Page 188 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

Diara squealed. “My dress for the feast. I can’t wait to show you.”

Sparks flew from Maren’s obsidian eyes. “Want to get ready in my tower?”

They peeled away, Diara avoiding puddles while Maren lifted her skirts to step through them. Chatting and laughing, the sound like silver bells over water. Vibrant and warm and full-bellied, a symphony that warmed my blood and lit the glow under my skin, one I never wanted to leave my ears.

Cebrinne and Ano fell into step behind us, Maren’s mother watching her daughter with a quiet kind of joy and pride.

“So,” Aren said, pausing to whistle at Fox. “What do you both plan to wear tonight?”

I motioned down my chest. “Something to accentuate my curves, obviously.”

Hadrian shrugged, stepping around an oily patch of water. “I was thinking of not going,” he said. Though if his gaze, locked on the woman ahead of him, was any indication, there was little that could keep him from his first dinner as King.

Aren cracked a toothy grin, one that made him look like a teenager, pulling his arms behind his back as he walked. “Not like it’s an important day.”

Ahead, Maren and Diara dissolved into fits of deep-gutted cackling, their steps drunken and slanted as they fought for air. We watched, amused as they swerved oddly to the side before they quieted and calmed. Until Diara snorted loudly, restarting the beautiful chaos of Maren’s laughter again.

How sweet it was, that sound.

How safe it made me feel.

81

Maren

Among the jeweled ferns and swaying palms, I walked the trail leading from the Leihaniian market to my house.

My little house, with my veranda and my underground oven, my garden rows and my Marequus horse that splashed her hooves in the nearby shallows, my thatched roof lined with chimes I’d made with my own hands, glass and shell and wood and silver dancing with the wind.

Well, mine and Kye’s.

But even he knew it was really mine.

The islanders waved, calling out as I walked. I spied Kimo and my cousin Nola, a small pair of round legs wrapped around her hip, a tiny cheek squashed over her shoulder as she patted her son’s little rump, bouncing him and singing heaviness into his eyes. She smiled at me from her porch, the one I’d grown up climbing and leaping from, but didn’t break her song.

Grass swished across my calves, soft under my toes. It wasn’t quite eventide, but crickets sang their love songs under the nearby leaves, a melody of croaking frogs joining them.

I passed the house my father had built for my mother, slightly smaller than mine, catching the sound of their voices within. My father’s soft rumble; my mother’s smooth cadence. The wooden walls veiled their words, but the lilt of their tones was enough. My feet slowed, and I let myself marinade in the sound for a moment, a smile creeping over my lips.

Kye was waiting for me outside under the wooden canopy he’d anchored into the ground, drinking in the melody of the night and staring out at the stars, a half-knit stocking between his wooden needles. I tried not to laugh at it, a winter garment among a sea of tropical plants. He sat in a tuft of swaying grass like a boy, long legs stretched across the bent blades, sprigs of green reaching through his toes.

The moonless night shimmered in his golden eyes as he watched me ignore my chair to sit beside him. I’m sure he would have preferred the chair, but he’d learned I’d always choose the grass instead. Two years among Calderians, and I still preferred the hard ground over a cushion, a fact Kye was willing to entertain only until we discussed whether to haul a bed into our house.

Apparently, sleeping with our heads on a hollowed log was Kye’s boundary.

“Any luck?” he asked, leaning against an arm to meet my eyes. Mint and thunder washed over me, and I drank it in like my own personal whiskey, amber-brown and maddeningly spiced.

I raised the bottle of bubbling volare I’d absconded from one of the merchant ships in answer. Kye took it, rotating it in his hands, and I knew he was searching for the label, curious where its grapes had grown, what year they’d been harvested.

If they might have once touched Dimas’s hands.

“I have glasses for us,” he began, watching as I uncorked the long neck with my teeth and blew the spongy wood down to the reeds below. A small plash. He shook his head. “I wanted to make a toast.”

“To treason?”

He blinked, taking a moment to place the words. Those memories had begun to slip back to him, in the weeks and months since returning to life, as if dying had opened a door his mortal mind couldn’t unlock before. It had haunted him at first, the vision of his own hands holding a knife under my chin. Staring at the confusion in my eyes. Laughing.

I’d made him pass them to me through his thoughts, determined to show him it didn’t matter any more. That I was here beside him, and he could trust his own mind. That not all kings go mad, and not all inner demons are evil.