58. Maren
Maren
Someone moaned, the sound long and deep, carving into my bones.
“Who’s there?” demanded a voice over the wail.
“I know those steps. I know you’re him. Come to barter for my soul.
You can’t have it, you wretched lying demon!
” A body ran at his cell door, and I jumped in surprise as the prisoner inside slammed his weight against the iron bars. “YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.”
The nails over glass continued.
My heart began to pump in my ears. The noises made me want to crawl deeper into my own skin, my legs wooden as I forced them through the dark. The moaning elongated into an echoing sob, so loud it vibrated inside my head.
The prisoner charged his iron door again, landing in a crash that rattled his hinges. He grabbed the bars of his door, pressing his eyes hard through the wide grate, leering at me.
“What’s this?” he asked, licking his lips. “Who’s this?”
I sent a quick look back toward the stairs, still bathed in shadow. Then faced the cells and sang.
The prisoner’s eyes softened into black. The moaning stopped. For a moment, I could only hear my heart, thudding softly against my breastbone.
Then the nails on glass returned.
“Pretty,” a voice said. “Almost as pretty as my mother’s voice.”
I walked past the quiet cells, halting before the very last one.
Inside, Kazimir sat over the floor, legs bent under him, carving into the wall with something that might have been a broken bone. His eyes flicked up to meet mine.
“Someone has been feeding you shield weed,” I said, a small seed of disappointment rooting through my chest. I’d been depending on being able to incant him. Not being able to added another layer of difficulty to my task.
The Rivean scoffed. “Haven’t touched it since I was a child. Allergic. What do you want, witch?”
I’d already opened my mouth to ask my first question, but I paused. “Allergic how?”
He laid his jagged bone on the floor with a dull sigh as if I’d just interrupted him from deciphering the world’s most prestigious texts. “It makes me sick,” he said, his northern accent rolling over every syllable as if I were too stupid to understand.
But I did understand. I couldn’t quite believe I hadn’t understood it before. “You’re Naiad.”
Kazimir went still. He turned, just barely. Just enough to see me from the corner of his eye. “What do you want.”
I stared at the man who, in another life, killed my husband. Who had chased us across Rivea, through rain and snow and strikes of lightning, who had bargained to take me prisoner in the mountains.
“What would you have done with me, if I hadn’t escaped in the mountains?” I asked. It hadn’t been on my list of questions for him, but I was suddenly curious.
“Is this because I taunted your prince? Told him the entire prison guard could be of use to you?”
He let the word drip slowly from his mouth, ensuring I understood his meaning. My jaw lengthened. I hadn’t been present when he’d said it, and Kye hadn’t repeated it to me.
Kazimir shook his head, turning away from me and reaching for his bone again. “I was trying to get under his skin when I said that.”
“What did you want with me?”
“What will you give me, witch, if I speak to you?”
I raised my satchel, filled with bread and apples. Roasted duck and fennel and onion lathered in butter, a raspberry pastry at the bottom. Each was wrapped carefully in wax paper, but I pulled back the satchel flap, letting the scent hit him through the iron gate.
He swallowed a mouthful of saliva. Then swallowed again, dropping his bone and walking to the door, the light combing through his red-black hair. A heavy drift of it covered his jaw like black rust, loose and wild. I held an apple just out of his reach.
“Yes, I am a Naiad,” he said almost desperately, eyes latched to the red apple in my hand. “I recognized it in you. I know what you are.”
My mouth thinned. “And what am I?”
“A princess of sirens.”
My head exploded with a thousand questions, but I didn’t have time to ask all of them now. “And what did you want with me?”
“Vládca Skorpió. The Rivean King’s nephew. He is searching for Naiads to fight in the war against Calder.”
“You believed I might fight for him?” I asked, my voice flat.
“I knew he was looking for Naiads, and I planned to give you to him.” The Rivean’s eyes climbed to meet mine. “But knowing you were married to Calder, he likely would have killed you.”
“Why don’t I feel a cold prickle at my neck when I look at you?”
He blinked, still frowning, as if asking himself the same question. “I used to feel it as a boy. Before they rubbed ash in my eyes.”
Something raw and rotten dropped into my belly. If it had been the ash of shield weed, I couldn’t imagine the level of pain he’d been subjected to.
I resisted the urge to glance back at the stairs behind me. Light from Aras’s lantern would find me before a guard did, and with Naiad hearing, I’d be alerted before they ever saw me. But I didn’t enjoy the thought of trying to sneak out after the guard had returned.
“Are there Naiads among the Rivean crown?”
Kazimir laughed in a don’t-be-so-stupid kind of way, waiting for the next question.
I retracted the apple. He jerked, fear flashing in his eyes. “Is Oberon dead?” I asked.
“Oberon,” he echoed slowly, as if tasting the bitter salt of the sea after decades away from the ocean.
“You would have been a child when he died,” I guessed, searching for clues to his age. His eyes were young, his skin smooth and devoid of wrinkles, and his mouthful of teeth were white and straight—but it was always difficult to tell with a Naiad.
“I know him.” His gaze dropped to the apple, unwavering. “The Rivean emissary, some twenty years ago.”
“You know him?” A small flurry of hope unraveled like a shining ribbon in my ribs. “He’s alive?”
Kazimir’s stare cut to me in the dark, hard and heavy and suspicious. As if he’d caught himself in a trance and realized I’d been the one to hypnotize him. He stepped back into the cell, his face dropping into shadow. The hunger in his voice dropped as well. “What do you want with him?”
Unsure what I’d done to spook him, I held the apple a little closer. Close enough for him to take it, if he tried. He didn’t move. “Is he alive?”
“He’s dead.”
The flurry of ribbon fell to the floor. “I see,” I said quietly. “Do you know anyone who would have been close to him?”
He watched me as if he couldn’t decide whether I was a lifeline or a threat. Like he didn’t trust my apple to be anything other than a death sentence. “Yes,” he whispered. “I was.”
“You knew him personally?”
No response, though from the flare behind his eyes, I knew the answer.
“How did you know him?”
Distant steps scuffed against stone, thin strands of light nearing the corner. I was out of time. It must have shown in my eyes, in the way I paused, reached for my satchel.
“Time for you to leave,” he said, quiet enough to send a chill through my skin.
"Please.” I tossed one final glance behind me, then set the apple through the lattice of his iron gate. “How did you know him?”
Kazimir tilted his head slowly, ignoring the fruit I’d left inside his door. “My mother left me with him.”