Page 142 of The Mortal Trials

“Do you have any pets?” he asks, shifting to see me better.

“Only the quetzals that flit through Abuela’s garden, if you consider those pets. They are fed and loved, I suppose.”

“Do they have names?” He purses his lips.

“No.”

“Just shy of pets, then. Pets must have names,” he primly informs me. August glances down at the necklace on my chest. “Since the fourth trial ended, there’s a lot I don’t understand.”

I nod my agreement, so my tone doesn’t betray that I’m keeping things from him.

He asks me about Cillian, and I brag about his skill with chiseling stone. Tell him how obsessed Carina always was about writing and syntax.

That I never knew what I wanted for a future or career and wondered if I was meant to be a soldier, and that’s why I had no other aspirations.

I describe Abuela. How she loves bright colors and sweet treats. How her smile can calm any worried heart. How she likes to hum like he does. “I miss her.”

He hugs me tighter. “How did she come to raise you?”

“Mamá left when we were little, to become an acolyte.”

His arm tenses around me. “For what god?”

“I don’t know.” And that much is true. She serves the Mexica pantheon, but if she’s bound to a particular Aztec deity, I don’t know which one.

“What about your dad?” he rasps, his voice more guarded after hearing the truth about my mother.

I clear my throat. “Da died a year before she left us.”

He’s patient as I collect my thoughts. Though I know he’ll be satisfied with only that information, I want him to know everything.

“Back then, we lived in the Celtic realm. Near his aging parents. They passed shortly after he did… He and Grand-da and their friends met each spring and rode horses deep into the forest. They stayed in a little stone cottage that had been in the family for generations and spent a week together, hunting.”

“What did they hunt?” His voice is gravel.

The truth. It’s all I have left. “Boar.”

I feel him tense.

“It was a boar that killed him.”

August sits in the silence with me.

“Do you want to know what’s worse than that?”

He swallows. “What?”

“Our Da described a long, stone bridge that spanned the mountains near that cottage and told us wild stories of the hungry trolls who lived beneath it. He said they ate wandering children.” Tears clog my throat again.

“Other than Daedalus being dragged into it, did the second trial have anything to do with your life?”

I nod. “Three of us were captured in one of the battles we fought. We were tossed into a tiny cell. It was sweltering and dark, and the stone sweated like the walls of the maze. We were supposed to be executed at dawn, but Morrigan prowled through the darkness to find and free us before the sun rose.”

He pauses the slow circles to ask, “What about the ash or the river?”

“Ash fell from the sky the day we buried my sister. It painted the red desert gray until the rains came a few weeks later. No one knows why. I think the river was a threat to Cillian. He is an apprentice to a master building a temple for Athena, who represents memory. The Lethe represents forgetting. I lost Carina in this life, but her soul is safe now. I think Ares is threatening to carry Cillian’s soul to Hades’s underworld before Morrigan can claim it. He would forget us there, and we would mourn him for an eternity.”

August presses his eyes closed and mutters a curse. “I’m so sorry,” he says, pulling me tighter against his chest.