He’s been turned into a Siphon.
26
MERYN
There was never a body. There was never body.There was never a body.
It’s all I can hear. All I can think. I believed he was dead, and now he’s standing before me as a Siphon.
He looks exactly the same. Except, not.
His features are sharpened. He hasn’t aged a day in theyearssince I last saw him. The same dark hair, the same aquiline nose, the same stubborn chin. It’s Saela’s chin. But his eyes look a little larger. There’s something more handsome about him after all this time.
I can’t take it. Ican’t.
My magic reacts to the storm of emotions in me. It starts to rip me apart from the inside, seeping from my pores and circling slowly around my fingers. The garden darkens.
It takes everything left in me—everything his death left behind—to maintain control.
Anassa senses my turmoil. It rages over into her, spilling through our bond, and she immediately releases a deep warning growl meant for the man standingbefore us. She paces closer, baring her teeth, ears back, as she positions herself protectively beside me.
His eyes—eyes just like mine—widen at the dark tendrils of magic reaching for him, at the shadows eager to strangle the life from him. The man I once knew raises his hand in a placating gesture like he’s telling me he won’t hurt me.
But it doesn’t matter, because the sight of it hurts me more than any blade ever could.
The moment he lifts his hands and holds his palms flat, I see it, and a crystal-clear memory returns to me.
Mother, pregnant with Saela, sitting in our tiny kitchen. She’s weeping over a tiny box. I asked to see inside, and she refused. I was young, and I didn’t get what was so important about the box. Not yet.
It would be months before I finally understood that there was no body to bury. That the only part of him left in the world—theonlything left—was contained in that tiny box.
A single finger, as if that could be enough. As ifanythingcould be enough.
Looking at him now, I see that missing finger on his left hand, and I want to scream.
I grip Anassa’s fur for control. Shadows hiss around me.
“Everyone, leave us,” I command, voice rough.
I can’t do this with all of them watching. With Ruby leering, enjoying the chaos she’s created. With Siegrid frowning, disapproving of my show of emotion.
This needs to happen without witnesses.
Siegrid and Stark make no move to leave until I open our mental connections and explain that the man in front of me is supposedly my dead father. Siegrid tenses. Stark immediately takes a step closer, nostrils flaring.
I can tell he doesn’t want to leave me to my pain. But he also trusts me to protect myself. Even so, he doesn’t leave without boring a hole through the back of my skull with his glare.
“I’ll be just beyond the manor house wall, if you need me,” he promises.
Siegrid inclines her head toward me.“I will head back to the base. Resume duties there.”
“Queen Sturmfrost,” Ruby warns, “please remember that you have until tomorrow evening to decide or the battle resumes full force.”
Then she and her attendants withdraw. Cratos’s and Genicos’s heavy footsteps echo over old stone.
And Anassa and I are alone with him.
The man who resembles my father.
