Pheolix.
“Here, gnat.” He turned away, easily striding away.
Cebrinne surrendered only a short distance, mouth hitched to one side in thought.
Hadrian ran a coarse hand over his mouth.
He looked like he might try to argue, but Diara, who had frowned at the pit for several long minutes, grasped his arm and swept the opposite way.
His eyes bulged, choking on the damp cavern air, and though he still looked as if he doubted whether Kye and I possessed sound judgment, the cord of his muscles relaxed, unwinding the moment her fingers curled around him.
He let her shuffle him to the first bend in the tunnel, where they waited for the rest to follow.
Kye was the last one to step away. He traced my bottom lip with his thumb. Don’t make me threaten Darkness to get you back.
I smiled against his skin. I wouldn’t mind seeing that. Maybe I will.
I’d make sure you enjoy it even less than he did.
His fingers stilled, and he tilted me up, securing my mouth with his.
My heart had begun to skip, knowing what it was about to fling itself into.
But his lips slowed again, a dizzyingly quiet pulse in my ear.
Kye left me with a quick kiss, one with only a hint of bite, a taste of ire, should he have to terrorize a god simply to reclaim me.
But it was sweet and lush and mine all the same, and I felt it tumble through my skin, settling into my blood.
He was the last to leave my side, but only by a few inches. He took half a tread away, just enough to give me space to turn and leap. His eyes were the last thing I looked at before I stepped off the edge, wild and calm and burning.
The hole in the bowels of Paria swallowed me in a single gulp, but not before a blur flew overhead, blue and black, gleaming.
Someone had jumped with me.
My feet hit liquid, shining under the twinkling lights of the starry ceiling above. And then it folded in half, renting a chasm through the center, and flung me into the deep.
It was all too familiar, yet completely distinct from my dive into Sylus Lake.
There the water had been brisk, fresh, tucked between crystals of ice and under pine and ashwood.
I caught a taste of the Parian pool as I descended, wet stone and forgotten earth.
Like ancient secrets and whispers and shadows that lurked just beyond the corner of my vision.
I tried to crane my neck, tried to see who had followed me in.
Not Kye, I pleaded with myself. He wouldn’t jump. Not after I’d asked him not to.
Kye would have come had I asked—but I hadn’t. And he trusted me to understand why.
So who fell just above me?
The wind screamed like nails on glass. It snaked up my dress, clawing my hair, tangling in my eyes.
I finally closed them, tucking my head into the crook of my arm.
The light extinguished as if it had never existed, and shapes passed too quickly to discern: rock, shade, ghost?
I was happy they whipped by before I could see them.
Then I landed, my feet too solid beneath me.
I anticipated the abrupt halt more this time than I had before. The floor wobbled, or perhaps my knees did, a liquid squirm that almost made me wonder if I still possessed a set of bones. The Breath of Safiro illuminated the vast nothing in soft blue, lighting my skin.
The blur arrived a moment after me. A sudden stop tilted her balance, and she fell to one knee, catching herself with her hands. She glanced up as I turned to view her over my shoulder, the soft light of my stone illuminating her hair and skin a gentle blue.
Cebrinne.
She straightened, as pliant and liquid as I felt, her waves like midnight across her eyes.
I blinked, my mind already whirling with questions, quickly followed by stinging anger.
“I didn’t want help.”
Now eye-to-eye with me, Cebrinne faltered, a soundless catch in her breath that echoed into my bones.
She looked at me like I was a reflection in a mirror she didn’t quite recognize, and even through the irritation radiating in my chest, a shiver lanced down my spine.
She wet her lips, hesitating, considering her words, but an appeal lingered in her gaze, urgent and tired like a slowly dying wind, willing me to understand something she couldn’t find words for.
“I don’t need help,” I said again, but the words were softer this time. Tethered to my lungs, unable to reach further than my breath would carry them. A knot twisted in my throat, hard and gnarled like the tortured grain in a slab of wood. And I didn’t know why.
“What is this?” curled a voice in my ear.
Like smoke and ash, shadow and vapor, black mist falling over river moors.
Icy fingers drifted across my shoulder, falling down my back, the drip of cold trailing all the way down my dress to my legs.
“Two mortals dropping into my home, two souls thirsty for a bargain.” He shrunk away before his shadows touched the glow of my stone.
Cebrinne tracked Darkness as he coiled behind my back, spiraling to my opposite shoulder. “Just one soul. I came to make a payment.”
My brows clashed. A wisp now sliding down my arm, Darkness shuddered in ecstasy. “A payment,” he drawled in a whisper that bounded off the wall-less void. “I knew I’d see you one day again, little darling, little siren. Little angry love.”
Cebrinne lowered her chin. “I’d like to pay the toll.”
