Page 30 of A Sea of Vows and Silence (The Naiads of Juile #3)
Selena
“ T here she is.”
The silhouette of a Naiad climbing onto the rocks cut through the moonlit water below. Just enough light to bounce off the bronze scales of her tail before she transitioned into legs.
Pheolix reached for my hand, offering to help me up, but I propelled myself upright with the sudden, hot fuel of anger. Aegir leaned into the rocks as I marched past, relief flickering under his sharp green eyes.
Cebrinne sighed when she saw me. As though the very sight of me exhausted her. Theia in the stars, I could throttle her. Grab her by the shoulders and shake the life from her, if she wasn’t so moon-damned determined to do it herself.
“I’m sorry,” she said, the words ushered out from the tail-end of her exhale.
I halted at the edge of the smooth Parian stone, arms and hands vibrating with a fire lit under my bones. “You’re not sorry. You just don’t want to hear me out. You don’t want to deal with me. That’s not an apology, Ceba. That’s an attempt to silence me and make yourself feel better.”
She sighed again, dragging her feet through the tide pool toward the cave, and the sound of her breath only fanned my flames.
“Why, Ceba? Why? We’ve made it this far. Why jump in before we had a plan? The tunnel is flooded with cursed water, and Xiane says it won’t drain for another day. You say you want your freedom, but your games are costing us time, and you don’t seem to even care. ”
Cebrinne glanced at me, her raven blue-black hair dripping with the sea, silk dress heavy with the weight of water. “I’m going to sleep.”
“Ceba!” I stalked after her, ignoring Pheolix and Aegir.
Pheolix scratched at the back of his neck, diverting his gaze to the other side of the island as though he’d just set eyes on the world’s most fascinating lumpy gray rock, but Aegir rested his hands on his hips and watched as Cebrinne flopped on one of his shipwrecked furs and flung an arm over her eyes.
I stood at her feet, seething. Some prudent voice in my head whispered that she likely was as tired as she looked.
That, if I gave her a day’s worth of time and space, she’d explain herself.
She always did. But after hours of imagining her tossing herself down that black pit, seeing the water gush and rise and flood, running for our lives and being forced to leave her behind, I hardly cared.
“Do you want to die, Ceba? Is that it?”
I hadn’t let myself ask until now, too afraid of her answer. But I’d put the question off long enough. I couldn’t manage a day like this again.
I had to know.
Cebrinne just lay there, offering me nothing but the underside of her chin and a scuffed elbow.
A knot thickened in my throat, painful and suffocating. I gulped down my air to breathe past it, my lungs suddenly raw from the salty wind. “You promised,” I forced out. “Until the ocean dries up. Until the moon burns out.”
The tide washed over the rocks behind me, smooth and slow. In. And then back out. I closed my eyes.
“I know I did, Senna.”
“Good,” I spat. “I was worried you’d forgotten.” I turned on my heel, abandoning her to the company of the hollow cave and stomping my way back to Pheolix, though I refused to make eye contact with him. I sank back into the space where I’d sat for hours, rubbing deep circles into my eyes .
“The tunnel might be drained by tomorrow,” Pheolix said. “We could go down in the morning and check.”
I shook my head. “I’m heading back to Calder at first light. Ceba can either come or stay. I don’t know why I care so much when she obviously doesn’t care at all.”
He spun his knife over his knuckles, dim light flashing from the blade. “Because you love her,” he said softly. “And there’s nothing worse than watching someone you love slowly lose themselves after they’ve spent years protecting you.”
“Is that what she’s doing?” I ran an agitated hand through my hair, the strands still caught between my fingers as I cupped my chin with my palm and looked at him. “Losing herself?”
He shrugged mildly. “Either that or she’s finding herself. They go hand-in-hand, sometimes.”
I studied him a moment. Then turned away, watching the light dance with the water below us. From my periphery, Aegir left the cavern wall. He squatted beside Cebrinne, forearms bent over his knees, and massaged his thumb into the meat of his opposite hand.
“Hungry?” he asked Cebrinne without really gazing at her.
She sat up slowly, pushing wet hair from her eyes. A flicker of annoyance sparked in my chest that she rose for him and not me. Aegir set a plate in her lap, a small cut of trout we’d fired an hour earlier. She stared at it as though it were invisible.
“I thought about what you said.” Aegir dropped a hip, lowering himself onto the stone beside her. “About Vouri.”
She acknowledged him with a slight tilt of her head, eyes still on her plate.
“You’re right,” he continued. “It’s her choice. I was hoping you’d deliver a message to her. If she wants, I’d send Sindri to meet her where the Venus Sea meets the Juile, just off the banks of the palace. ”
I snorted under my breath, knowing how she’d take that. I could almost hear the thoughts inside her head. Would you like me to clap? Praise you for allowing a female to make a decision regarding her body? Well done, you stand-up male. Thank you for giving her your permission.
Ceba laid her hands on either side of her plate, rotating it slowly in place. “When?”
Aegir blew his air out in a single, soft blast. “Whenever she likes. The next full moon, if she wants.”
“And afterward, we’ll pretend we cordaed ,” she said, voice devoid of tone. “To lure Thaan into a trap. Without the stones?”
“No.” His brows knotted slightly, watching her plate turn.
“No, not as part of a trick. I don’t think that sort of trick would work, anyway.
Luring Thaan into a trap by making him think we’d mated.
We don’t even have the stones Theia said would kill him, so what kind of trap would we set?
And watching you jump down there—” He clamped down on his jaw, twisting his head to the side.
“It’s clear there’s something you and Selena aren’t sharing with me. ”
Her hands slowly stopped. Aegir propped his knees up, wrists carelessly hanging off them as he watched her.
“Senna and I summoned the lunar eclipse the morning we left for Venusia,” Cebrinne said. “That’s how we were able to reach Theia.”
I stared across the cavern at her, open-mouthed at her confession, though I supposed it shouldn’t surprise me. It’s not as though she’d discussed all the other choices she’d made of late with me prior to making them. And I knew she could see me sitting here, well within earshot.
Aegir stretched his back. I suspected the attempt to appear relaxed cost him a bit more effort than he let on. “And how would you do that?”
“Ursa explained it as she was dying. Here, in this cave. She watched as her colony swore their loyalty to Thaan. All of them, including me. Then they left, and we were the last to go. She stopped us and said the only way to be free of him would be to call Theia.” She hesitated on her words, returning to her plate.
Sending it in a slow spin over her thighs.
“How to pull the tide so the moon would follow. Where to find a silverspire. What we’d need for a flame that called to the moon. ”
Aegir’s chest deflated, his tattoos dark under the shadow of the cave. “So that my Domus would think you were a lunar sign.”
“No. Thaan came up with that after we caused the eclipse, but that’s not why we did it. We just wanted to ask Theia if I’d ever be free of Thaan. If there was any possible way.”
I glanced at Pheolix, uneasy about allowing him to listen as Cebrinne spilled our secrets to the Venusian Videre .
The drone’s gray eyes glinted in the dark, watching the two of them talk with unerring focus.
I assumed Thaan had given him the same blood drops he’d offered Cebrinne.
Freedom for a day, a handful of days at a time.
But if Thaan wanted, he’d only have to call to Pheolix’s blood and then question him.
Aegir finally reached for Ceba’s hand, pinning it softly, halting the rotation of her plate. “And Theia gave you the details of Thaan’s death?”
“No,” Cebrinne murmured. “She gave me the details of mine.”