75. Maren
Maren
Thaan looked like something that had stepped from the page of a children’s storybook. Black feathers grew from his arms and shoulders, deep crimson scales along his neck and hands. Even his eyes seemed more hawk-like, sharpening over mine like hooked barbs.
“You’ve finally learned to join a fight armed with more than a stick,” he said, raising an open hand. Black talons grew from the ends of his fingers, long and curled. I didn’t understand his words until he pointed a talon through the wide leaves.
A man stood not far away, radiating with gold. No bounds held him in place. He was free of rope and chain and water-pearls. But he bared his teeth at Thaan as if he couldn’t move, a small tremor in his tightly bent arms—as though he were pulling against an invisible cord.
“I always wished I could see a Sola,” Thaan mused. “They were little more than myth even when I was a child, but the elders would tell tales of them. Flying, swooping, riding the wind like water. I was jealous, until I traded my soul to Darkness. I have no need for envy now.”
He studied my glare for a moment in silence.
I never left his gaze, but in the corners of my vision, I hunted for faces.
Hadrian and Diara, shackled under hard water beads to my right.
Straight ahead, my mother and father sat at the base of a tree, their wrists tethered against smooth palmwood.
At least forty pairs of eyes stood behind Selena, drones waiting for orders.
“You’re mine, Maren,” Thaan whispered. For once I didn’t argue. He held everyone I loved within the bounds of this island, either by storm or wind or glassy water. “Anrous.”
A drone stepped before the others, one of the tallest of the small crowd. I wonder if this was all that remained of them. Or if there were more scattered across Neris, hunting Nori and Olinne.
Thaan motioned with his talons. “Come. Stand here.”
He backed away, allowing Anrous a free path to me. I beckoned to the water in the air, just to see if it would answer. To taste the cold shoulder of my power and know that I had tried.
Grass rustled over Anrous’s calves as he came to a halt before me.
He might have been a cousin of Pheolix’s, rust in his short hair, a splash of freckles across his cheeks, but whatever personality he’d once had seemed to be buried under the years of service as Thaan’s drone.
He stared at me as though looking at the night sky though my eyes, waiting for his master’s order.
“Take her hands,” Thaan said.
The drone moved closer.
And dissolved into dust. Soft and slow, a succession of burning flakes, almost ethereal as he shimmered into the wind. I was reminded of the soul in the Evercrumbling, a sunken shape lost to the silver sand of Perpetuum.
Anrous reached through the air. And then simply blew away.
My gaze lifted to Thaan, unamused that he had killed his own servant, yet curious at how he’d done it. He met my eyes with a similar hunger, curious and excited and burning with a kind of raw need that gripped my throat with icy hands, fear gnawing through my thoughts.
He hadn’t done it.
Thaan couldn’t radiate heat, couldn’t burn a soul to ash. My stare slanted past Thaan. To the luminous man bound by nothing but shadow. Wisping shadows, tendrils curling over his wrists, dripping from him like liquid smoke.
“Caecus,” I hissed.
A dark chuckle echoed near my ear, icy fingers up my arm. “Hello, wraithling,” whispered the night.
“You played both sides,” I said, anger sharpening within me, flooding my chest.
“No, little pet.” The fingers slid to my throat, lifting my chin. “I played my side,” he breathed into my ear. And then snapped away before I could respond, leaving only the whirls of smoke to fall over my shoulders.
Are you hurt? I asked Kye, suffocating the impulse to look him over and see for myself. Thaan had laced his talons together, gazing at me like I was a layered riddle.
Not hurt, he replied, terse. Strained. As if thinking the words alone cost him precious energy.
I transferred my weight between my feet, focusing forward again. Thaan reached for my arm, reflexively, like he expected me to dash away. Then recoiled as if stung, cradling his talons in his opposite hand. I shifted my stare up at him, the tension between my teeth hard enough to taste blood.
Thaan flexed his jaw, working a bad taste from his mouth. He stood close enough to stab, if I’d had my knife. Close enough to kill, if I’d had my stones.
“I know he’s your corda-cruor,” Thaan said, impassive. “But you cannot save him. If you’re waiting for me to offer you a place among my army, in which I’d spare his life, you are wrong. He is too wild now, too unpredictable. There is no scenario where I would allow him to live.”
“You want his blood,” I said, equally cool in spite of the scene before us.
Of course Thaan would want Kye’s blood. I’d been so shocked at learning Kye’s heritage, so mesmerized by his newly tapped power, I’d overlooked the allure that came with it. Kye was not only a threat to our enemies.
He was also a prize.
Thaan tilted his head. “Did Selena ever tell you the story of her first transition?”
“Yes.” My mouth thinned, mind ablur with possible rationales for the question. “You stole her and my mother at night and forced the change over them.”
“Did she tell you who changed her?”
My mouth twitched. But words fell short. She had not.
Thaan’s talons joined together, curling over each other as he walked around me in a wide circle.
“She was my favorite almost immediately. Your mother hated me, of course, but Selena was patient and kind and bright. So bright. I used to play games with the two of them along the boardwalk, drawing circles of chalk and skipping through the pattern. She was so like…” His sentence melted into the night air.
Across the grass and fern, Selena watched us, expressionless as her hair danced with the wind.
“She was like Leibra,” I said. “Your first daughter.”
The name snapped Thaan from whatever reverie had stolen his words.
His jaw hardened. “When my drones took them, they both fought. Your mother only snarled and scratched. But Selena was the one who turned back to face me. The one willing to defy me, to tell me no. I knew then, she would be my heir.” He leaned in, careful not to come too close under Kye’s watchful eye, the small feathers along the back of his neck lifting in the breeze.
“Can you imagine what little bastard got in my way?”
I frowned, thinking. But there was truly only one answer. My mouth shaped the name in silence, and Thaan gave a low rumble of dissonance.
“He pulled her below the surface, a worthless gnat, and breathed his hollow air into my daughter. Whatever she could have been was stolen. Stunted by the oxygen of a powerless drone.” Thaan’s talons curled into a sharp fist. His hawk-like eyes narrowed back to mine.
“But here before me lies the pathway to reclaiming that power for her, humming in your veins. There is no winning, Granddaughter. I won’t offer you consolation.
I’ll offer you truth. Everyone you see before you is already dead.
Vow yourself to me if you wish. If you do not, well—” He paused before stepping away, eyes trailing over the crimson streak that had dried under my nose. “Your blood is mine either way.”
Despite his words, he never gave me the chance to give him an answer. Thaan turned to his hoard of drones, motioning vaguely at me. “Kill her.”