I stared at her, my mind suddenly as empty and vast as the endless cavern we’d landed in.
“The toll, the toll. I have many up above, many pathways that lead to my house of shadow. Under bridges, over roads, across stars and within the dust of long-dead hearts. You’ll have to be more specific, lovely pet, so that I understand which passage you wish the privilege of crossing.”
He warped and twisted as he spoke, still a drifting shadow, and Cebrinne regarded him with a lack of amusement. “The toll under the colony of Paria.”
Darkness bloomed softly, as if breathing her words in, digesting them, inky fog falling over itself and vanishing before its dust hit the floor.
“The colony under Paria,” he recited to himself, sliding off my arm and shifting toward her.
“You are here for the stone. And you. I know your face.” He rolled languidly across me, a hazy tendril sliding up my neck and under my ear.
“Maren of Leihani. I have already collected your soul, sweet wraithling. One pretty little promise, another mortal for the scenery, a bauble for eternal shelves.”
A flicker of nausea traced the lining of my stomach, but I folded it away, training my eyes on Cebrinne.
“I don’t wish to live in your debt.” Pride lifted my voice, gave it breadth and weight and gravity.
It curled my fists, tightened my muscles, hardened my jaw.
I’d spent the better half of a year chained by obligations I hadn’t wanted. To Thaan. To Selena. To the moon.
Cebrinne’s gaze aligned with the shadowy wisp, but her mouth twitched down at hearing them. “This isn’t about debt.”
Darkness swept back to view us both. Had he been human-shaped, his shoulders would almost be shimmying with amusement. “Darling mortal, you’ve entered the house of shadow. Either you incur her debt or my own.”
I clenched my teeth. Darkness shrank, just a little.
Slowed. Studied me. Like a man giddy at winning a hand of cards, only to realize his opponent outplayed him.
“Unless you mean to trick me.” He said it slyly, as though humored by the very idea.
But a cold edge rested in the drip of his voice. A knife hidden under a hand.
“I will not call in a debt,” Cebrinne said, summoning our attention back to her. “I don’t wish to be repaid.”
Darkness leaned away, shadows coiling around itself, and though his shape remained like vapor, I imagined he was analyzing the moons under his nail beds. “Though the toll you seek is steep, very steep. The payment is great, very great.”
Cebrinne nodded once. “I will make it.”
I scoffed in disbelief. But Darkness swished closer to her, and alarm cracked through my skull. I reached to draw him back, but his inky cloud slid through my hands, dripping off my fingertips like thawed frost. “Only the child of the moon can reach the stone.”
She aimed her gaze at him now. “I don’t wish to reach it. I’m here to pay the toll.”
Darkness cocked his head. “Imagine if you’d known to pay it the first time.
What trouble you might have saved yourself.
” He chuckled to himself, the sound like crackling smoke.
“But no. You dove down into my house, then asked to simply leave. I wanted to keep you then, lovely, pretty pet. But I was too curious who she might grow up to become.”
He crooked his head, shadows slowly gazing back at me. “The child of the moon.”
My mouth parted, a chill in my blood as I watched them both.
“I let you leave my house in full health,” he said slowly, coldly.
The amusement that danced under his billowing vapors had chilled, his voice now measured and quiet.
“In an exchange for meeting your child of the moon. A bargain that implies introduction, darling mortal, a bargain that implies a name.”
Cebrinne’s eyes remained locked dispassionately on his slowly rolling shadows. “You didn’t ask for a name. You asked for a meeting.”
“Tricksy, lying, thieving mortal.” Darkness let out a sound like a wet hiss, a flaming iron rod pressed into a bed of ice. His gaze shifted to me. “It does not matter now. I know her name. I own her soul.”
Cebrinne didn’t flinch. “It was not a trick. I followed your terms.”
“Very well,” he replied, shrinking back to himself as the hot whistle of his voice ended.
“I’ll accept your toll to allow the child of the moon to cross over to the stone.
” He straightened, shadows cooling almost to his visceral form.
A man draped under a cloak of smoke. He tilted his head right, then left, then right again, sampling the taste and texture of all the bargains he might offer before they left his tongue.
“Fifty years of your mortal life,” he finally said, shifting close enough to draw the tip of his finger across the lifeline in her palm. “Starting now.” Scarlet bloomed in the center of her hand, and she watched it silently. Resolute.
“No,” I breathed. I don’t know what I’d expected.
Something abstract, like the bargain he’d made with me.
Passage in trade for a soul after her life had reached an end.
A memory, a secret, a promise to fulfill.
Not something measurable. Years drifted by, but they still held solid lines.
A beginning and an end. Fixed. Definite.
“Done,” Cebrinne said.