Page 4 of A Sea of Vows and Silence (The Naiads of Juile #3)

Cebrinne

“ W hat were you dreaming about?”

Selena blinked at me, blue eyes vibrant in the dark. I waited for her mind to adjust. For sleep to recede and waking thoughts to ascend. She pushed her sable waves from her eyes, rolling onto her hip to better see me. “About playing skip-chalk as kids. Back in Cypria.”

The memory dashed behind my eyes. A simple one. Happy. Shapes and numbers etched in white along the gangway. Rolled dice. Small feet bouncing across a map of fate’s invention.

Laughter.

I gave a slow nod, though we both knew it was a lie. Nightmares visited Selena almost every night. The soft moans from the bed across mine weren’t borne from tossing dice over a chalk pattern. She’d been dreaming of that night again.

The night we’d first transitioned.

Ten years ago.

I sighed slowly, my stomach crumpling as it always did when I remembered that night. I never dreamed of it, though. I rarely dreamed at all. “Come on,” I said. Then stopped and smiled. “Happy Birthday.”

Selena straightened, smiling back. “Happy Birthday.”

We dressed in the dark, ears focused on the muted breaths flowing from the apartment beside ours. Deimos and Thaan would sleep for another hour. Not an abundance of time, but enough. She laced my corset for me, then turned so I could do the same .

“The silverspire?” she asked.

I twisted my hair over my shoulder, combing my fingers roughly through the strands. “The balcony. Next to the juniper tree.”

Selena ducked out of the room in a quiet swish of skirts as I gathered our tools. A knife of opal. A vial of crushed mugwort. Dust of white seashells. The feather of a dusk-whispering owl. I rolled the bundle into my soft leather pouch, tying it to my waistband as Selena appeared at my shoulder.

“Ready?”

My breath didn’t escape my lungs until we were outside, and even then, it only trickled out, shallow and thin as we darted between the shadows hung along the curtain wall. Across the sky bridge and down one of the southern towers, our quiet feet seeking the refuge of the cliffs.

I knotted the leather cord a second time. “Ready.”

We’d planned our path weeks ago, but the events of the early morning were years in the making.

Most of our supplies were common. But the silverspire was the only flower to call the moon’s attention. It bloomed during a solar eclipse, but not before reaching seven years of age.

We’d convinced Thaan to let us search the north for Naiads, the ones that migrated between hot springs in the Sylus Mountains. Then traversed the slopes ourselves, intent on finding a lustrous floral shine between rock and earth.

Discovering the moon-damned flower had been the simple part.

Handing Thaan a list of known locations where Naiad families sought refuge in the sulfurous heat sent raw bile up the back of my throat.

And then we’d had to change the trajectory of the moon. Hours of fighting the tide, sending it just a little east, just a little south, measuring the stars in our spyglass at night to calculate the rotations in the vast sky.

One inch too many, and we’d lose years.

“You’re quiet,” Selena murmured, eyes ahead on the dawning sunlight .

“It’s early,” I said, listening to the scrape of our boots over rock and rough heather. “I'm not fully awake.”

We’d stolen, lied, threatened, promised, and coerced. Selena carried guilt over our methods. I didn’t. Guilt was a five-letter word I cared little about. Too human. Too small. An emotional reaction to failing your own sorry expectations. Self-imposed and bitter.

Guilt was the psychological trick society played to keep you in line. To keep you honest. A punishment of your own device, an addiction everyone seemed to seek, whether or not they’d actually done any harm.

Yes, I’d hated myself for giving Thaan the little Naiad colonies. But not because he’d left for two months with a troupe of his secret soldiers, seizing the youngest ones and leaving the old and weak to die off.

I’d hated myself for offering him a tool with which to broaden his reach and bolster his numbers. Because in the last ten years, since the night Selena and I had been taken, the one thing that helped me close my eyes and seek rest at night was the knowledge that someday, somehow, I’d kill him.

“Are you nervous?”

I ejected a puff of air. “No.”

The scent of salt on the wind lifted both our faces. We stared together at the moon, low over the horizon, eerily dark. The sun’s rays wrapped around it—a lover embracing a black hole in the sky.

As a child, I’d believed Aalto was enamored with Theia. As an adult, I knew the gods weren’t interested enough to even consider loving us mortals, let alone each other.

“It’s all right to admit you are.”

“I’m not.”

“It is your freedom,” she said, sitting on a veined red boulder to unlace a boot.

I sat beside her in a huff, probing the inside of my belly for the presence of fear. But there was none.

Just smooth, liquid, molten hate .

“I’m not nervous.”

Selena nodded. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Her lashes fluttered. “Well. I am.”

“Don’t be. If Theia can’t give me an answer, I’ll just take care of him tomorrow with the knife under my pillow, let my blood boil me from the inside out, and be done with him forever.”

Exhausted of such jokes, she cut a sharp glare at me in the dim morning light. I smirked, holding her glare until she clicked her tongue and focused on her hands instead. My smile faltered.

I wasn't sure if it was a joke anymore. When you sign your soul away to a thing you hate, you carve a piece of yourself away. And something roots in the place your soul used to be. Something wrought and polluted and numb. Years pass, and the hole only grows. Until you discover you’re more vicious than living. More monster than mortal.

I was a black cloud of rotten nothing , forever blooming in the dark.

Selena waited for me to mock the glare she aimed at the horizon, and when I ignored it instead, she shoved to her feet. “You’ll do no such thing, Ceba, and just for saying that, you’re buying me a pound of peppermint toffee.”

“I suppose I can afford it if I die tomorrow.”

Selena’s nose pinched the way it had when she was small. When we hadn’t cared that our feet were dirty and bare. That sewn-in patches lined our dresses. That we hadn’t combed our hair by the time the sun reached its zenith in the sky each day.

“Why are you taking your boots off?” I asked.

“Aren’t you taking yours off?”

“No.”

Selena grabbed her boot, shoving her foot inside. “I thought we had to be naked.”

A potent cackle from my throat. “We’re not swimming. We’re not moon-bathing. We’re burning a stupid magical flower. ”

“Give me that.” She snatched my list away. I crossed my arms, suffocating my smile, though it erupted from the corners of my mouth anyway. I’d memorized the list years ago. Silverspire, opal, mugwort, seashells, feather.

No naked .

“Well, everything else we have to do as moon-forsaken Naiads requires us to be naked.” She crumpled the list and tossed it dully at my stomach, her nose even more pinched.

I laughed at her until she shook her head, her mouth breaking into a smile that devolved into reluctant laughter. And then I laughed harder.

I didn’t realize that would be the last time I would laugh out loud with my sister.