Page 23 of Sunsplitter

The space was small, but comfortable. Fi set her bag beside the bed, a sweet of flowers drifting through the open window. Like the sitting room, like Antal’s room, this one looked out on another garden, larger than the entry courtyard.

The vavriter waited in the doorway. His gaze didn’t peel heralive like Avroz’s did, but the probing eyes kept Fi on guard.

“You’re a vavraesa?” he said. “Unusual. Vavriter are more common as Arbiters.”

Fi didn’t know that word, either. Vavraesa. But the components…

Vavrae… antlers.

Sa… without.

She withheld her curse. Was that the daeyari word for humans? Fuckingantler-less?

“I’m a Shardwalker,” she returned. That was the word Antal used, scoffing at how Fi’s people used “Voidwalker” to describe anyone who could see Curtains—before she’d learned real Voidwalking.

“Ah! A useful skill.” Geslam grinned, appeased for now. “We have a kitchen for staff use. If you’d like dinner?”

“Thanks. I already ate.”

A nod. “The daeyari will take their meal in the sitting room. Would you prefer to stay here, or be on hand?”

Fi hated both those options pretty fiercely, but she’d come here so Antal wouldn’t be alone.

“Lead the way.”

He’d known this wouldn’t be easy.

By Veshri’s high and sharpened antlers, Antal hadknowncoming back here would be excruciating, yet he still had to clench his claws to keep from trembling, bite his tongue to keep from snarling. A calm mask. A blank mask. That was all he’d give them.

The vavriter steward, Geslam, had been middle-aged when last they’d met, gaunter-cheeked now, and more gray in his hair. Antal watched him lead Fionamara down the hall toward the guest quarters. Then he was alone with his parents in that dusk-lit sitting room.

It was the same as the day he’d left.

There, the wide stone sills and glassless windows overlooking his mother’s garden, where he’d napped as a child with his tail dangling over the ledge. If he sat still enough, the moths visiting the flowers would land on his growing antlers.

There, the sitting pillows, where his mother had held him in her lap and taught him how to braid his hair. How to be gentle with his claws. How to Shape energy through metal toys.

There, the swath of tile where Razik had bled out onthe floor. Stone so dark, it had swallowed the red. Where Antal’s lover had looked to him, reached for him in his final breath. Where Antal had, for one time in his wretched life, lunged at his father with teeth bared—only to be pinned to the floor, blood so thick in his nose that he’d nearly choked.

They don’t last, Avroz had said, claws wet from Razik’s throat.They’re a distraction. You have bigger things to accomplish.

His mother linked her arm with his, smiling as if nothing was wrong. She smelled like the flowers he remembered, like soil and fresh growth.

“You’ve chosen an excellent time to visit,” she said. “New blooms in the garden.”

Chosen?Antal could laugh. Could snarl. Avroz drifted alongside them in his silver-tipped robes, that calculated calm on his face. That feigned disinterest Antal knew too well. Gauging every Void-damned inflection like a slip of soft skin beneath armor.

His father. For the first time in decades, Antal faced his father and found him stunningly unchanged. The same slow gait. The same cunning gleam in his burgundy eyes, the same chilling scent of hoarfrost on old stone. Avroz was grinning more than the day he’d banished his son to a different Plane of existence. That was the only difference.

Merciless Void, Antal hated this place.

Most of it, at least. The brush of his mother’s tail against his was a forgotten comfort. A fresh ache.

“I would love to see your garden,” Antal said.

She squeezed his arm. “Tomorrow morning, then. You’re only staying for three days?”

“I have duties to return to, azaevi.” Even that word, so disused on his tongue. Bittersweet.