Page 67 of Lady of the Drowned Empire
“Lyr, I…I….” He went quiet, and there seemed to be some commotion happening around him. “I have to go,” he said, voice low.
The light left the stone.
I yelled and threw the stone on the mats, sinking to my knees and burying my head in my hands.
It was the second time he’d refused me his oath.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MORGANA
The week following the murder of my father passed by slowly. Painfully. Meera kept herself up in her room, crying and only rousing herself to make any necessary public appearances. We were to appear at breakfast and dinner. And we were expected to look put together, like everything was fine. Aunt Arianna demanded it.
The amount of soturi within the fortress had nearly doubled overnight, a mix of Ka Batavia soldiers and Ka Kormac. Cresthaven was becoming so unpleasant to be around that I found myself joining Lyr at the library for research every day, which was annoying and frustrating.
But keeping my secret from her—keeping the knowledge I had about Jules—left me riddled with guilt, so I sat with Lyr reading and rereading the same Godsdamned boring information. I couldn’t find anything new about her contract with Mercurial, and neither could she. But the more I read, the more I was convinced that he really had put a piece of the actual light inside her and that it had reacted to the part of her that was Asherah. Asherah had part of the light in her, too—Auriel had placed it there just before the Valalumir had crystalized. If Mercurial had been holding onto Asherah’s chest plate for a millennium after her death, it made sense he’d found a way to recapture the light as well.
But even knowing that—so what? The information was useless. It didn’t get her out of the contract, and it didn’t tell her what to do next. We were both completely stumped. The Afeya hadn’t offered anything useful beyond his last appearance. In fact, Mercurial had been mysteriously quiet for days. Lyr said he’d vanished from their last meeting, claiming he’d been angered by someone else, and had gone to take care it. But he never resurfaced, or gave Lyr any hint of when he’d return.
When all of our Afeyan contract research led to our hundredth dead end, I urged Lyr to return to researching the history of Asherah, looking again for clues into Asherah’s loss of power and how it might connect to finding Lyr’s own. Much of it, she’d read before, but now, as she poured over the scrolls, she was acting possessed. Every scroll had to be read from start to finish, no detail miscounted. Every little thing she could find, she’d obsess over and then cross-reference with her earlier notes.
I was so fucking bored, having to read this all and then hear Lyr repeat it again in her mind. I’d known the story—every Lumerian child did—but never to this extent. If my old teachers could see me now….
Canturiel created the light in Heaven. Akadim tried to steal it. A war was fought in the Celestial Realms, and the demons lost and were banished to Lumeria on Earth. The gods and goddesses of the realm were materializing as well, playing with taking physical form. Some came and went as they pleased, incarnating into fully grown bodies and abandoning them at will.
Then one day, they got stuck. Their bodies were permanent. They began to age—far more slowly than we did—yet they were mortal. New Lumerians weren’t simply falling from the sky, or magically appearing, they were being born. Wars were fought to drive back the akadim, and Lumerians were dying.
In Heaven, four goddesses and three gods sacrificed their lives to protect the light, forswearing all other duties—until Auriel saw Asherah and Asherah saw Auriel. And after years of denying their attraction, they broke their oaths.
The affair discovered, Asherah was banished to Lumeria. Auriel stole the light to come to her aid, and the Council in turn punished every god and goddess who’d failed to stop him.
Moriel, who had first reported the affair, was the most furious. He led the akadim forces. The goddess Ereshya, Asherah’s most loyal companion, defected to Moriel, and the god Shiviel became Moriel’s Second. Three of the Guardians battled the remaining four until Lumeria Matavia sank to the bottom of the ocean, and the Valalumir shattered into seven pieces, and knowledge of their location vanished.
By the end of the week, I was near tears, largely from frustration. Lyr was going in circles. She had no idea how to find her power or what anything meant. And Mercurial was nowhere to be found. I could see the toll it was all taking on her.
And I was near tears also because of boredom. I’d been avoiding going outside as much as I could—still reeling from what I’d learned about Jules—and I knew the streets were full of people talking about the transition of power, yelling in support of Arianna, or gossiping about Tristan and his new beautiful, talented bride. Disgusting.
Lyr was more hurt by that than I’d expected. Tristan had always been a piece of shit in my eyes, but Lyr had really loved him—or somehow convinced herself she had. The way her heart raced when thinking of Rhyan was an entire universe away from how she’d always felt around Tristan.
I couldn’t get her to talk about it or about Rhyan. He was still gone, still hunting, and apparently barely speaking to her. He called her vadati once a day under the guise of checking in and assuring her he was alive. I’d been around the forsworn long enough to know the truth—he was reassuring himself that she was alive.
By the end of the week, we were expected to appear at dinner at Cresthaven, a formal banquet with the entire Council to show support for Arianna and celebrate Tristan and Naria’s engagement. We still had not even had a funeral for father.
All week long, when I hadn’t been with Lyr, I’d been trying to listen—to be near Arianna as much as I could stomach, to hear her slip-up and forget to use the elixir and leave her thoughts unshielded. But she never did, not once.
I’d spent another night with Namtaya, torturing myself with her memories of Jules, piecing them together with my own.
Just before the banquet began that evening, I felt his presence outside my bedroom.
Are you coming in? I asked.
Are you inviting me?
I rolled my eyes. Oh, now you’re waiting for permission.
I have always waited for permission.
Who gave you permission to watch me the other day? I could still feel his eyes on me, the darkness and intensity of his gaze watching me writhe beneath Namtaya, watching me come undone by her tongue and her fingers and the truth I’d learned—and come undone by knowing he’d watched in the shadows.
