CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Verena
COMING TO FELT DIFFERENT, almost as though my mind had returned inside the wrong vessel.
Something had shifted, stirred. Not quite in the world, but in me.
The Viper was still there, curled tight around my skull, its fangs dragging despair into every new breath.
The bond, sewn together between Ronan and I, pulsed with a new stability.
I knew what he had done the instant I heard his voice inside my head and that tether locked into place.
But this…this was something else entirely. Pulling, silently and limitless. It didn’t yearn for control because it didn’t need to. The dark pulse under my skin struck at it, but the new presence didn’t fight back.
Where the curse wanted to consume me, this force wanted to become me. Whatever it was, it hadn’t saved me.
It was only just waking up.
Sunlight filtered through the caravan’s ceiling window, dust fluttering throughout the air.
After the chaos of Ronan, after everything, I was still trying to piece myself together when Elva and Nezra had reappeared, very quickly, after he left.
They told me the pixies mentioned a caravan they had solely for tomes and novels, a library on wheels, and had offered it to us with one request: be mindful and leave every volume behind when we were done.
Elva and I had combed through countless books back in the Luamis library, desperate for answers, always finding nothing.
Obrann had seen to that. Ordering scribes to burn every book that so much as mentioned the war between the gods and hel. A kingdom rewriting its own past, erasing proof.
But there were always those who remembered the cost, who hid fragments in the dark, risking their lives to keep history alive. I thought a scribe would have hidden something in our archives, but if anyone held the outlawed truths without fear, it would be the pixies.
“Where did you learn to speak Verathi?” Nezra’s voice drifted from where she leaned against the sunken arm of a chaise, the fabric worn where her elbow rested.
My eyes burned from straining over the tomes, the script so small and dulled. I pinched the bridge of my nose, letting darkness settle behind my eyelids for a moment.
“Callum taught me when we were growing up. I didn’t learn much, could never quite get the hang of it. Just a handful of words, maybe a few phrases.” I paused, the thought settling too late. “How did you even know I could speak the ancient tongue?”
“You were mumbling when Ronan carried you back from the cliff. Not in Narith. In Verathi. And your magic,” her voice lowered. “It listens when you speak it?”
I hadn’t remembered that. What I’d heard from my own lips, echoing in the haze of pain, had sounded only like Narith, our native tongue. Not the god-language.
I sighed. “No need to whisper it in secret. The curse isn’t my magic. But yes, it listens.”
Contemplation stirred in Nezra’s eyes as she studied me. Finally, her lips moved up, a hint of something unreadable. “Interesting.”
Inessa huddled in a far corner, her cropped hair tucked behind her ears, her frame almost swallowed by the velvet of another chair.
Elva sat across from her in a twin seat, legs folded beneath her, both tracing reverent fingers down lines of ancient history.
My legs uncrossed as I moved toward the edge of my own cushions, placing the useless tome I had scoured last onto the wooden table. “Why?”
Inessa’s head snapped up, her eyes peering over the rim of her book. Elva nudged her shoulder, urging her silently to keep reading, though her own stare lingered a little too long on me.
“Well...” A slow exhale rolled from Nezra’s chest, “Because the ancient tongue is otherwise dead. Buried with the gods. It’s rare to find a Fae who knows even fragments of it.
Never mind two.” She played with the glove on her hand, like she was tempted to rip it off before she said, “Never mind one who a wolf will obey.”
Ah. Forgot about that.
The whiff of mildew and old parchment curled through the air as I cracked open another volume layered in withered leather. Hope sparked in me at the first lines—words of gods, of the divinity stones.
Maybe those could cure my curse.
“You know it,” I mused.
Nezra laughed, amused. “Yes. But I am a Liraern. My kind has known every language to ever exist. It’s in my nature to remember it.”
I pressed a palm to my chest and bent in an exaggerated bow. “Our invaluable queen.”
She scoffed, flicking a handful of nuts at me, the shells scattering against my lap before she placed the rest on a shelf. The raven perched there tilted its head, its eye whirling as it snatched one up.
It was a sleek, unsettling thing. Beautiful, but creepy.
A strange warble leaked from its throat, the sound oscillating through the cramped caravan. My stomach twisted when I realized the cadence was Verathi.
My spine stiffened. “Did...did that thing just—”
Her lips quirked, a smile that wasn’t one. She tossed another nut onto the shelf, eyes never leaving me. “He listens,” she said smoothly. “Sometimes he repeats.”
