81. Maren
Maren
Among the jeweled ferns and swaying palms, I walked the trail leading from the Leihaniian market to my house.
My little house, with my veranda and my underground oven, my garden rows and my Marequus horse that splashed her hooves in the nearby shallows, my thatched roof lined with chimes I’d made with my own hands, glass and shell and wood and silver dancing with the wind.
Well, mine and Kye’s.
But even he knew it was really mine.
The islanders waved, calling out as I walked.
I spied Kimo and my cousin Nola, a small pair of round legs wrapped around her hip, a tiny cheek squashed over her shoulder as she patted her son’s little rump, bouncing him and singing heaviness into his eyes.
She smiled at me from her porch, the one I’d grown up climbing and leaping from, but didn’t break her song.
Grass swished across my calves, soft under my toes. It wasn’t quite eventide, but crickets sang their love songs under the nearby leaves, a melody of croaking frogs joining them.
I passed the house my father had built for my mother, slightly smaller than mine, catching the sound of their voices within.
My father’s soft rumble; my mother’s smooth cadence.
The wooden walls veiled their words, but the lilt of their tones was enough.
My feet slowed, and I let myself marinade in the sound for a moment, a smile creeping over my lips.
Kye was waiting for me outside under the wooden canopy he’d anchored into the ground, drinking in the melody of the night and staring out at the stars, a half-knit stocking between his wooden needles.
I tried not to laugh at it, a winter garment among a sea of tropical plants.
He sat in a tuft of swaying grass like a boy, long legs stretched across the bent blades, sprigs of green reaching through his toes.
The moonless night shimmered in his golden eyes as he watched me ignore my chair to sit beside him.
I’m sure he would have preferred the chair, but he’d learned I’d always choose the grass instead.
Two years among Calderians, and I still preferred the hard ground over a cushion, a fact Kye was willing to entertain only until we discussed whether to haul a bed into our house.
Apparently, sleeping with our heads on a hollowed log was Kye’s boundary.
“Any luck?” he asked, leaning against an arm to meet my eyes. Mint and thunder washed over me, and I drank it in like my own personal whiskey, amber-brown and maddeningly spiced.
I raised the bottle of bubbling volare I’d absconded from one of the merchant ships in answer. Kye took it, rotating it in his hands, and I knew he was searching for the label, curious where its grapes had grown, what year they’d been harvested.
If they might have once touched Dimas’s hands.
“I have glasses for us,” he began, watching as I uncorked the long neck with my teeth and blew the spongy wood down to the reeds below. A small plash. He shook his head. “I wanted to make a toast.”
“To treason?”
He blinked, taking a moment to place the words.
Those memories had begun to slip back to him, in the weeks and months since returning to life, as if dying had opened a door his mortal mind couldn’t unlock before.
It had haunted him at first, the vision of his own hands holding a knife under my chin.
Staring at the confusion in my eyes. Laughing.
I’d made him pass them to me through his thoughts, determined to show him it didn’t matter any more. That I was here beside him, and he could trust his own mind. That not all kings go mad, and not all inner demons are evil.
That Thaan had built his grief around himself like a cage, confusing isolation with power and locking himself inside.
But like so many scars Thaan had left behind, they healed over the surface faster than within.
It had taken him a long time to pull those memories from his thoughts like dusted old letters from a box, unfolding and reading through them, letting himself relive our first few months in his tower.
All the hate and anger and mistrust we’d strung through the hallway like garland between our doors.
All the hidden want and heartbreak beneath them.
He huffed a short laugh. “To treason. And to your last night without warmth from the sun.”
This, I believed, he was more excited about than I was. I was perfectly comfortable living under a constant shadow from the sun’s rays while here in Leihani, soaking in the balmy climate instead.
We’d finished building our home under the last few withering days of dry season, a choice Nori and Olinne had turned their noses up at.
“Why would you want to sleep here when you have an entire colony under your feet?” Olinne had demanded to know.
I’d smiled, reveling in the irritated scrunch of her nose. “Because of the entire colony.”
We did sleep there, sometimes. Kye held his breath and let me tote him underwater, careless of the siren tails flashing below the surface.
We also stayed in Venusia from time to time.
The ammonite’s shell had been mended, and some of the Naiad families had returned, though many opted to stay in Juile where the water was warm year-round, laden as it was with volcanoes.
We weren’t shy about returning to our tower in Laurier Palace, either. Hadrian had let us keep it for ourselves, though Diara had infiltrated my old rooms across the hall.
“Are you sure you don’t want one flight,” Kye asked, “before it might burn you alive?”
The volare swished as I upended the long neck against my mouth, gulping down fizz and warmth. “Very.”
The one and only flight in Kye’s sun-molten arms was already more than I ever wanted to experience again.
I loved to watch him practice, though, like a firebird among the clouds.
I only worried when he flew too high for me to see, disappearing behind the atmosphere where stars shine abroad, holding his stupid breath before turning around and careening back.
Mihauna, it upended my stomach, thinking of how fast he could move.
We passed the bottle back and forth, drinking from its throat among the crickets like we weren’t a queen and a royal prince. Just us and the music of the rolling sea under the crackling fire of the stars.
A small clap like thunder behind the trees, and I knew he was here as my stones flickered blue.
Darkness.
My gaze slanted to Kye’s. He rose first, reaching to pull me to my feet just as shadows plumed through the wide fan leaves of the nearby palms. Smoky tendrils and a smile hidden under black mist, like something born from the deep chasms under the tide.
“Hello, little wraithling,” he purred. Shadowed eyes slid to Kye. “And mister wraithling.”
Kye crossed his arms, his jaw an unfriendly square.
