Carrying a small brown bag, I stole through the servants’ passages. I preferred them, anyway. Nobles wanted nothing more than to gossip about each other, or to pry gossip from you, all the while staring with eyes that scourge and tally, logging away every detail in your diction, your poise, your flawed sense of fashion.
I held little faith that servants didn’t also trade gossip within their own circles, but at least they kept me out of it.
The door to my apartment snicked shut behind me. Selena peered from behind a wall a moment later, laden in violet silk and gauzy organza. Swaths of lace crossed over her chest and behind her neck, leaving her back entirely bare to the lowest point of her spine. A slit in her skirt revealed the full curve of her hip, black and gold embroidery gleaming throughout. I followed her to our bedroom, where a similar gown waited across my bedspread in deep blue.
I tossed the small bag on top of the dress and crossed my arms, studying Selena’s gilded bodice through the reflection of her mirror. “Theia strike me dead, Senna. What does he have planned for you?”
She’d already applied rouge and kohl, her red lips bright, and blue eyes dark. Smoke hovering over a crystal sky. “Emilius.”
I gave an involuntary recoil. It’s not that Emilius wasn’t handsome. He was. But the King’s gaze often lingered too long, his hands wandered where they shouldn’t wander, and when he leaned in to speak over the volume of his musicians, his breath misted over the shell of my ear, leaving a moisture that made me want to crawl from my skin and abandon it on the floor.
“Have you seen Thaan yet?” my sister asked.
“No.” By habit, I turned my cheek, listening for sound on the other side of the wall.
“He’s in his administrative office now. I tried to catch Vouri’s eye earlier, but I couldn’t stay with him there.”
“Aegir’s here.”
Halfway through securing an amethyst-drop earring into place, Selena halted. “Here? In the palace?”
“Outside. In Sidra’s water technically, though he says she won’t mind.”
Selena cocked a hip expectantly.
“He came to take Vouri back to Venusia. I told him I’d help sneak her out, though a part of me wishes she’d just taken it upon herself to piss on his need for permission and done it herself.”
She blinked. “It?”
I scoffed. “Cordaedher big, silent knife-throwing Venusian.”
A muscle feathered in Selena’s chin, and she set to impaling her other ear with an equally dazzling teardrop. “We’ll need her to come back.”
“Why?”
She scoffed. “Because, Ceba, the only way Thaan will come close to the ocean is if he thinks you and Aegir have mated.” Sitting at her vanity, she preened at her sable waves, pinning them around the crown of herhead while leaving most of her locks to cascade over the sharp angle of her shoulders.
“Selena.” I sat on her bed. In the mirror, her reflection hitched at hearing her full name. Her eyes darted to meet mine. “We can’t reach the stones. Pretending tocordaewith Aegir walks us into a trap half set.”
She swung around in her gold-studded chair. “What if we don’t need the stones?”
“We do, though. Theia said they’re the only way to—”
“Ceba, listen.” She closed her eyes with a gust of breath, impatient. “Theia cursed Thaan. Who is to say she isn’t lying to us? What obligation does a god have to answer the questions of mortals? Thaan can’t touch the water. He can’t enter the sea. How do you know that isn’t how we free you?”
“Because it’s not.”
“But how do youknow?”
“I don’t know.” I whipped the words at her, lashing each one with my tongue. “I don’t know—except that I do. I do know, and I’ve never been more sure. I know it in my bones, Senna. I know it in myblood. I feel it inside myself, stone steps on a path laid by the moon. It’s prophecy to you, but it’s fate to me.”
Selena lifted a hand, turning her face away and closing her eyes. “You’re confused. Confused and desperate, and I don’t blame you, but this isn’t the answer. You can’t go marching off to a fishing island to kill yourself just to get away from Thaan.”
“It’s not just to get away from him.”
“I don’t care what it is,” she snapped. Then sighed. “This line of thought, jumping into the Parian pit, not caring about the consequences of anything—I’m worried. I’m worried for you.”
I opened my mouth, but a knock came from the door. We both turned to it, our conversation spilling into sudden silence. Tension hovered acrossus like oil poured over water. Thicker than the air but somehow caught on the surface, unable to sink away.
