Maren
Shock led me back to Selena’s rooms as numb as avacous.
She placed me on her couch, fighting back tears, then walked to retrieve something from her shelves. A pretty little book, the spine pristine, the pages so crisp it might have never been opened. But it had.
My heart sped as she laid it in my fingers. I knew this book. I’d learned to read from this book. But my version had been in tatters, so delicate I’d grown afraid of even lifting a page. This one was whole. Its canvas cover was glossy and hard from varnish, as though it had been bound only the day before. Selena’s own heart pounded as she opened it for me.
To Senna,
Happy birthday. May the filth on these pages keep you up on the nights that Pheolix does not.
Love, Cebrinne
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Senna.”
She smiled briefly, as though she hadn’t heard the name in years. “Yes. Senna and Ceba. Selena and Cebrinne. We wereborn on the island of Cypria to a single mother who was shunned for our existence. Thaan was the first Naiad I’d ever met.” She sighed, sitting beside me. “He found me on the pier, and I remember that first cold shiver that whisked down my spine. He didn’t look or act then the way you know him to now,” she said slowly, a slight frown separating her brows. “He was strong and tall and handsome. He walked me home and I watched a light glow in my mother’s eyes for the first time in my life.
“Ceba hated him right away, but she hated everyone. His ship left without him, and he stayed to court my mother. I was happy for her. Happy for all of us. Ceba and I fought over whether he was good enough for our mother, but even she couldn’t argue that our mother had fallen for him. A couple months after we arrived, Thaan said he planned to ask her to marry him down by the water and wanted us there to witness it. To celebrate. That he’d left a note for her. And told us she’d be close behind. So, we followed him down to the docks, and then he pushed us into the water.
“And that was your first transition? Thaan forced it on you, the way that Sidra tried to do for me?”
She nodded. “They were waiting for us in the water. Thaan'sDomus. All so young. Like us. I imagine Thaan had done the same to them. Found them just starting life, the door to their transition almost closed. Roamed port to port for human-born Naiads without a colony to protect them, who didn’t know siren blood ran in their veins, waiting for hisspiculaeto trickle down his back whenever he saw one. Stealing them from their homes.”
My brows twinged. “You said he made an agreement with the Naiad colony that took you.”
“He did. Much like your agreement with him.”
I scoffed, my throat catching at the sound. “That’s a loose way of putting it.”
“TheSiliqua Domusin Cyprian waters was a small one. Fragile and in need of Naiads. As a gift for letting us transition in their water, Thaan offered his little group of us to theirVidere. Ceba struggled with it. The colony, the way we’d been tricked. We knew the night he planned to attack theirDomusand take it for himself.
“We’d been warned to stay back and do nothing. That if we joined, we’d be killed. We’d both made small friendships with the Naiads there by then. And when we watched them die and didn’t do a thing to help…” She closed her eyes. “It carved a wound into my soul. A hole I always hoped one day would fill. But I think it was different for her. It didn’t carve anything from her. It soaked into her instead. Filled her with acid, corroding her like a cancer slowly takes a heart. And when she signed her contract with Thaan, she didn’t realize how final it was. Neither of us did. She thought she could betray him the way he betrayed us, and when she realized she couldn’t, that corrosion in her only festered.
“I don't think she ever forgave herself for the fact that she’d distrusted Thaan from the start, and he’d still tricked her. The fire she had—I see it in you. I’ve seen it in you since the day we met.”
My tongue stuck to the hard palate of my mouth. I swallowed again, trailing my mother’s scrawl across the inside of the cover. “Who is Pheolix?”
Selena shook her head, pain laced in her eyes.
“My mother had this same book.”
“I know. I gave it to her.”
I slowly turned the pages. “It was inscribed to Alana.”
Selena sighed, then nodded.
I glanced at her. “She knew she was going to run from Thaan? She made up a name for herself first?”
“She studied the registrars for a common Leihaniian name. One that would pass under an inspection of the yearly census, in case he ever looked.”
I frowned. "She didn't do the same for me. My name isn't Leihaniian."
Selena smiled softly. "Maybe she wanted something familiar-sounding to remind her of home." She leaned into the cushions of her backrest, studying the open book in my hands. “We always gave each other the same gift. Every birthday, every solstice. We would believe that we’d discovered the most unique item in the world, something the other could never come up with. But somehow, we always surprised ourselves.” Her eyes flicked to mine, and she reached for one of the lazy curls that hung from my head. “My message to Alana inside was my blessing to leave. To go to Leihani.”
All the years of my childhood, wondering where my mother had come from. Wondering whereIhad come from. They washed over me slowly, trickling like rain in a forest. Damp and cold, but utterly clean.
“Does Thaan know that I’m Ceba’s daughter?”
