Chapter 27
In my bedchamber, the hallucinations gripped me. Nixie and Lumina were near, but felt lifespans away, only visible as rose and gold smears that bled into one another.
The truth still dribbled out of me in broken sentences.
“I need to get out of here,” I choked out, my body thrashing but heavy from the world’s distortion.
Or did someone hold me to the bed? Did someone chain me to this bed?
“Set me free!” I yelled, and the words shimmered before me in the room. “I need to find Arlo. We need to leave.”
“Who could have done this to her?” Words like blush peonies, shuddering in a meadow, fluttered across the room like butterflies.
“You know who did this.” Candlelight flickering in a dark room said, “Calypstra.” The name caught flame and burned to black ashes before my eyes.
Then, at the base of the bed, my mother appeared.
Stark and clear as day. Sound and color and time cascading around her, like she was a stone in a roaring river.
“You are a princess, Elowyn.” Her voice rippled, finding me in this strange place that felt like it was between life and death itself. “You are a queen!” Her voice boomed as she watched me writhing under the weight of the words.
“No,” I yelled. “I am nothing. No one.”
“Queens do not cry.” But a torrent poured from her dark-blue eyes, like the angry sea, gushing and gushing, dark-blue waves washing over me. Lapping over me. Drowning me.
“Did you cry when I left?” I asked, desperate to know the truth. “Did you love me, did anyone love me?”
“Guardians save the queen!” Mother chanted as swells of tears streamed out of her eyes, down her cheeks. Filling the room with an ocean of her tears. She didn’t answer me, only repeated, “Guardians save the queen!”
“Did you love me, mother?” I begged. “Did you cry when I left?”
She shut her eyes, stopping the flood of her tears.
“Queen Elowyn Blackthorn, the first of her name!”
I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want those words. I wanted only her love. Someone’s love.
She opened her eyes again, but this time, they were the same as they had been long before all my pain and agony started. At least before I knew it. Before they were red from crying often. But were they not always red? Were they not always sad?
She stepped forward in her cerulean evening dress, her long, sleek black hair braided over her shoulder. Not a day touching her perfect young skin. No longer pregnant, with a thin, tapered waist that I knew from before she was with child. Before I left. Before my world flipped upside down.
Then a loud thwack shattered the room, resounding through my body.
To my horror, her head was severed from her shoulders and rolled onto the bed, sopping with her tears, into my lap. Frozen, I could not move, not even to flinch. Her eyes looked up at me, two clear blue sapphires of pure honesty.
Burning, sacred truth.
“Did you ever love me?” I asked. I needed to know the truth.
“Love dies,” she answered. “Glory lives forever.”
Daylight pierced the sea and dispelled my night of torments, as if none of it happened at all.
The room was empty, my body aching. Anxiety seized me, relentless. I reached under my pillow and felt the hard cover of the journal. Thank the Guardians, it was still there, just where I’d left it.
I was alone, but the presence of Nixie, Lumina, my mother, and my demons lingered. When had they left me?
I sat up in bed.
You know who did this. Lumina’s words still burned in my mind, as they had in the depths of my agony.
Calypstra.
But why? On Hylos’s orders? But he had prevented me from divulging my secrets right at his feet, before all.
If he didn’t order it, then who did?
Everything felt strange, as if hallucinations and truths still lurked in the shadows, even in broad daylight. I needed to leave, to let the past dissipate and haunt someone else for a change.
Surging from bed, I changed into the silken emerald training outfit I’d worn the day before and rushed out the door of the empty room that was overcrowded with my past.
I knocked on Nixie’s door across the way from mine.
“You’re awake,” she said as she rubbed at the dark-crimson circles under her eyes. It had been a long night for us both, then.
“I’m ready for training,” I said curtly.
“But last night, you hardly slept—”
“Nixie. I need to.”
And with a nod, she agreed.
A bead of sweat traced a path down my spine as Nixie guided me through the stances of my next lesson in the armory. The scent of salt from the sea and my sweat melded. She explained how to plant my feet and hold positions steadfastly. But I was weak and shook under the weight of my body.
“I could never win a fight with a siren,” I said. If I needed to, I would be defenseless. The helpless thought made me sick.
“With a bit of wit and determination, I think you could stand a chance,” Nixie said as she circled me, analyzing my pose. “Plus, sirens are cocky. You can always use that against them.”
“Speak for yourself,” Morvyn retorted from across the room beside Raylik, who watched too. Both pretended to find interest in my progress, but something told me they were given orders to keep an eye on me.
No one spoke of my strange outburst, or the calling out to my dead mother I surely did in my torments. Thank the Guardians. I wanted to forget it all for as long as I could.
“Keep your feet flat, and drive that big toe into the ground,” Nixie ordered. “You may even be better than some of the finned folk because your feet have more dexterity,” she encouraged me, then gave my shoulder a firm shove, the connection feeling good as I stood my ground.
“Fantastic! Now, step toward me and lock back into that position.”
I did as she instructed. But her next shove sent me off-kilter.
Raylik walked the distance between us.
“The best way to remain standing in a fight is to avoid getting hit at all,” he said, even-toned. “Avoid her blows.”
I reset the pose, and Nixie prepared to strike, but I stepped backward, avoiding her.
“Good!” Nixie praised.
Raylik nodded his approval.
Nixie lunged at me again, and I sidestepped her shove. As she increased her speed, I dodged again, a triumphant smile stretching my lips.
“Very good!” she exclaimed, then reached for me once more. I stepped back as I had before, but this time I collided with something at my calves, sprawling onto the unforgiving stone floor which bit into my ass.
Morvyn let out a hearty laugh, his finned foot protruding. He had tripped me.
