Page 53 of Hymn of Breath and Bone

“I was,” she confirmed. “Now I am no one.”

“But I thought that if your mate died…”

“Only if the bond is consummated, Urchin,” Caspian reminded me gently.

So Theia had never even experienced that kind of love with her mate. It made her situation so much worse, somehow.

“Was it my people who did this to you?” I asked, fearing the answer.

“The selkies took my wings after they took my mate. But it was the sirens who took my eyes as punishment for their exile. Why should I see, if we would never see the Isles again?” Theia laughed, a horrifying, eerie sound. “But the goddess gave me a different sight. And now you’re here to ask me questions to which you already know the answers.”

Her voice was bitter and agonized, and I realized now why she holed herself up in Nordhavn. She’d been exiled. Mutilated and betrayed by both peoples, her mate dead and her life as good as forfeit. It was a wonder she survived.

“The selkies took your mate?” I asked, mind hitching on the words that didn’t match the story I’d been told.

“His own father killed him because he loved me,” she said flatly, as if she’d gone suddenly very far away. “Of course, he told his people that I had cast him from the cliffs. I wish they’d taken my heart, as well as my wings.”

My heart cracked for her—for the betrayal that was not one of siren origin, but of selkie lies.

“I am so sorry,” I said quietly, reaching out to take her hand.

She pulled it away with a hiss, baring her yellowed teeth at me. “Do not pity me, little goddess. Pity those foolish enough to think they can changethe hearts of others.”

I blinked in surprise as Caspian looped a protective arm around me. “What did you call me?”

I thought Ran’s nickname had just been a quirk of his personality. Caspian told me she had visions, but why would she have seen that?

Theia grinned. The expression was not friendly. “I call you what you are, little goddess. I see all, even that which you refuse to see yourself.”

“We didn’t come here for your games,” Caspian growled, laying several gold coins atop the table. “We came for—”

“I know why you came,” Theia hissed, considering the coins briefly before pushing them back toward him. “The truth is my price,” she spat. “Sea and sky and sky and sea.” She spoke in an eerie, singsong voice that made the hair on the back of my neck rise. “Tell me, little goddess, who you must be.”

“You want me to answer your riddle?” I asked, trying to work out the meaning of her words. I looked to Caspian for assistance, but he was frowning at Theia.

“Theia—”

“Sheanswers the question, boy,” Theia repeated, releasing Caspian. He gasped, gripping the table with both hands as he sucked in a lungful of air. “You leave with nothing if you answer for her.”

I clenched my jaw in frustration, hating every second in that horrible, smoky room. My lungs were burning and my head was swimming unpleasantly, and it was nearly impossible to focus with Theia’s claw-like nails clicking against the table.

Caspian squeezed my hands in reassurance, shaking his head. “Think, Urchin. Answer the question.”

“Sea and sky and sky and sea,” Theia repeated in that eerie song. “Tell me, little goddess, who you must be.”

Sea and sky and sky and sea. A ridiculous answer came to me so abruptly that I disregarded it as I tried to come to a more reasonable one. But nomatter which way I turned her words in my mind, I kept returning to the day Caspian suggested I could manipulate the wind.

A reason I could speak to the creatures of the sea as no one else could. Why I could shape the air as well as the water. Why Rannoch had saved me from Morar. Why the sea had saved me from drowning the day we crashed into her inky depths. Why the sea dragon feared mymother’swrath.

“You think I’m Melusine.”

It had seemed such a ridiculous idea when it first struck me that I’d pushed it away. But now, faced with Theia’s sightless, gleeful face and Caspian’s tight-lipped frown, I knew it was the truth.

“How?” I asked, looking to Caspian, rather than Theia, for answers. “Melusine was a goddess. Born of sea and sky. I have selkie parents. There was nothing special about my birth.”

“Wasn’t there?” Theia crooned.

“I wasn’t breathing,” I said with a shrug. “My lungs are bad. Even more reason I can’t be a goddess.”