Page 40

Maxim looks thoughtful, but Kallias’s features twist into one of the most beautiful portraits of disdain I have ever seen.

I roll my eyes and let out a weary sigh, the kind I’m sure Aella would wholeheartedly approve of. The answer is so clear to me, but apparently, I need to voice it.

“We need Myna.”

Chapter 13

Aella

The days blur together as we follow the stream northward, its winding path carving through the Agria. On our fifth day, the landscape begins to change, the forest thinning as the ground rises in uneven slopes, the first hint of the mountains breaking through the horizon.

Klem navigates the uneven terrain with steady footing, though any sudden jolt sends a twinge through the nearly healed wound along my ribs.

But my thoughts are elsewhere, fixed on the man riding beside me.

It’s not the sharpness of his gaze or the quiet power in his movements that holds me captive. It’s what lingers beneath his skin.

Lightning.

I’ve asked him dozens of questions over the past few days, most of which he’s deflected. But I find myself wanting to try again.

“Are you from Arkhadia’s royal bloodline?” I ask, nudging Klem forward to ride closer to him. I’d never considered the possibility before he showed me his theïkós, but lightning could fall within the power of winter.

Lyxander glances my way. “Do I look like I’m related to King Xerxes?”

I narrow my eyes as my sole theory goes up in flames, crumbling to ash before I can grasp at it. I’ve only seen the king of Arkhadia in portraits, but Lyxander looks nothing like him.

Still, I press on. “Then where does the lightning come from?”

“Probably the same place as your wind.”

I roll my eyes. “Do you ever get tired of not answering me?”

“How else will I keep myself entertained?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say dryly, wiping away a raindrop that splatters on my cheek. “With a conversation, perhaps?”

“If I’m the only one answering questions, little bird, it’s not a conversation. It’s an interrogation.” His expression doesn’t change, but there’s a subtle shift in his posture, a tension that wasn’t there before.

I look away. His words cut too deeply, striking a chord of hypocrisy I’m not ready to confront. After all, it’s not like I’m planning to tell him he accidentally abducted the princess of the Sorrows.

“I’m sure there are many others with powers like ours who choose to hide out of fear,” he says. “Those with the gift to see, and those who prefer the farthest heights of the sky, or the deepest depths of the ocean.”

“Harpaurai? And sirens?” Oracles and seers I know to be true; my old mentor, Calliope, had a touch of the sight. But sirens are cautionary whispers on every isle and dock in the Sorrows—warnings traded over chipped cups and salt-wet ropes to keep the youngest among them in line. Now and then a sailor staggers back claiming he heard one and lived, and the crew laugh until the story sours. The Harpaurai are rarer in the telling. I know them from my nursemaid’s tales when I was small, and from one encounter with Keres under a headless statue. That memory crawls over my skin, and I force it off. “You’re speaking of bedtime stories and seafolk ballads.”

“Perhaps that’s all we are in the end. Stories someone chooses to tell.” He pauses, then asks, “If your theïkós had emerged differently, would you have told others of it?”

The question catches me off guard, and I falter, my fingers tightening on the reins.

My gaze is drawn to his jawline, the dark markings twisting across his skin, stark against the pale canvas of his throat. Not tattoos, as I had assumed. Scars. Made not by hands but by his own body. By refusing what was his, driving it deeper until it erupted, branding him with the cost of his silence.

A weapon, the Eagle had called him.

No. Not called. Named. Marked and remade, cast in iron and storm and cruelty to fulfill a purpose that wasn’t his own. Keres, too, had only seen his power, not his person. To them, he was a vessel, something to drain and pour into themselves.

The heavy memory of Keres latches on to me, gripping tightly and refusing to let go. I fight to steady my breathing, swallowing back the urge to press my own discomfort down into the cracks of someone else’s pain.

“No,” I admit finally. “People either fear power they don’t possess or want to claim it as their own.”