“You bastard!” I hissed, but I couldn’t even feign anger. I laughed too, despite everything.
“You’re late. I’ve been here at least thirty minutes alone,” Arlo said, hunched over the virginal, heavy eyebrows knitted and wearing a grimace to match. He turned to face me. Instantly, his features smoothed and softened.
I collapsed onto the couch.
The restless night plus the hard training I had forced Nixie to push me through had me exhausted. But my mind still raced. Thoughts of who was after me spun, chased by my mother’s words of pure and utter treason.
“Any luck finding the fix?” Arlo asked, meaning the portal out of this damned place.
“No.”
I was further from answers than ever before. Morvyn had left my side only long enough for me to spend some time alone in the library with Arlo, but I knew he loitered protectively at the base of the stairs.
They were all on guard after last night. I hoped by now I’d garnered enough trust to wander Naiadon freely to look for the portal, but it seemed I was back at the start. All because someone here plotted against me.
Arlo crossed the room, boots clacking on the marble. He stood before me, his eyes cross-hatching my face.
“Stop that,” I said.
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me like that.” Like he could read me like a damned book.
And when that handsome, annoying bastard looks at me, for the first time in all of my life, I feel seen.
Infernum. This was all such a disaster.
Arlo kneeled before me. Those eyes of pure sunshine landed on my skin, trying to burn off the storm clouds rolling through my soul.
“What happened?” I tried hating him for the gentle way he asked. Because it made me want to reach out to him, touch him. Maybe even tell him what I’d shouted in front of everyone. He is exquisite. Resplendent.
I was such a fool.
We had no time for feelings.
We needed to find the portal.
We needed to get out of Naiadon.
We needed to save Oakhaven.
“Tell me,” he said, trying his stern captain’s voice. Fuck, why did I like that voice?
“I’m not your subordinate,” I said, crossing my arms.
“Oh, I am well aware. If you were my sailor, I’d have you flogged daily for defiance,” he said with a sly smile.
“Stop.”
He put a callused hand on my bare knee. “Come, tell me what’s the matter.”
“I had a night terror. That’s it.”
That’s what I’d call it. So he wouldn’t worry that someone was attempting to … well, I wasn’t sure what they were trying to do, really. But whoever poisoned me had ill intentions, clearly.
His finger drew figure eights on my knee, igniting a wildfire up my thigh and between my legs. That was all it took. My heart leaped in my chest. Little traitor.
“What was the night terror about?” he asked.
I pushed his hand off my knee and stood up. “Nothing of importance.” I walked to the virginal. “Will you be able to fix it?”
I ran my fingers over the keys, but frowned when no sound rang out at my touch. I longed to lose myself in its music and quiet all these senseless thoughts.
“Elowyn,” he said, following me, “if you keep secrets from me, I cannot help you.”
“There are things you can never help me with.”
Like my dead mother and hateful father. The world and how it sees me. Or how it doesn’t see me at all.
He grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward him.
“Arlo,” I said weakly.
He lifted his large hand and delicately traced a thumb over my cheek.
His other hand fell on my waist. I shuddered.
What was he doing? Why couldn’t I tell him to stop?
Remind him not to be distracted, nor to distract me.
So I could appropriately wall myself off further from him.
Instead, my hands, with minds of their own, traveled up the muscles of his broad back to rest on the lower curve of his ribcage, where strength and vulnerability met.
He was so solid. So steady. So real. When everything else felt fleeting and false.
“When I heard a noblewoman would be on my ship, I thought you would be snobbish, cold, removed. Then I saw you there, in your wool under-frock,” he growled in a low voice that filled me.
“And I knew you were different. Then you sat with my men.” He smiled that perfect, damnable smile, crinkling lines into his nose.
“You dined with us. Laughed with us. Like you were meant to be there all along at my table.”
I wanted to bathe in the pool of contentment that was Arlo. Bask in him. My personal sun below the sea.
“That world you were born into, you do not fit its confines,” he said.
“Yes, I know that I don’t exactly fit in among the elite—”
“No. That isn’t what I mean.” His hold tightened around my waist and heat radiated from him, seeping into my soul.
“Elowyn, your life is worth more than dressing ridiculously for feasts and stamping out that fire in you. You’re meant to be free.
Wild and unbridled. I had a hand in locking you away once.
I can’t bear to do it again. I will not. That’s why we should—”
I put a hand over his mouth to stop the words from spilling forth, so the sirens would not hear them when they searched his mind. But also, so I would not hear them, because I wasn’t sure I’d be strong enough to refute them.
Our faces were so close. I yearned to know what he tasted like. Felt like.
But I took a step back instead.
“I need to help my people.” That meant warning my father of the sirens waiting in the sea, forming their attack. Returning to my fate. Possibly marrying Cedric.
“Why? Why help any of them at all?” There was an edge to his voice.
“Why help Alistar? You could have left him to starve on the streets. He wasn’t your problem.”
“That’s different—”
“No, it’s not. You helped him because you know it’s not right to turn your back on those put in your path in need of saving. That is Oakhaven for me. They are my people.”
“They are your father’s people.”
I took another step back, running into the virginal. It hurt, but I couldn’t decipher why.
“Elowyn.” Morvyn was there at the top of the stairs, right on time. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
But Morvyn didn’t accept it, scowling at Arlo. “Hylos is waiting for you. Are you ready to go?”
“Yes.” I turned from Arlo, leaving him. Angry at him for stating the simple truth. They weren’t technically my people. Oakhaven wasn’t mine. But my mother’s words still haunted my mind, repudiating what Arlo said.
“Elowyn, wait.” Arlo stepped forward, reaching for me, but Morvyn threw a hand and sang, and in a heartbeat Arlo was lulled and we left.