She tossed him an impatient look. “That’s ridiculous. Yes, we bond with land and become attached to it, but it’s basically the same as becoming attached to a community over generations. It’s based on relationships, on tradition. My grove once looked after the greatest forest in the world, but times changed and we had to leave. We didn’t die. Not because of that, at least.”
“The greatest forest in the world?”
Alashiya paused her pacing. Looking away from him, she explained, “The God Forest, where all beings were made. My mother’s line stretches back to the very first nymph,who Blight made from a foundling left among the roots of the first trees. I’m the last one left.”
Taevas wasn’t religious, but he knew the place she spoke of. It was hard not to, when every version of the great creation myth began there. It was an unspeakably ancient, sacred cedar forest whittled down to hardly a sliver of greenery after ten thousand years of necessity.
But that wasn’t what interested him most.My mother’s line stretches back to the very first nymph,she’d said.
Something clicked in his mind when he looked at her then, something she’d been telling him all along and he had waved away without thought.
Even he knew the stories of the nymph queens of the old world, when everything was new and wild. They were the dispensers of wisdom, of prophecy, and it was often a chance meeting with one of those queens that would send a great hero on their journey. He vaguely recalled that they had once had their own powerful trade networks built of thousands of interconnected family groups —the groves she spoke of? —and vast wealth.
But time had come for them, as it always did, and nymphs had little by way of defensive abilities. At some point, they’d gone from legendary queens to ethereal dancing figures in paintings, their power lost to the erosion of history.
“You’re a queen,” he breathed, astonished that he’d been so blind.
Alashiya gave him another impatient look. “Yes, I’m queen of this grove. We’ve been over this.”
“No.” Taevas limped over to her and stopped her pacing by cupping her shoulders. “No, you’re aqueen,Alashiya. If you’re a direct descendant of the first nymph, that means you’re— what? Queen ofallnymphs?”
She looked at some spot over his shoulder. “That title has been defunct for thousands of years.”
“And so it means nothing?”
“Exactly.”
“That can’t be true,” he insisted.
“It is.” Her eyes closed. The fight bled out of her. “I say that I’m queen of this grove, Taevas, but that doesn’t mean much. I was princess of something once, when my family was alive, but now I’m queen of nothing but memory.”
The empty rooms. The crumbling house. The queen of memory.
Taevas skimmed his hands up until he cradled Alashiya’s jaw. She seemed so fragile, but that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Not if she’d survived on her own for so long.
In a hoarse voice full of dread, he asked, “What happened to your grove,metsalill?Why are you all alone?”
It broke something in him when she leaned forward, bending like a flower in the wind, until her brow touched the dip between his collar bones. His breath hitched. Members of his clan often came to him for advice and even comfort, but it had never felt like this.
Ithurt.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Taevas wrappedan arm around her shoulders. His other hand cradled the back of her head, holding her to him as firmly as he dared. The wretched, useless wings folded against his back twitched with the instinct to wrap her in the dragon’s embrace, where she would be sheltered from all the evils of the world. The embrace was a sacred thing reserved for closest kin and Chosen. For a dragon to let a person into the embrace was to expose their greatest vulnerability, the hyper-sensitive membrane and delicate bone of their wings, and offer them the protection of their shelter.
An embrace meant sacrificing their wings in the event of an attack. It meant letting a person under your guard, where they might slip a knife between your ribs or snap a fragile bone. It meant family and love and choice.
It made him angry — so,soangry — that he couldn’t give her that which was her right, herplace.Because of the decisions of a few faceless men, he couldn’t give her the embrace when she so clearly needed it, and he would never, ever forget that.
But when Alashiya slid her arms around his waist and clung to him like that, a little of his rage was tucked away, saved for another time and a better use. She pressed her face into his throat,where her eyelashes tickled his skin. Her breath warmed him in tiny distressed puffs.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she whispered. “I just want to go to sleep.”
She was hiding again. Running from the conversation. He felt as though he’d forced a door open that had remained shut for too long, and the memories that had escaped weren’t the sort that could be dealt with in a single night.
But he couldn’t let this die. As much as he wanted to, as much as it killed him to push, he had no choice. He couldn’t allow her to suffer in silence any longer. She was his to protect, and that started now.
“I don’t need details,” he explained, “and I won’t push any further than this, Shiya, but I have to know.”
