Page 9 of Heart of Night
“Nothing, Ayna? Really?” He raises a light brown brow, shooting me a gaze that somehow feels familiar, yet his features are as unfamiliar as they were two minutes ago.
When I don’t respond, the male turns and leans against the shelf, one hand braced on the worn wood, and pins me with those gray eyes. “I must say, I’m a bit disappointed. I guarded your sleep for the past months after all.”
His words clang through me, taking with them all my resolve to remain unbothered, strong, and my mouth opens wordlessly.
“I do look a bit different now, I’ll give you that. You probably remember a winged monster with beak and black eyes.”
And feathers on his features, I add in my mind, but when I study him, I see the similarity of his build. The Crow who stood guard the first day I woke at the Crow Palace. I never paid much attention to who guarded the door to Myron’s chambers, too occupied with either Royad or the Crow King himself at my side whenever I left the room.
He’s one of the Crows who used to glare at me when I walked the hallways, one of those who believed I didn’t have a place there and that his people were better off without a broken curse—at least, that’s what I assume from his appearance in the Flame residence.
“Are you a traitor Crow or just an opportunist?” Clutching my fingers in my lap, I scan his features, memorizing the straight nose and light stubble, the pointed ears, and the waves of his hair. In his leather armor, he looks every bit as menacing as he did in his half-Crow form, but I refuse to balk, refuse to panic. If anything, this male is another source of information. Finding enough of those, may help me piece together what’s going on here. Because, no matter how much Ephegos hates Myron for the death of his sister, that cannot be the only reason I’m here. If revenge was all he wanted, he’d torture me himself until I beg for death. But he hasn’t even hinted that’s what he has in mind. Not yet.
“Neither.” Herinor gives me a grim glance that makes me wonder if he is all that dangerous or merely a male stuck in a position he hates. When I measure him, he shakes his head. “Don’t look at me like you wonder if I’m better than them because I’m not.” He gestures at the ceiling in the general direction of where I assume the other inhabitants of this residence must be located. “I’m not upset the curse is broken, even when I didn’t believe it necessary. There was power in the way our bodies were locked in claws and feathers. It gave us an entirely different way of perceiving the world, made us strong, resilient.”
I don’t interrupt, despite the millions of questions about how he knows the difference, if he is one of the ancient Crows responsible for the curse or if he is just like Myron and Royad, who were infants when the curse hit.
“Do I mourn our king?” He shrugs. “More than I mourned Carius. I hated that male, thought there was something inherently cruel about Myron’s father that made it impossible not to follow his lead. Something charismatic, almost like a song of violence our Crow nature answers to. Of course, our people turned into what we are today. Of course, the gods would—” He stops himself, hand wandering to his mouth where he wipes as if expecting blood to spill from his lips. But the curse is broken, and nothing is keeping him from speaking the truth of his people, the curse, and whatever gods placed it on them.
“Who cursed the Crows?” I half expect the Neredynian gods to rain vengeance down on me for the mere question, expect anything other than an actual answer.
All the more surprised I am when Herinor holds my gaze and says, “Vala, the Goddess of Life and Water.”
My breath catches in my throat. I haven’t the slightest clue about that goddess, but if she cursed a people to be stuck in their monster form, to become unlovable and cruel, she can’t be a deity I want to pray to.
“You probably haven’t heard of Vala. Neredynian deities aren’t commonly known in Eherea, let alone Neredyn, our?—”
“Home,” I finish for him, eager to get on with the conversation now that I’m finally getting information. “How did she curse you? What happened exactly that justifies taking away all females of a people and damning them to slowly go extinct?” Taking away a species’s females so they can no longer bear offspring and spread across the lands to cause more destruction is an effective punishment—a cruel, brutal punishment. The curse merely missed that Crows bred with humans and, apparently, Fire Fairies whenever they could get their claws on them. I shudder at the mere thought of the horrors the Crows symbolize.
All those conversations with Myron and Royad come back to mind, how the Crows had taken from the lands of Neredyn whatever they pleased—resources, women—that they’d wreaked havoc wherever they went. And after the curse hit the Crows, Carius brought them to Eherea where he eradicated the people living at the palace in the Seeing Forest. He didn’t care to ask for land. He took. He killed for it.
Maybe Vala was right.
I was, I hear a non-distinct voice in my mind, the sound familiar, an echo of the moments I’d begged the murderous lake of brides’ tears to help me save Myron.
Everything goes still inside of me, listening for another sound from what I now understand can only be the voice of the goddess herself.
Why? she’d asked me. Why I wanted to save the Crow King.
And I’d answered I was the only chance he had. Back then, I didn’t realize that the lake from the sacred chamber was more than just the former brides’ tears but a medium for the Goddess of Water.
Guardians save me.
Had I not been sitting, my knees would have gone weak now.
“You were there when it all happened, weren’t you? You were with Carius from the beginning.”
Herinor nods, folding his arms over his broad chest, leathers creaking. “I was just as bad as Carius. I killed and raped and looted. And where we went, a trail of death and destruction followed. The human race was very new to Neredyn back then, and the gods had already left the realm of the mortals, and our creator with them.”
“Shaelak.” It’s a wild guess, but Shaelak is the god the Crows kept referencing.
“You are quite observant, Wolayna.” Herinor measures me with a glance that’s almost civil. I try not to think how many ways this situation can go wrong with his track record of crimes. “No wonder Myron risked everything to make you fall for him.”
“He didn’t make me fall for him,” I correct. “Quite the opposite. He tried to warn me away countless times.”
“That kid has always been too soft for a Crow.” The expression on Herinor’s features isn’t unkind, yet not fond either. But something changed the moment I walked in. He isn’t trying to scare me or threaten me. Herinor, the hulk of a Crow guard, is doing exactly what he said he would. He is leading a conversation, and I’m getting surprisingly much information out of it. So much, in fact, that my head is swimming.
“Only the God of Darkness can create a species such as ours. I believe he considers us Crows his one mistake.” There is regret in that voice, a darkness deeper than the one in the half-shifted Crows’ all-black eyes when they’d been stuck through the curse. Darkness and remorse.