Without a word, we both stood.
49
Selena
“Happy Birthday, Ceba.”
Early spring once again. My favorite time of the year. The skies were both sprinkling and bright, the sharp scent of cloud and petrichor breathing through our window, sunshine cutting harsh strands through the gray. In our bedroom, still in our nightclothes, I laid my gift in my sister’s lap. She took one look at it and flashed me a slow, rare smile. Then handed me one identical in size.
I raised a brow, suspicious. I knew what was in mine: the newest Cecina Grym novel. She’d probably never read it. Reading was my pastime. Cebrinne wouldn’t care about a story detailing the life of a young queen kidnapped by the Solstice Faery.
But I’d given it to her anyway.
Because it was small and portable. Because it was something she could use and then reuse. Because it was a piece of me.
She pulled the sunny ribbon from my neat center bow, her smile only growing as she unearthed the plaster-soaked canvas hardcover from its paper home. A mischievous sparkle gleamed in her eyes. She pointed to my gift.
“Is it the same?” I asked with a grin. “We did it again?”
Her wrapping was less tidy than mine, held together with twine. I laughed as I held up the same book. Varnished and shining, painted leaves and flowers hung across the cover. Ceba laughed, too.
At least, she would have.
Sometimes, I’d see a glimpse of what she used to be. She’d eat a bite of cake and forget she couldn’t saymmmm. She’d stub her toe and forget she couldn’t swear. And for just the briefest moment, before she remembered, she was back. Herself. I’d lean in, desperate for the sound of my sister’s voice. But it didn’t come. Her face always crumpled, as though some part of her, like me, had thought that it might.
I’d spent days—weeks—trying to understand what had happened. After the initial relief of ensuring Cebrinne was safe, I’d waited for an explanation. Why had she attacked Vouri, and why couldn’t she speak?
I knew it was Thaan. He’d found me on the beach after I’d stalled Aegir’s heart, racing for the carriage. The drones stayed to circle the water, searching for theViderethat had escaped them, but Thaan and I returned to Calder to find Cebrinne covered in blood. He’d been with me the entire time.
But I knew he’d also been with her.
Never discovering what happened was the only thing harder to accept than knowing she’d never speak again. It tortured me at times. Stole my sleep and focus. Not that I’d had healthy versions of those things before. The sirens in my nightmares had evolved to a man with brown eyes and a sharp knife. To finding my sister in shock, unable to talk. To calling to an unbeating heart, screaming for it to pump again. Even still, when I wasn’t sleeping, there was little else I thought of that didn’t involve Cebrinne’s silence. Everything I did led back to it.
Something as simple as lifting a glass of wine would make me ponder whether someone who couldn’t speak might also have trouble swallowing. Gossip that the King and Queen had shared a public fight ending with the Queen throwing her jewelry box down a well led me to fish it out in the middle of the night, testing her rumored magic rings on Ceba’s fingers as she watched, a subdued patience in her gaze. Watering plants, standing in the sun, commissioning a new dress. No matter what the task was, I’doften find myself internally drawn from it, my mind ablaze with what had happened that day. And how to fix it.
Maybe that’s when I realized I was wading through the sea of grief, making my way to the depths. That I wasn’t searching for peace as much as bargaining over what I had lost. That I’d always been a bargainer rather than a listener, had always fought for what I could trade rather than what I might keep.
Grief was much like water. It ebbed and flowed, at times shallow enough to navigate yet so all-encompassing you might lose yourself within it. It absorbed me on the dark, lonely days when I’d find Cebrinne staring out at our balcony as though waiting for an answer to her own silent questions to appear. But it found me just as easily when we were content. The bright moments when we stole through the kitchens for sweets like we’d used to, an undercurrent that trickled below the mischief as cold and bleak as the dark.
I wasn’t sure when I realized I was holding onto Cebrinne for my own sake rather than hers. If grief were an ocean, Ceba had always been my anchor, and the thought of losing her left me spiraling under fear of a stormy, aimless drift for the rest of my days. I bargained because no one ever talked about the grief that came before you lost someone. The sister I’d known who had snapped at Cyprian sailors and fought with Thaan’s drones had somehow become a shell of her former self.
The bargaining that camebeforeloss might have been as hard as acceptance after it. That slow-marching truth that descended before your eyes. Not every heart broke the same way.
Sometimes, it took only a moment to shatter a heart. Other times, heartbreak was merely a slow fracture. A splinter of glass that fell out one tiny shard at a time. I’d held it together with my hands, not caring that it made me bleed.
“Open it,” I said softly.
Cebrinne brushed her raven hair behind an ear and turned the front cover, teal eyes lowering to read the inscription I’d laid inside with my favorite bottle of ink.
To Alana,
I love you. I’ll always love you.
Until the ocean dries up. Until the moon burns out.
Senna
Cebrinne’s mouth parted. Her gaze darted to me, and I swallowed hard, forcing that thick, raw burn in my throat down to the depths. Her heart sped. She glanced down at it and back to me again, her chest inflating with disbelief, and I let out a small, watery laugh. “We’ll have to make a plan,” I said after listening to ensure the apartment beside ours was empty. “You can’t swim across Sidra’s waters to the island. I think it’s safer to put you on a ship south, while we leave a trail elsewhere for Thaan to follow.”
