Chapter 59
SERENNA
Serenna had faced battles less determined to defeat her.
Sharyne screamed so loudly that Serenna’s vision pulsed, the chamber in the Drowned Spires distorting around the edges—the crystal walls, the silver basin, the folded linens. Even the drifting orbs of illumination trembled at the pitch.
“I’m trying,” Serenna said as she knelt, hating the pleading desperation in her voice. She’d sounded the same before, on her knees in front of this infant’s mother, begging Ayla to spare Fenn’s life.
Sharyne didn’t care.
The infant kicked both legs free of the swaddling cloth with fury too large for her body, one tiny fist punching the air. Her whole face had gone red with outrage, silver eyes squeezed shut.
Even dying, Ayla had made this look effortless. She’d held Sharyne against her chest with smug softness and unpracticed hands, as though infants only wanted warmth and quiet and not, apparently, to wage war on cotton.
Gritting her teeth, Serenna wrestled the cloth back into place. “Your mother had no right to leave you with me.”
Guilt split the haze of exhaustion when Sharyne went abruptly still. Serenna froze with her, her resentment for Ayla spilling over at the life she’d left behind.
Sharyne inhaled so deeply her ribs expanded under Serenna’s shaking hands, gathering the next wail with terrible purpose.
“I’m sorry,” Serenna whispered. “Please don’t.”
The scream punched through Serenna’s skull and rattled behind her eyes, bright as the sunfire that still haunted the dark whenever she closed them.
A week had passed since Galaeryn’s failed ascension. A week since Fenn had dragged her and Vesryn back from the sky with the Starshards at their throats. A week spent helping Jassyn send the human army back across the realms. Sleeping in fractures. Waking to whispers.
Serenna redoubled her efforts, drawing Sharyne’s arms close the way Saundyl’s wife had shown her.
Fold. Tuck. Pull snug.
Simple.
The cloth slipped loose. Sharyne wrenched one arm free with a furious jerk and smacked herself in the cheek.
The wailing doubled.
Fenn appeared in the doorway. His hair hung loose around his shoulders, the ends still dripping from bathing in the lake, his tunic unlaced at his throat.
His brows climbed as he took in Serenna kneeling beside the low cradle he’d pilfered from Asharyn, then Sharyne half-wrapped and shrieking, the swaddling cloth twisted around them both.
“What are you doing to her, she-elf?”
Serenna’s disbelieving laugh broke too close to a sob. She shoved disheveled hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Changing her. Swaddling her. Ruining her life. I don’t know.”
Fenn crossed the chamber while Sharyne screamed until her fists trembled.
“She’s fed?” he asked over the wailing.
“Vesryn gave her a bottle before Veyrix summoned him.” Serenna looked down at the damp cloth balled near her knee. “Then she spat half of it up and decided I was the enemy.”
“So you pinched her?”
Serenna glared up at him, but the expression wouldn’t hold.
“I can’t do this.” The words escaped before she could stop them.
Her throat tightened as Sharyne cried between them, and Serenna stared down at her, terrified by how little it took to fail a life this small.
Ayla’s Starshard hummed in Serenna’s pocket, nearly as heavy as the promise she’d made to her dying sister.
She wanted to be rid of it.
Shame followed the thought immediately, but it didn’t change the urge to put the gem out of memory and out of reach. Out of the room where Sharyne’s cries kept giving Ayla a voice.
But the gem belonged to Sharyne.
One day, when she was old enough to understand—when she could carry a piece of her mother without being crushed by the history—Serenna would honor Ayla’s final request and give her what remained of her and Mishryn.
Until then, Serenna would carry it for her.
“I don’t know what I’m doing.” Serenna clenched the swaddling cloth. “There has to be someone better suited. Someone who doesn’t…” She swallowed, jaw aching around the confession. “Someone who doesn’t panic when she cries.”
The humor slipped from Fenn’s face as he glanced down at Sharyne’s damp lashes, her trembling mouth, the furious pulse fluttering against petal-thin skin.
He crouched beside them and covered Serenna’s wrist with his claw. “I’ll show you.”
Fenn reached past her, holding Sharyne’s arms gently while he drew the cloth across her chest. Talons made for tearing skimmed close without catching skin, sweeping the fabric around Sharyne until only her furious red face remained.
She hiccuped.
Then fell silent.
Fenn nodded. “There. See? Not so difficult.”
Sharyne’s lips puckered, threatening betrayal. One arm strained against the cloth as she tested the restraint and found herself, for the moment, defeated.