The bird’s wings twitched, feathers rustling, and again the warble came—two words slurred in the god-tongue. This time, I understood them.
Deythrun onrahni. Death awakens.
A tremor crawled across the nape of my neck.
“What did it say?” Elva cut in.
“Prophecies, curses, the weather report,” Nezra said lightly, plucking dust from her sleeve as though none of it mattered. “Ravens are dramatic. You get used to it.”
Her tone was too careless, her eyes anything but. I pressed the tome harder into my lap, feeling the letters pulse beneath my skin.
“Don’t look so rattled.” Nezra leaned back. “Sometimes he repeats what’s coming. Sometimes what’s already happened.” She shrugged. “Either way, he’s grown to love an audience.”
I tried to shrug it off myself, tried to swallow the damning weight those words had left in me as they sat heavy in my chest.
“So,” I said, desperate to change the subject. Grabbing a few of the nuts that hadn’t scattered across the floor, I tossed them into my mouth one by one. “What’s going on with you and Ford?”
Barking out a laugh, Nezra’s eyes darted through the thick book in her lap. “Not a thing. Why do you ask?”
“I watch you guys,” I countered, heat curling at the edge of my grin. “It’s not that subtle.”
Inessa coughed from her corner, very pointedly not looking up from her book, though her ears twitched.
It actually had been faint, Nezra and Ford. Glances hidden behind lowered lashes, touches disguised as accident. If you weren’t watching closely, it would seem like two companions finding easy friendship.
But I had seen the way Ford’s gaze lingered when Nezra looked away, the way her eyes tracked him when his hands brushed against Inessa’s arms in sparring.
Nezra slammed her tome, leaning back into the chaise, voice cutting. “It’s not like that. Harmless flirting out of sheer boredom, I assure you.”
I tilted my head. “Are you sure it’s harmless on his side?”
She stood, her back to me, the back of one finger gliding down the raven’s sleek feathers.
“I’ve watched him flirt with at least ten pixie women and men, since we arrived.
It’s mutual.” The raven tilted its head, preening under her touch as she scratched beneath its beak.
“Besides,” she added. “My heart already has its owner.”
I nodded, pretending to sink back into my book, though my eyes barely skimmed the words. Without lifting them, I asked, “Do you want to tell me about them?”
Her eyes shimmered, ocean light blurring as she crossed back to me, the book abandoned and lowered herself to the cushion at my side. “Yes.”
My own tome closed with a thud, falling heavy against the table as I turned fully toward her. “What are they like?”
Elva and Inessa angled away, but their ears tilted toward us.
“Her name is Audra,” she began. “And she is…stillness in the eye of a tempest. Everything I was, I wanted to be better for her. She made me want to be better. She is kind and understanding and she always sees the best in everyone she meets.”
Audra sounded like Elva.
Nezra drew a shaky breath. “I was reckless. It’s how I got caught in that fisherman’s net, trapped on Luamis. But when she found me, when she rescued me, she saved me in so many more ways.”
Her eyes stirred, restless. I wondered if the storm Audra rescued her from was from herself.
“That feeling has never left me; it woke me up. I made her a promise to save her from her mother, and nothing will change that. One day, I will give us a new life far, far from here.”
“That’s honestly really beautiful.” My voice caught on the weight of it, and I caught Elva swiping at tears, still pretending not to watch us. “And kind of heartbreaking. Is Audra from Tempest Tide like you?”
Nezra shook her head, the smallest glimmer breaking through her sorrow. “No.”
“Who is her mother?” I asked. I was terribly curious who would need saving from their own blood like that.
“The witch queen, Isolde.” The name stripped Nezra’s voice of its easy humor.
A chill threaded down my spine. I had never had the pleasure of meeting the infamous witch, but the stories were enough. After their magic was ripped from them, they vanished, resurfacing forged new from Hel’s core, rumor said.
And Nezra was in love with the spawn of that?
“Aren’t you, I don’t know, worried Audra will turn out exactly like Isolde?”
“Darkness is rooted in all of us; it’s programmed into our nature,” she said, as though it were law. “But that black well always has a balance. And what we choose to act on? That’s what makes the difference.”
My darkness wasn’t programmed. It wasn’t natural. It was forced, spun around me without reason, without balance.
I shook my head, as if not understanding.