62. Kye
Kye
An entire month passed with that Rivean asshole sleeping in the room beside ours after he vowed his blood to Maren.
Aitne had vacated the room, reminding us she’d only stayed to mend Maren’s leg, which hadn’t pained her since she’d returned from Perpetuum. I wondered in secret how Ano felt about being moved into the moldered servant quarters when a prisoner lived in our tower, though he didn’t seem to mind.
The last of winter melted away, leaving the ground waterlogged under rain that flew so hard toward the ground it felt like a slap against my skin.
Just inside the door, I shook it out of my hair, letting my hand banish the worst of it until the wall next to me looked like an outraged dog had released a deluge after its bath.
Maren sent me a testy look over her shoulder.
You could just call it off me, I reminded her, stealing an apple from the basket on the table. One from last harvest. I chomped into it, flopping sideways into an armchair, my jaw slowing as I realized it was as soggy as the palace grounds outside.
I’d woken up in a mood, and it hadn’t gone away. The air felt dark. Heavy. And not from the stormy clouds outside that scooped the sunlight out of reach. It was like a shadow had laid its hand over the palace, reaching for me.
Reaching for us.
Gave me the fucking gooseflesh.
Don't you have some other chair to lounge in on Evenstar? Maren said, mouth crooked
I took another bite. Nope.
Not true. The others were waiting for me. But I was waiting for Leal. I’d asked him to sit with Maren while she questioned Kazimir, a request I suspected made her feel like I doubted whether she could squash Kazimir like the little fucking mosquito he was. Which was ridiculous.
I knew she could.
I just didn’t want that fucking Rivean alone with my wife.
Not after he’d taunted me in the office of the Deadman’s House, or forced a blade through my chest, or beat my brother before bartering for Maren, pulling her into his forces to do who knows fucking what with her.
Even now, I could feel him watching me as he sat across from her with his beady little fucking Rivean eyes, wishing I’d leave the room.
Nope. Sorry, you little Naiad fuck. No wonder he’d hated me so much in Rivea.
I’d thought it was because I was royalty, the assumption I usually made with everyone who hated me.
It was because I was human.
“What’s your tail look like?” I asked through mouthful of mushy apple.
Maren clicked her tongue, sending me an even more withering glare. It’s rude to ask a Naiad that, Kye.
Really? I swallowed, licking bland apple juice from the corners of my mouth. “Is it blue?”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to answer him.”
Across from her, Kazimir surveyed me with the flat temper a blacksmith reserves for a blister that won’t pop.
Go be threatened somewhere else, Maren hissed. Intimidating him doesn’t help me.
I snapped the last bite of flesh from the apple between my teeth, chewing slowly as I gazed out the window. Doesn’t help who?
She sighed from her nose, long and slow. Time to stop teasing her before some poor soul found my mangled body in a ditch somewhere.
Aalto knew, I might have been a little threatened. Why was every Naiad the prime definition of fucking male beauty. Even with his dark auburn hair tied back in a choppy tuft behind his head, the longer strands hung over his cheeks like a night-faring bandit, slinky and sly and annoying as fuck.
His face was almost as punchable as Aegir’s, a comparison I hadn’t thought possible.
In my periphery, he smiled coldly at me. I made a show of checking my nails, hoping he felt like an idiot smiling like that while I refused to look at him.
As far as I was concerned, these sessions were pointless.
An entire month, and though he’d given Maren the name of the person he was protecting—Cerbin, the name of a person who, according to Hadrian’s Rivean spies, didn’t exist—as well as intricate details regarding Rivea and the Emissary and his guard duties and Oberon and the grass on the ground and the clouds in the sky and the sound of brown crickets chirping in the dead of summer under the old altar of the fucking blah blah blah blah blah—
He’d given us nothing that might help us find Thaan or Selena.
Though I caught him, sometimes, looking at Maren the way a drowning man looks at their rescuer, a look that should have—and did—bring me some sense of security. At least I didn’t believe he’d betray her. It still fucking annoyed me.
The door opened, feet shuffling into the apartment behind me. With a lazy heave, I rolled to my feet, leaving the chair beside her open for Leal. Maren tilted her head just enough to eye me sideways, a small smile on her lips.
Even in miniature, it was a smile I couldn’t resist.
