Chapter Thirteen Zephyra
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ZEPHYRA
Arion sits as far from me inside the carriage as possible.
He leans against the door, his wings curled around him as a feathery blanket while his head lolls against the plush blue velvet interior.
He’s been sleeping for almost an entire day, waking every so often to snap a finger out the window and urge the horses faster.
It would be relaxing, peaceful even, while the carriage careens violently over the smooth paths of Mortia’s obsidian shorewall—except loud, roof-throttling snores pour from the warlock’s open mouth.
They seem to bounce from wall to wall before burrowing inside my ears like insufferable sand crabs.
I can’t suffocate him. I can’t throw him from the carriage.
Since I don’t wish to die myself—and I really don’t want to be stuck here with him awake—I can only sit and stare, letting his snores eat away at my nerves. My stomach grumbles irritably, but I ignore it. I’ve gotten good at ignoring hunger over the years.
Peering out the window, I watch sixteen horse hooves gallop over the dark pathways carved by humans centuries ago.
Weeks after Mortem’s Fall, when humankind decided merrow were the source of all evil, the remaining three gods—Lucius, Tempestas, and Hifax—worked with humans to erect massive, magical walls that still stretch from continent to continent.
Roads were carved overtop them, a way for humans to trade goods without daring to set sail on merrow waters.
These walls divided the ocean. From one sea into four.
I gasp as the sight of the road changes beneath our feet.
Without any transition, obsidian gives way to wood.
“It’s… it’s made of timber.” I bend down to touch it, expecting my finger to come away with splinters.
But it’s inexplicably as soft as cotton.
An exhalation of awe catches in my throat. “How is that possible?”
“Gods.” Jacin wraps strong arms around my waist, and I fall happily against his chest. He pushes a pink tendril of hair behind my ear. “The human world isn’t entirely detestable. We have a few things going for us.”
“Like indoor plumbing.”
He smirks and presses a kiss to my throat. “We’re close, Zephyra. Remember what I told you. Don’t do anything with nefarious intent. Don’t think any malicious thoughts.”
I laugh at that. “I’ve never had a malicious thought in my life.”
Tearing my head from the window, I slump down on the bench, cross my arms, and frown. Arion’s snores seem to grow louder by the second. Perhaps the first thing I’ll do when I repay the debt is cut off his nose. Then his wings. Then his head.
Thick locks of chestnut brown hide his worried brow, his jaw somehow clenched even as his lips fall open on another snore.
Even in sleep, he isn’t peaceful, as if the pressure of the entire world is bearing down on him, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to suffer the enchantments of the isle without fantasizing about decapitating the warlock.
Without dreaming of severing our bond and pushing him into the sea.
Without… without thinking of Jacin.
His name cracks open my chest, and a sob almost tears from the wound. It feels as fresh as it did eight years ago.
“I can help you, my dear.” The strange merman watches from his tempestuous wave as storm clouds gather overhead. Thunder rumbles. Rain falls fat and sharp on my cheeks. Almost like tears. “I can bring him back. That is what you want, isn’t it?”
I glance down at Jacin. At his beautiful face. At his broken body. At the blood on my hands. This shouldn’t have happened. It was an accident—just one stupid fucking mistake. It’s my fault, and now he… he’s gone.
“Yes.” My heart shatters, and I tremble. I can’t stop trembling. “That is what I want.”
“Then come to me.”
Tears burn my eyes. Mentioning the library to Arion was foolish. I don’t want to see the trees, the woodsy shore, the saltwater cattails and lilies and the stalls Jacin pulled me to along the way. I don’t want to remember his laughter, or how quickly it all fell apart.
Pulling my legs into my chest, I sneak another glance outside.
The timber wall beckons with emerald firs lining the road, and the silvered cord sways in the new, cool wintry breeze.
It’s all exactly the same. It’s all so painfully different.
I shut my eyes before I can see anything else.
I need to focus. Banish the memories and fears and regrets.
