Chapter 30
Thirty
Ispent that afternoon training with Anayla, though under Fieran’s watchful eye. He had the rest of Bismyth training together in one of the massive labyrinth rooms. Enormous floor-to-ceiling windows opened to the brilliant blue sea below, knitting my fear of heights and fear of deep water.
I was breathing hard and frustrated with myself when Anayla told me to follow her. The two of us stepped out into the cool hallway.
“Fear and I have been talking about those dirty tricks—” she began, then faltered.
I followed her gaze.
Maura leaned against the wall opposite us, looking self-possessed and untouchable as always in her tight corset and leather trousers, her bracers sparkling with both spikes and gems.
But her very presence here betrayed her vulnerability.
“Maura.” Anayla’s voice was gentle, disappointed, and affectionate, all tangled together. “He’s not ready.”
Maura studiously didn’t look at me. “This is ridiculous.”
“You went too far,” Anayla said firmly. “He told you to stop provoking her a half dozen times. He couldn’t abide the barbs. You really thought he’d tolerate that beating?”
The words jolted me. Fieran had defended me against her petty little remarks? But when she had left a trail of her jealousy and he always saw through us…why had he trusted her to train me?
“And everyone is going to let him cast me out?” Maura swept her arm to indicate the training room, straining off the wall in a way that betrayed her tension.
“I wish you’d done things differently.” Anayla sounded genuinely pained in response.
Maura made a disgusted noise and pushed off the wall. She never even looked my way as she swept off, but it wasn’t until she was out of sight that I realized I’d tensed for a fight.
My shoulders were tight, my hands knotted into fists. I flexed my hands deliberately. “Fieran still hasn’t forgiven her?”
“No.” She looked troubled. “He always acts as if no one can hurt him. Because he can read us so well, because he expects betrayal.”
She glanced in the doorway, where Fieran—shirtless and looking far too good, damn him—was working with two younger shifters who had been struggling to keep up with the others. “But he didn’t expect it from Maura. He trusted her.”
“And he can’t stand to be wrong.” My voice came out bitter.
“It’s not that. We’re his only real family. He’s had enough experience being betrayed by family. He…” Anayla cut herself off, as if she had changed her mind, and cast me a distinctly judgmental look. “Speaking of being wrong…you’re wrong about him.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“No.” She left it there, reaching into her pocket. “I brought you a gift. If someone pins you again, this will make them let go.”
She held out a gold cuff, engraved with delicate vines and studded with gems.
“It’s pretty,” I said skeptically. It was the kind of thing I could sell if my family needed money, but I needed it for myself.
“It burns,” she told me. “But not you. Let me show you.”
She moved as if she were going to take me down, but I raised a hand to stop her. “Why didn’t you want to give me this inside? Where the mats are?”
She hesitated, but it was enough for me to put the pieces together. “You don’t trust everyone in Bismyth.”
“I want to,” she told me. “I think—I hope—we can. Now come on. Let’s train with it.”
I nodded and followed her, but disquiet lingered with me.
When the clan was walking back to the barracks, Ander was sitting at one of the tables by the fountain. His tall, muscular figure, the gold-touched brown hair that was shaved at the sides, and the way he commanded a room was as eye-catching as Fieran.
Fieran’s lips tilted. “You can go talk to him now. No need to climb those stairs again and then back down just to try to trick me. You look as if you’re about to collapse.”
I glared at him. “Maybe I will. Maybe I enjoy his company.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound troubled. “I’ve enjoyed our day together, anyway. See you at supper.”
I was sure he was testing me, trying to figure out the exact limits of my relationship with Ander.
But it was useless to pretend I wasn’t plotting with Ander.
Perhaps I could play on Fieran’s jealous impulses enough to divert him from the truth.
Besides, I really hated those stairs.
Fieran watched me go toward Ander—almost as if he were handing off my safety deliberately—before he shifted his wings. They swept out to either side of his powerful figure, towering over him—long purple-black wings, shimmering, transcendent. It was impossible not to stutter with awe at the sight.
Then he launched himself upward.
“I hate him,” I told Ander as I approached, despite the smile fixed on my face. When I rested my hand on his shoulder, the thick muscle flexed beneath my palm.
Ander, for his part, picked up his part seamlessly. “Are we making him miserable?”
My smile suddenly turned effortless. “Is that even possible?”
“It’s possible.” He put his hand on mine before I could pull away, though I’d only planned to touch him briefly, and his calloused palm was warm against my skin. “I have your book for you.”
He tapped the top book on a stack with his free hand. I didn’t pick it up yet, knowing Fieran was watching.
“Thank you.”
“Just be careful.” There was an unexpected thread of impatience in his tone, just a hint of it. “If there’s something he wants you to believe, he’ll make sure you find it on your own. That you earn it. That way you’ll think you truly know.”
His words left me thinking back about everything that led me to seek out the book. Ander was implying that Fieran had maneuvered me into seeking out this book, which seemed fantastic even by Fieran’s standards. “I want the full story of what happened between you two, Ander.”
“It wouldn’t be that useful to you. Unless you want to know for reasons besides making sense of Fieran’s manipulations.”
“Don’t you want me to despise him?”
“I hope you despise him enough for your own sake.” His gaze was too knowing, especially when we were so close. “Or is it hard to remember how to hate him when you’re by his side?”
“Oh, I can remember.”
“Good.” But he gave me a long, doubtful look.
