Chapter Twenty-Seven Arion #2
“Then the first guard stepped out from that wall of fog, and… well, we didn’t have much of a choice.
Vesper started singing, and it lured more than just one guard toward us.
After they unlocked our cells and opened our doors, we decided it was best to incapacitate them and hide.
We weren’t certain how many enemies would be waiting for us. ”
“So,” Gavriall asks, “we are working with the murderous siren now?”
Zephyra nods. “For the time being.”
Gavriall eyes Vesper warily, absentmindedly rubbing the cut on his throat. “I don’t trust her.”
Vesper chomps her teeth in his direction, and he flinches.
Zephyra ignores them both and turns to face me.
Her hair tangles around her arms, disheveled, and her turquoise eyes have narrowed with exhaustion.
Bruises cover her scars now, shade them in purple and black.
Not only that, but my shirt seems to have been scorched—charred in thick, vertical lines as if she’s been recently burned.
Why didn’t I feel it? I should ask her that.
I should ask her why Vesper isn’t trying to kill her anymore, who Vesper even is, why she came after us.
I should ask her about the plan, how to proceed, but all that comes out is, “Are you okay?”
She blinks at me. Her brow furrows, the smallest scrunch, as if she’s actually processing the question and doesn’t know how to respond. “Honestly? I—I don’t think I am. This entire past week has been shit, and now we’re trapped on a Tempest ship with…” She glances back at Amaya. “Who even is she?”
“Princess Amaya Frost,” I hasten to say, voice rougher, terser, than I intend. “Stormborn seventeenth daughter of Tempestas. She offered us an agreement before you attacked her. If she brought us to you, we would tell her about the heart. She isn’t going to kill us. She’s treasure hunting.”
“Is that true?” Vesper asks, poking into our conversation as she steps into view. Gavriall inches away from her.
“Yes,” I say.
Right as Zephyra says, “No fucking way.” She plants a hand on her hip and shakes her head. “You really think the princess of Tempest dragged us onto a ship of soldiers to bargain for treasure?”
“I do,” Gavriall offers.
Zephyra huffs, blowing a tendril of pink away from her face. “I wasn’t asking you, historian.”
Gavriall eyes the skull, then the door. His lips twist in a petulant scowl.
“Allow me to answer for you, warlock—no. There’s no fucking way a princess fished us out of the water in hopes of stumbling upon some sort of treasure,” Zephyra says, shaking her head again.
“We should kill her before she can gut us. We kill her; we jump into the ocean, make a swim for it, and hope other sea monsters don’t murder us before we make it to the ruins. ”
“You’re forgetting our deal,” Vesper says.
Zephyra glowers. “Fine. We kill the princess. Then we fight you. Then we jump into the ocean, make a swim for it, and hope other sea monsters don’t murder us before we make it to the ruins.”
“We could fly—” Gavriall starts.
“Absolutely not,” Zephyra hisses, her hand moving to her stomach as if she’s going to vomit. “No more flying.”
The skull croons from the floor, “Pretty birds in the skies, arrows shot through pretty wings, each of you whispers lies, only one of you sings. Fall, you will. Fall, they must. Down, down, down—to turmoil and dust.”
“All right, last plan,” Zephyra repeats, “we stomp on that weird-ass skull, then we kill the princess, then we fight Vesper, then we make a swim for it.”
“Stomp on me and I’ll gnash teeth through your organs, girl,” the skull growls in a much darker tone than before.
“Why are we fighting the siren?” I ask.
Vesper glances at me coolly. “Afraid of your odds, warlock?”
I raise a hand, a single flame erupting in the center of my palm that simultaneously curdles death in my gut. I don’t let the pain or the weakness show on my face. “Not at all.”
“There’s an awful lot of talk of murder happening right now,” Gavriall says. “Very disconcerting when we’re traveling hundreds of feet in the air.”
Everyone ignores him.
Zephyra forces my arm back down to my side. “We are not attacking Vesper until she attacks us first.”
“Why?” Gavriall and I ask in unison.
“Because she is—she was my friend, and we have a princess and a ship of soldiers to worry about. Okay? So tell me how we handle that first. And then… then we’ll discuss Vesper.” She pleads silently for me to understand, to listen to her.
“We can’t kill the princess,” I say. “For one, Amaya is a daughter of Tempestas—God of Storms, Chaos, and Vengeance. If we kill his direct descendant, he’ll murder us where we stand.
Then there’s the crew; the princess won’t be traveling with a pack of doe-eyed soldiers.
She’ll have the best of the best flanking her.
The strongest, the smartest, the fastest. Even still, let’s say we manage to explode the ship or use Vesper’s siren song and kill everyone—we are undoubtedly circling the skies of Tempest. We’ll fall down to another massacre.
We’ll be surrounded on all sides. Gavriall is shit in combat.
Vesper will be torn apart by the first person not enthralled by her song, and you won’t have your abilities to protect you.
” She’ll be killed first. Her pink hair is unmistakable, and suddenly—the thought of Zephyra hanging, choking, dying isn’t pleasing at all. It makes me ill.
“What about you?” Zephyra asks.
“I am a warlock from a rival kingdom. They will rip the wings straight off my back the second they get the chance.”
Silence settles around us at that, absolute, and I glance between my three current allies.
A criminal. A siren. And my mermaid. None of them can survive this.
This trip has been doomed since the start.
And Zephyra is right—we’ve been followed.
Every step along the way, someone has found us.
Gavriall, the cult, Vesper, Amaya. Either it’s a horrible coincidence or… the heart is real. And it’s close.
“We need her, Zephyra. If we’re going to retrieve the heart, there’s no way we can do this without her, her crew, her ship—”
“Wait,” Gavriall interrupts. “Do you… do you hear that?”
“No,” Zephyra and I say in unison.
Vesper tilts her head, and a moment—one brief breath—passes before her hand flies to her mouth. “Fuck.”
Her whispered curse permeates the silence, and the four of us understand at once. A chill racks my spine.
Vesper’s siren song has stopped.
We glance down at where Amaya was previously lapping at Vesper’s feet. Only, the princess isn’t there.
Now upright, brandishing two blades and no longer under the thrall of a siren’s song, Princess Amaya Frost lunges for Zephyra with bloodlust blazing in her storm-gray eyes.