Page 90 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

I bared my teeth in his direction. “My people.”

The Videre’s mouth tightened. “Your people are of the sea.”

“Why is it one or the other for you?”

“Because it can’t be both.”

A soft growl rumbled in my throat. “My father is a human. He’s an islander. I am both.” My nostrils flared, molten steel sharp in my nose, a spike in anger. Words flared within me, weapons to aim at the Venusian. How proud he was to exist as a Naiad, how arrogant and self-important and superior. How fitting to believe his own species deserved safety while humans didn’t.

From the corner of my eye, Cebrinne shifted her weight. I ignored the choking impulse to steal a glance at her. She’d cordaed to a human. To my father. Did she share the same sentiment as Aegir?

The Venusian leaned forward on his elbows. “I know you’ve surrounded yourself with humans you trust, Maren. But you’ve been lucky. You could have easily been strung up under the bow of a ship. Left as a figurehead to rot under the sun. There’s a reason men who witness Naiads are cursed to die. Humans rarely exhibit the self-control to exist alongside Naiads. They don’t deserve to exist alongside us.”

My fingers twitched. “That’s why you had no qualms hiring a ship of pirates to take me. You knew they’d be dead in a month.”

Aegir sighed. “Humans, like pirates, seal their own fate.”

“And innocent islanders? Do they deserve less than Naiads?”

He clicked his tongue, lifting a shoulder and letting it fall.

I said, low and edged with venom, “If you truly believe that, you’re no better than Thaan.”

Pheolix’s chair creaked as he shifted, leaning against his armrest, lips sucked into his mouth as though concealing either a cringe or a smile. The rest of the room sat so still, we may have been a painting on the wall. The air between us frosted like a ghost had wandered into the apartment, someone I’d never met and never seen but I could feel. Roaming behind our backs and between the chairs, our conversation prisoner to something long dead.

Aegir’s arrow-tipped gaze drifted down to stare absently at something behind me. “Is that what I am to you,” he asked, the blaze in his voice snuffed out. “Another brand of Thaan?”

From the corner of my eye, Kye crossed his arms, his mouth hard under the dust of his stubble.

Perhaps I’d gone too far, forming Thaan’s name in my mouth and throwing it at him like a knife. Perhaps I should have apologized. Queens were diplomatic. They guarded their politics the same way they guarded their feelings, with tight lips and held tongues. Queens didn’t hurl insults at other monarchs, especially ones who have pledged their allyship.

Something tugged at me there, a warning in my chest. If I didn’t take it back, I might have lost Aegir’s loyalty. All I’d done since he’d found me in Rivea was push him, challenge him, test him.

But admitting I was wrong felt like pointing out a crack in a foundation I’d laid brick by brick, a mortar of pride and anger and years upon years of making myself small. Unseen. Invisible. Just to make everyone else’s lives easier.

I tasted the words in my mouth. No, Aegir. That’s not what I think.

But the words were bitter. They stuck to my teeth like ash, mixing like a foul, shameful paste, and I couldn’t let them go. I stared back instead, uncaring that I might seem harsh or cold.

Aegir sighed. “You are like him, too,” he said softly, pushing his chair out from the table. He strode around us without a second glance. Selena’s door clicked behind him.

40

Maren

“How many royal ships are in Leihani’s port?”

I’d closed my eyes, curses flying around my head like bats in a Mihauna-damned cave in the wake of Aegir’s departure. But I opened them at the sound of Cebrinne’s voice.

She sat directly across from where I stood, both hands on the edge of Selena’s table, eyes wide and skin pale, a stillness in her body that verged beyond natural, but the pounding of her heart was rapid. Erratic.

Like a candle’s flame fighting against a windstorm, flailing in the dark.

My mother had returned from Perpetuum weeks ago, but she and I had never mentioned my father. I’d thought she hadn’t cared. She’d used us as a means of escape, after all. And if she had cared, it was only because of the tattered threads of their cordae, the bond of a past life. Not because she missed him, or even less imaginable, because something inside her loved him.

You don’t abandon the things you love.

But the bones of her knuckles were painted white, the skin around them so tight they looked ready to burst.