Page 66 of Promise of Darkness
I tear into the bread, slathering butter over it and then dunking it in the stew. “Sweet Maia.” It’s so good, though I haven’t eaten in hours so anything would taste amazing right now.
“Baylor’s not that scary,” she murmurs after an appropriate pause.
Aha.
Clearly, Thalia takes after her cousin, for he’s not the only one with an agenda, it seems.
“He didn’t scare me,” I tell her. “I wasn’t feeling well.”
“You went white as a wraith,” she replies, “the second you saw him.”
“Heisthe Blackheart, is he not? My mother’s generals piss their pants when they hear they’ll be facing him.”
“I didn’t think you’d be the sort to be afraid of him. And he may be this big, gruff bear, but he’s perfectly housebroken.” She flashes a smile at me. “If you think him scary, you should see the orphaned kittens he thinks nobody knows he’s got stashed in his rooms. He takes them saucers of milk every night, but the demi-fey think it’s for them, so they’ve been stealing it. Now he’s set traps for the demi-fey.”
She bursts into a peal of laughter, as if she’s picturing it.
I can’t help myself. A reluctant smile tugs at my lips. I don’t know why, but I feel as though I’ve known her forever.
Thalia reminds me of Andraste, and how things used to be.
The second I think it, my smile dies.
Thalia rests a hand over mine. “I understand. It must be overwhelming to think yourself the pawn between two courts.”
“No, it’s just…. I miss my sister. I miss my home. And even then….” It was never truly a home. It hasn’t been for a long time. “Have you ever felt as though you don’t belong anywhere?”
“Yes,” she whispers, and her fingers curl through mine. “When I was a child, I was… unwanted. The fae are rarely fertile, and my mother had a brief fling with a mysterious man on a beach one night. His seed took, and here I am.” She shrugs, but I can see she hasn’t escaped the weight of her past. “I’m the bastard offspring of one of the saltkissed. My grandmother tried to drown me at birth. As you can imagine, I never had a home until I arrived here.”
“Your grandmother?” Thiago’s grandmother?
Thalia shudders. “An evil bitch if ever I’ve met one. She’s dead now. Sometimes I spit on her grave.”
Tugging another piece of bread from the roll, I pop it in my mouth. “When I was a little girl, I spat in my mother’s teapot once. She would have killed me if she ever realized.”
“Your mother does make my grandmother seem a benevolent soul,” Thalia admits.
I offer her a grape. There’s not much to say to that.
At least she didn’t try to drown me at birth.
That I know of.
“So you’re half saltkissed?” Does that mean Thiago has the sea in his veins too? Or is it through her maternal bloodline that they share blood? “You were alive during the wars?”
The Father of Storms created the saltkissed many an eon ago, gifting his worshippers with the ability to breathe underwater and to have voices that could sing a sailor to his grave. Most of them were female worshippers, which is typical—I’m sure they “worshipped” him in a particular way—but a very prized few were males.
Most of them were trapped in the prison world with him when they bound him to the Hallow that resides on the rocky Isle of Stormhaven in the middle of the Innesmuch Sea.
The ones who remained in this world lost their voices.
I’m told that sometimes you can still hear them, pouring their rage through a conch shell late at night.
“I was alive,” Thalia mutters. “I was living in Unseelie territories then, trying to eke out a living. It wasn’t a pleasant time. I’d been exiled by my grandmother and found myself hunted by every type of creature who can be found in those forests. Thiago found me after the wars, locked in a cage in the goblin caves. They liked my voice and used to make me sing for them by stabbing me through the cage with their spears until I relented. My powers were starting to mature, and Thiago could sense me out there in the world somewhere. He didn’t know who or what he was feeling, but he came for me. He rescued me. And I’ve been by his side ever since.”
I feel a little embarrassed.
“I think your grandmother might be worse than my mother,” I tell her.
