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I can’t forget the fact he hasn’t yet said anything about staying with us, and though I trust him—he’s saved our lives a few times already—I don’t know what his plan is.
What he hopes to do.
Whether he’s thinking rationally or if it’s an emotional pull he feels toward the family who abandoned him. I can’t blame him, honestly. Emotion has always governed me, no matter how I tried to shed all feeling and become Artume’s perfect vessel.
They say the Fae were always governed by violent passions. The chroniclers spent a lot of pages on their depravity and fury, their violence and bloody taking of revenge, their ardent love for their own and their unrepentant defense of it.
I’m starting to think that I could never have made a good vessel, a good priestess of a virgin goddess. A human goddess. That giving in to my emotions isn’t a sin, that this is how I was meant to be.
And that Kiaran is no different, much more so because he was never taught to suppress his emotions, to control himself like the rest of us were. So unlike Taj’s military discipline and worse even, Finnen’s Temple training.
Goddess, Finn… The thought of him as a prisoner and carried away from us is an open wound in my chest. What if they hurt him? What if they killed him?
No, I can’t even consider the possibility, and—
We almost stumble into Kiaran who has stopped suddenly in a narrow street, lined with well-kept two-story houses, their cloistered balconies beautifully carved from dark wood, their porticos arched and columnated.
Only the house Kiaran is standing in front of is…
“Fire,” he whispers. “Burn.”
“Yeah,” Taj mutters, “this house is burned down all right. Burned to ashes. Wait… is this your house? Dammit, Kiaran.”
“Did your family die in a fire?” I whisper, remembering his reaction to the burning meat back at his cave. “Oh goddess, I’m so sorry.”
“No.” He blinks. “Cousins.”
“This is your cousins’ house?” I ask.
“I’m confused,” Taj says.
“You were sent here to live with your cousins,” I whisper, “and someone burned them? But you escaped.”
“They carried me,” he says. “Away. Left me.”
“The townsfolk?”
He scowls at the burnt ruins. “Family.”
“What? But—”
“Aunt. Uncle.”
“Oh. Shit. More family, huh?” Taj scowls. “Such nice people.”
“They help us. Now. They help us.”
“Really. Why would they?”
“Exchange,” he says, a slow grin spreading on his face, baring too many teeth, and canines that are too sharp to be human. “For their lives.”
“This isn’t a good idea,” I mutter as we follow Kiaran down the street to where presumably the rest of his family live. I feel… weird. Heat flows through me, making sweat bead on my skin, waves of it. I’m hot and cold and hot again, and my belly is cramping—a different pain from before, but still present enough for me to take notice.
“I mean,” Taj says, “what do we have to lose? We need to leave this town quickly. If they can hide us for the day, give us horses and food, we can be out of here by nightfall.”
“We are going to threaten them. And hope they don’t manage to grab us instead and deliver us to the army or the Temple.”
“We’ll get the drop on them.”
