“Technically, my father’s. But my mother commandeered it when she visited Naiadon. She loved to read and write. Well … so I’ve been told. I come here to be close to her.” He leaned back into the seat, pulling a blanket across his lap, and a look washed over his boyish features, aging him into the man that circumstance had forced him to become.
I knew that look well.
“She is no longer alive?” I asked gently as I pulled my knees in. I sipped the drink and it unknotted the throbbing in my temples.
“I don’t think so,” he said, watching the hearth. There seemed to be more to the story, but we both let his words dissipate and be overtaken by the gurgling of the fireplace we both watched.
“My mother died when I was young,” I said. “Well, was murdered, really.” Saying it out loud gave it the weight of truth. I could never utter those words upon land, not without the threat of a traitor’s death.
“It is a strange feeling,” Hylos said, “not having the people who brought you into this world there to guide you through it.”
I nodded. “A lonely feeling.”
“So lonely,” he added.
Like you were adrift at sea, never knowing when you would see land again.
“But you find ways to see them in the world,” I said. “To hear them. Feel them. You were once a part of her. She’s forever a part of you.”
He smiled gently. “Among my people, they say that if you listen closely, you can hear the song of your ancestors within your own. Maybe every note we sing carries the voices of those who came before us, woven into ours like threads in a tapestry. I can’t say how much is truth and how much is hope, but I like to believe my parents still live together, at least in my song.” We let the thought settle between us, quiet and warm. It was as if, together, we could feel his mother in that room—reading, writing. Living.
Sadness sank into me. What did my mother love? There was so little I knew of her. Her name was like a curse in my father’s country. A memory he had ensured was thoroughly erased from the face of the world. All that remained of her was me.
“I heard what it called you. And I want you to know”—his blue, familiar eyes softened, truly kind—“when you’re ready to tell me who you are, no harm will come to you.”
I believed him.
“Will you tell me about Oakhaven?” I asked.
“What do you wish to know?”
“When did this all start?” I drained my mug and placed it on the table beside my seat, my head feeling exceptionally better.
“The first siren to disappear was my father.” The true king of the sirens. “At first, like you, we assumed it was another rival siren Circle. My father had enemies, but it would have been odd for no ransom or other actions to follow. His inner circle searched all three seas meticulously, from the darkest midnight depths to the tropical shallows. But they found nothing.”
He frowned. “But then somethingchanged.More and more sirens were taken mysteriously, like they were ripped from the sea to the skywithout a trace. No one could figure out how, or why. Until …” Hylos stood, walking to the large map.
I followed him, the blanket wrapped around my shoulders.
He pointed at an area east of Oakhaven.
“This city formed on the ocean, raised from the sea like magic. It’s no coincidence. The missing sirens. My father’s disappearance. All of it has to be connected.”
“Whiterok,” I said, wrapping the blanket tighter around my shoulders. My prior fate.
He offered me a terse nod, not peeling his eyes from the map. “I think it’s made with siren magic.”
But how was that possible? Cedric was the one who built it. There was no way he knew of sirens, was there?
“Tonight you tried to leave,” he said, still not lifting his eyes from the map of my father’s country. “But that bracelet you possess, the ventus, it’s no mistake that you possess it. No mistake you’re here. The sirens have a saying: Nymphaea sends those to be saved. She sends people to us for a second life, one not afforded to them above the waves.”
He looked up at me. “Elowyn, I believe there is a reason you are here. The Guardians themselves have ordained it. Nymphaea herself has sent you to us.” Sincerity saturated his voice. I wanted to trust him, wanted to believe; he was almost as convincing as the kelpie’s entrancing call. “And maybe it’s because a ‘forgotten princess’ needs a place to start over.”
But this was not my home. If the Guardians had done this, then it was only so I could leave and tell my father of the fate that brewed in the oceans past Oakhaven’s borders. That was the only thing that made sense. What else would the Guardians want from me?
“I wish to leave.” My words cut quickly through Hylos’s trance.
He frowned, then turned and looked out the large window, his back to me. Dark-blue ink swirled in waves on his skin, images of sea creatures visible between them.