She’d already looked away, but my hand wrapped around the back of her neck, sloping her head even more toward me.
Her golden skin was cool and smooth under my palm, and touching her sent a shiver down my bones, flaring into my veins.
She tasted like Leihani. Sweet and rich as island sun, but spicy too, like the starblooms my mother used to grow.
My mouth sank over hers, and I almost doubted we weren’t somehow still cordaed. That she wasn’t tied to my blood for eternity. Because why else did my heart thrash in my chest when she met my eyes or my breath stall in my lungs when her body met mine?
My jaw rolled, and she loosened into the kiss, letting the weight of her head fall fully into my hand, her neck stretched and bare. I had half a mind to tell Leal to get lost then throw the Rivean off the balcony just to waste the day kissing her.
“Oooh. Apples.” Leal’s voice surprised me enough to break me from Maren’s spell. I glanced behind us at where my friend conducted a survey over the innocent basket of apples as though determining which was the least bruised. My mouth pursed.
A dark electricity hovered through the air; one I’d felt before.
Maren disappearing in the Brána Do Podsvetia.
Chaining me to a chair while she left to fight Sidra.
Walking up the stairs of the King’s tower, belting my knife to her waist, staring at the door as it closed.
Call it instinct or natural worry or my fucking premonition ring.
Something rooted my feet to the floor.
Warned me not to leave.
The air was thick and charged with something wicked, something full of teeth and talons, floating just beyond the reach of my fingers. I breathed it in, and it lifted every hair on my body.
What’s wrong? she murmured. Her voice wavered, mutated, like she’d woken me from a dream.
“I’m staying,” I said, glancing down to find my fingers twisting my premonition ring.
My pulse flickered quietly under my skin.
It might have been selfish, choosing to stay.
Pheolix led his lessons blind, with Aren and I the most experienced fighters.
Aren had mostly healed, returning with us to Evenstar over the past week, but I’d taken the lead. “Leal, you go.”
“Would rather not.” He turned his apple core, searching for a fresh bite. “Nori’s starting to cut a mean hook.”
“Even if Aitne is there?”
“Aitne’s in Leihani helping her mother. But I’ll see her later. She and I are going for a walk.”
I raised a brow, readying a gibe at him when warmth spread over my hand, obsidian moons sparkling in front of mine. “Kye. We’re fine. You should go.” She nocked her chin east, pointing through the wall to distant Evenstar. “Help Nori even more with that hook.”
The scent of her skin vibrated inside my head, that near-black in her eyes almost as intoxicating when she was calm as it was when she was angry. The static in the room flickered, the shadows dying down, seeping through the cracks in the floor as though they were made of ink.
Maybe I’d never recovered from jealousy.
Maybe I’d only told myself I had because I’d explored every inch of her, every freckle and valley and scar, and though it was as familiar to me as the taste of cool water, I still longed to drink her in again, to be the only one who did.
Maybe it wasn’t who was spending their time with her, it was simply enough that it wasn’t me.
Sometimes I wondered if the cordae hadn’t broken all the way. Or maybe it severed her from me, but not me from her. If it had remained with me like a sorry ghost, a ley line rooted in my blood. Invisible and imaginary and undeniable as a portal that always led me to her.
Or maybe I was a scared little fool with a scared little child in my scared little mind, shrieking for the thing that protected me from my own vicious thoughts.
Maren squeezed my arm, gently. As if she knew. Then turned back to lay her notes out on the table, feather pen ready in a very Selena way.
“Did Oberon personally know the King of Rivea,” she said, already scribbling something down, her attention to me severed as neatly as a book closing.
I tucked a kiss into her hair. Be back in a few hours. Don’t go to bed without me.
She didn’t glance up at me, but her lips curved. Don’t be late.
The door closed behind me, and I watched my own hand close it. Shadows grew from the corners of the room, disappearing from behind the threshold. Static returned inside my head. Nonsense noise, like the fizzle of a flame or slowly ripping paper.
The door handle was smooth under my palm. I stroked it for a moment with my thumb. Considered opening it again, walking through and evicting Leal from his chair and staring at Kazimir’s Rivean fucking face until Maren decided she was finished.
Then I shook the thought away, leaving the door and its handle to sit with the shadows.