Before she could gather another scream, Fenn lifted her against his chest, one broad palm bracing the back of her head. Sharyne startled, then settled into warmth with a soft, offended sigh.
Serenna shook her head as the ringing in her ears eased. “You’ve done this before.”
Fenn rolled his eyes. “I helped raise seven sisters. I can handle one tiny elf.”
Serenna stared at Fenn cradling Sharyne, at how impossibly small the infant looked, held safe in the curve of his talons.
Before dawn, Vesryn had insisted on holding his sister with solemn, exhausted concentration, Sharyne’s fist tangled in his silver hair while he pretended not to notice.
All morning, she’d been passed from Fenn’s claws to Vesryn’s arms to Serenna’s unsteady hands. Ayla’s daughter, held by the people left standing between her and a world that had already taken too much.
Fenn drew another length of cloth from the cradle and slung it over one shoulder.
Serenna blinked. “What are you doing?”
“Securing the menace.” He settled Sharyne against his chest and bound her there with efficient, merciless tugs. “Since your princeling abandoned his post to speak to the dragons, I’m assuming command.”
Serenna’s mouth twitched. “Did you inform him of this self-promotion?”
“Not yet.” Fenn hooked a talon in the sling and tested its hold. “He was already prickly after scorching two bottles of pocket goat milk.”
A laugh slipped out of Serenna. “That’s what she’s drinking?”
“Milk that I acquired at great personal cost.”
Serenna’s brows rose. “You…milked a pocket goat?”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Fenn mumbled. “Especially with Lykor glaring over your shoulder.”
Serenna laughed again, and for the first time all morning, the tightness in her chest loosened. Then the basin caught her reflection and the sound died.
She recognized every exhausted line of the face staring back, yet the silver eyes still belonged to a stranger. As she touched her cheek, some worried part of her expected it to feel colder.
Just eye color, she told herself.
Just like Sharyne’s held only bright outrage, not the ancient depth Serenna feared she’d find there. She was simply a baby who screamed at cotton and milk and the indignity of being alive.
Serenna was only tired.
She nearly believed the lie.
But each night in the Drowned Spires chipped away a little more of her certainty. The crystal walls reflected too much light, splintering every reflection until the bedchamber crowded with watchful versions of herself. When lake wind wound through the corridors, the walls hissed with whispers.
Twice now in their tower, Serenna had woken barefoot at the window with Vesryn beside her, both of them staring up at the stars until the darkness between those distant lights seemed to beckon.
Both times, Fenn had marched them back to bed before either could argue, muttering that standing upright was no way to slumber.
Serenna lowered her hand from her cheek and turned away from the basin.
Fenn was watching her, concern flaring in his eyes. Bound against his chest, Sharyne had finally surrendered, her lashes fluttering with impending sleep.
“I’m tired.” Serenna glanced toward the crystal walls. “It’s this place.”
The words landed weakly between them, but Fenn let them pass. For now. He’d seen Vesryn drift into that same strange distance, and Serenna knew he’d only wait so long before making them face it together.
Fenn thumbed one of his piercings. “Just as well we won’t spend another night here. Your princeling sent word.”
Serenna frowned. “He did?”
“Twice. Just now.” Fenn shifted Sharyne higher against his chest. “Insistent, for him.”
Heat crept up Serenna’s neck. She’d been so lost in her own thoughts that both sendings had slipped past her notice.
Fenn studied her a moment longer before lifting a claw, a portal unfurling beside them. “Skylash is growing restless.”
He stepped through with her, and morning sun struck Serenna hard enough to sting her eyes.
She blinked against the brightness until the hillside sharpened, the lake glinting below. Along its muddy shore, the battlefield lay nearly empty, reduced to trampled grass, broken earth, and blackened scars burned deep into the ground.
The last of the human soldiers waited in dwindling lines to be returned with Saundyl to Vaelyn.
Scattered tents listed half-submerged, the lake already creeping in to claim what the living had left behind.
Farther out, the Drowned Spires rose from the water in glinting crystalline spears, beautiful enough to make the memory of what had happened above them feel stolen from another life.
At the crest of the hill, Skylash and Veyrix waited.
Skylash tracked two rangers circling overhead on their dracovae. Her injured wing pressed tight to her flank, though she’d already hissed that she required no more healing from their “wretched starlight.”
Veyrix loomed beside her, white eyes bright and clear, his head lowered toward Vesryn, who stood before him.