“I know, too.”
“I thought…” Her lashes flutter in surprise. “I thought you weren’t aware that Meriam was your mother. Did Cathal tell you?”
My heart holds so still that I think it’s stopped beating. “Meriam? No.Mahanandamother me.” Silence. “No?”
Behati inhales a breath that makes her narrow ribs dig into her crimson robe. “Yes and…no.”
“What meanyes and no?”
“It means that the Mahananda had a hand in making you, but so did Meriam.”
“Mahananda make mewithMeriam?”
“Yes.”
“Mahananda is father?” My question comes out as an exclamation.
“Not exactly. You had a father, but he no longer lives.”
My eyebrows draw so close on my forehead that they jostle the root of my tusk. “I lost, Behati.”
“I imagined as much. Your past is quite…thorny.”
It must be another expression, because the past isn’t flora or fauna.
“What I meant by that is that your past is a complicated thing to grasp, like a stalk full of thorns.”
“Stalk full of thorns make bleed. My past make bleed?”
“In a way, yes.” The curve of her lips holds such melancholy that it dims the air. “Your past made many hearts bleed, most of all Priya’s. It filled her with such pain that she contemplated slumbering in the Mahananda.”
I frown. “I no see bed when I went; only darkness.” It had enveloped me like the ocean, swathing me in complete and utter tranquility.
A small laugh traipses from Behati’s lips. “Slumbering in the Mahanandais the expression we use when we are ready to return our magic to the Mahananda. It’s one of the only ways we, Shabbin women, can end our lives.”
Oh.I make a note to stay wide awake if I’m ever submerged in the Mahananda again. “Why Taytah so sad?”
“For you to understand this, I’d need to start at the beginning. Well, at your beginning. Five centuries ago, Meriam had a baby with a Shabbin male. That baby was you. When you were very young—around four or five—your mother fell in love with a Lucin, a Faerie named Costa Regio, who was Lorcan’s general.”
I’ve heard the name Regio. Like Meriam’s, turbulent silence ensues its mention.
“Costa betrayed Lore and, aided by Meriam, managed to subdue him by staking him with obsidian. You may now have an understanding of what obsidian does to regular Crows, but to their king, it transforms him to iron and knocks downallhis people. In other words, if Lore is immobilized, so are all his shifters. This sparked the first Great War in Luce—the Magnabellum—after which Costa crowned himself king.”
I feel like asking for a quill to squiggle all these names and events down, but obviously I do not…for I cannot. I stare at my hands, which are as useless as the blood inside them, and fold my fingers over one another in my lap.
“For years, we thought he’d made Meriam his queen, but then the serpents started arriving on our shores, carrying banished Lucins, who explained Meriam had disappeared.”
“Disappear? Where?”
“No one knew at the time.”
I imagine they have the answer now, and although I’d like to learn it, something else feels more essential: “Why you not go Luce and save Lorcan?”
“Because your mother had erected wards around Shabbe that kept us locked in. For five hundred years.”
My mind feels as snarled as the tresses atop my head before my bath. If she left when I was four and this is five centuries later, then… “Why I no remember?”
“Because, when the Mahananda brought you back as a Serpent shifter”—Behati runs her finger along the seam of the velvet cushion against which she reclines—“it erased your memory.”
