Blood leached from my face.Bayne.
Oh gods, had something happened to Bayne? My heart hammered. That tether, that thread was my link to Bayne.Why hadn’t he believed me?A weight crushed onto my chest. Khato had to have suspected our link, sending me to the Waters of Ascendiel to show me my own threads, to show me possibilities. My stomach pitched. I could have tied myself to him before all of this…
“Despite running away from his throne,” Astraeus continued, his voice cutting through my thoughts, “he’s rather righteous, isn’t he? Though I suppose he has dabbled in theft enough to warrant the title of pirate, noble as he may be.”
My blood raged. “Stop talking,” I hissed.
“Or what? Does the pup bite?”
His words curved, and I could hear the grin forming on his lips.
My blood boiled. “Fuck you.”
“Oh, I’d fuck you silly, love. But now is not the time.”
My jaw ached. I blew out a short breath, willing my temper to calm. “You know nothing of what Bayne has been through. Do us both a favor and shut your piece of shit mouth.”
Another throaty chuckle, and my nails sliced into my palms.
“I know more than you realize, Bonscaíh. Bayne is a liar,” he countered, the damning word forcing the recent ache of betrayal back into my heart.Liar.
“He’s a liar and a thief,” he continued. “And a damn good one at it, I’ll give him that. He uses his charm…thatcharisma,to get what he wants.”
A vice wrapped around my chest, as if the pirate lord were speaking aloud the intrusive thoughts I couldn’t shake from my mind since Ronan revealed Bayne’s dishonesty. His charm… his charisma… But things had changed between us, hadn’t they?
“And he’s stolen much from the Lords of Marisarma. We’ve lost great value thanks to him,” Astraeus said, scattering my thoughts.
“Seems like you care more about your treasure than your people,” I bit out, wishing I could slap the smile right off his godsdamned face.
“Iamtalking about people,” he murmured, voice going deathly quiet.
“What do you mean?”
“I think that’s enough for now,” he said, forcing his voice back into that casual tone. “We don’t know who is listening. Stealthy fucking creeps.”
I stilled, squinting against the darkness and searching for any sign of an outline or whites of an eye, but we’d missed them so easily in the burial chamber. Where were the others? How long had we been down here? Carina couldn’t have held the water much longer if we’d been out for more than an hour. Did they think we were dead? I swallowed a dry breath, shut my mouth, and waited for our captors to return.
Minutes,maybe hours later, I blinked my eyes open. Soft light peeked in from the corner of the room, indicating the rise of Ganmira and Renova, illuminating the icy chamber in swaths of blue and white.
Astraeus hummed a soft melody, the smoothness of his voice reverberating into the trunk that bound us, sending small vibrations into my back. I twisted, my best attempt at avoiding the movement, irritated at its calming effect.
“Do you think they could be the People of the Stars?” I finally asked, thinking of the fairytales in the book that had shown itself to me at the Living Library. I’d lived my entire life not knowing there were other beings besides humans. Elves… Would it be that preposterous that the children of the gods would be real? Demi-gods living in hiding?
Astraeus stilled behind me. “No.”
“How do you know?”
I winced against his shrug, and my elbow barked in pain. “Then who are they? Why did you call her ‘your holiness?’” I whispered after a few heartbeats of silence.
Lord Astraeus was quiet for several moments before he responded. “In Votruvia, there are tales we are told as children about the People of the Dead. Wraiths, with nothing left of their human form but bones, led by their holy mother, defending the souls of the deceased.”
An eerie awareness snaked through my gut. “Defending them from what?” I whispered.
“‘Impostors,’ my mother would say. An enemy never here but never gone. More riddles. A cautionary tale, of course. ‘Affrontyour elders, the People of the Dead will take you from your beds.’ But there’s always a bit of truth in them, isn’t there?”
Lord Astraeus shifted behind me, as if scanning the room. “I wouldn’t be surprised if hundreds of years ago, Votruvians encountered the locals here in the Death Dunes and some made it out alive. History belongs to the survivors.”
“We need to get out of here,” I murmured. “Take this off me.”
