Chapter Thirty-Nine
Before we left for Jeju, there was one place I needed to go. Calroy came with me, wings tucked close in the narrow tunnel.
The corridors beneath the arena still held the smell of old blood no amount of time would scrub out. I found the gate at the end of the passage, the same one the boarox had lumbered through after the fight, heavy iron bars sunk deep into the rock.
A ring of keys hung from a hook outside the guard station, abandoned along with everything else the queen’s soldiers had left behind when they fled. I tried them one by one until the tenth caught, the lock groaning as it gave.
For a long moment, nothing moved in the dark beyond it.
“Hello,” I whispered. “It’s me, the goddess of the sea.”
Saying it out loud sounded foreign and strange on my tongue.
Then the same low, somber sound I’d heard the day it turned away from me in the arena, sniffing the blood at my feet instead of finishing what it started, lumbered toward me.
“You’re free,” I said, stroking its coarse hair. “You are free to roam as you please. I got the queen’s permission to set you free.”
The boarox huffed through its nose in response.
Nira had said the boarox was a gentle animal once, before it was caged. The Seelie queen had used it for sport, and it had only acted to protect itself. Animals were like us. They fought back. So why wouldn’t this one?
I understood better than most what it meant to be caged and called dangerous for wanting out.
Its black marble eyes found mine one last time, then it moved past us, slow and massive. I held Calroy’s hand as we watched it disappear up through the tunnel toward the garden, where Fraya awaited to guide the animal into the forest.
We stood there a while after it was gone, the tunnel quiet again, just the drip of water somewhere in the stone. Calroy didn’t let go of my hand.
“Why do I bleed blue?” The question I’d carried since the cavern floor finally found its way out. “The Seaborn, the boarox, the oclego. Why all of us?”
Calroy traced a slow line along my wrist, where blue ran beneath my skin. “Because the sea is yours.” He turned me to face him. “It always has been. You didn’t just rule the water, Yeri. You also ruled over the animals. They bow to you, and you alone. You were their maker.”
I thought of the boarox in the arena, the oclego thrashing against Russo’s ship—both of them bleeding the same color that had marked me my entire life. Not a curse. Not coincidence. Mine.
All those years in the cavern, I’d thought my blue blood meant something was wrong with me.
Nam had never told me otherwise, and maybe she hadn’t known how, or maybe she’d been protecting me from a truth too big for a child to carry.
Either way, I’d spent my whole life ashamed of the one thing that had always belonged to me most.
Not anymore.
I smiled at the revelation that I had created these animals. I was sure there were more creatures out there to find, and I couldn’t wait until I was ready to explore the world and discover them.
“You ready, my love?” Calroy unfurled his wings.
He would fly me to Jeju. Jinha and Minha were already there, thanks to Oscan.
I wasn’t ready to bury Nam, but it had to be done. Before I could answer, Calroy scooped me up and launched into the bright, sunny sky.