She bared her teeth at him, her bone nails digging into his forearms, drawing blood. Her teeth were ready to tear out Kiyan’s throat.
I thought Kiyan was going to strangle her, even though she didn’t seem to need air, but instead he shouted something in a language I’d never heard, jagged and guttural. My ears perked up at hearing this new sound come from his lips.
The grin was gone from the jaipari’s face, replaced with a slack jaw and unbridled shock.
She responded, and I could hear the questioning lilt of her raspy response. He growled the same foreign word he said earlier, and something else.
Then, inexplicably, he pointed at me.
Finally, the creature softened in his hold.
She nodded and he released her, her eyes darting to me, this time with a sly look instead of hungry. She gave me a smile that I don’t think she meant to be terrifying and then bowed her head.
Then she looked back at Kiyan.
“Good luck, princeling,” she said in the common tongue, her voice raw and ravaged, the sound of rushing water bursting through rock.
She gave him the same small bow of her head and slipped under the surface without a word.
Kiyan and I swam hard toward the other side, and he helped lift me up out of the water onto the edge of the rock.
I collapsed on my side, and Kiyan lay on his back, panting and looking up at the ceiling. My mouth tasted of blood and salt and heavy minerals from the cave water, and I curled my hands open and closed to get the feeling back into them. I turned to Kiyan, watching him catch his breath for a few minutes.
“Care to explain what that was? And what just happened?”
“She was a jaipari.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “The damned things can lie dormant for centuries waiting for those who disturb their waters.”
“What did you say to her? It didn’t sound like ancient fae to me, but some sort of dialect I’ve never heard before. And her final words were in the common tongue. Why did she call you princeling?”
He was silent for a minute, not looking at me. When I thought he wouldn’t answer, he finally spoke, his words rough.
“There’s an old agreement with their kind and the royal family. I invoked it. She was charged with protecting the crown, to stop it from falling into the wrong hands.”
I stared at him. “How could you invoke an agreement between jaiparis and the royal family?”
He finally turned to look at me, his eyelashes sticking together and dark drops of water trickling to the stone floor. An inane urge to reach up, cup his face, and brush the droplets of water from his lips came over me. But the surprise of his words still hung in the air, and I waited for his response.
Good luck, princeling.
“Because I’m a member of the royal family.”
Shock traveled up my spine, my heart pounding wildly in my chest.
“You mean, the family trapped in the Mountain? In Tirich Mir?”
“The very same.”
I stared at him, my eyes roving over his face, staring so long at his immovable face after such a shocking pronouncement that I almost thought he’d turned to stone.
“Who are you?” I finally asked, my throat thick with emotion.
He gave me a bitter smile. “No one. I don’t exist.”
Chapter 36
It’s my birthday today. I stood in your room and closed my eyes, but when I opened them, you still weren’t here.
—Letter from Kiyan to his family, unsent
