“I might not be able to,” I said, ignoring Nori. “The last time he left for Winterlight was the morning after our wedding, and I was never invited to go with him. I stayed in the palace alone.
Olinne nodded. “And slowly fell apart with worry. But you were not a queen before. And a queen does not ask permission to walk beside hercordae.”
“No, but…” I leveled each of them with a glance, finding them watching me with the same resolute expression, as though they’d already assumed the decision I’d make, and were simply waiting for me to say it out loud. “It feels like I’m abandoning my colony if I travel so far away.”
“Your colony goes where you take them, My Queen,” Aoede said, massaging her fingers gently under a layer of golden scales. “I can stay here with a few Naiads to tend the nursery. You will not enter war without an army of your own.”
Nori closed her eyes. “If yourcordaerides to war, so must you. And so must we.”
Selena raised her brows in my periphery. Hand still curled around the stone, I nodded, relief waging its own war with uncertainty in my chest. Would I be able to take responsibility for each life lost in my name?
So goes the test of an untried queen, Kye’s voice answered in my thoughts.
Aitne returned to the palace with Selena and me. Her amber eyes grew as round as the moon as she followed us under the arched stone of the palace walls to find the glass towers waiting beyond, drenched in wrought iron and naked vines of winter ivy. Snowflakes fell around us, and though we’d called the water from our hair and bodies, I knew my lips were as blue and quivering with cold as theirs were.
Still, I couldn’t regret my short meeting with the Juile Naiads in the bracing sea. My gait straightened after Aoede and Aitne’s ministrations, I knewMihaunawould be full for a second night once the sun leveled with the horizon. With luck and an ample dose of water calling, I’d be walking normally by the time we left for Winterlight, or close after.
Kye met me in the doorway of my old apartment, having heard every thought I’d blasted across to him about the Naiads and the war with Rivea. I’d heard plenty of his as well. Aren would be riding with us to Winterlight, along with two other friends of Kye’s named Dimas and Leal.
At a profound lack of mounts for myDomus, Nori left to brave the cold water with a message to the Naiads of the Anatoly Sea, asking permission to travel through their territory in the east. There, my colony would follow an inlet just beyond thevineyards of Ascento, where, according to Nori and confirmed by Selena, they could swim upstream through the Sylus Mountains and cut across the lake, barring that it wasn’t frozen. The Sylus Lake was the deepest lake in the world, and they’d find themselves only a day’s journey from Winterlight. If all went to plan, they’d reach the Calderian fortress before we did.
Aitne gave Kye the same wide-eyed stare she’d given the palace, scuttling inside my old rooms to avoid him. He raised his brows, leaning a shoulder against the wall. I shrugged.I’m not sure she’s seen a man before.I bit my lip.At least, not one up close. Alive.
Do I need to worry about her knifing me in my sleep?
I laughed nervously.No.
My hands met over my waist, the itch to weave baskets suddenly twiddling my fingers. Nori’s unexpected reaction to learning Kye might be in danger had been a convenient one. Too convenient. I’d thought the Naiads would turn up their noses, offended at the very idea of helping to keep a human safe. But their unyielding determination to do the opposite left a pool of doubt swelling in my stomach.
Something about Kye placing himself at risk unsettled the members of my colony.
And I wasn’t sure why. But I knew it didn’t stem from love for him.
72
Maren
King Emilius approved my request to ride with Kye to Winterlight. It surprised me that he did, though I had to wonder if he was simply hopeful I’d wind up dead. His eyes followed Selena as she stood beside me, so hungry with flagrant desire I had to stifle the urge to leave them looking like Burian’s.
But three days after I emerged from the Juile Sea a Queen of Naiads, we set off from Calder City, finding ourselves headed in the opposite direction that Kye and I had forged two months before.
At least I found myself happy to ride Kolibri every day.
Dimas and Leal were apparently cousins, though you’d never know by looking at them. Dimas stood as tall as Aren, just a few inches shy of Kye, with the dark green eyes of a hunter, his words brief and his movements stealthy.
Leal’s height reached just past my own. He wasn’t the thinnest man I’d ever seen. Pheolix held that title, though with every day that passed, Pheolix seemed to fill out more and more, the emaciated cut of his cheekbones rounding as he lived another day outside of Thaan’s control.
Leal was simply cut like a wire. His voice cracked like a whip, and he wore a smile brighter than the blinding fields of white snow we rode past on our way north.
Unskilled with a horse, Aitne sat behind Selena and kept her head down, pretending Leal didn’t sneak sideways glances at her. Selena must have noticed. She often took the last place in our line, seated high and proud on her white stallion as though she’d been born in a saddle and offering Leal stifling glances when his eyes strayed too far in their direction.
Ten days passed.
Cold and wet, I tried to keep my inner complaints to a minimum. It didn’t help that Kye loved it all. The trees, the mountains, the endless feeling of exploration as the road stretched out from us. I suppose his heart was carved with wings and a burning wanderlust. Mine had been carved from roots that grew deep into the earth, resistant to the idea of pulling myself out for the sake of straying from home.
She named you her heir the day you retrieved the Breath of Safiro under the ice.
My hand found the stone hanging from my neck. Would I have felt the same, had I never touched it? Was it the voice of the stone that called me to return to the Juile Sea? My bond to the waters there as queen?
