Chapter 1
Kiera
This ship was a cage.The sea, my prison.
Because once again, I’d locked myself in captivity with my enemy. But now he knew I was also his, and I had no key to release the shackles that grew heavier with every mile.
For the thousandth time on this gods-damned tiny ship, I rounded a stack of barrels, my hand instinctively twitching to the hilt of my mother’s blade sheathed at my waist.
For there he was, standing at the railing, gazing out of the endless expanse of rolling waves.
Aiden Falcryn.
His black hair lifted in the cool breeze as he hung his head. He gripped the railing with long, strong fingers I knew too well.
But his father’s falcon ring was now absent from them. I wanted to ask him why. My mind was drowning in a sea ofwhy, why, why. But my voice refused to cross the hastily built wall between us.
Aiden hadn’t spoken a word to me since we’d left the harbor.
He can’t have you.
The words still induced a tiny shiver down my spine.
His dark clothes were still torn and stained from battle. Someone must’ve bandaged the knife wound on his side. Iwondered if it pained him much. Or if he carried enough pain in his heart to numb the pain in his flesh—as I did.
Nikella had given me a salve for the many cuts I’d sustained trying to free myself from the ropes she’d bound me in.
Because ofhim.Because he’d finally learned the truth about me.
But I’d also learned the truth about him. Aiden was my father’s would-be assassin. My mother’s killer. And my... my... Nothing. Certainly not someone whose pain I should care about.
He was simply in my way, as he’d always been. But I refused to pick a fight with him on a ship full of his recovering allies.
So I did what I’d been doing the last two days we’d been sailing north—I turned on my boot heel and walked the other way.
Thank the gods, I’d gotten my “sea legs” as one of the bone-rattlers had informed me with a laugh when I could barely walk a straight line and kept staggering to the railing to puke my guts into the roiling waves.
They hadn’t spoken to me much since then, but I felt their curious stares follow me as they clambered along the ropes and sails ofMynastra’s Wings.I hadn’t been with their original horde of fighters taking down the Den, yet I’d fled Aquinon on their ship, so who was I?
Nobody asked, and I didn’t tell.
Silence had become my only weapon in a cage no one else could see.
A few of the Dags tried to congratulate me on my excellent use of fireseeds against the Wolves. But I withdrew from them as well.
They didn’t know I was the reason those Wolves were there in the first place. They didn’t know I was the reason they’d lost twenty-one members of their clan—eighteen to the Wolves andthree on the ship due to their injuries. The bone-rattlers had lost fourteen of their own as well.
I’d demanded the exact numbers from Nikella instead of Aiden, who’d spent most of the last two days doing what he could for the injured and the dead.
From afar, I’d watched them slide the bodies into the sea. The Dags had sung while the sailors clasped their strings of bones and murmured prayers for Mynastra to treasure their dead brethren’s bones in her bed.
I’d whispered my own prayers... and my apologies.
Afterward, I’d paced the deck a hundred times, guilt and rage pounding my heart like the cold waves that crashed over the railing.
But I preferred it over sleeping in my little hammock strung up in the ship’s belly. Because, in my sleep, another man was there.
The architect of so much pain in my life. The reason I was fleeing Aquinon, abandoning my brother and sister to an unknown fate. The mentor who’d beheaded my father and taken his crown.
