A Dawn of Onyx (The Sacred Stones, #1)(105)

I had—

I couldn’t even think of it. What I had done.

What I had lost.

“Nobody is following us,” I said, instead.

“After your… episode,” she paused as if trying to get her wording right. “There was nobody left to follow us. None of King Ravenwood’s witches from the capital are here, so I found a spell to cloak the ship. When they gather their armies back together, at least we’ll be untraceable.”

I nodded, numb.

I was not going to ask about Kane. Whether he was on this ship or—

“So,” she said, removing the cool compress and soaking it again. “You’re a Faerie. You could have told me, you know.” I could hear the hurt in her voice.

“She didn’t know.”

I looked up, squinting into direct sunlight. The voice belonged to Ryder, who had Leigh by the hand. She was stone-faced.

I had never seen her expression so cold.

“How are you a true Fae, and neither of us are? We had the same mother,” he asked. He, too, was graver than I had ever seen him before. That endless light that shone inside him regardless of circumstance was gone.

“I don’t know,” I said. It came out like a plea.

I stood up with Mari’s help and walked toward him steadily. When I knew neither would flinch, I wrapped them in a hug.

We stayed like that for a long while.

Even though we had different fathers, I had never felt like they were my half-siblings.

I had never known my father and my mother had never spoken of him in my childhood. At last, I had pried it out of her just two years ago. She told me she had met a man from another kingdom, which one she couldn’t recall, in a tavern outside of Abbington.

She was drowning her sorrows over the recent loss of her own mother, and he had lifted her spirits and taken her dancing. The next morning, she woke up in his cottage and he was gone.

She never saw him again.

I hated to think of my father that way, so I didn’t think of him much at all.

Even as I wracked my brain, I knew it wasn’t possible that the man could have been responsible for what I was.

I was the last full-blooded Fae. Both my parents had to be full-blooded Fae. Which meant either my mother had hidden her Fae nature from us our whole lives, or she wasn’t really my mother.

My siblings were now my only living family, the closest people I had left, and odds were, I wasn’t related to either of them at all. That coupled with the gaping hole deep in my heart at the loss of my mother and the realization that she wasn’t really the woman who had given birth to me was enough to break whatever spirit I had left.

Despite our embrace, I had never felt so far away from them, and we had just spent months apart. I hated what I now knew I was, so foreign and removed I hardly felt like myself.

But most of all, I hated Kane. I wasn’t sure where he was—I told myself I didn’t care if he had survived the battle with his father.

Why should I?

I pulled away from my siblings and looked out across the too-bright deck. A few soldiers were tending to the wounded, but it seemed most everyone else had gone below.

The stomps of petite footsteps from the captain’s quarters echoed across the deck, breaking me from my somber thoughts.

“Ghastly cowards, that’s what we are!”

I spun to see Amelia, Eryx, Griffin, and Barney make their way onto the deck in succession.

No Kane.

I couldn’t tell if it was grief or fear or relief that twisted my stomach.

Each of their gazes lingered on me. Amelia cold as ice, King Eryx with vague interest, Barney’s sympathy, Griffin unreadable as always. A flicker of shame sparked deep in my chest at their prying eyes, but I was too numb, too exhausted to really feel it.

“Amelia, we had no choice.” King Eryx turned back to his daughter. “We had to survive.”

Amelia whirled to face him. “We left our people to suffer.” She practically spit the words.

“We got some out on the other ships, they—”

“I got them out. You just ran like a—”

“More importantly,” he enunciated right over her. “We lived to fight another day.”

“And where will we go now? Just keep running?” she asked, bitterness coating her voice.

King Eryx looked to Griffin, but he didn’t respond. Instead, Griffin turned to the bow of the ship.

Like a dark and vengeful demon of death, Kane stepped out from the shadows.

“We sail for the Kingdom of Citrine.”

He was alive.

I thought I heard my heart crack open.

He looked wrecked. Gashes covered his arms and neck, one eye was blackened and sealed shut, and his lip was split. His chest wound was haphazardly wrapped under his open, billowing shirt, but bright red blood was seeping through the makeshift bandages.

Kane’s focus landed on me immediately. His eyes flickered with concern.

I pulled my gaze from his, and settled on the briny, bottomless water across from me.

“We have no way of sending ravens to let them know we are coming, King Ravenwood,” King Eryx said to him.

“We’ll just have to hope they welcome us with open arms.”

A dark laugh barked out of Griffin at the sentiment. “They won’t.”

“I know,” Kane said with lethal calm.