Page 34 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

I should have been happy for them. I didn’t know how to be.

Kye’s thumb roamed across the back of my knuckles. He kissed the air loudly, stirring Kolibri into motion, leaning to the side to unbuckle his baldric from my back.

Snow swung away, a soft gust kissing my cheeks in the wake of Kolibri’s steady gait. I sensed Nori through our bond, watching us go. Summoning others to join her in following behind. My Queen, she said, excited. Calling me back to meet my mother, not understanding I was the one who had brought her.

I know who she is.

She didn’t respond, though a cinch of confusion lingered from her mind to mine.

I stretched my shoulders against Kye’s chest, calling back to her, We can’t stay. Gather everyone and return to Calder’s base.

Kye didn’t speak. I wondered what he thought of me, unable to stay among them. Ice crunched under Kolibri’s hooves. We bounced together gently, Kye’s warmth seeping through the layers of my byssus silk.

His voice sifted into my thoughts, quiet and soft as falling snow. Want to talk about it?

I let my shoulder rise and fall, ignoring the sharp strain on my newly healed back. I’m not sure what there is to talk about.

I think there’s plenty. If you want to.

I turned words over in my mind, trying to reconcile with myself whether any of it was even worth mentioning. Discovering my own feelings was like peering down the long aisles of a maze. Too many wrong directions. Too many dead ends. Too many sharp turns, pitfalls, risks of doubling back. Not to mention the walls of the maze. Ignited with my own inner fire, dripping with my own poison. Or the calm sky above, the glimpse of escape I’d never reach.

No, I’d been caught in this maze as long as I could remember. Even in moments I’d thought I’d found an exit, I’d been wrong. And maybe that made it worse. Maybe it wasn’t my fury alone, but the cruel acceptance that I was a fool to think I’d ever find a way to leave it behind.

Because all I’d ever known was my own anger. Anger was the voice in my head that sorted all my problems, stifled my insecurities. Anger had always guided me with a firm and unwavering hand. It had thickened my skin, hardened my heart. Anger was quiet, hiding within my blood, but it also roared, fearless and powerful.

We’d made it. I’d done it. Accepted my fate, killed the Abyssi, crossed the sea of stars. Returned with Kye, alive, and reunited Selena with her sister. Self-reproach stabbed at my heart. I should have been happy. I should have been proud. All I felt was alone. A child without a mother, stumbling through the world, ashamed at what she’d grown into.

Even now, when that trickle of guilt threatened to douse my ire, anger snarled and sneered back, twice as incensed that I’d even considered inviting remorse into my head.

Too at war to speak, I offered a deep sigh instead, sinking into Kye’s warmth.

Ashwood creaked against the cold. Limbs without leaves, skinny and silver-gray, knots and knobs in their trunks and branches like too many knuckles on a pointed finger. A crow landed nearby, watching us move in beady silence. I suffered the urge to call to its blood and shatter its body as well. It stretched its bony black feet, shook its head, and flew out of view, sunshine gleaming off its tail feathers.

“I’m happy for her and Selena, together again,” I finally said, watching the place the crow had disappeared with perhaps too much focus. “I don’t want to be her friend.”

Hands curving around my thighs, Kye gathered me closer. “You don’t have to be.”

“You’re not going to warn me that I’ll regret it if I’m not? That you wished you’d had more time with your mother? That I’m lucky to have it now?” I tried to keep the mockery from my reply, but it oozed through anyway, gathering in the cracks. It wasn’t aimed at him, and I hated how vulnerable it made me feel. Instead of shielding me, it wiped me bare, unearthing insecurities I would have rather kept buried, even from myself.

Kye’s knees squeezed as he turned Kolibri around a winding path in the snow. “I do wish I’d had more time with her. But no. I’m not going to say any of that.”

His heart thrummed into my back. I closed my eyes, wondering if I should apologize, though the pressure of his thumb against my inner wrist informed me I didn’t have to.

My throat scratched as I swallowed. “I don’t want to be her daughter.”

He didn’t say anything. I wished I could see his face. Were his brows tight, his jaw set? What rested behind his eyes? Judgment, disapproval? What would I do if he admonished me now?

My chest flared, the burning drip of poison my answer. Another dead end, another wrong turn. The maze threatened to swallow me down.

“You don’t have to choose now,” he whispered.

I want to choose now, I said, a snap in my departing thoughts. I don’t want to get to know her and decide later. I don’t want to change my mind. I don’t want to build a relationship or make memories or have what we should have had. I spent my life wondering what it might have been like to know a mother. She came to Leihani intentionally, married my father intentionally, made me intentionally—just to leave us. Intentionally. She made her choice. Now I get to make mine.

I probed his mind for his thoughts. For the existence of criticism, whether small or great. Kye’s breath fanned the shell of my ear. He corralled his thoughts in silence, wrapping them under mental walls, though what did stray through didn’t hum with condemnation as I feared.

What are you so sure I’ll say? he asked after several moments of my persistent mental prodding. That you shouldn’t protect yourself? That you don’t need boundaries? I won’t say that.

Then why are you concealing your thoughts? I shot back.