“Do I perish at your talons as well, Miss Ríhbiadh?” Konstantin leans back in his chair and leisurely hooks a foot over his knee. His pretense at tranquility is lost on me, seeing as the tendons in his neck strain against his pale skin like rigging.
“Do you really think your death would cause my grandfather such distress, Vizosh?” I quip.
Lachlano snorts.
“Depending on who were to succeed me, it might,” Konstantin replies steadily.
“Jaytair’s wound tight because, in the prophecy, I wear a diamond on my ring finger, which means I must find my mate.”
“We don’t know that he’s your mate,” my grandfather grumbles in Serpent.Again.
“It’s twice that you’ve said that. Why in the world would I sport the jewel of someone who isn’t my mate on my ring finger?”
“Your paths crossed,” my grandmother suddenly says, blinking away the veil of magic. “You know her.”
“Her?” I repeat. “My mate is a woman?”
“Your mate?” Taytah’s canted head sends her long pink locks frolicking across her cream velvet cape. “No, the dead woman.Why did you think I was…” One glance at Jaytair’s complexion leads her mouth to soften around an, “Ah. You uncovered what your grandfather preferred you didn’t see.”
“She’s perspicacious like that,” he grumbles, recycling my words.
I’m about to roll my eyes when a realization hits me dead center. “Great Mórrígan, Jaytair! You know who the ring belongs to!”
With a harsh flare of his nostrils and a harsher glower at the tawny slats beneath his boots, he mutters, “No.”
His lie escalates my heartrate, because my grandfather has only ever protected me, which can only mean one thing. “What sort of monster does the Cauldron bind me to?”
Taytah strokes my cheek. “He’s not a monster.”
“Then why is Jaytair about to toss up his carnival fare?”
“Because, like your parents, he would’ve preferred bundling you up in the Sky Kingdom until you blew out a hundred candles. I’m sorry, abi, but I’m afraid I need to go rest now.” Taytah kisses my forehead before sidestepping me to reach my grandfather. “You’re not alone. We’re here for you.”
“Does she even need us anymore?” my grandfather mutters before mumbling something about how my father will be turning him into a forever-Crow, and that he hopes my grandmother can still love him in puny bird form.
Taytah titters as she leads him toward the door. She’s the only one who does, though. Even Lachlano, whose pearly whites are on display even when he sleeps, doesn’t react to my grandfather’s woeful remark.
As my grandmother paints the sigil to slip through the door, I call out, “At least solve one of my two puzzles by telling me who the ring belongs to!”
She adds a cross in the middle of her circle. “Do you remember what it looked like?”
“It was square and as big as my knuckle, so I’m guessing it’s someone well-off.” As I shuffle through my memory, she presses her palm to the door. “Wait!”
But she doesn’t. She slips through the wood, my grumbling grandfather in tow.
Ugh.
“Maybe I can help narrow it down,” Aodhan says, in Glacin this time.
With a frustrated sigh, I say, “I don’t know how, unless you’ve visited every jeweler in Glace.”
“If your grandparents recognized the stone”—Aodhan presses away from his perch as though his legs were in need of stretching—“then it’s an heirloom and not a new design.”
Huh.For some reason, my mind goes to Lev’s mother, and I try to remember if any ring graced her finger but then realize the diamond would probably belong to my mate’s dead relative, since prying an engagement ring off a living person’s finger would be in poor taste.
“You said the stone was a large square?” Aodhan asks.
I snag the memory and paste it on my lids. “Squarish.”
