47. Maren #2
Golden brown irises swept sideways to meet my gaze. He maneuvered his chin and mouth through the jungle of my hair, aiming his face up at me. “Your star-wielding,” he said after a heavy pause. “If you practice here at the palace, you can’t do much more than static and sparks.”
“I thought about that.” Leihani was only half a day’s swim if I pushed myself, and the vacant islands offered plenty of privacy, but I didn’t want to arrive dead-tired just to put myself to work.
“Aegir knows a remote isle northwest of here. The Venusians call it Evenstar. It’s the last bit of land the sun touches before it sets. ”
Kye’s brows tensed. He nudged close enough I could no longer see his face. “So,” he said slowly, “Venusia is more appealing than Leihani?”
“It’s only an hour away for a Naiad. And more secluded than Leihani, with water surrounding it. No trading ships, either.”
He didn’t answer. I waited a full minute before sitting up so that I could look at him. “What?”
“It’s just—” He scratched the side of his neck with a callused thumb. “What if I need to reach you quickly?”
“How would you reach me if I went to Leihani?” I countered.
He exhaled through his nose, aiming his eyes elsewhere.
“Kye,” I said flatly. Expectantly.
“It’s fine. Venusia is fine.” He sat up, rubbing the flat of his hand roughly over his mouth as if wiping an invisible mess away. “I need you to stay out of the palace for a while.”
“As in leave the palace?”
“Just during daylight.
I expected more, but he didn’t give it. My eyes narrowed as I focused on him, until the silence and his steady gaze built in the center of my head like a pressure valve.
“I’m not going to apologize,” I said.
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“He locked me in his quarters, grabbed my arm, forced me to watch as he killed a man”—Kye opened his mouth and I surged on before he could speak—“then threatened my islands and my father and you.” My voice deepened with warning, a burn in my sternum like I’d swallowed a hot spike, the scent of molten iron rising around us.
“I’m not saying you’re at fault,” Kye said quietly. “I gave you my knife and told you to use it.”
“But,” I added for him, widening my eyes.
He propped himself on an elbow, angling his nose and mouth so that they skimmed mine. “I’m trying to deal with the fallout.”
I scoffed. The bed groaned as I tilted out of it, swinging onto my feet.
“I’m happy to go back there now and finish.
” I’d killed men by now. Innocent men, even.
Men whose only crime was being called to war or working in a prison or sailing a ship.
It had been months since I’d struggled with the morality of ending a life.
I wasn’t sure when it had happened. Perhaps when I’d become a queen with a colony to protect or when Death had run alongside me for three days as I crossed the stars.
I wasn’t sure when I’d changed; all I knew was there was the Maren of then and the Maren of now, and I was never going back.
Kye’s hand wrapped around my wrist, and he pulled me back, his eyes drilling a hole through the nearest wall as if straining to avoid looking at me.
“Believe me,” he said, “I count the days until Emilius is dead and my brother can take his place. But until then, he is to me what Thaan is to you, and—”
“I’m not afraid of Thaan,” I corrected. And then flinched when I realized how it must have sounded to him.
I’d heard the word coward often enough in his thoughts, lurking behind corners and in the space under doors like an invisible plague when he least expected it.
Other times he almost invited it, called it to the stage and let it throw its weight behind every decision he made, as if he felt safer in simply knowing it existed within him.
Even if he hid it from everyone else under calm eyes and steady hands and a voice that never wavered.
His mouth twitched with unspoken thoughts, that curtain between us firmly drawn. He tucked a curl behind my ear, letting his thumb coast across my jaw. His eyes seemed far away, as if he lay in bed with a distant memory. “I am, Leihani. I’m afraid of Emilius.”
“What’s your plan, then?” I asked, trying to choose my words more carefully. “Just tiptoe around him while he threatens everyone we love?”
He pressed his mouth into my temple, then lay down without another word.
A voice in my head warned me to drop it.
That I was edging into uneasy territory, pushing him when he’d already asked politely enough not to be pushed.
But a part of me suddenly needed to know: What was his plan?
To live the next thirty years under a mad king’s rule, under intimidation and torment for the sake of keeping peace?
“Kye.”
“I don’t have an answer yet,” he said, calm and soft and tired.
He turned just enough to gaze at me, the down of his mattress rustling.
“I’m not like you. You condemn something a problem and decide to kill it within the same breath.
That might be an easy fate for Thaan. I mean, look at him—no one knows what he looks like, and no one would miss him if he were to die, except maybe his Naiads, who would probably celebrate his disappearance. But Emilius…”
He pushed himself upright again, loosing a sigh that seemed to take the strength from his bones.
“There’s a guard outside the King’s quarters who watched him invite you in with two hands, and now he has one.
He left for an unscheduled hunt two nights ago, the night you left for Leihani.
I don’t know when he’ll return, but I’d be willing to bet the coffers he’ll return with a story of being maimed by a boar or a buck.
Then gossip will do what gossip does in a palace, and if you’re seen snooping around his tower or if he suddenly dies without warning, that gossip will grow a bit too similar to the sound of your name, so if you could please, please, give me some time to come up with a fucking plan. ”
I tilted my head to the side. Opened my mouth.
“Please,” he repeated, in a tone that nullified any semblance of request. “For now, just do nothing.”
“Okay.” I lowered myself to my pillow, my back to his back, that soft lure of sleep now silenced under the blare of red wind inside my head.
Our single candle, low in a puddle of wax, hissed as it drowned, dropping the room into darkness.
I stared out the window at the stars, though I didn’t really see them.
I waited for sleep to find him. For his breaths to lengthen into slow pulls against the dark. But it didn’t.