Page 100 of The Isles of the Gods
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My mother doesn’t protest as I wipe myself clean and get changed. She doesn’t even ask why Dasriel is standing in the doorway, watching me.
She just gazes at us both with dull eyes, accepting this latest blow as she’s accepted every other. Eventually her gaze drifts to the window, to examine the passing clouds, and that’s when the spark of frustration inside me springs to life, becoming a tiny lick of flame.
I’ve always saved my anger for my father, who left us with nothing. But why did she let him? Why didn’t she make sure he provided for us? Force him to make arrangements?
She let him put her in a house in the city, away from her family, away from her friends. She let him choose my school and send me there, far from everything and everyone I knew, to live as a curiosity among the nobility.
And when he was gone, we lost everything anyway. My education. Our home. Our dignity.
For a moment she’s not lying on her bed here in our apartment, but on her bunk in the third-class cabin we shared with a dozen others on our way to Port Naranda, crammed into the tiny space with the ship shuddering around us, a single lantern lighting the gloom.
A month before that trip, I was at school with the prince I’m now hunting, arguing with friends about nothing moreimportant than whether we should walk to the village on the weekend.
I thought not one of those friends tried to help when we fell from grace, and Mum just accepted the hard landing. But did shecreateit?
A clean break will be better,she kept telling me.We must look forward, not back.
To learn that my friendsdidlook for me—that they tried to find me and couldn’t—I don’t know what to do with that information.
Can I even believe Leander? Or was it his guilt speaking, just excuses for what he should have done? For failing to show up when it mattered, like my father? He knew how much that galled me—he’d have hated to feel like he was doing the same.
But the answer churns in my gut, slow and painful.
I believe him.
I know him well enough to know when he’s telling the truth.
Which means he gave my mother letters for me, and she didn’t pass them on. In her heartbreak over losing my father, she wanted her clean break from our old lives, and she got it.
PerhapsIcould have tried harder, written to him once we got here. Refused to leave Kirkpool in the first place.
Mum shifts in the bed, and I glance up at her as I crouch to tie my bootlaces. I can’t talk to her about it now, not with Dasriel here. It will have to wait.
I reach out to take her hand, her skin too dry, too cool. I’m caught between her and Laskia, the two of them as different as it’s possible to be.
Mum’s still accepting it, no matter what they do to us. Shehelped it happen, so sure was she that our end was coming. And now, even as she lies here, too sick to get out of bed, she simply resigns herself to whatever comes next without a flicker of fight.
Laskia, on the other hand, believes you get what you take, not what you’re given. She might be insane, but at least she’s trying to choose her own destiny.
I don’t want to end up like her—but I don’t want to end up like my mother, either.
I want to make my own path, but I can’t see any way out of this tiny room and the leash Laskia’s holding in her fist.
“Come on, Your Lordship,” rumbles Dasriel as I finish tying my bootlaces and slowly rise to my feet. “Hunt won’t wait.”
SELLY
The Docks District
Port Naranda, Mellacea
I’ve left the prince of Alinor hiding in a filthy courtyard behind a tavern, tucked in behind a huge crate of empty bottles left over from last night’s revelry. He has Keegan to guard him, the two of them crammed in side by side, faces grim.
I nearly killed Leander with my stupidity, and horror is still trying to push its way up my throat and overwhelm me with guilt.
This is why magic isn’t for me. This is why the spirits never responded to me, not through all the dozens of teachers who tried to help. It took a royal magician to force them to notice me, and even then, they rebelled against who I am.