I’d come to understand, after nights awake staring at the ceiling, reliving the night Selena had died and wondering what I could have done differently, why Darkness had switched sides, helping to lead me into Nahli and set my nerves at ease by killing a harmless bird.
That he’d seen Thaan take control of Selena’s mind, had known she’d force the stones from me.
He’d played into the hand he’d been dealt—aid whoever held Thaan’s heart. Even when it meant abandoning me for a few minutes within Thaan’s grasp.
I knew it. I understood it. But I didn’t like it.
And Kye was even less fond of Darkness’s strategy than I.
Darkness propped his elbow over his opposite arm, nestling his chin in his knuckles. “Mister sunshine, I see. Aalto’s children were always devoid of humor. Too much light burning in their head to leave room for any laughter.”
“Caecus,” I said, my tone like the flat of a sword.
Darkness leaned into Kye, curling a dusky coil over his shoulder.
“If you ever want to learn how to have a chuckle, Sola, rise in the west and set in the east. That will throw the entire world upside-down.” Inky drops slid to Kye’s elbow, falling into the grass.
I stifled a shudder, knowing how cold Darkness’s touch could be.
His smoke burnt away where their skin met. Darkness hissed softly, shimmering far enough that they grew back, hiding his arcane tattoos. “Certain you want your warmth from the sun back, wraithling? He seems a bit…hot-tempered.”
I set my hands against my hips, waiting.
“No fun, no fun,” Darkness chanted, a white slash through the black.
“All right then, wraithling. I’ve come to end a bargain.
” He twirled his finger gently. Dim strands of light glowed around his fingertip, woven through the air in every direction like the thick fibers of wool, each one as delicate as spider silk.
He swirled through them until they tangled in a glowing knot, no bigger than the seed of a dandelion, and caught it in his palm, holding it out for me to take.
I’d seen it once before. A kernel stolen from the strands of truth, he’d called it the day he’d taken it from me.
My hand reached for it, and his fingers closed. “Unless you’d like to strike another.”
“No, Caecus,” I sighed. “No more bargains. Not for me.”
He chuckled under his breath. “Lies, lies. There is still one more debt to settle between your soul and mine.”
I plucked the glowing kernel from his hand. It dissolved into my skin, warmth oozing over my fingers and through my hand, arm and chest, up to my face and down to my bare feet. A groan rolled from my throat, my toes curling into the grass.
My eyes shifted to meet the God of Darkness, a sly smile curling over my own mouth. “I don’t think there is, Caecus.”
The dark mirth in the god’s eyes faltered. His shadows grew around him, coiling and waving like suspicion growing in the water. I waited for him to demand that I call to my vows as Sidra once had, to force the debts of my blood to the surface of my skin so he could read them in written words.
Perhaps he didn’t need to. Perhaps he could read my blood now, coursing through my veins.
Or it could have been that my night-sea eyes hadn’t sparkled, as he’d once told me they did when I lied.
Or maybe it was all there for him to take, like a page read from my memory.
It was all in the past, after all. His domain.
“Trickster,” he whispered. “Cheater. Liar. Thief.”
“Not a trick,” I said, ignoring the wet hiss of his shadows and stealing my mother’s words. “I followed your terms.”
“How?” he asked, black tendrils snapping loud enough the crickets hushed.
“A Naiad’s vows can be fractured for one full day of freedom by drinking the blood of their oath-master. I bargained my soul to be your wraithling after I died, and you carried me to fight the Abyssi, letting your flesh burn under the glint of the moon. I tried to clean it for you, remember?”
“You stole my blood,” he seethed.
Kye shifted, stepping an inch closer, the light under his skin beginning to rouse.
“Not on purpose,” I said, not bothering to hide the curve of my mouth.
“I stuffed that swatch of bloodied silk into my baldric. When I passed under the burning stars, I pulled it off and dumped the seawater over my head. It wasn’t my fault, really, that some of it dribbled over my tongue, but once I tasted it, I knew what it was. ”
“It means nothing,” Darkness said. “You still reached Perpetuum within three days. Our deal still stands.”
“She didn’t,” Kye said softly, gazing at me with a kind of awe that melted the bones in my legs.
“She missed the last step just as her time ended, and I reached through the veil and caught her. She didn’t reach Perpetuum in time—she drank your blood and then only hours later, let herself fall short.
” He barked a breathless laugh. “You failed on purpose.”
Over my shoulder, I locked eyes with Kye, my smile stretched wide. “I knew you’d catch me if I fell.”
Darkness made a sound like steam and fumes and sizzling flesh, turning away and crackling back into the shadows.
Neither of us watched him go.
“Really?” Kye murmured. “Truly? We’ll be together—in this world and the next?”
“Yes,” I laughed, though my throat was suddenly raw and tight, heat smoldering along the rims of my eyes.
Kye ran his fingertips through the roots of my hair, tilting my face up at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I licked my lips, shaking my head against his hands.
“The same reason you never told me you were Sola. I didn’t know if it would work.
I didn’t want to get your hopes up if it weren’t true.
I didn’t know for sure until he gave me that kernel of the sun back, and my body had closed all debts with him. ”
Kye kissed my forehead. Then my mouth. A small, soft kiss, pausing to swallow and laugh in disbelief. Then another, long and lingering and indulgently slow.
“You’re mine,” he said. “Mine and no one else’s. Forever.”
“Forever,” I echoed, kissing him again. He tasted like gardens and storms. Like falling stars and promises kept and lies so beautiful they could only be truth.
I reveled in that taste. The decadent burn of forever, like honey on my tongue. For the rest of my mortal life.
It was so much sweeter than poison.