Scavenge the Stars (Scavenge the Stars #1)(56)

She met his heated gaze, and the two of them stood there, frozen, as if waiting for the other to move first.

Cayo swallowed. What would happen if he reached out to tuck back her hair? If his fingers skimmed the side of her exposed neck? There was a speck of water at the corner of her mouth. He could brush it away with his lips.

But before he could decide whether to take a step toward her, she shook herself and headed for the cliff face.

“It would be best if we forgot this happened, Lord Mercado,” she said as she began to climb, her limbs flexing as she moved.

It took him a moment to come to his senses, his blood warm and buzzing through his veins. “You can just call me Cayo,” he called up to her.

She paused, looking down at him. She seemed something born of the earth itself, power and beauty mixed with something almost feral.

“Thanks for your company,” she said at last. “Cayo.”

She climbed the rest of the way up, leaving him to shiver in the breeze as evening began to streak through the sky.

And wonder how in the hells he was going to climb up after her.





And so Punisher drove his sword point to Trickster’s chest, where welled a bright berry of blood. The drop fell to the earth and an orchard grew around them, the trees silent witnesses to the price Trickster paid for deceiving the gods and thwarting their whims.

—KHARIAN MYTH



Following Cayo Mercado’s example, Amaya took the long way home. The night was dark yet carried a balmy warmth, and her wet hair dried frizzy and soft about her shoulders. She still smelled of the sea, her skin coated by a patina of salt.

She went largely ignored as she wandered through the streets of Moray, her slippers dangling from her fingers. Her feet had long since dried, but she didn’t like the constricting fabric of her shoes, so used to going barefoot on the Brackish and on the islands where they had made their diving stops. She almost missed the feeling of a deck under her soles and the kiss of too-warm sand.

That was why she had gone to the inlet: to rekindle her connection with the water, to be alone for a blessed hour in order to parse out her thoughts. To mull over what the debt collector had said about her mother.

And then Cayo Mercado had barged in, refusing her a moment of privacy. Yet…Amaya wasn’t as mad as she would have expected at his unexpected company. It had helped, in an odd way, to see that she wasn’t the only one in some state of misery.

Amaya came across a street musician with a lap harp and stopped to listen a moment. He had collected a small audience, but no one looked twice at her; with her untamed hair and plain day dress, she wasn’t the remarkable Countess Yamaa, but just Amaya, a long-forgotten child of this city.

There was a pressure in her chest, a dreadful weight that pulled her shoulders down in such a way that would cause Liesl to order her to keep her posture straight. But Amaya’s mind was filled with conflicting thoughts. Her throat was tight with the fear of facing the consequences that rose before her.

Cayo Mercado. Everything Boon had said about him made him out to be a fop, a careless merchant’s son with no head for business. Perhaps those things were true, but the Cayo Mercado she had seen today was…different. Just as she hadn’t had the visage of the countess to hide behind, Cayo hadn’t had the visage of Lord Mercado. They had merely been a boy and a girl swimming in the sea.

When they had spoken of loss, she hadn’t missed the aura of hurt that surrounded him like a fine mist, the depth of loneliness—of helplessness—in his dark eyes. She had felt that mist coat her like a second skin, had taken it into her lungs. His pain tasted like hers.

They had both lost their mothers. Cayo was in the process of losing his sister.

And thanks to Boon’s plan, he was going to end up losing a lot more.

Yet she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of envy toward him. If Amaya was water, always moving, then Cayo was a tree, planted firmly into a patch of soil called home. Digging roots into the earth—grounded, connected.

Amaya staggered away from the lilting music and wandered deeper into the city, barely conscious of where she was going. She felt feverish, hot and numb all over.

Did Cayo really deserve to suffer for the sins of his father? Just as the children sold to the Brackish had been forced to pay for their parents’ debts, Cayo was merely the unwilling victim of his father’s crimes. They had all been ravaged by the generation that had come before them, told to feast on scraps and to be thankful for it.

Amaya stopped to lean her shoulder against the nearest building and passed a hand over her eyes with a shaking sigh. She couldn’t go through with this. Cayo Mercado did not deserve her revenge, no matter how spoiled and strange he was.

Dropping her hand, she looked around to get her bearings. She was in one of the traditional Rehanese districts, full of wide, short homes with green roofs like mountaintops and pointed eaves. Some homes bore statuettes of star saints, animal-like beings who carried out the work of the sky god. Lanterns had been lit along the street, dancing across the cobblestone in whirls of amber and orange.

It seemed vaguely familiar to her, like recalling a dream from a long time ago. Looking closer, she found the plaque bearing the street name. Guen Street.

She knew this place. It was the district where she had once lived with her mother.

Her lips dry and her heart beating faster, Amaya pushed off the side of the building and hurried down the street. She passed ghosts along the way—memories of holding hands with her mother as they went to the fish market, climbing onto roofs to keep a lookout for her father coming home for the day, the local neighborhood festivals held every season. Her mother had always loved those, for any excuse to dress herself and Amaya in Rehanese wrap dresses with their hair done up in the traditional styles. She had always splurged for freshly roasted nuts and balls of sticky rice coated with sesame seeds.