If a single bad thought creeps in once we enter the isle, I’ll be ensuring our death in the exact spot I ensured Jacin’s damnation so long ago.
The sorcerer already ruined my life once.
I can’t let him do it again.
As we disembark from the carriage and step onto the Greenwood Isles’ damp soil, I plaster an intense smile on my face, forcing my eyes wide and merry.
Unfortunately, the isle looks exactly as it did eight years ago, as if I’ve unburied a time capsule and am now living inside the remains of a past I’ve tried so hard to forget.
To my left—a fisherman’s shack Jacin dragged me inside to rip off my short black wig and kiss me senseless.
Up ahead—a marketplace carved from the hollow of a dozen massive willow trees where Jacin and I bargained for fruit with loose buttons and pocket lint.
And behind me, away from the port, on the sharpest edge of the isle, just inches from the sea—the place where a dryad uprooted and killed him.
Dark, twisted thoughts skitter through the shallows of my mind, but I push them away, every single one, and smile even wider. Harder.
Arion glances at me with a startled curse. “What in Mortem’s name are you doing? You look ridiculous.”
I turn slowly, baring my teeth at him in the kindest way I can muster.
“Think happy thoughts, warlock.” I want so badly to add, if you have any—but it doesn’t matter that I stop myself.
The enchantments hear it regardless. The canopy of emerald above us shifts, just slightly, but enough that they point arrows of sharp branches at my head. A warning. A threat.
I swallow.
Happy thoughts, happy thoughts, happy thoughts.
Arion manages a small grin, appearing almost pained by the action. “Lovely day today,” he lies through his teeth.
I nod. “Just lovely.”
I stifle the pain in my chest, inhaling through the haunted memories. Eight years ago. I was a different person then. I was a child. And now—even as I smile, as I laugh and play pretend for the isle’s sake, I’m just a ghost. Jacin would hate who I’ve become.
I would hate who I’ve become.
That thought wrecks me more than any other, and my knees nearly buckle right there, on the leaf-strewn street of the marketplace. Arion reaches out to catch me, already breaking my number one rule, but I leap away from him and smack into the rough bark of a tree.
“What is it?” His gaze darts upward, his wings spreading wide to shield us from the eyes of our many onlookers. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t… my thoughts…” I manage through shallow breaths.
I can’t stop picturing Jacin’s bloody corpse. Can’t stop imagining what would have happened if I’d attacked the dryad first. If I’d clawed through this place and ripped it apart.
And with that, the tree at my back moves. Slender willow branches tangle around my wrists and twist. I hiss at the sudden burn, struggling to break away. Arion steps closer, and the branches start to tangle around his ankles too. His gaze darkens. “Happy thoughts, Zephyra,” he commands.
But I can’t. I c-can’t…
A branch curls around my neck like a noose.
Shit shit shit.
“Oh, petunias. Knock that off, Cheshire.”
A strange, lilting accent sounds from behind Arion’s wings, and he just manages to twist away in time for a pale, stubby man to waddle up to the tree and smack it with a lavender umbrella.
“Bad. Bad.” He smacks it thrice more with a sigh before plucking a razor blade from his plaid pocket and aiming it at—at me.
Fuck.
I squirm, fighting the branches cutting into my skin, conjuring any happy thought that has ever crossed my mind. Seahorses wearing rouge. Blowfish trombones. The sorcerer gutted and flayed.
The branches loosen then, but it doesn’t matter. The man leverages that razor at me and—and slices easily through the leafy ropes.
He grins at my expression. “Cheshire is a newborn dryad. She is more sensitive to negative thoughts than the rest. Forgive her; she’s still learning.
” He whacks the trunk with his palm, and the tree emits a rustling giggle.
I gape between them, unsure what to say, but he spares me from responding when he asks, “You are from out of town, yes?”
Arion pulls limp branches from my neck, my wrists, as the man beams at us, exchanging the razor blade for a monocle and pressing it to his left eye with an absurdly cartoonish gasp.
