49. Maren #2
“I’m sure we won’t have to wait long,” he said heavily, climbing the carved stairs and sinking into the shallow basin of illuminated water on the left, motioning for me to take the right.
He scratched absently at the crown of his head, then shook his braids out behind him.
“Can I offer you anything? Are you hungry or thirsty?”
“No.” My eyes wandered to the tall ceiling, where celestial stars had been carved into the prehistoric shell, intricate figures with nine points. Peaceful, eternal. Nothing like real stars, roaring with fire and violence, clashing so close and hot I’d thought they might eat me alive.
“Tell me about Perpetuum,” Aegir said, his gaze a gentle stroke over the side of my face.
I shuddered the sea of stars out of memory. “What would you like to know?”
“Everything, I suppose.” He leaned against the wall of his pool, releasing a generous sigh as the warm salt drank his body all the way to his waist. Smoky scales breathed from his skin, wrapping his ankles and curling around the tops of his shoulders, fading into his cresting wave tattoos.
“How did Death meet you? Did you find Naiads along the shores?”
“Other Naiads, yes. And humans,” I said, remembering how, like Theia, the Naiads all held a silvery hue, as if drops of the moon had lit them from within. “Death met me at the edge of the world, after I slayed the Abyssi. It led me across the sea of stars, like a friend.”
“What did it appear to you as?”
“A manta ray.”
Chin perched against his thumb, Aegir smiled. “My grandfather spoke to it before he left this realm. Called it a lion of the sea.”
I tested the pool water with a toe, but it was warm enough to melt butter.
A moment later I’d dropped fully in, closing my eyes at the heat.
The cold had plagued me for weeks, Darkness leeching the sun from me like a virus in my blood.
I could have curled up in this little pool and slept.
Like Aegir, I let my scales loosen over my legs, a pale shimmer under the water.
Aegir watched in silence as the nearly transparent silk of my dress floated aimlessly below the surface. “And the Fates?”
“Terrifying.” A muscle spasmed under my lip. “Amazing. I don’t know how to describe them. Making a deal with them is to bargain with the cosmos. I’ve never done anything that’s made me feel quite so small.”
He scratched the side of his cheek with a short thumbnail, teeth white. “I’d love to see them.”
“You wouldn’t,” I laughed.
“Maybe from a distance, then.” The severity in his green eyes softened. “At least you are free now.”
“My contract with Thaan ended when I drank Sidra’s blood.” I lifted a glob of water from the pool, twisting and turning it into air, shaping it like clay. “I would have been free without Theia’s meddling.”
“Do you regret it, then?”
My brows tightened. “Regret which part? Traveling to Perpetuum?”
Aegir dragged the edge of his teeth over his lower lip, considering the question. “Losing your corda-cruor?”
I tilted my head in thought. I’d known, when I took Sidra’s throne, that it would change things between myself and Kye.
I’d always understood his mortality, and it hadn’t seemed to matter the night of our wedding or in the dark of a Rivean inn, when the cord of my life might fray and break around the same time his did.
I’d consumed Sidra’s queen blood knowing it would change everything. That I’d eventually endure an existence without him. A long one. A lonely one. Sidra hadn’t given me very much choice, locking me in her hold and forcing me to fight her to the death.
It was too easy to lie to myself. To say I wasn’t relieved I’d traded our cordae to Love.
That I’d never endure the pain of losing Kye again.
Not because I wanted anyone else. Because of the thing that I couldn’t bring myself to remember, though it lurked under the floorboards of my mind anyway, shining darkness through the cracks at me like some demon roaming under my feet.
The feeling of earth and rock sliding around me, cracking and boiling, a slow march of liquid collapse.
Of sky torn into shadow and night and ruin, the shreds of stars leaping together like veins of the sun, all other light snapped into nothing.
Of my body splitting open, a wound wide and deep and endless, a voice screaming and screaming and screaming, a name that went unanswered.
Of a tether that unlatched from my soul, as faint as a feather’s kiss, a hole in my center I could never fill.
An undying hollow I’d never escape.
I wondered if that was why I’d been pulling, little by little, from him.
Once upon a time, his touch had set flame over my body, his voice had reverberated deep in my core, leaving me almost trembling in hunger.
But I couldn’t remember the last time he’d even felt warm against my fingertips, or when the scent of mint and rain had even entered my thoughts.
Trading my cordae to Love was a gash in my side, a pain that burned and bled.
But the bleed would slow, eventually. The gash would stitch.
I’d carry its scar like a fragile lover, hiding it from everyone else, seeking it out at night when I was alone in the dark.
I could almost feel it now, like a raised weal under my hand.
Sometimes, there is safety in losing the thing we love.
The thing that would have left us first.
I’m in this with you, Kye had once told me, and you’ll never be alone again.
But there was never a way he could have kept that promise. Our fates were intertwined for only a brief moment under the ever-turning stars. He would go, and I would stay.
I opened my mouth, my gaze returning to Aegir as I formulated an answer, and only then did I realize, with a whip-strike to my lungs, the way he was looking at me. Like he was waiting, ever so patiently, for me to see the covetous aching in his eyes.
I sat up slowly, staring back at Aegir in mounting alarm. The air of the throne room, serene only a moment ago, now felt too thick in my mouth. “Of course I regret losing my cordae. Wouldn’t you?”
The monarch of Venusia hung an arm around the lip of his pool, warm water dripping from his hand. “I can’t think of a worse fate.”
“Agreed.”
“What’s wrong?” He drew himself up, hoisting his weight over his hands so his back aligned with the wall to match the vertical tilt of my spine. “You look like you’ve stepped into a pit of quicksand.”
“I’ve just realized.” I stood, his stare fixed on me as I swung a leg over the smooth wall, raising myself into a crouch over the shell floor. “This is your Videre’s dais. I should be in the water below.”
Aegir followed, lifting out of the water to sit over the curve of his pool. “Those are colony pools.”
“Exactly.”
He held out a hand, catching my arm, gently pulling me back. “Stay.”