Chapter 15 #3
Elina looked very different tonight. Instead of a dress, she wore a long, flowing skirt.
A light, transparent scarf crossed over her breasts, then tied at the back of her neck.
Some of her long, purple hair was woven into thin braids, the rest hung in loose waves down to her butt.
But the biggest difference was her wide, carefree smile that she never had in Kye’s palace.
She wasn’t alone. A tall man with indigo blue skin and short, snow-white, tight curls hugged her from behind, nuzzling her hair above her ear.
“Maren, this is Talios, my husband,” Elina introduced him to me. “And this is—”
“Maren,” Talios said, not waiting for her to finish the introduction. “The treasure of the glass palace. Nice to finally meet you, Maren. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
He let go of his wife just long enough to give me a deep, ceremonious bow.
“I can’t believe the king let you come here tonight,” Elina said in a hushed voice. “Or did you sneak out?”
“Actually, King Kye came with me,” I said.
“He’s right there.” Evis flicked the tip of his nose with his finger while furtively pointing at the tall, pale figure in the distance.
Elina placed a hand over her heart, her eyes widening as if she’d just seen a ghost. “Oh, by the Great Mother of the Ocean, I did not expect to ever see him here.”
“No one did,” Talios agreed. “When was the last time he left the palace?”
Something about the way they talked about Kye rubbed me the wrong way.
I didn’t care that they didn’t address him by his title, but he had a name.
They sounded like employees talking about a mean, unpopular boss in the office, with care that only came from fear, not from respect.
They saw him as an intruder into their world, not as a part of it.
I was a true outsider here. Yet they accepted me more readily than they did Kye.
“I should go,” I said, suddenly feeling uneasy for some reason.
I wasn’t responsible for Kye’s relationship with his people. Whatever issues he had with his subjects weren’t mine to fix. He had lived in Lyrei for a hundred and twenty-one years. This was his home. It wasn’t my fault that he had become a stranger in his own kingdom.
Except that dancing in the view of the man who couldn’t join us suddenly didn’t feel like fun anymore.
“But we just got here,” Elina protested. “Dance with us.”
She laughed, tipping her head back as Talios took her for a twirl in the ocean. The waves crashed around them, then the water fanned in an arch, framing the beautiful couple with a circle of ocean spray.
“Just one more dance,” Evis spun me around too.
A spray of water rose in a spiral around us, funneling out like a mini tornado.
“Are you doing this?” I marveled, following the spinning droplets with my gaze.
“Yes.” Evis beamed. “Do you like it?”
“It’s pretty. You can really move water like that?”
“Like that and in any other way.” He opened his palm. A thin stream of water rose from the surface, hit the middle of his palm, then bounced up and down like a miniature fountain in his hand.
“It’s incredible. And so beautiful.” I smiled, reaching for the water in his hand.
It stretched into a ribbon from his hand toward me, then looped around my wrist. I lifted my arm, breaking through the “ribbon” and laughed.
“You make it look so easy, Evis.”
“It isn’t hard.” He shrugged. “Every siren can do this and much more. We just need to touch it.”
Unless a siren couldn’t touch.
Every siren could do this, except for the siren king.
I remembered Kye’s crestfallen expression when he confessed to me that he could no longer feel water.
It was hard for me to understand it then.
I still didn’t know how exactly water felt to sirens, and probably never would.
What I understood much better now was Kye’s anguish at having lost this ability.
A very important part of what made him a siren and one of his people was now gone.
Evis hummed along with the music, twirling us in the ocean spray again. But I raised a hand, asking him to set me down.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “The fun has just begun. The night is young.”
The night?
I glanced around quickly. The sirens’ glowing skin as well as the shimmer of the water and the plants around us illuminated the darkness, making the night look brighter than it was.
“I really should go,” I insisted, freeing myself from his hold.
“If you must, but I shall miss you all night long.” Smiling, Evis bowed to me before kissing my hand, then walked me out of the water and up the beach to Kye who was watching us intently.
Evis was still humming to the music as we approached the king. Kye stood by his rock, his hands crossed over his broad chest, his head down, those multi-faceted eyes of his shooting ice shards at Evis.
