Chapter Twenty-Nine Zephyra
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ZEPHYRA
Once I’m safely on my own—cowering in a random room somewhere belowdecks—I retch into an empty bucket.
Amaya has agreed to help us. She has offered us passage.
She is flying us to the Sceleratus Trench.
I cling to the warped bucket, gripping the steel with pale knuckles and paler hands.
I vomit again. Acid. Bile. Fear. I can’t hold it in any longer.
My scars have reopened, and now they’re weeping.
I’m weeping. For eight years, he imprisoned me.
He abused me. He tortured me. Maybe in that time, I should’ve grown stronger.
Thicker skin. A harder constitution. But I didn’t.
And I feel weak because of it. Pathetic.
I can’t see through the burn of tears. They trickle over my cheeks, drop into the bucket with my sickness, the salt water calling forth my tail.
I don’t care about it. I don’t care about anything except that sharp vise around my heart.
It punctures my chest in a ruthless grasp.
The scent of copper billows around us now, like freshly spilled blood, and ruffles my pink hair. But I do not tremble, and I do not swim away. “I will save your lover, but only for a price.”
The stories say this. They say powerful magic costs great sacrifice. I don’t care what it is—I’ll pay it. For Jacin, I’ll pay it. “What do you want?”
“Oh, that’s simple enough.” The High Sorcerer of the Four Seas smiles. “I want your soul, Zephyra of the Syl. I want you.”
No. Goddess, no.
I escaped. I escaped, and I was never—I was never supposed to go back.
The door behind me opens for a brief second before softly clicking shut.
I don’t need to turn to see who it is. The silvered cord tightens around my throat, until I’m almost choking from the pressure.
From the concern throttling the bond. Something shifts behind me.
Something like heat and muscle and tension.
“What is it?” Arion sets a gentle hand on my back. It sounds as if he crouches. His wings brush my shoulders, tender caresses of their own volition. “What’s going on, Zephyra?”
I can’t bring myself to shove him or his wings away. I can’t bring myself to move at all. “N-nothing.”
“That’s a lie,” he says simply. Not an accusation; just a statement. But how am I meant to respond to that? Secrets swirl viciously in my stomach. He already hates me for being a merrow. Why should I give him more of a reason?
He sits now. He doesn’t remove his hand from my back. Instead, he begins tracing tender circles with his palm. Up my spine. Down it. I glance at him through my periphery, waiting for him to wince in disgust when his hand accidentally touches my scales.
He doesn’t.
He doesn’t speak either. He just… sits. Silence hangs heavy over us, interrupted only by rows and rows of hammocks that rustle and swing with each sharp turn of the ship.
Neither of us moves. An hour passes. I count each second in my head.
Hope and pray there will be another way. Another option. Of course, there isn’t.
We are headed to the trench.
We are headed straight for the sorcerer.
“Are you done being sick?” Arion murmurs, his voice rougher in the quiet.
I nod tremulously, and Arion takes the bucket from my quivering hands.
I’m desperate to hold something, to tear my nails through something, so I palm the floorboards.
Curl my fingers into the wood. “One second,” Arion says—and, indeed, it takes a single second for him to clean the bucket and me with his magic.
The horrid taste of bile vanishes on my tongue.
The smell of sickness suddenly weaves into the sweet scent of strawberries.
“You shouldn’t waste that,” I whisper. “Not on me.”
I can hear his jaw clench even without looking at him.
His touch disappears, and for a moment, I think he might leave, but he only kneels in front of me and tips up my chin so I’m forced to meet his gaze.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say—plea.
His wings span half the wall behind him.
An oil lamp smolders above him, casting his shadow over me as his eyes rove my face.
His touch travels to my neck, and he loosens our cord from my throat.
Like a snake, it coils around his finger instead and slithers up his wrist.
“Do you know anything about the Warlock Trials?” he asks abruptly, and the question nearly throws me off my axis. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.
I blink at him. “You mentioned the cult and torture, but aside from that… no. I tried to avoid warlocks at all costs.”
His lips twitch with a half grin. “I’m sure you did.” He tucks a lock of pink behind my ear, and his knuckles skim my cheek. A casual touch. Ordinary. Still, something cracks open in my chest, something old and strange. It feels like…
Warmth, I think quickly. Just warmth.
