65. Kye
Kye
Kye! It rang across like a sob of panic, a frantic crack inside my head just as clean oxygen stole through my blood, rousing me awake. No—NO! Kye!
I’m here! I flung water furiously from my eyes, climbing onto the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. Where are you?
“Go,” Nori urged, reaching back to pull a low-conscious Hadrian above the surface. “We’ll catch up!”
Shrill inhales peppered behind me, the scuffle of boots and hands over ocean-worn stone as the other humans woke from their low-conscious state.
I was already halfway up, sloppily grabbing at the hand-holds and small ridges I’d grown familiar with, water draining from my hair and clothes like translucent sheets of silk.
Are you in the guest apartment?
The stone pillars rose from beyond the ledge, windows illuminating the towers like columns of light. Except ours.
Our tower was dark.
Where are you? I shouted inside my own head, my leg halfway over the clifftop. Something small scuttled under the heather, thistles shaking as it bounded away. Dark clouds gathered over Laurier Palace that hadn’t been there when we’d left Evenstar, as though blown in by a sudden storm.
A storm with dark waves, a daggered tongue, and obsidian eyes that cut like glass.
Leihani!
Every moment she didn’t answer injected my blood with heart-shattering panic. It thundered in my ears as loudly as my boots pounding across rock and weeds and grass and flat stone. The guards under the arch both snapped their attention to the sound as I approached.
“Prince Nikolaos?” one of them asked, hand reaching for the sword at his hip. “What’s the trouble?”
I stopped only to grab the hilt before he did. His blade unsheathed with a metal rasp, his surprised eyes doubling in size. I turned and fled, leaving a trail of dripping water behind me.
They shouted, and for a moment I expected them to follow, but neither of them did. I aimed for my tower, though something wound my throat like the garrote Captain Kriska had once thrown over my neck, choking me off from any hope she was actually there.
It was dark. Why was it fucking dark?
Leihani, answer me.
Two maids gave startled gasps, lurching out of my way as I flung the door of the grand entrance wide.
I banged into a lord’s shoulder as I turned the corner, not slowing to apologize.
“Excuse you,” he hurled sharply at my back.
My hand gripped the hilt harder, angling it over my legs so I wouldn’t hit anyone with it by accident.
Straight to my staircase through the sea of people ahead or ascend here and take the sky bridge from west to south?
Fuck. I don’t know if it mattered.
That shadow I’d felt earlier, that seedy weight of dark fear churned like rot in my stomach over the idea that I might choose the path that took longer.
Stairs, I thought to myself. It might cost me an extra minute or two. But the grand room served as a base for the entire City of Towers, and like any city, it had quiet days as well as bustling ones; the crowds sometimes grew so thick it took an hour to reach my fucking spiral stairs.
This was the same staircase that would lead to Selena’s apartments in the west wing, wider than my private stairs to accommodate more traffic.
My feet devoured the stone slabs two at a time, squelching in wet leather, the setting sun warm across my back.
It did nothing to thaw the chill that clung to my skin, the icy nightmare in my veins.
A throng of bodies at the top of the stairs leaned into the curtain wall, letting me pass to the bridge.
Their curious stares lingered across my back as I grasped the door and threw it open to step into the scathing wind, almost ripping it off its hinges.
A level below, the bridge was fully enclosed, free from the threat of Taurennos wind, especially with the scores of dark clouds looming outside.
But the open one was empty of people in my way.
The windows of the level below rattled as I flew across. My hands were shaking as I reached the door to the other side.
LEIHANI.
By now I expected silence. But it gutted me anyway, the vastness of that quiet like a fucking chest wound being pried open wider, deeper. Was this what Maren felt when I died? The awful sound of her own voice, echoing off nothing but the dark?
MAREN.
I’d known something felt off this morning. Had felt it all fucking day. The sour air, the frigid static in my head, the hovering instinct that said nothing but wrong, wrong, wrong.
I’d fucking kill that Rivean if he’d hurt her. Would track him down like a cold predator, chasing his every step until my hands found their way around his traitorous fucking neck, until I’d squeezed and sliced and stolen every inch of life from his sorry fucking body.
My clothes had drained enough to reach the status of annoyingly fucking wet, rubbing my skin raw and slowing my strides.
But I’d reached the end of the bridge, the short spiral stairwell above the only thing between my tower floor and myself.
Each breath punctured the wall of my lungs, my chest too tight with sprinting and terror to fully expand.
“MAREN!” My voice shook the walls as I climbed, the dark top of the stairs in sight.
The door to our apartment was closed, but the opposite one where I’d left her hung open like a narrow slit of black. I shoved it open to step within, running almost headlong into the wood. Something was blocking it from the other side.
“Are you in here?” Fury exploded in my bones as I heaved my weight against the door and pushed. That it would slow me down now, with her possibly on the other side. But it wasn’t her.
It was a rug, rumpled and sopping wet. Next to it, a cushion that belonged to the armchair I’d sat in that morning. I threw myself against the door, then again, each shove granting me only a few miserable fucking inches, until it was almost wide enough for me to slip through. “Leihani.”