“Who said you could sing to her?” he growled.
Evis blanched, choking on the last notes of his humming.
I rolled my eyes with a groan. Just when I felt sorry for Kye being excluded from the party, he had to go ahead and provide more reasons for people to exclude him.
“Growling is not a way to make friends, Your Majesty,” I said with an artificially sweet smile. “And Evis is just humming to himself, not singing to anyone. Not that he’d be doing anything wrong even if he was singing, now would he?”
Evis cleared his throat quickly and rubbed his palms on his loose pink pants.
“Well, thank you for the dance, Maren. Have a good night. It was...um, an honor to see you, Your Majesty.” He backed away with an awkward bow to the king before disappearing into the festive glow of the night.
“And you wonder why you’re all alone in that palace,” I said to Kye.
“I most certainly never wondered about that,” he countered, lifting his arm to offer me the other end of the bead necklace again.
I took it, since we were back on our way to Arnon’s palace, and while walking side by side, it made no difference if we were connected by the necklace. But Kye was right, it did feel almost like holding hands.
“Well, maybe you should wonder at least a little,” I said. “Then you may figure out that being nice to people doesn’t cost anything. They may even be nice back to you. And then, who knows, you may even end up making friends without forcing them to be your hostages first.”
He gave me a sideways glance. “Does that mean we’re friends?”
“Is that all you got from what I’ve just said? Really?”
I expected a flippant response, teasing or flirting from him, but Kye just stared ahead, his brows knitted into a frown.
“I don’t deserve nice,” he said. “Not from them.”
I thought about what Evis had said about carnage in Sarnala. Kye had sent his friends to their deaths. They had died for nothing. They killed many werewolves, too, whose only fault was that they acted according to their nature while warding off an unprovoked attack from the invading sirens.
Was Kye really that rotten in his youth? Spoiled, royal brat with no regard for life or peace?
I didn’t know Kye back then, but I believed I’d learned his character a little by now. And I didn’t believe he’d be capable of such senseless cruelty and callousness, not now and probably not even then.
Kye could be cocky, gruff, and vain sometimes, but he wasn’t a narcissist void of compassion.
He valued life, not just of sirens and humans, but even of lesser beings like animals and plants.
He was capable of regret. I saw him suffer from guilt.
A hundred years’ worth of it... A shudder ran across my shoulders.
What a terrible burden that was to carry for that long.
“We should hurry,” Kye said with an edge to his voice and tossed a penetrating look at the water under the bridge we were crossing.
He walked in wide strides, making sure to step on one bridge stone at a time. After we had crossed, the glass blocks shimmered in the starlight among the dull paving stones behind us, marking the passage of the king.
From what I’d read, the Reef of Lyrei consisted of an ancient coral colony that formed in and around underwater mountains.
The peaks and tips of the mountains created the rocky islands of Lyrei on the surface.
They peppered this part of the ocean, some interconnected underwater by rock and coral, many linked on the surface by bridges, either naturally formed or built by sirens.
In addition to the dead coral and seaweed “trees”, there were plenty of real trees and shrubs around too.
Some looked like palm trees, with wide dark-purple leaves that I saw were used in construction on the islands.
Others were shaped like pine trees. Except that their “needles” were long and soft like ribbons.
The islands also burst with flowers. Almost every shrub, three, and seaweed ribbon was in bloom. The wide, pastel blooms found their way into the hair and clothing of the locals too. Sirens seemed to prefer flowers to jewelry, decorating themselves with blossoms.
On this beautiful, gentle evening, it was hard to believe any danger could be lurking nearby.
“Can the Abyss monsters come this way? Or do you think they’ll stick to the palace?” I asked.
Kye’s jaw flexed. “I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. The creatures clearly aren’t behaving like they should, which makes predicting their next move that much more difficult.”
“Then maybe there’s no point in me leaving the palace at all? If they really are after me, won’t they find me no matter where I am?”
He held his gaze on me for a long moment.
“As much as I’ll miss you for the next few hours, you’ll be much safer in Arnon’s place. He has an entire army of guards to protect you, as well as strong magic wards all over his home.”
“What wards are those?” I asked.