Page 54 of A Sea of Vows and Silence (The Naiads of Juile #3)

Selena

“ H appy Birthday, Ceba.”

Early spring once again. My favorite time of the year.

The skies were both sprinkling and bright, the sharp scent of cloud and petrichor breathing through our window, sunshine cutting harsh strands through the gray.

In our bedroom, still in our nightclothes, I laid my gift in my sister’s lap.

She took one look at it and flashed me a slow, rare smile. Then handed me one identical in size.

I raised a brow, suspicious. I knew what was in mine: the newest Cecina Grym novel. She’d probably never read it. Reading was my pastime. Cebrinne wouldn’t care about a story detailing the life of a young queen kidnapped by the Solstice Faery.

But I’d given it to her anyway.

Because it was small and portable. Because it was something she could use and then reuse. Because it was a piece of me.

She pulled the sunny ribbon from my neat center bow, her smile only growing as she unearthed the plaster-soaked canvas hardcover from its paper home. A mischievous sparkle gleamed in her eyes. She pointed to my gift.

“Is it the same?” I asked with a grin. “We did it again?”

Her wrapping was less tidy than mine, held together with twine. I laughed as I held up the same book. Varnished and shining, painted leaves and flowers hung across the cover. Ceba laughed, too.

At least, she would have .

Sometimes, I’d see a glimpse of what she used to be.

She’d eat a bite of cake and forget she couldn’t say mmmm .

She’d stub her toe and forget she couldn’t swear.

And for just the briefest moment, before she remembered, she was back.

Herself. I’d lean in, desperate for the sound of my sister’s voice.

But it didn’t come. Her face always crumpled, as though some part of her, like me, had thought that it might.

I’d spent days—weeks—trying to understand what had happened. After the initial relief of ensuring Cebrinne was safe, I’d waited for an explanation. Why had she attacked Vouri, and why couldn’t she speak?

I knew it was Thaan. He’d found me on the beach after I’d stalled Aegir’s heart, racing for the carriage. The drones stayed to circle the water, searching for the Videre that had escaped them, but Thaan and I returned to Calder to find Cebrinne covered in blood. He’d been with me the entire time.

But I knew he’d also been with her.

Never discovering what happened was the only thing harder to accept than knowing she’d never speak again.

It tortured me at times. Stole my sleep and focus.

Not that I’d had healthy versions of those things before.

The sirens in my nightmares had evolved to a man with brown eyes and a sharp knife.

To finding my sister in shock, unable to talk.

To calling to an unbeating heart, screaming for it to pump again.

Even still, when I wasn’t sleeping, there was little else I thought of that didn’t involve Cebrinne’s silence. Everything I did led back to it.

Something as simple as lifting a glass of wine would make me ponder whether someone who couldn’t speak might also have trouble swallowing.

Gossip that the King and Queen had shared a public fight ending with the Queen throwing her jewelry box down a well led me to fish it out in the middle of the night, testing her rumored magic rings on Ceba’s fingers as she watched, a subdued patience in her gaze.

Watering plants, standing in the sun, commissioning a new dress.

No matter what the task was, I’d often find myself internally drawn from it, my mind ablaze with what had happened that day. And how to fix it.

Maybe that’s when I realized I was wading through the sea of grief, making my way to the depths.

That I wasn’t searching for peace as much as bargaining over what I had lost. That I’d always been a bargainer rather than a listener, had always fought for what I could trade rather than what I might keep.

Grief was much like water. It ebbed and flowed, at times shallow enough to navigate yet so all-encompassing you might lose yourself within it.

It absorbed me on the dark, lonely days when I’d find Cebrinne staring out at our balcony as though waiting for an answer to her own silent questions to appear.

But it found me just as easily when we were content.

The bright moments when we stole through the kitchens for sweets like we’d used to, an undercurrent that trickled below the mischief as cold and bleak as the dark.

I wasn’t sure when I realized I was holding onto Cebrinne for my own sake rather than hers.

If grief were an ocean, Ceba had always been my anchor, and the thought of losing her left me spiraling under fear of a stormy, aimless drift for the rest of my days.

I bargained because no one ever talked about the grief that came before you lost someone.

The sister I’d known who had snapped at Cyprian sailors and fought with Thaan’s drones had somehow become a shell of her former self.

The bargaining that came before loss might have been as hard as acceptance after it. That slow-marching truth that descended before your eyes. Not every heart broke the same way.

Sometimes, it took only a moment to shatter a heart. Other times, heartbreak was merely a slow fracture. A splinter of glass that fell out one tiny shard at a time. I’d held it together with my hands, not caring that it made me bleed.

“Open it,” I said softly .

Cebrinne brushed her raven hair behind an ear and turned the front cover, teal eyes lowering to read the inscription I’d laid inside with my favorite bottle of ink.

To Alana,

I love you. I’ll always love you.

Until the ocean dries up. Until the moon burns out.

Senna

Cebrinne’s mouth parted. Her gaze darted to me, and I swallowed hard, forcing that thick, raw burn in my throat down to the depths.