It made me wonder if we both knew what it was like to be in one of Fieran’s traps, and to still not be entirely able to resist his charms.
At dinner, Dairen tried to block my path again, offering me that disarming smile. “Sit with us where you belong.”
“Rules are rules, Dairen. I don’t belong.”
I did need to sit down before I dropped one of these plates, though. I was balancing three plates and the remnants of my dignity; I didn’t want to give this roomful of shifters one more show.
“You belong with us if we say you do.” He reached for the plates—to help me and to force me to obey, probably in equal measure—and I ducked him as best I could, trying to move on to the unclaimed side of the room.
I glanced down the table, then up at the mezzanine, but I didn’t see Fieran. The room, despite its embroidered tapestries, soft torchlight, and soaring ceiling, felt dull without his presence.
Still, the air prickled. That strange sixth sense of mine—the one that always flared when he was nearby—told me he was watching or pulling strings from the shadows.
I wasn’t sure why Fieran needed to not just bring me under his control. He needed to charm me. He needed for me to be under his control…and to like it.
I was not being drawn into his kinks.
“Maybe I don’t want to belong anywhere I haven’t earned,” I told Dairen over my shoulder.
He was right there, closer than I had expected, walking alongside me with his hands shoved into his pockets. “No one earns their clan. We’re chosen. Fought for.”
“Then I guess Bismyth will have to earn me,” I said with as much of a shrug as I could manage given my precarious cargo.
Laughter rose in my wake as I moved on, but it sounded good-natured, with Bismyth ribbing Dairen for his failure of charisma.
A big shifter barreled through the crowd, shoulders squared, face half-hidden in shadow. I gasped and stumbled back, eyes squeezing shut on instinct, the plates wobbling dangerously.
The collision never came.
A sharp grunt, a crash of wood and glass. But I stood untouched.
Then I opened my eyes in time to see the man half-sprawled across a table—into someone’s dinner, no less. He tried to pick himself up as a table full of Obsidian shifters shouted at him, but he mostly seemed to be managing to roll himself around in the gravy.
Standing between us was Kiegan.
He didn’t look angry. That was the unnerving part. Calm, steady, like a cliff the sea broke itself against. His hand still hovered midair from the shove before he reached for one of my plates, and I let him take it.
“Going to make the most of the free food until I die,” I said cheerfully. The two of us left the ruckus behind as we walked to the unclaimed side.
He put his plate and mine down on one of the empty tables as I sat across from him. There was a stain of fresh blood smeared on his tunic, but he looked unharmed. It looked suspiciously like a handprint, like someone had grabbed him trying to keep from falling.
“Why are you sitting with me? I’m not very popular,” I reminded him.
“Neither am I.”
“Why’s that?”
He seemed like a formidable friend and ally.
“Many reasons. One’s the rumor that I killed my own brother,” he said the words off-handedly.
Tension cringed down my spine. “Is the rumor true?”
“Yes.” He split his apple again and held out half. His leaf-green eyes met mine. “But it’s not the whole truth.”
It felt like a dare.
When I took the apple from him, it felt like a promise. “Do you want to tell me the story?”
“Not at all.”
I nodded and bit into my apple.
“Do you want to tell me how a mortal ended up here?”
“I can’t be the only half-mortal, half-shifter, can I?” I mused in response. “If there’s one thing I learned working in a pub, it’s that people forgive a lot of differences when they’re eager to fuck.”
He choked briefly on his apple.
I raised my brows at him pointedly. “Did I offend your sensibilities?”
“No. Though I wish some drunken revelry was my origin story.”
He clearly didn’t want to tell me anything about his past.
“I wonder why I’m the only one who both looks mortal and has the dragon mark. If there are others.”
“Maybe the other ones with shifting stars didn’t make it here.” There was no hiding the tang of mockery in his tone.
I frowned at him. “Shifting stars?”
“Rumors are spreading about you. About a shifting star. A fake mark. And my favorite, that you’re Fieran’s enchanted mortal servant. You might be more infamous than me by the end of the week.”
“I’ll probably be dead by the end of the week.”
“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned your stupid plan to die soon. Why?”
“I mostly trained to mop and serve,” I said. “Not so much with the preparing-to-fight-for-Fae-entertainment stuff. I almost got murdered during training the other day. My opponent underestimated just how breakable I am.”
“Maura?”
My brows arched.
“I’m not stupid, though I look it,” he said. “She’s disappeared from Clan Bismyth. And Clan Bismyth’s leader watches you.”
“Like he has an evil plot that involves me?”
“Like he’s obsessed with you.” His gaze flickered ever-so-slightly past me. “Whether or not you are his enchanted mortal servant.”
I turned to follow his gaze.
Fieran was stalking toward us.
“He’s got his reasons. I just need to figure them out.” I twisted in my seat and greeted Fieran with a smile. “Yes?”
Fieran’s gaze was intent on mine as he loomed over the table, and I had the distinct impression he was deliberately ignoring Kiegan. “I’m going to make a bargain tonight if I can. Do you want to come?”
To save my brother?
He was really going to let me come?
What had brought about this change of heart?
“Yes,” I said.
Kiegan sat back, crossing his huge arms over his chest and watching us knowingly.
“Then meet me in the common room in ten minutes. Wear something discreet.”
As if anyone looked twice at mortals to begin with.
Also, it would take me ten minutes just to make it up those stairs.
As Fieran strode away, radiating irritation, Kiegan winked at me. “You’re welcome.”