39. Maren #2
The elder Naiads all gazed at him in silence.
Selena drew a deep, still breath into her chest. “It means Thaan tortured him through incantment and forced wakenings so that Emilius couldn’t be vacoused by any Naiad.
But would still blindly follow Thaan’s word.
It was Thaan’s last resort. We’d incanted him one too many times, and he’d begun to catch on. ”
“And what does that mean for Emilius?” Kye asked slowly. “To have his mind addled?”
The Naiads, even Aegir, gazed at him with varying levels of sympathy, like he was a child who had just asked when their dead dog would come back to play.
Kye’s jaw knit in silence. Red began to rim his eyes, and he finally dropped his gaze to the floor.
I think maybe all kings go mad, he’d once confessed to me, right after explaining how his mother had died. How he believed Emilius had killed her. I don’t think they can help it.
The taste in my mouth grew sour. I swallowed it down. “Emilius is the way he is because of Thaan?”
“What happened in the King’s chambers, Maren?” Selena’s voice was soft against the near silence of the room.
“The King sent ships to Leihani.” I pulled my attention from Kye, back to them. “To my father’s house. Emilius threatened to open fire against his house if I can’t convince one thousand islanders to join his war.”
Aegir’s shoulders relaxed, his expression carefully controlled. “At least there’s an easy solution. Just sing to the humans.”
I frowned. “The entire island population? Losing one thousand islanders would devastate Leihani. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t plan to give him a single one.”
“You’re concerned over humans?” Aegir tilted his head.
I bared my teeth in his direction. “My people.”
The Videre’s mouth tightened. “Your people are of the sea.”
“Why is it one or the other for you?”
“Because it can’t be both.”
A soft growl rumbled in my throat. “My father is a human. He’s an islander.
I am both.” My nostrils flared, molten steel sharp in my nose, a spike in anger.
Words flared within me, weapons to aim at the Venusian.
How proud he was to exist as a Naiad, how arrogant and self-important and superior.
How fitting to believe his own species deserved safety while humans didn’t.
From the corner of my eye, Cebrinne shifted her weight. I ignored the choking impulse to steal a glance at her. She’d cordaed to a human. To my father. Did she share the same sentiment as Aegir?
The Venusian leaned forward on his elbows.
“I know you’ve surrounded yourself with humans you trust, Maren.
But you’ve been lucky. You could have easily been strung up under the bow of a ship.
Left as a figurehead to rot under the sun.
There’s a reason men who witness Naiads are cursed to die.
Humans rarely exhibit the self-control to exist alongside Naiads.
They don’t deserve to exist alongside us. ”
My fingers twitched. “That’s why you had no qualms hiring a ship of pirates to take me. You knew they’d be dead in a month.”
Aegir sighed. “Humans, like pirates, seal their own fate.”
“And innocent islanders? Do they deserve less than Naiads?”
He clicked his tongue, lifting a shoulder and letting it fall.
I said, low and edged with venom, “If you truly believe that, you’re no better than Thaan.”
Pheolix’s chair creaked as he shifted, leaning against his armrest, lips sucked into his mouth as though concealing either a cringe or a smile.
The rest of the room sat so still, we may have been a painting on the wall.
The air between us frosted like a ghost had wandered into the apartment, someone I’d never met and never seen but I could feel.
Roaming behind our backs and between the chairs, our conversation prisoner to something long dead.
Aegir’s arrow-tipped gaze drifted down to stare absently at something behind me. “Is that what I am to you,” he asked, the blaze in his voice snuffed out. “Another brand of Thaan?”
From the corner of my eye, Kye crossed his arms, his mouth hard under the dust of his stubble.
Perhaps I’d gone too far, forming Thaan’s name in my mouth and throwing it at him like a knife.
Perhaps I should have apologized. Queens were diplomatic.
They guarded their politics the same way they guarded their feelings, with tight lips and held tongues.
Queens didn’t hurl insults at other monarchs, especially ones who have pledged their allyship.
Something tugged at me there, a warning in my chest. If I didn’t take it back, I might have lost Aegir’s loyalty. All I’d done since he’d found me in Rivea was push him, challenge him, test him.
But admitting I was wrong felt like pointing out a crack in a foundation I’d laid brick by brick, a mortar of pride and anger and years upon years of making myself small. Unseen. Invisible. Just to make everyone else’s lives easier.
I tasted the words in my mouth. No, Aegir. That’s not what I think.
But the words were bitter. They stuck to my teeth like ash, mixing like a foul, shameful paste, and I couldn’t let them go. I stared back instead, uncaring that I might seem harsh or cold.
Aegir sighed. “You are like him, too,” he said softly, pushing his chair out from the table. He strode around us without a second glance. Selena’s door clicked behind him.