Prologue
Cathal
The pink ramparts of Shabbe and the placid waters of its climbing rivers shimmer gold in the light of a new dawn. Though the rising sun’s radiance fans across my sweat-glossed brow, it doesn’t breach my mood.
I cross my arms and glare at the moat that loops around the palace gardens, my trepidation rising like the limpid waters that Priya’s coven—or Akwale, as they prefer to be called—is coaxing upward. Thank Mórrígan I’m immortal, for my poor heart would’ve stopped ticking long ago. It’s a wonder it hasn’t, between my daughter’s misadventures and the fate that awaits my?—
I swallow and replace the word titillating my tongue with the name of the woman the Cauldron birthed from serpent scales a fortnight ago: Zendaya.
Lorcan steps up to me, the contours of his body firm, unlike mine, which bleed smoke. “Priya has conferred with the Cauldron, brother. There’s no risk of Daya remaining in scales.”
Kanti, my daughter’s cousin and a prominent member of the Akwale, glances up at us from where she kneels at the moat’sedge, luring the waterline higher. “If it makes you feel any better, she might not even be able to shift.”
No, it does not fucking make me feel better. If anything, it tautens my skin and tenses my muscles, for if the Cauldron stripped Daya of her ability to shift, then why did it bring her back so physically altered? Why did it leave an ivory bead between her eyebrows and paint her eyes lid-to-lid black?
“She’ll shift,” whispers Behati, the queen’s advisor and seer, who also happens to be Kanti’s grandmother.
I look away from Zendaya just in time to see the veil of clairvoyance clear from Behati’s pink eyes.
“You saw her shift, Taytah?” Kanti pushes her long black hair behind an ear that bears more piercings than Lazarus’s.
“Yes,” Behati says. “The Mahananda has just shown me.”
The knot of my arms tightens in front of my stiff chest. “What else did the Cauldron show you?”
“That is all I foresaw, Cathal. Daya in her Serpent form.”
“Did you see her shiftingbackinto skin?” I press.
“I only saw her transform into scales.”
As long as she desires to shift back, Lorcan says through our people’s mind link,I’m certain she’ll return.
“As long as shedesires?” I snarl at my oldest friend and king. “What if she doesn’t care to remain two-legged, Lore?” My muscles punch against the cage of black fabric that was stitched to measure but which, at the moment, feels maladjusted and shrunken. “What if she longs to return to the ocean for good?”
I’ve changed my mind. I suddenly wish for Behati’s vision to be erroneous. For Daya not to shift, for what if she loses herself to the ocean and chooses scales over flesh? I crush my lids closed to bury the selfish thought. How dare I worry that she might not shift back? My self-absorption is repugnant. If I could no longer sprout wings and take to the sky, who would I be?
Fingers wrap around my arm. I startle until I notice the hand belongs to my daughter. She places her sweet cheek against my twitching bicep.
“Is everything all right?” I ask her when I notice how wildly her violet eyes shimmer.
“I just wanted to stand beside you.”
Perhaps it’s the truth, or perhaps her empathy springs from the same marrow-deep fear that gnaws on my soul.
I stare over at the pink-haired woman whose forehead rests in her grandmother’s palms. “What is Priya showing your…” I swallow down the wordmother, replacing it with a pronoun that won’t sadden Fallon: “…her?”
“What might happen to her body.”
“Whatwillhappen,” Kanti says, before gesturing to Behati. “Taytah had a vision of her shifting.”
Fallon blinks at her fellow Shabbin, then at me, before finally locking eyes with Lorcan. “She truly is a new breed of shifter.” Wonder brightens my daughter’s pitch.
If only some of it could breach my heart.
The briny moat has risen so high, it now spills over the lip of the sunstone cliffs and froths around Daya’s bare feet. I squint, scrutinizing her deep gold skin for bright pink scales, but none appear. I loathe the relief that floods my veins, loathe it with every beat of my bestial heart.
As the sun climbs higher, the swoop of dwellings that blanket the hollowed land begins to shimmer as though crafted from gold instead of sunstone. Shabbe is awakening, and the Shabbins along with it. I spy many trickling down to the moat’s razor-sharp cliffs, gazes pinned to the recessed vale, to the white-haired queen and pink-haired princess. I spy some contemplating the water’s surface, which glistens a mere dozen feet away for once.