But there was no answering voice, no sound or movement or streak of light inside except for my ragged panting, the lack of life a sickening blow to my senses, enough to make me vomit.
It looked like someone had lifted the room upside-down and shaken it.
Everything lay everywhere, broken and shattered, some of it so destroyed I wasn’t even sure what shape it had once had. A dark mass shrouded the far wall where the window used to be, velvet black as night sky. And everything, everything, was wet. Soaking.
She’d fought back.
I’m not sure why that single thought poured fear through my skin. That she hadn’t had an accident. Someone had attacked her, had broken into her own fucking tower. That she’d fought them. And lost.
Debris crunched and snapped under my feet as I stumbled to the mantle, feeling for the flint and oil lamp.
But it wasn’t there. The mantle had been wiped bare.
“Where are you, where are you?” My voice shook and cracked.
Dread spilled from the other side of panic, into heat prickling behind my eyes and a pain in my chest I couldn’t distinguish between sharp or dull.
Into visions I couldn’t trust and thoughts my heart wasn’t ready to hear.
“Kye.” I whirled at the voice standing at the door behind me, even though I recognized it as Diara’s.
“Go across the hall and find a lamp,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine, the words frayed and thin from an agony that stuck in my throat like a hard, sharp rock.
Her shadow flicked away, distant footsteps clattering over the steps somewhere beyond her.
My foot struck something firm but soft. Dense.
Like a body.
I dropped to my knees, feeling for the rest of it. A torso, a face, a pulse. It was male, too wide and heavy to be Maren.
But then it coughed, weakly, and I grabbed under a pair of shoulders, hauling the body to sit upright against the wall.
He groaned, air flashing through his clenched teeth, a voice too deep to be Leal’s.
“Laurier,” he muttered, recognizing me in the dark. Probably by my scent.
“Where is she?” It sounded more desperate than I meant it to, though I didn’t fucking care. He started to collapse forward, and I nudged closer, my hand anchoring him to the wall just as Diara returned, lamplight flooding the wreckage of the room.
Kazimir’s face was pale, white foam dried in the corners of his mouth.
He gazed at me with eyes half-open like he’d spent the day bathing at the bottom of a liquor bottle.
But I recognized that look from men across fields of broken grass and blood.
My hands found the edge of his shirt, and I barely had to lift it to find the flat hole in his waist, a lethargic ooze of blood seeping from its mouth.
“Come here, Diara,” I said, wrenching my coat off and balling it tight. Kazimir gave a pained gasp as I pushed it against his wound, eyes flaring wide and rolling to the back of his head. I shook him awake with a patient growl. “Where is she?”
“Naiads,” the Rivean slurred.
Drones. The bones of my knuckles bled through my skin, ghost-white.
“Where’s Leal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who took her? Where?”
“I don’t know.”
I swore under my breath, the sound ragged. “What do you remember?”
His fingers felt along my arm, crusted with blood, and he grasped the hand that burrowed into his stomach. “He called to her blood. He wants her power.”
I glanced over my shoulder to the faces pushing through the doorway, searching for rationality among Kazimir’s response. Thaan couldn’t call to Maren’s blood, not anymore. She’d freed herself by becoming Queen.
But I didn’t know the laws of Naiads, the scale of duty and servanthood their bodies abided by. Naiad laws were like a river that ran backward, a current that defied sense, one I could drink but not understand.
“She owes someone a debt,” Nori guessed—then inhaled sharply, her eyes igniting with the answer. Olinne gasped as well, as did Aitne, who had kneeled beside me to look at Kazimir’s wound.
“What?” I demanded, dread climbing again at the fear in the healer’s honeymead eyes.
“Maren didn’t first transition in Juile waters,” Aitne said. “She was in Calder during that time. Sidra would have felt her enter the sea if she had.”
My brows tightened. “Where did she transition?” And then it dawned like a sheet of stinging rain and ice.
Maren owed Aegir a debt, and he’d come to collect.
Already beside the door, Nori dashed back into the hall. I handed my balled jacket to Aitne, hot on her heels, the rest of them dodging to the side as I barreled through. “Nori!” I called ahead, leaping down the stairs. I caught her halfway down. “Take me with you.”
“To Venusia?” she spat in mockery. Her eyes flashed with anger. It rose in her like a scalding pot, a second away from bursting. “No. She isn’t answering my thoughts, which means she doesn’t have control of her body. They hate humans, you’d be killed in a second. Stay here.”
“We’ll bring Pheolix. Force them to fight with their hands. I can kill them that way.” I balled my fists, trying to avoid sounding anything but fucking desperate. “You know I can.”
She stared at me in disbelief. In disgust. Then shoved me away. “You can’t just turn a Naiad into a human to fight them your way. I can’t offer you my protection, and you have nothing to offer them.”
“I do. Nori—Nori.” She turned again, and I grabbed her arm, spinning her to face me. “Wait. Fuck, wait—please. I do.” My breaths lengthened, my heart slowing with resignation. With finality. With making a choice I’d never be able to take back. “I have something to offer them.”