“Oh my! Have you two—have you been marooned? You look as if a whale swallowed you whole and spat you out on our shore.” He twirls his thick white mustache and winces upon glimpsing Arion’s excruciatingly bare chest. “No shirt! No shirt in the isles? That won’t do.
That just won’t do. You must come with me. Now. Now!”
I shake my head slowly. “That’s all right—”
“I insist,” the man demands, his voice a tad harsher than it’d been seconds before. And that mustache… it curls above an almost-nefarious grin. My hackles rise at the sound, at the sight, my heart already racing. This is bad.
But—
“My sweet, you are far too beautiful to strut about the isle in rags,” the man says. “You will stick out like a sore thumb amidst a forest of green.” He grins, and his expression no longer seems nefarious at all.
Maybe it never was.
Maybe I’m merely losing my mind.
Arion glances between us warily, studying my face as if I am, in fact, the problem here.
Not this man. This nice man who seems to only want to dress us.
I shake my head again in an effort to stop my negative thinking in its tracks and instead focus on the man before us.
Just a man. He seems familiar in the way that everything here does.
His bald head reflects the sunlight streaming through a thousand willow branches, and a bright-green-and-purple plaid cloak hangs from his slight frame, his feet bare and large and horribly calloused.
I don’t think about how gross the sight of that is.
I think about how glad I am he saved me.
“Thank you,” I manage through a tight smile. “For not letting the tree kill—”
He presses his umbrella to my lips. “Don’t say it! Cheshire is very triggered by thoughts of… you know.”
I do know. I know very well. Death. I smile harder against his umbrella, and he relaxes with an exaggerated sigh. “You and your gentleman suitor are not fit to be wandering around with your limbs out. It’s quite cold on the isle—”
Arion steps forward. “It’s fine. We don’t mind—”
“Nonsense! Clothes make the man!” The mustachioed man hooks an arm through mine and drags me forward, weaving us with spritely speed down the trail before I can think better of it.
Before I can fight him off. “You are in luck, you know. I am Gerald. Yes, that Gerald—of Harold and Gerald’s Fine Fineries.
It would be my pleasure to find you both something suitable for your visit.
I dress everyone here. Whether they like it or not. ”
At the very least, Arion’s disguise seems to be working perfectly.
This man—Gerald—doesn’t seem offended by my merrow hair or Arion’s warlock wings, which means he definitely doesn’t see them.
Although, that doesn’t stop making this a complete nuisance.
We don’t have time for Gerald, and certainly not for Harold or fine fineries.
The less time spent here, the better, and we have a library to rob—
The tree nearest me groans, uprooting as if to stomp down on me.
Gerald frowns at it and whacks it too with his umbrella, pulling me faster along.
“These fuddy-duddy dryads. I swear—sometimes they don’t know up from down or side from side, never mind that most sides are the same side so long as you’re on a different side. Names, my sweets?”
It’s hard to keep up with the words spilling from his lips in a fast torrent of nonsense. Almost as hard as it is to keep up with his pace. “Uh, pardon?” Arion follows behind us, maneuvering easily over fallen leaves, twigs, and acorns.
“Your names,” Gerald urges. “I can’t well call you ‘my sweets’ in front of my truest sweet.”
Without thinking better of it, I say, “I’m Zephyra.”
Abruptly, Gerald pushes me through the hollow of a willow, and I trip into a shoppe smothered in rich fabrics and vibrant textiles.
Another man waits inside, dusting first gossamer curtains and then a hive of buzzing bumblebees that hangs from the curtain rod.
His dark brown head shines the same as Gerald’s, though he has no other facial hair in sight, and he wears mismatched stockings with a fuzzy robe.
He whirls when he hears Arion enter, waving kindly before his gaze falls to me.
“Well, well, well,” he says with an impish expression.
“Just look what the cattails dragged in.”
I don’t respond.
I can’t respond.
Because Gerald turns at the same time, pokes me in the stomach with his umbrella, and says, “Zephyra! Ha! I knew I remembered you.”