Her heart sped. She glanced down at it and back to me again, her chest inflating with disbelief, and I let out a small, watery laugh.

“We’ll have to make a plan,” I said after listening to ensure the apartment beside ours was empty.

“You can’t swim across Sidra’s waters to the island.

I think it’s safer to put you on a ship south, while we leave a trail elsewhere for Thaan to follow. ”

My sister nodded, fingers tracing the name I’d written onto her page. Alana . I thought a glass film covered her eyes, but she blinked it away, smiling instead. She pointed down at my book.

I dashed a cheek, my laughter returning. “Don’t tell me you wrote the same thing as well,” I teased. But I opened it up to find she hadn’t.

To Senna,

Happy birthday. May the filth on these pages keep you up on the nights that Pheolix does not.

Love, Cebrinne

I fought to keep my face from falling. “How did you write this?”

We’d experimented with writing. Cebrinne could hold a pen to paper, but as soon as ink began to flow, she’d drop the pen with a sharp hiss as though it had burned her, cradling her wrist.

Cebrinne held up her right hand. Her fingers curled awkwardly, her joints twisted sideways, her hand stiff as though arthritis had deteriorated every connection between her bones.

“Ceba,” I chided softly. She shrugged, but I lifted her hand in mine, wondering if I could water-heal it.

Something told me an injury from breaking a blood vow wouldn’t be so easy to mend.

“How long ago did you write this? Will it get better?” My sister waved the question away intolerantly, tapping the page.

I sighed, staring at the name she’d written. “Pheolix left. He’s back in the mines.”

Cebrinne made a show of rolling her eyes. She walked two fingers dramatically through the air.

I smiled sadly. She knew, of course, what had occurred in the servants’ quarters.

That I’d traded Pheolix’s life with the promise of never seeing him.

Bargained it away, once again. I’m not sure he’d even want to see me after I’d listened to his warning over the bonds of drones and, battling exhaustion and confusion, had let cowardice make my decision for me.

I’d thought that maybe he’d send a letter, if nothing else, to say goodbye. He knew where I slept.

But he hadn’t.

“I vowed I wouldn’t see him,” I said.

Cebrinne turned her arm over, miming the act of cutting her vein open with a knife.

“No. I didn’t swear on my blood.”

She threw her hand in the air.

I bit back another laugh, but Cebrinne suddenly stood, pulling me to my feet. She dragged me to our balcony, flinging the door open, and furiously pointed to her chest.

“You,” I translated, watching as she turned and arced her arm towards the distant sea, “go to Leihani.”

Cebrinne rocked her head up and down. Then aimed her finger at me .

“Where will I go?”

A single, firm nod.

“I don’t know.” I leaned over the railing, staring at the water.

Some part of me wished I could go with her.

Gather every last drop of time she’d have to offer.

Meet the human she’d cordae , hold her daughter, stay with her until the very end.

But I’d need to lay false tracks for Thaan instead.

I wouldn’t even risk going later, should the path lead back to me.

Cebrinne stomped her foot, yanking me from the rail. She whipped her arm into a straight line pointing north.

My mouth twisted. “I can’t.” A raindrop hit my nose.

I inhaled sharply, my chest tightening with sudden frustration.

“I’m not like you. I didn’t receive a clear-cut prophecy from a celestial goddess.

It’s too hard for me not to keep a category of consequences.

I’ve never walked so confidently into the unknown. ”

Cebrinne’s eyes gradually narrowed. She motioned to the balcony floor. The palace flagstones below our feet, her gaze caged with a deep wariness that verged on accusation.

“Don’t worry about whether or not I stay here.”

She shouted a silent word. I recognized the shape of it, the way her teeth bared for only a moment before her tongue flicked the roof of her mouth. Senna. She grabbed the book from my hand, opened the cover with a violent flip, and slapped her own writing.

“Ceba,” I said, but she cut me off with the wave of her arm.

She pointed to herself. She pointed toward Leihani. She pointed to me. She pointed to Pheolix’s name.

I exhaled through my nose. “What if he doesn’t want to see me? He agreed to guard us in hopes that he’d find his brother, but I got him sent away before he could.”

It’s not as though I hadn’t fantasized about it. Riding a horse into the mountains, sneaking through the tiny town to discover the mines above. Winterlight.

But my imagination blurred the moment I met Pheolix’s eyes. I’d had my chance. I’d lost it .

The corners of her jaw flexed. Her shoulders slackened, though her eyes drilled into me, as though she were dealing with the dumbest person in the world. She crossed her legs and fell to her rump on the floor, nose high and stubborn in the air.

It was the most animated I’d seen my sister in almost a year—and it was that thought that caused my certainty to stumble.

I swallowed. “You won’t go unless I do?”

She continued staring at me with mounting impatience. I raked my eyes with the heel of my palm. Then lowered them to search the newly claimed light in her eyes. “All right,” I said. “All right, fine. I’ll go.”

She smiled. Extended a pinky.

I wrapped it in mine.

We shook.