“Even if you had managed to beguile a warlock, they wouldn’t have told you anything.
The Warlock Trials are, first and foremost, a secret.
That’s partly how the elders separate the weak from the strong.
We don’t know what’s ahead until it’s too late.
And then—” His eyes close as if he has to force the words out.
“They start with discipline. Teach us how to brawl, how to exercise, how to be perfect. A rigid schedule they only disrupt once we’ve mastered it.
Then they move on to the torture. They tear us from our beds.
They isolate us. Slice us. Hang us. Set us on fire.
Less than five percent survive.” A shudder racks him, and I reach forward instinctively.
Take his hand and squeeze once for reassurance.
“The cult comes next, after we explore the first tendrils of our magic. At that point, the transition has begun, and the cult teaches us resolve.”
Anger flares hot in my chest. They didn’t teach him shit. “They hurt you.”
“Yes.” His gaze flashes with an indecipherable streak of emotion, even as his voice remains controlled.
“And we are meant to thank them for it. Once we withstand the cult’s torment without hurting or reacting, the elders gift the few remaining warlock-hopefuls our wings.
They install them. Far more painful than any of the previous Trials.
It takes days of surgery, of lying on a bare cot in the Surgical Chamber while they bleed us dry and dig through our bones.
The process consumes the rest of our human blood.
It condenses the magic in our veins until we’re brimming with power.
Only power. Nothing else. We aren’t meant to be anything else. ”
Arion’s grasp hardens in mine, and I know I can’t let go. I don’t want to let go. His wings undulate slowly, beautiful as ever, white and gold and radiant as the sun, and I—I never anticipated this being the reason for them. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not telling you so you’ll pity me, Zephyra. I want you to understand.”
I hear the word he doesn’t add: I want you to understand me. My stomach flips.
“All these Trials pale in comparison with the last.” He exhales once, soft but terse, before he says, “The elders need to be certain we no longer feel anything. Not pain, not weakness, not fear, not even humanity.”
My gut clenches at his words. At the way he says them as if he’s setting a satchel of gunpowder between us and holding a lit match. “What is the last Trial?”
His molten gaze seeks mine. “Murder.”
“Oh,” I say, though I can’t feel my lips or his hand or even the floor beneath us. “Who—”
“I don’t know.” He laughs suddenly, bitterly, and pulls his hand from mine.
“Isn’t that horrible? I don’t even remember their name.
By all accounts, they were nobody. Just some criminal the elders caught stealing from the market.
I can’t even remember what the man was stealing.
The elders brought him to Tower Arcana, and then they asked me to kill him. ”
I want this story to have a different ending. The impossible ending. Not for me, but for him. Arion doesn’t sound as apathetic as he claims; he sounds destroyed. But we both know the truth, and he wants me to hear this. I breathe, “So you did.”
A brusque nod. “So I did.” He sits back, leaning against his wings and the wall.
“I wasn’t to use my magic. It needed to be a death at my own hands.
The elders needed to know we could do the job—any job our kingdom required of us.
I had to wrap my hands around the man’s throat.
I had to kill him slow. He cried. He begged.
He soiled himself. I can’t remember his name or his crime, but I…
I remember his mustache. I remember it kept twitching, and the more he sobbed, the more snot drenched the scraggly gray hairs.
It disgusted me. I didn’t care about him dying.
I cared that he was repulsive. He told me he had two daughters, and I choked the life from him without another thought. ”
“You remember that too,” I say.
He shakes his head in confusion. “What?”
“That he had two daughters.”
Arion snorts. “Some paragon of virtue.”
I stare at him. This doesn’t sound like Arion. At least, it doesn’t sound like the Arion I tried to drown in the Sel all those days ago, or the Arion who fought me in the streets of Crestfall. “Do you ever regret it?”
Ripping a hand through his hair, knocking his head back against the wall, he takes a few seconds to answer.
“I don’t know. I didn’t. I always thought I was doing the right thing.
I thought warlocks were good, and criminals were bad, and the world was painted in stark shades of black and white.
Right and wrong. Warlocks are supposed to be the heroes.
Everything we do is supposed to be for the betterment of humankind. ”
I hesitate to ask, “And now what do you think?”