The Deepest Blue(22)
She dropped her face into her hands. Her shoulders shook with silent sobs.
“Now you know,” Lord Maarte said. “Will you make your choice?”
Mayara lifted her head. “I will.”
“Remember: once you make your choice, it cannot be unmade.”
I can never be one of them.
They killed Kelo.
“I choose the island.”
Chapter Seven
Lord Maarte recorded her choice and stamped the paper with his seal pressed into hot wax. He then nodded to the Silent Ones. Feeling numb, Mayara let herself be ushered out of his office. She’d cried, and now she felt empty.
One of the Silent Ones led, while the other two flanked her. Their white masks facing forward, none of them looked at Mayara. Their robes whispered against the stone floor.
You killed him, Mayara thought as she walked between them. But the words felt hollow and unreal. None of this felt real. It was all some terrible nightmare, distorted by the cartena flower. Maybe she was still knocked out by the drug and lying on a cliff at the feet of her captors. Maybe she was still asleep in the cove, with Kelo asleep beside her, resting uneasily because she knew they were being chased. Or maybe everything was a dream, and it was still the night before her wedding and the storm hadn’t come and none of this had happened.
All that felt more plausible than the truth.
The first Silent One opened an ornately carved door and waited for Mayara to enter. It took her a moment to realize she’d been brought to the fortress’s baths.
In the village, everyone bathed in tidal pools, or if you wanted to rinse the salt from your skin, you could venture farther into the island’s interior and bathe in one of the freshwater streams that trickled down from the lakes. But in the fortress of the Family Neran, the baths were in a magnificent cavern tiled with blue glass and polished shells. Gilded columns supported an arched ceiling above interlocking pools of steaming turquoise water.
The three Silent Ones positioned themselves within the bathing room, guarding the door. Mayara stood on the edge of one of the pools. It was obvious they wanted her to bathe. Why else bring her here? And as much as she didn’t want to cooperate, she also didn’t see the point in resisting.
This could be my last bath.
She supposed that would be true of many things now. Her last bath, her last meal, her last night in a bed, her last dreams, her last breath. She wondered how many lasts she’d already had: her last kiss, her last day with her family. . . . Kelo has already had his last everything.
No. I don’t believe it.
My Kelo can’t be dead.
She’d known Kelo forever. They’d been born within a few hours of each other, in the birthing room of the healer’s house. Their mothers had nursed side by side while the grandmothers of the village stood outside, welcoming them with the traditional lullabies. When they were a few months old, their fathers had strapped them onto their backs and carried them as they worked on their boats. As toddlers, while their parents fished in the shallows, they would chase hermit crabs on the beach, share pineapple slices, and then fall asleep sticky and sunburned. Older, they studied together—or rather, Kelo studied and Mayara sneaked into the kitchen to steal slices of coconut pie, to help them study. They’d shared their first kiss at age fourteen, and by the time they were sixteen, everyone knew they would wed someday. It had been as inevitable as sunrise.
That summed up Kelo himself: as inevitable as sunrise. She’d never doubted he would be there for her. He loved her with unwavering certainty. To think of that constant as gone . . .
I can’t.
Very deliberately, she shoved the hollowness, the pain, the grief, and the disbelief into a tight ball deep inside her. Kelo would have told her to feel her full feelings. Emotions, the ability to feel anything beyond hate and rage, were what separated them from the spirits, he said. But she couldn’t. Not now. They’d swallow her whole, so she swallowed them instead.
Mayara shed her clothes and slid into the water. It was so warm her skin prickled. Steam rose around her. Gliding through the pond, she found the soap, carved into the shape of a conch shell and resting beside a sponge, and she cleaned off all the blood, sweat, salt, and sand that clung to her skin.
She was working her fingers through her knotted blue-streaked hair when she heard voices from across the baths. Ducking down, she debated whether she should stay or go. She didn’t want to speak to anyone. Go where? Mayara glanced at the Silent Ones—they hadn’t moved.
She wondered what they’d do if she jumped out of the pool and ran across the room and out the door on the opposite side that the newcomers had opened. . . . Reaching out with her mind, she brushed against multiple spirits in the corridors of the fortress. A fire spirit writhing in a fireplace. An ice spirit lurking in the kitchen. Numerous water spirits swimming by the dock. She felt their pent-up rage, very different from the unbridled fury of the wild spirits that rode the storm. These were Belene spirits, linked to the queen and to the islands and controlled by the Silent Ones.
In other words, running was a bad idea.
So she stayed in the baths while the women splashed through the pools, drawing closer. There were two of them: a woman who looked to be about Mayara’s age or perhaps younger, with bronze skin like hers, anemone-orange hair, and an angular face, and an older woman who looked to be in her fifties or sixties, with weathered wrinkles, black hair with clumps of gray, and a wide mouth.