Page 154 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

I knew what he was doing, forcing me to sit where the Queen of Venusia belonged. But I couldn’t make myself argue. I was falling, slowly, madly, into a well in my mind, bottomless and cold.

The blue water drank my legs as I lowered myself in a haze, silver silk floating around me.

And then he strode in. Kye. Still wearing the soft black leather shirt he’d laced himself into this morning, his baldric nowhere to be found. The water had been called from his curls, dark gold like a midsummer night, just long enough for the ends to kiss his brows. A small glow flickered around his edges, embers in the bed of a fire. He was the most beautiful, most excruciating thing I’d ever seen. He didn’t even look at me.

He stopped before Aegir, hands relaxed behind his back. Behind him, Nori, Olinne, Aitne, and Cebrinne marched forward, glaring up at Aegir from the floor. My Naiads—my Oculos, my mother—had brought Kye here, sealed his fate with the evidence of sirens and their tails, a betrayal so deep it cut me to the bone.

“Human,” Aegir said, the softness he’d offered me now traceless in his voice, “You have come here uninvited, unwanted, and in violation of Naiad law. I will grant you my audience before I end your life. What is it you came to say?”

“I’ve come to offer you a trade.” Kye’s voice was strong, confident—but the shadow behind his Adam’s apple dipped as he swallowed. “My life for Maren’s.”

Aegir’s mouth split into a soundless laugh. “No.” He raised a finger at Sindri, summoning the Oculos forward. Sindri’s hand reached for his knives.

Kye tilted his head back an inch, shaking his hair from his eyes. “I know enough about Naiad customs to understand you want Maren for her blood. That it will strengthen your own. I offer you mine instead.”

“And why would I be interested in your blood?” Aegir mocked.

Kye smiled coolly. “Because I’m one of the three last living descendants of Aalto. The sun.”

67

Maren

Silence expanded like a billowing mist, distorting everything through smog. Aegir must have been as shocked as me. His compulsion over me slipped, and my mouth hung agape as I stared at Kye, standing at the foot of the dais.

“A Sola…” Aegir breathed. “A Sola born from Aalto.”

The word stroked some far, dusty corner of my memory. My first meeting with Selena, less than a day after I’d entered the City of Towers.

What other creatures descend from the stars? I’d asked.

She’d considered my question. Naiads and humans are the only ones I know of. There was a third, once. The Sola, born from Aalto. The sun. They bred themselves out of existence, mating with humans eons ago.

Kye looked at me, finally, regret burning in the center of his molten eyes. “Theia showed it to me in Perpetuum. At the top of the Mountain of Truth when I reached my hands in the Temple of Fates. My entire lineage, all the way back to Aalto, when he was still a mortal man. When we returned, I asked Selena if she knew anything about the Sola. She helped me find the few archives left to see if there was a way…” He ran an uncertain hand over his mouth, doubt darkening his gaze. “Sola blood runs in my veins, but I’m twenty-seven. The door is long since closed to me, and I would have needed another Sola to turn me anyway. From everything I can find, the Sola exist only within human veins. There isn’t anyone alive who can wake it within me.”

Disbelief stole the words from my head, scattering them out of reach. I stared dumbly at him as details from the last few months began clicking into place. The many times I’d look across the fire on our way home from Paria to find Kye next to Selena by the fire, talking to her. Even after we’d returned, he’d borrowed her books and scrolls.

And his heat—he used to burn like a furnace next to my skin, waking me up with a single touch. It had been a long time since I’d melted under the flame of his skin. I’d thought we’d maybe grown apart, or that I was so focused on ending Thaan that I’d let Kye slip away a little.

But I’d traded the feeling of the sun’s rays to Darkness.

“Thaan knows,” Kye continued, drawing my attention back to him.

Aegir’s hands curled over the walls of his shallow pool. “He told you this?”

“No,” Kye said, looking back to me, “but I’m certain he discovered it on his own. When he tried to take you from Selena’s office, just after you became Queen.”

I might not have remembered, had been able to grasp what he meant, had he not stood before me now, glowing like a lantern lit from within. He’d always had that kind of light. Even on the beaches of Leihani, before his ship came to take him home, I’d thought he’d looked like a warrior of the sun.

But he’d burned with light that day, when he’d thought Thaan might take me with him. And Thaan’s beads of water had evaporated from his skin, steaming to air and vapor, allowing him to crawl through while the rest of us had been trapped. And something had lit in Thaan’s eyes—surprise, fear. Understanding. But he’d already forced me to transition, to show Kye my Naiad form, already wove Kye’s death.

Thaan had left believing Kye was an obstacle that would resolve itself in a matter of weeks, only to realize he’d been thwarted. I’d brought Kye back from the dead.

“That’s why his drones took you. Why the crow on the riverbank turned toward you.” I said, the full measure of Kye’s words twisting like a fist thrown to my gut. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Kye’s gaze fell then. It drifted slowly across the floor of the throne room before he quietly said, “Because you’re a Queen, and you were focused on achieving what you needed to. I didn’t want to distract you. I was fine with researching alone, aided a little by Selena. And because—” He blew the air slowly through his nose, his head tilting. “A young Sola can live over a thousand years. I didn’t want you to get your hopes up that I might find a way to turn, when I only found dead ends. I was happy to live out the rest of my days at your side as a human. I didn’t want you to wonder, after I’d gone to Perpetuum, if there was something different you could have done.”

Unwittingly, my gaze flashed to Nori, the only one who had voiced the complication of a Naiad Queen cordaeing with a human. Kye and I had both been too nervous to discuss it again, leaving it to linger under the surface of our conversations instead, a rough undercurrent neither one of us had been brave enough to be swept into.