Unless a siren couldn’t touch.
Every siren could do this, except for the siren king. I remembered Kye’s crestfallen expression when he confessed tome that he could no longerfeelwater. It was hard for me to understand it then. I still didn’t know how exactly water felt to sirens, and probably never would. What I understood much better now was Kye’s anguish at having lost this ability. A very important part of what made him a siren and one of his people was now gone.
Evis hummed along with the music, twirling us in the ocean spray again. But I raised a hand, asking him to set me down.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “The fun has just begun. The night is young.”
The night?
I glanced around quickly. The sirens’ glowing skin as well as the shimmer of the water and the plants around us illuminated the darkness, making the night look brighter than it was.
“I really should go,” I insisted, freeing myself from his hold.
“If you must, but I shall miss you all night long.” Smiling, Evis bowed to me before kissing my hand, then walked me out of the water and up the beach to Kye who was watching us intently.
Evis was still humming to the music as we approached the king. Kye stood by his rock, his hands crossed over his broad chest, his head down, those multi-faceted eyes of his shooting ice shards at Evis.
“Who said you could sing to her?” he growled.
Evis blanched, choking on the last notes of his humming.
I rolled my eyes with a groan. Just when I felt sorry for Kye being excluded from the party, he had to go ahead and provide more reasons for people to exclude him.
“Growling is not a way to make friends, Your Majesty,” I said with an artificially sweet smile. “And Evis is just humming to himself, not singing to anyone. Not that he’d be doing anything wrong even if he was singing, now would he?”
Evis cleared his throat quickly and rubbed his palms on his loose pink pants.
“Well, thank you for the dance, Maren. Have a good night. It was...um, an honor to see you, Your Majesty.” He backed away with an awkward bow to the king before disappearing into the festive glow of the night.
“And you wonder why you’re all alone in that palace,” I said to Kye.
“I most certainly never wondered about that,” he countered, lifting his arm to offer me the other end of the bead necklace again.
I took it, since we were back on our way to Arnon’s palace, and while walking side by side, it made no difference if we were connected by the necklace. But Kye was right, it did feel almost like holding hands.
“Well, maybe you should wonder at least a little,” I said. “Then you may figure out that being nice to people doesn’t cost anything. They may even be nice back to you. And then, who knows, you may even end up making friends without forcing them to be your hostages first.”
He gave me a sideways glance. “Does that mean we’re friends?”
“Is that all you got from what I’ve just said? Really?”
I expected a flippant response, teasing or flirting from him, but Kye just stared ahead, his brows knitted into a frown.
“I don’t deserve nice,” he said. “Not from them.”
I thought about what Evis had said about carnage in Sarnala. Kye had sent his friends to their deaths. They had died for nothing. They killed many werewolves, too, whose only fault was that they acted according to their nature while warding off an unprovoked attack from the invading sirens.
Was Kye really that rotten in his youth? Spoiled, royal brat with no regard for life or peace?
I didn’t know Kye back then, but I believed I’d learned his character a little by now. And I didn’t believe he’d be capableof such senseless cruelty and callousness, not now and probably not even then.
Kye could be cocky, gruff, and vain sometimes, but he wasn’t a narcissist void of compassion. He valued life, not just of sirens and humans, but even of lesser beings like animals and plants. He was capable of regret. I saw him suffer from guilt. A hundred years’ worth of it... A shudder ran across my shoulders. What a terrible burden that was to carry for that long.
“We should hurry,” Kye said with an edge to his voice and tossed a penetrating look at the water under the bridge we were crossing.
He walked in wide strides, making sure to step on one bridge stone at a time. After we had crossed, the glass blocks shimmered in the starlight among the dull paving stones behind us, marking the passage of the king.
From what I’d read, the Reef of Lyrei consisted of an ancient coral colony that formed in and around underwater mountains. The peaks and tips of the mountains created the rocky islands of Lyrei on the surface. They peppered this part of the ocean, some interconnected underwater by rock and coral, many linked on the surface by bridges, either naturally formed or built by sirens.
