The thrill of danger alighted across my skin like an icy breeze. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

Twenty-One

I sat with Kiva on the couches that evening, having just relayed what had transpired in the stables over slices of whiskey cake, an Ambriellan dessert I’d fallen in love with the time I’d visited. I felt like I always had the night before Negnoch; not ready to sleep but desperate to go to bed and for tomorrow to come so I could see Res.

“There’s something broken in him, Kiva,” I said quietly, the image of Ericen with his head pressed against his stallion’s still fresh in my mind.

“I’m sure there is, but it’s not for you to fix. Have you forgotten who he is?”

I cast her a halfhearted glower. “No. But I don’t think he has to be our enemy.” She laughed, and I pressed on. “I’m serious. He doesn’t want to be his mother. He wants to be better.”

Ericen hadn’t told me those things from a place of self-pity; he’d told me because he intended to do something about it. He wanted to fix his broken pieces. I understood that, just like I understood his desire to be better than his mother. My mother had made mistakes, ones whose echoes now haunted me and Caliza both. We’d inherited the consequences of her decisions, and I would do better.

She set her half-eaten cake on the table. “You could never trust him.”

“I think I could, in time. I think even you could, if you let yourself try.”

“No thanks.”

I sighed, setting my empty plate beside hers. “Have you ever heard the story about how the crows were created? The one from Saints and Sellas.”

“I never read those fairy tales. They’re a waste of time.”

I smiled. “It’s my favorite out of all of them. My mother told it to me one night with only a candle burning in my room. After that, I memorized it.”

Kiva shifted in her seat, leaning back against the armrest so she faced me, and I began to talk.

“When the Sellas made the crows, the night lasted for a year. They drew their power from the night and from it formed the crows. Its darkness became their feathers, its vastness their power, its tranquil silence their quiet wisdom. The night grew angry with the Sellas and refused to give way to the day. Time passed. Crops and people alike started to sicken from the lack of sunlight, withering as the night grew lush and full. The Sellas begged the night to end, but it refused.”