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‘Here I am,’ Thea echoed, greeting her sister with a smile.
Wren’s whole body seemed to sag as she came to stand beside her. ‘I think that’s the first time you’ve smiled at me since your initiation test.’
‘Well… We haven’t seen much of one another.’
‘You were avoiding me.’
Thea sighed. ‘I was.’
Wren nudged her. ‘I am sorry, you know. For keeping that from you.’
Thea swallowed. ‘I know.’
‘I was just trying to do right by you, to protect you.’
‘I know, Wren.’ Thea touched her sister’s arm. ‘I forgive you.’
‘You do?’
Thea held Wren’s hopeful gaze and nodded. ‘Life’s too short,’ she said, echoing Wilder’s words. ‘Too short to hold grudges against the people you love.’
Wren gave her a sad, knowing smile. ‘Here.’ She rummaged in her pocket and produced Thea’s fate stone.
As soon as the piece of jade hit Thea’s palm, it was as though a heavy blanket had been thrown over her senses. Suddenly, she felt off-kilter, like the world had tilted beneath her feet and she wasn’t seeing clearly.
‘Thee?’ Wren prompted.
‘Is it stronger than it was?’ she asked, gripping the rail of the ship to steady herself.
Wren looked at her strangely. ‘No. I treated it exactly as I always have…’
Thea frowned, taking the fate stone between her fingers to examine it. The numbertwenty-sevenhad grown darker, but it had been doing that for some time now. Enovius was coming for her, slow and steady.
‘Thea,’ Wren said, forcing her to look up. ‘It’s not the alchemy that’s stronger. It’syou. That’s why it feels so different. You’ve never had this much power to suppress before.’
‘Oh.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Queasy… Like a piece of me is missing.’
‘Because it is. Do you really think this —’
‘Wren, please,’ Thea cut in. She thought her sister would continue to argue, but she seemed to understand that Thea needed to do this her own way, in her own time.
Wren simply rested her elbows against the railing and looked out across the sapphire sea. ‘We haven’t talked about her…’ she ventured quietly.
Thea knew who her sister meant.
The Daughter of Darkness. The winged woman who had shattered a part of the Veil.Anya.
‘Do you think it was real?’ Wren asked.
Thea followed her gaze across the water as the morning sun crept a little higher. ‘We both know it was.’
‘They had wings, Thee…’
‘I almost did too,’ she admitted, recalling the searing pain of the reaper’s talons piercing her flesh in the Bloodwoods. ‘I could have been one of them, could have been sucked into that army of darkness…’
