A soft knock startles me from my thoughts, but it’s Alexus’s voice on the other side. “Just checking on you.”
“I’m all right. Bathing, then I’m going to sleep.”
A moment passes.
“I… I couldn’t stay in the lighthouse, so I’m just down the hall should you need to talk.” His voice is tender, as though he knows I do.
But I simply can’t right now.
“Okay,” is all I say as my chin trembles. I listen as his hand slides down the door before he turns and returns to his room.
Tears come more swiftly than I expect as I sit alone in a tub of water that grows tepid after a while, smothering my sobs behind a wadded cloth. I cry for my sister and Alexus and Colden and Elias and Finn and all of Tiressia, until my burning eyes have no more tears left to give. My mental wards are down, too, but I’m too far gone to erect them again. Neri will just have to hear my misery should he choose to prowl.
It isn’t until a couple of hours later, once the last drop of wine is gone and I’m buried under the gentle weight of a comforting coverlet, that a softshfftwhispers through the room. I tug the covers from around my face and look toward the sound.
A note lies on the stone floor near the rug’s fringe, slid through from under the door. With a frown, I push the cover back and rise slowly, my head already aching, and groggily retrieve the folded parchment. Lifting the fallen strap of my nightrail back over my shoulder, I carry the note to the hearth and hold it against the low light.
On the front is a drawing of a wolf’s head, almost like the marking on a seal, announcing the author of this particular communication quite plainly. When I open the letter, I find four words written in old Elikesh, scrawled in handwriting far too elegant for the hand that penned it. Four tiny words that I would never imagine the God of the North thinking, let alone writing.
Forgive me, little bird
I want to be unaffected and unmoved, but the truth is, though I don’t understand why the wolf draws such vast swings of emotion from me, my hard heart softens as I read those words a second and third time. Such an endearingly human gesture, from a beast of a god no less.
But that isn’t how any of this is going to go. Neri and I will be at one another’s sides for decades. I can’t be so easy with him that a simple written request for forgiveness, slid like a lover’s letter under my door, is all that’s required to heal a rift he carved.
No. As I toss his letter into the fire, I make up my mind, knowing exactly what I must do.
If Neri, God of the Northlands, wants my forgiveness—if he wants me in any way at all—I’m going to make him earn it.
14
NERI
Early the next day, Thibault and I head down the main road that crests Village Hill, glamoured to look like two gentlewomen out for a morning stroll. The last thing I imagined while trapped inside this bastard Eastlander is that I would one day find myself side by side with him on a joint mission inmylands, shielded byhismagick no less.
But here we are.
We didn’t try to sift from the tor. We weren’t sure where the vice admiral might be. And though the captive guards revealed that there are more protections around the city than usual since Rooke’s murder, we wanted to get an idea of the current military climate ourselves.
In truth, I’m glad sifting wasn’t an option. Not after my botched attempt last night. I lay in bed, arms folded behind my head, wanting to close my eyes and open them on the beach, to let the rush of crashing waves clear my mind after Nephele tossed my note into the fire. I heard it plainly enough, my words catching the flame and crisping to cinders.
She doesn’t know she’s the only being whose forgiveness I have ever asked for, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t matter if she did.
With my best offer at an apology burned to ash, I listened as she padded across her room and crawled back into bed, noting how her breathing eventually slowed into a deep sleep. But her mind was in turmoil, so intensely tangled with racing thoughts that I could discern only three things. One, she’s desperately brokenhearted, more than she shows. Two, she’s physically miserable. And three, she plans to make me miserable as well.
When I sifted to escape the temptation to listen to her dreams, I arrived on the windy beach, though barely. The aether felt as though it were dumping me instead of delivering me. Worse still, the sand was littered with small, splattered puddles of silver, near iridescent in the moonlight. Puddles of aether. As though the primordial substance couldn’t hold itself together for me anymore.
As though perhaps it no longer recognized me.
Which is concerning.
It forces me to think about the curse from the grove as we stroll up the hill. Asha mentioned it quite often over our long years together. She’d concocted great plans for being resurrected should she somehow lose her life, plans that Fia clearly never agreed to execute for her goddess. Asha didn’t want anything to stand as an obstacle should the need arise for her to be restored for her people.
Or for Moeshka, perhaps. A dream that didn’t seem to want to die.
Looking back, I have to wonder if she had some other reason for such worry over the curse that I wasn’t privy to. Not that I would’ve noticed. The only thought I gave to resurrection was entertaining her musings, and that was usually a half effort.Why would you want to be brought back from the Shadow World?I would ask.What good is an immortal life if cursed? And what might that curse be?
She could never be sure, which made it far less interesting for me, but she read every tome, scroll, and tablet she could get her hands on to try and uncover the mystery. And there I was, at her side, disbelieving and struggling to imagine that death for us would ever happen at all. Such is the way with most gods. When the only thing feared is being unmade.
