Page 51 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

“Don’t lie,” I said. “You led me to his death. You knew the path you walked me down.”

“We’ve all lost something in this war.” Cebrinne stepped out of her bedroom, and I turned to face her.

She was the mirror image of Selena. Her hair was a bit darker, a bit cooler, perhaps even a bit silkier. But there was something untamed hidden in the angles of her face. Where Selena was smooth and refined, Cebrinne was coarse and wild. She seemed both young and old, standing there with her chin adrift in the air, and I wondered whether her time in Perpetuum had aged her mortal body. Was she in her twenties, like me? Or her fifties, like Selena? As a Naiad, it was nearly impossible to know.

“And what did you lose, that you didn’t get back?” I asked in a lethal whisper that rippled loudly through the room. “What was taken from you that you haven’t recovered?”

She held my gaze without moving, though she blinked several times, like she was fighting to decide whether answering or not would be safer.

“I lost my sister,” Aegir said softly. He turned one of Selena’s shelf baubles in his hand, a hollow sphere of glass blown into a bubble. “Both my parents. Both my grandparents.” His fingers puffed and shrank comically behind the curved glass as he rotated it. “What have you lost that you haven’t recovered, Queen Maren?”

They waited for me to answer, the room a swirling mix of half empathy and half vindication. Like he’d bested me with a single question, a village elder imparting his wisdom regarding the unfairness of life. Like I’d spent the last eleven days sulking and brooding over nothing, and no harm had been done by watching Kye die and fighting to bring him back. As though I should be thankful to stand where I did, alive and whole back in Calder.

I wasn’t alive. I wasn’t whole.

“I lost my corda-cruor.”

Cebrinne hefted a long exhale. “You returned with your husband.”

“I sold my soul to Darkness to reach the Abyssi,” I replied, my head tilted so far down I glared at her through the underside of my own lashes, “and I traded my cordae to the Fate of Love in payment for reaching Perpetuum.”

The flicker of superiority dropped from each of them. Selena’s hand spread across her chest. “You’re no longer cordaed?”

“You sold your soul?” Cebrinne said in the same moment.

My hands shook, a bright, restless whirring in my blood. I curled my fingers into fists. They looked at me like I’d just told them I’d discovered consumption in my lungs. Even Diara craned her neck to better see the expression on my face.

All at once, I was ready for this conference to end. “Why did you call this meeting?” I ground out.

Aegir opened his mouth, and a knock sounded at Selena’s door.

She crossed the thick static of the room to open it. I shifted along Selena’s wall, making room for Kye to stand beside me. But it was Nori and Olinne who followed Selena back inside. They slowed as they entered, eyes scanning the room as soon as they tasted the unrest in the air. Aegir waited for them to claim a place and settle, then parted his lips once again to speak.

Another knock. Aitne. She didn’t wait for Selena to let her in, cracking the door wide enough to squint through the hallway at us, ensuring she’d found the correct location.

Aegir waited respectfully for her to skirt inside and stand beside Nori before he cleared his throat.

A third knock. Or rather, the vibration of hinges as someone turned the knob, a slow metal whine flowing once more from down the hall.

The Videre’s teeth flashed as he loosed a gust of frustration. “How many more have been invited to this meeting?”

“Just this one,” I answered.

Kye stepped inside. He hunched in the hallway as he entered, careful not to hit his head against the low ceiling. Diara’s tongue clicked in vague distaste as Hadrian spilled out from behind him. I couldn’t help but share the same feeling, though I’m sure for very different reasons than Diara.

Kye’s eyes found me as though he’d seen me through the walls and knew exactly where I stood. He moved past Selena on silent, long legs, an air current fanning across me as he leaned a shoulder into the wall at my back. Hadrian decidedly looked anywhere but in my direction. Or, more likely, the direction of the female human in the room beside me.

Everything all right? Kye asked.

I gave my head a small shake, unwilling to expand further.

“Is that everyone?” In the office doorway, Aegir raised his brows to the room at large. He opened his mouth.

“One minute, Aeggy,” Pheolix cut in. “I really want to knock on that door one more time.”

Pheolix had changed since I’d last seen him.

The day we’d set out for Winterlight, his skin hung from his thin body, the color of his cheeks a hue lost between yellow and gray, so translucent I could track the veins under his forehead. His hair had taken on the wilted look of damp straw, and he’d passed through the rooms of Selena’s apartment with one hand sliding along the wall to guide his steps. He’d looked like a man who had emerged from a dark coffin after having slept for a century, who had forgotten how to move his legs or what the sun might feel like on his face.