“Why?”
She stares straight ahead at the prickly fruit with curved leaves that lords over the rest of the fruit like a juice-filled king. “We don’t question the Mahananda, Daya.”
Perhaps, we should. I wonder if I could ask it for my memories back. Do I even want them? “What about dead sister?”
“Hmm.” Behati returns her attention to me. “Dead sister?Who’ssister?”
“My.”
Behati’s thin eyebrows writhe beneath the stroke of hair. “You’re Meriam’s only daughter.”
The pulsing beneath my ribs quiets again. If I’m Meriam’s only daughter, then that means…
That means…
“How far did you get in Daya’s history?” Cathal leans against one of the pillars holding up my ceiling, arms folded beneath a fresh shirt, his hair slicked back from a bath of his own, black stripes fresh and dark against his pale skin.
“I cannot tell her everything at once, Cathal,” Behati says. “It would overwhelm her.”
The Crow didn’t stay behind to avenge his mate; he stayed because Iamhis mate.
Chapter 17
Zendaya
Iam Cathal Báeinach’s mate.
I have a mate.
Does that mean that Fallon isours, or did he have her with that other female she refers to as Mamma?
My fingers pace the scar around my neck, back and forth, back and forth. Cathal said Meriam killed her daughter. If my mother killed me, then how?—
The Mahananda!That’s what Behati meant when she said it had brought me back. She meant it had resurrected me.
The scars that blemish my skin and scales must be remnants of Meriam’s attack. How brutal was my death?
I spring my hand off the paler band of flesh and onto the cushion beneath me as I try to recover from the blow of Behati’s words. I feel drained and laid bare like the Amkhuti, unrecognizable yet composed of the same bones, a trench instead of a river, a wasteland instead of a thriving milieu.
Heat bursts through my chest at the sudden realization of all I’ve lost. It claws up my ribs and grips my heart before moving farther upward to throttle my throat. I want to rage and scream. I want to run through the courtyard to the Mahananda’s edgeand demand why it had to steal my past when it breathed human life into my scales.
But I don’t.
I just sit there, motionless, my lungs barely filling, my heart barely beating, strangled by shock and horror and—and devastation.
I had a daughter.
I had a mate.
I had a life.
The heat seeps into my face, into my cheeks, into my eyes before collapsing out of me, draining me some more.
“What exactly did you tell her, Behati?” Cathal’s voice booms against my buzzing eardrums like waves crushing stone, and then smoke sweeps up my trembling arms, becoming more solid as it strokes and enfolds.
“I only told her what Meriam did to Shabbe and to her as a child.”
“Daya, look at me.”
