42. Maren
Maren
The moon floated high enough to flirt with the overhead clouds by the time I’d prepared myself to leave. Full and round and heavy, she sat like a mirror in the sky, glinting a reflection back to me I didn’t wish to see.
You are the beginning.
Kye arrived as I pulled my silk cloak over my shoulders, a leather-bound tome under his arm, the title a simple word spelled out in symbols too ancient for my eyes.
He set it down with a heavy thud, eyes lighting softly as he fixed his golden stare onto the clothes that lay underneath my black Naiad dress.
“Do you want me to come?” he asked, fastening the cloak at my neck.
I leaned forward, ignoring his hands and letting my forehead strike the hard wall of his chest just below his collar bones. “No,” I lied, the word vibrating against his skin.
The morning I’d left Leihani, I’d told Kye I hated the islanders.
That was after Naheso tried to drown me under the marshes of my breadfruit trees.
After I’d killed my uncle and walked in a daze through the market covered in swamp water and blood to find the village healer, Akamai, and had discovered Kye instead.
It felt like a lifetime ago, though it had been less than a year.
My belly twisted like a fist. Returning to Leihani without Kye at my side felt like wandering back into a cage I’d accidentally escaped.
I’d been small there. Forced to mature early yet treated like a cursed child, shunned and kept out of sight.
Wherever I roamed, I could be anything or anyone.
A witch, a siren, a queen. In Leihani, I’d always be exactly what they made me into.
Defending the islanders against Aegir or refusing to allow Emilius to use them in his war was one thing. Returning to the island myself was another entirely. I’d once thought I might never go back. Moons above, the largest part of me still balked at the very idea.
But a quiet part of me begged to return.
Not just for my father, who I hoped was simply visiting a friend or socializing on a veranda other than his own.
I missed my tiny house with windows so close to the sea I could almost touch the waves.
I missed warm, rich soil under my nails, separating seedlings from their mothers, wiping sweat off my brow after a long night under the moon and plunging into the salt water without a care about my dress or hair.
I wondered if this was what Kye felt whenever he returned to Laurier Palace.
It didn’t matter if I wanted him with me or not. We both knew that after what happened with Emilius, Kye needed to stay in the City of Towers. The residents of the palace would quickly realize the King was suddenly missing a hand. Questions would soon circle like sharks.
I suppose my one comfort in leaving now was that Emilius had the brief chance to kill Kye, but he hadn’t taken it.
I let him fasten my cloak and kiss me goodbye, promising to return tomorrow. Twenty minutes later, I found myself staring past my toes into the dark, furious waves of the Juile Sea.
“No horse?” a smooth voice asked in the dark.
I straightened and looked at her, the young woman who emerged from cliff-edged shadows. Wind whipped at her black-blue hair, her eyes the stark color of grit and uncertainty swept together deep within tides of teal blue.
“She was useful when we traveled to Paria, but no,” I answered. “I’m faster without her.”
My mother nodded once. Then adjusted her view, turning her head toward the water, broken lines of moonlight between the cresting waves. I didn’t ask if she was coming. I didn’t tell her to stay, either. We stood together in silence, listening to the sounds of a waning winter night by the sea.
Then I dove in, charging toward my island home.
A moment later, the sound of a body breaking the surface in a flurry of bubbles followed.
I checked the ships first.
Nine of them. Bow to stern, port to starboard, crow’s nest to the hold.
We lined up the vacoused sailors and asked each first mate to count their crew. If there was anyone else on board—passengers or prisoners.
I’d thought of sending them back to Calder, ship, sailors, and all—but they’d only wake up in the morning, one day into the three-day sail, and turn around. I needed to send a message to Emilius regarding my islands.
Send your ships to Leihani. And lose them.
“Throw yourselves overboard,” I ordered the men, ignoring their chemical smell, the way their eyes followed me like round pits of Darkness. “Swim to the bottom of the sea. Do not resurface.”
And they did.
One by one, the men dropped off the side of the deck, until only my Naiads remained on a ship now home to ghosts. I fought the rising gorge in my chest, the sting of guilt over senseless death.
“Break their masts,” I said to Nori. “Sink each one.”
Cebrinne watched the turquoise water swallow that first ship like a haunted memory, jarring and mesmerizing at once, her hand loose around her throat.
“Are you coming?” I asked her. She nodded.
We pitched ourselves in, shooting past the drowning men, many of them already lifeless bodies.
The reef floor brightened as its depth shifted into view, lit only by the moon and stars.
Pink corals, teeming with tiny inhabitants.
Orange stars clung to rocks, urchins lining grooves and channels like poky little rivers.
I paused at the foot of my father’s beach where the water began to shallow, lifting my eyes above the surface just enough to scan the nearby houses.
Stars blazed overhead, but few fires remained between houses, most of Leihani caught under the lulling current of sleep. I’d asked Nori to incant the village hours ago, but I imagined some of them would be awake and alert by now.
Beside me, Cebrinne’s heart thudded like a pair of knuckles against a door. Wind shifted, dragging the sour scent of nervousness from her. She lingered behind, her steps up the shallow incline to the beach slow and cumbersome.
“Come on,” I murmured, lifting out of the water.
We didn’t call the sea off ourselves. We let it drip instead, trickling from our hair and chins and clothes, our footsteps silent over the sand like wraiths.
My grandfather’s old canoe, the one I’d always hated, sat beached where mine had once docked.
I wondered who had helped my father retrieve it from the cursed island of Neris.
Cebrinne smoothed a hand across its side, silent as her gaze wandered the shore.
The nets and buckets and baskets and fish traps, ropes and charred leaves and rare bottles of glass.
I stopped long enough to loosen my byssus cloak, laying the black silk over the canoe’s bow, and she stole a sharp breath of air at the sight of me, swathed in bark and tapa cloth.
Leihaniian clothes. The softened hau sighed as I came to a stop. Friendly, old, worn. My hands scaled up my stomach and across the weave of my tapa wrap, tracing the line of small seashells I’d once stitched into the cloth.
Something swam behind her eyes as she took me in, but I didn’t have enough time to try and decode what she saw. Though whatever it was, it made my stomach squirm shyly before I turned toward the house.
Our steps left sand, meeting long, tickling grass instead. Crickets chirped. Frogs croaked. My wind chimes tinkled, shells and glass and hollow bits of wood singing us to the door.
“Wait,” Cebrinne gasped out just before I reached the steps.
I turned to look at her, eyebrows raised. Her blood pounded loudly now. A restlessness had wormed its way into her limbs, slender fingers wringing themselves into odd angles. She swallowed, a hue paler than her familiar ivory tone, though a flush had lashed across her cheeks.
“How—” She paused, stepping back to tuck her hair behind both sets of ears. “Do I look all right?”
I blinked at her. Then choked back a helpless laugh. “You realize he’s old, right?”
Cebrinne clicked her tongue, rolling her eyes to the distant skies.
“His knees crack when he stands up, he limps sometimes when the thunderstorms grow too heavy, and the hair has silvered behind his ears.”
“Do I look all right?”
“Yes, Cebrinne. Of course you do.” I paused to call the water from her, smoothing her hair and the gauzy white dress she’d chosen, tiny yellow flowers embellished in the fabric. I smiled, softly. “You’re beautiful.”
Silence stretched between us like the underground roots of a sapling, until we cleared our throats and adjusted our clothes, each of us pretending we hadn’t spoken. I climbed the steps to my veranda, Cebrinne right behind me.
Crossed the wooden plankboards, past the log benches set against the walls, sweeping my father’s door flap aside just as the sun crept into the eastern sky.
But dust across the floor was all that waited inside.