Page 93 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

Kye and I shared a short glance, though his eyes flicked away with a terse breath. He dusted his hands slowly as if he didn’t quite know what to do with them. I meant to ask Selena for a book I’ve been trying to find, he murmured politely into my head. I’ll be right back. Let me know if you need me.

I dipped my head, waiting for the soft pound of Kye’s heart to recede in the opposite direction.

“That was nice of him,” Aegir said flatly. As if he were referring to the niceness of an ant.

My feet padded to the edge of the bridge. “It was nicer than you deserve,” I said softly, leaning my arms over the crenellations and watching the sun lower itself into the water. I avoided his eyes, but I could see them from the corner of my vision, glistening wet.

My arsenal of words had never harbored any built for comfort. They’d always been laced with venom, honed with oil and whetstone into piercing blades and arrows, as unrelenting as the crack of a whip against bare flesh.

I’d never trained for the opposite, as most women had. Witchling and demon were the words that had raised me, and that’s what I’d evolved into. My early years had starved me of kindness and empathy, and like any child who sought a nourishing meal and never found one, compassion was a nutrient I couldn’t process. Deficient in my words, but also in my heart, in my blood, in my bones.

Maybe that’s why I stood here, unhappily gazing out at the fading light over the ocean and foraging for ways to soothe Aegir’s ghosts. I didn’t love the thought of offering Aegir charity, and trying to felt unnatural. Like pulling tendons from my wrists because someone said they needed a cord to tie their shoes.

But the idea of stepping onto the shores of Leihani sent my heart into a chaotic flutter, the drum of it harder and louder than the hail that fell over Kye’s tower roof after a freezing rain.

“Selena told me, once, that you’d had a sister when she met you.” Mihauna, the attempt was horrible. Even outside my mouth it tasted wrong, all oblong and rusted, a tool I’d inherited and never learned to use, stored somewhere under my veranda to gather dust and keep company with the worms.

Aegir clicked his tongue. “Her name was Vouri.”

Was.

What a terrible difference in weight, the variance between is and was. The pull of that word, the way it descended through the air like a pebble hitting a riverbed, never to touch the surface again.

It’s nearly dark, Nori said, shifting my thoughts from Aegir.

I’m on my way. Wait a few hours after the sun is down, then send Naiads through the village from every corner, singing their way in. Check for him in every home. I’ll be there soon.

Yes, my Queen.

My fingers wandered the rough skin of the stone, and though I tried not to fidget, I let them do what they always did. Weave invisible baskets.

“How did she die?”

Aegir ran a hand down his short beard. “I don’t know. It was here, somewhere. The day after she cordaed.”

My heart sank a bit at that. “Would you want to know, if you could?”

Wind breathed through the strands of my hair as he considered the question, though his fingers had stopped their examination of the stone, sitting still as a statue instead. “I don’t know,” he finally exhaled. “I hoped to at first, when I followed you here. I hadn’t spoken to Selena or Pheolix in years. Discovering what Thaan did to them both…” His hand twitched, and he crossed his arms, leaning his elbows over the crenellation instead. “It haunts me that I was so close. Just hours away in Venusia. And that I didn’t know.”

The Videre rolled his jaw to the side. “Thaan has torn apart so many families. Destroyed every small colony he could find. Killed thousands, and taken thousands more captive, forcing their loyalty. He’s killed every member of my family. I’m all that’s left. Hearing you compare me to him”—he scratched the side of his neck awkwardly, then shook his head—“I don’t know. I guess it makes me question everything. Why am I even here?”

My gaze fell to the sea below. Something small and hooked latched onto the center of my throat, prying me open just enough for mortification to trickle inside. An ally, he’d called himself when he’d joined us in the mountains. I wasn’t sure if I’d made a very good one. At every opportunity, I’d pushed Aegir away. Maybe it was the way I’d been raised. Taught through slanted glances and cruel whispers behind my back that I couldn’t rely on anyone. Now, when someone new offered their loyalty, I felt the need to test it. To strike and wait for the inevitable: to be discarded like a stray dog who couldn’t behave nor be trusted.

“Maybe it’s that moon-damned island.”

I glanced sideways at him, surprised. “Leihani?”

Aegir looked at me then, green arrows in the dusky light. “Thaan is a shadow I can neither see nor escape. The last time I felt this close, this hopeful that I might rid the world of him—” He ran his hand through his braids, reluctant to finish his sentence.

But I understood.

“My mother went to Leihani.”

I’d wondered whether they’d been friends, once. The way the four of them had fallen into conversations like old habits, both comfortable and shy, poking fun at each other one moment and tip-toeing around subjects the next, as though there were certain doors between them that were flung wide and others locked tight.

Aegir grimaced, his teeth vibrant against the sunset. “I spent years wondering if I should have tried harder to convince her not to go. That there might be another way. But I remembered that determination in her eyes.”

I stepped away, hands sliding off the stone, the conversation suddenly losing the distracting benefit of existing outside the topic of my birthplace. Even though Cebrinne had bartered her life with Darkness to give me the Scale of Safiro, even though she’d apologized for the years I’d spent without a mother, I wasn’t sure there would ever be a time when the idea of her traveling to Leihani to find a husband and have a daughter wouldn’t feel like a dagger in my heart.