Page 80 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

“How do you think he manages to always seem happy?” Kye mused, watching Selena turn in Pheolix’s arms.

“I don’t know,” I sighed. I’d often wondered the same. Out of all of us, Pheolix had suffered the most. Somehow, he didn’t wear it like the rest of us. “Maybe, when everything has been taken from you for years at a time, it’s easier to find joy in the small pieces of life.”

Kye rocked his head to the side, considering that as he watched the pair twirl. From the top of the hill, the others watched also, a smile stretching Cebrinne’s mouth almost ear to ear.

I rested Kye’s arm against his saddle, calling to the water in his blood to close the cut. He stopped me with his hand. “Don’t,” he said softly. “I’ll keep it.”

“Don’t heal it?” I scoffed. “Why? It will leave a scar if I don’t.”

He drank me in, eyes glittering. “I know.”

Part II

The City of Towers

36

Maren

We arrived back at the City of Towers on the first day of Piscaa.

It wasn’t yet spring, but the sun beat over our shoulders and necks in an exceptionally heavy blanket of warmth, the clouds nowhere to be found. The members of our company shed their coats and cloaks, drinking in the early-season heat.

I, of course, stayed under my furs, warding the chill from my fingers to my toes.

I should have been grateful that it wasn’t the same bone-deep cold that I’d suffered from in the Brána Do Podsvetia, so bitter and frozen it seemed to cluster in my blood, coating my skin like hoarfrost. The absence of the sun’s rays was more an annoyance than a threat, like itchy fabric against my skin or an article of clothing that refused to fit right.

Still, when the palace towers climbed from behind the trees and the black-lace iron gates rose into view, I felt myself sag with relief, even as Kye began to fidget in his saddle.

I probably should have been more comforted that we hadn’t seen any drones since we’d left the river. That the only sightings of birds had been from afar, and Pheolix had been solely and undisputably Pheolix. That the knots at the base of our skulls from craning to look over our shoulders could now recede.

But I was a girl from the islands. If I couldn’t have sun, then I wanted fire. A warm stone hearth and flames free from the abuse of wind, which I could watch from the edge of my bed as they twisted and twirled like lovers across a ballroom floor.

We’d only just climbed the floors of our tower, our calves aching at the stairs we hadn’t scaled in two weeks, when a knock rapped against the door. Kye was already halfway through discarding his shirt, but he tugged it back down over his bare stomach, aiming a questioning look my way. The heavy oak door swung open to Hadrian, who stepped briskly inside.

The crown prince scrubbed a hand over his mouth and chin, anxious. He cleared his throat, the scratch of lungs and air loud and rattling. “He wants to see you.”

We didn’t ask who. Kye and I glanced at each other, wondering what the King would want from us so soon after our arrival. We’d been in the castle no longer than ten minutes. Kye reached for the coat he’d just discarded over the neck of an iron hook. “All right.”

“Not you,” Hadrian said.

His warm brown eyes swerved to me.

Kye hunted my steps, muttering and swearing to himself, his dislike for my summons to a private dinner with the King in his quarters a metallic burn inside my nose, searing hot.

I’d never ventured to the King’s tower. I’d never thought I’d have a reason to. It rose above the ballroom, the highest tower in the castle. Unlike Kye’s, where views of the north and east were obstructed by the towers surrounding his, the King’s stairway windows conceded nothing but miles and miles of open air and distant fields. I grew almost dizzy climbing, the panes of glass so wide it felt as though I was rising in the air.

Kye had stopped speaking by the time we reached the Queen’s quarters, which was almost worse than his grumbling. A guard stationed outside her wooden door watched us pass. I’d asked Kye, once, why the King and Queen slept on different floors.

He’d grunted, condemnation in his golden eyes. Whatever the answer was, he’d ground his teeth together, his jaw flexed so hard it sharpened the corners of his face, then promptly changed the subject.

You didn’t have to come with me, I said, gazing up the final flight of stairs ahead.

Why would he ask for you? Just you, alone? Kye asked inside my head.

My hand traced over the heavily engraved oak railing as I ascended. If we are alone and he does anything I don’t like, I can just sing to him.

And if Thaan’s given him shield weed?