“Have you met the commander? No one would willingly stow away on his ship. Unless— Do you think he was trying to stop him from charging over here?”
“He didn’t stow away. Silvius brought him here.” I shudder from the memory that the commander painted inside my head of torturing all those I love to get to me.
I hope Minimus found the vile man and crushed every bone in his body. They may regenerate, but as long as he can’t swim, he can’t harm me and mine.
“Brought him here to do what?”
“As a negotiating chip.” I refrain from telling her that his intention was probably to cull his head with a steel blade, telling her instead about our trip to the Acolti safe.
I count Lore’s wingbeats, follow his landing. The second he deposits Phoebus, I leap toward my friend. There’s blood on his forehead, blood on his chest, blood on his thigh.
Lazarus kneels beside me, already fingering his crystals. “Are any of these wounds from your talons, Morrgot?”
“No, Lazarus.” The words are so crisp that they sound spoken out loud, but Lore can’t—
Wait . . .Lazarus?
I snap my gaze off Phoebus’s purple-tinted lids and onto a pair of legs clad in black leather. I track the legs to trim hips and a torso that flares beneath a dark cuirass and iron pauldrons. To a honed neck, as sinewy and solid as the rest of the male. To a face with eyes that glow the darkest gold and hair so black it glints blue.
My ears begin ringing, my veins prickling. I’ve seen Lore in a vision and then in a dream, yet the male standing over Phoebus and me feels like a complete stranger. “Lore?”
“Álo, Fallon.”
“Hot damn, I’ve reached the overworld.” Phoebus’s voice makes my eyes jump off the human embodiment of the Crow King and onto the Fae’s opened green ones.
I smile, tears tripping down my cheeks. “No, Pheebs. No, you’re very much alive.”
“Are you quite certain, Picolina, because—” His attention surfs back to Lore, who’s still watching me as though I was the one who’d shapeshifted. “Ouch.What was that for, Syb?”
“See? You’re alive. And staring lewdly at one of Luce’s new monarchs,” she adds under her breath.
He blinks, but his shock is quickly supplanted by a hiss as Lazarus heals him with his magic crystals.
I don’t move away, but my eyes drift off Phoebus and back onto Lore, whose dusky pink lips move over foreign words that sound almost like a chant: “Tach ahd a’feithahm thu, mo Chréach.”
“What is he saying?” Sybille asks me.
“I don’t know. I don’t speak Crow.”
He turns his face toward the sea and bellows those same words, again and again.Tock add a faytham thoo, mo kreyock.They scatter goosebumps along my skin as they surge through the air, spill from the cliffs, and spread over the ocean.
The stone beneath my feet begins to tremble, the sea to froth, the sky to hum.
Lore repeats his chant, his timbre as low as his dense, sooty lashes. It is almost as though he’s praying, and perhaps he is. He’s spent two decades trapped and tortured, far from his people, powerless, and before that, five centuries. I cannot fathom the depth of his loneliness and pain, of his horror and fury.
If I were him, I’d raze the world and every Fae in it.
When he turns his sunset irises on me, I pull in a breath. His eyes burn, torching their way past my unguarded ones, and I’m suddenly gone from the cliffs and back in that room with my father and some woman I’ve never seen before. Her eyes are cast downward, on a slightly rounded abdomen, which she keeps stroking. I take it she’s pregnant.
You must leave tonight, Zendaya.The voice surges from billows of black smoke that keep tearing and weaving into the shape of a giant crow. Even faceless, I recognize Lore, whose voice has become as familiar to me as Nonna’s.You’ll only be safe back in Shabbe now that Justus Rossi knows you carry the curse-breaker.
What if— What if they find a way to strengthen the wards? What if I can’t re—Her voice breaks, and a sob lurches from her full lips, shaking the river of dark auburn locks that runs down her back, all the way to her waist.
My father moves toward this bereft woman, and although his shoulders are straight, his dark eyes are rimmed crimson as though he’s been blinking back tear after tear. He folds Zendaya into a fierce hug and kisses the top of her head.
I glance at vision-Lore, wondering why he’s showing me this scene. To prove my father is compassionate?
When I turn back, I find the woman’s eyes resting on me, and my heart . . . my heart stops because her irises are bright pink. She’s Shabbin. This woman crying in my father’s arms is Shabbin.
