A watery laugh escaped her. “You’re very smooth,argaman mlk.”
Pressing his lips into the curve of her shoulder, he asked, “What does that mean?”
A soft huff escaped her nose. “Purple king.”
He hoped she could feel his smile against her skin. “You are my wildflower and I am your purple king. I don’t think either of us gets points for creativity.”
“I like that you call memetsah-leel.”She slowly slid one hand beneath the pillow until she found his fingers. Twining them together, she whispered, “I never imagined what your voice would sound like.”
He gave her fingers a small squeeze. “How is it?”
“Good.”
“Just good? Ah, my Shiya. You love to wound me.”
The softest, most precious laugh popped like champagne bubbles in the dark. “It’sverygood. I like it even when you’re being bossy.”
“I fear I will always be bossy,” he wryly informed her.
Alashiya was quiet for a beat. “My grandfather wouldn’t approve. He always said I needed to find a nice nymph for a husband.”
Taevas stared into the darkness beyond the nest, the weight of her tragedy pressing down on him from the shadows. “Do you think I could’ve won him over?”
He felt her deep breath as she drew it in and let it out. “Yes.”
Surprised by that, he noted, “You sound very certain. He must not have had his mind set on a nymph after all.”
“He did,” she insisted. “It’s all he talked about at the end. He was so worried about me being alone, and he blamed himself for not having done enough to make sure I wasn’t when he passed. But he’s not so anxious anymore. At least, I don’t think so.”
Taevas’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“It’steq.I carry his ghost.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A queen isn’t just a queen. It’s not just a title. It’steq.To carry. To hold memory, knowledge, and the souls of those who passed.” She clutched his hand beneath the pillow and curled a bit more tightly on her side, like she needed to protect herself against something unseen.
Speaking in the rhythmic cadence of a storyteller, she whispered, “The first nymph survived because she was given to the Earth by Blight. He couldn’t provide her with milk, so he dug a hole at the base of the oldest cedar tree and placed her inside, where the roots and the soil itself could provide for her. They burrowed into her skin, her bones, her heart, and twined themselves into every part of her. When she was strong enough, he dug her out again and showed her how to live in the forest he’d made. He told her that the knowledge was hers to hold forever.”
“I’m not used to Blight being the hero of a story,” Taevas murmured.
The god of disease, decay, and wilderness wasn’t widely spoken of for being kind or nurturing. He was known as the scorned lover of the goddess Glory, the being who lurked in the dark and whose image was never shown, lest his gaze rest for too long on an undeserving soul.
“The gods aren’t heroes. They simplyare.”Alashiya pulled the arm he’d slung around her waist up so she could cradle it against the plush warmth of her chest. “Blight disappeared, leaving the nymph to fend for herself. Eventually she found a husband and had many children, who went on to have children of their own. When she died, her knowledge passed to her oldest daughter, and then again toherdaughter.”
Taevas blinked. “Wait, what?”
“All nymphs are descended from the first. A few years ago I did some research at the library and read that she was most likely a normal arrant woman who somehow became infected with a strain of mycelium that grows on tree roots — Blight only knowshow, I suspect. That mycelium allows information and nutrients to transfer from tree to tree, and, with time and the mutation of magic, from nymph to nymph. We all have it. We all live and die and make our mark in the hyphae, the network — but only queenscarryit.”
He wondered if this was what it was like to be truly, completely gobsmacked. “I… You have ahive mind?”
“No,” she replied, rubbing the line of his knuckles against the underside of her chin in slow, soothing drags. “We have a connection. We share memory and knowledge. How to survive in the wild, what berries are safe, and what caves have bears. Over the generations it deepened, became more complex. I can’t speak to my ancestors through it, but I can feel them and access the knowledge of their lives through impressions. All nymphs can, to some extent, but only queens can reach back as far or hear them as clearly as I can.”
“Queen of memory.” Goosebumps prickled his arms.
Alashiya nodded. “Each grove has its own queen, its own branch of the hyphae, but all nymphs are connected by the root, the first. And now me.”
“And you… You became queen of your grove when your mother died.” She hadn’t said it, but he couldn’t imagine how else it could’ve gone.
