“Follow my lead!” He took me for a spin in a circle.
I honestly expected to trip in the surf and fall. But the water under our feet spun along with us. It moved in the same direction Evis was leading me, pushing around my ankles and giving me speed. The steps were simple, and I caught up quickly. Soon, I was able not to stare or even think about my feet but look at Evis’s grinning face.
“Maren, is that you?” a familiar voice called.
Evis stopped spinning me, and I came face to face with a smiling Elina. She was barefoot too, which made me think that people of Olathana only wore shoes in the glass palace, for obvious reasons.
Elina looked very different tonight. Instead of a dress, she wore a long, flowing skirt. A light, transparent scarf crossed over her breasts, then tied at the back of her neck. Some of her long, purple hair was woven into thin braids, the rest hung in loosewaves down to her butt. But the biggest difference was her wide, carefree smile that she never had in Kye’s palace.
She wasn’t alone. A tall man with indigo blue skin and short, snow-white, tight curls hugged her from behind, nuzzling her hair above her ear.
“Maren, this is Talios, my husband,” Elina introduced him to me. “And this is—”
“Maren,” Talios said, not waiting for her to finish the introduction. “The treasure of the glass palace. Nice to finally meet you, Maren. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
He let go of his wife just long enough to give me a deep, ceremonious bow.
“I can’t believe the king let you come here tonight,” Elina said in a hushed voice. “Or did you sneak out?”
“Actually, King Kye came with me,” I said.
“He’s right there.” Evis flicked the tip of his nose with his finger while furtively pointing at the tall, pale figure in the distance.
Elina placed a hand over her heart, her eyes widening as if she’d just seen a ghost. “Oh, by the Great Mother of the Ocean, I did not expect to ever see him here.”
“No one did,” Talios agreed. “When was the last time he left the palace?”
Something about the way they talked about Kye rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t care that they didn’t address him by his title, but he had a name. They sounded like employees talking about a mean, unpopular boss in the office, with care that only came from fear, not from respect. They saw him as an intruder into their world, not as a part of it. I was a true outsider here. Yet they accepted me more readily than they did Kye.
“I should go,” I said, suddenly feeling uneasy for some reason.
I wasn’t responsible for Kye’s relationship with his people. Whatever issues he had with his subjects weren’t mine to fix. He had lived in Lyrei for a hundred and twenty-one years. This was his home. It wasn’t my fault that he had become a stranger in his own kingdom.
Except that dancing in the view of the man who couldn’t join us suddenly didn’t feel like fun anymore.
“But we just got here,” Elina protested. “Dance with us.”
She laughed, tipping her head back as Talios took her for a twirl in the ocean. The waves crashed around them, then the water fanned in an arch, framing the beautiful couple with a circle of ocean spray.
“Just one more dance,” Evis spun me around too.
A spray of water rose in a spiral around us, funneling out like a mini tornado.
“Are you doing this?” I marveled, following the spinning droplets with my gaze.
“Yes.” Evis beamed. “Do you like it?”
“It’s pretty. You can really move water like that?”
“Like that and in any other way.” He opened his palm. A thin stream of water rose from the surface, hit the middle of his palm, then bounced up and down like a miniature fountain in his hand.
“It’s incredible. And so beautiful.” I smiled, reaching for the water in his hand.
It stretched into a ribbon from his hand toward me, then looped around my wrist. I lifted my arm, breaking through the “ribbon” and laughed.
“You make it look so easy, Evis.”
“It isn’t hard.” He shrugged. “Every siren can do this and much more. We just need to touch it.”
