Page 64 of A Wrecking of Salt and Fire

Katrin scrunched her nose at him, her amber flecked eyes narrowing. “I’ll have you know I had him on his ass both times. Dare I say it was easy?”

“I still think you just wanted to be on top of me.” Ander raised one eyebrow, shrugging his shoulders while he put his hands in his pockets.

Red swept across Katrin’s face, that pulsing need clenching low in her stomach. She thought of the way he had stared at her broken body after he bathed her, the careful gleam of desire in his seatide eyes. Gods, she had to stop thinking about that, especially with this many people around them. But it was hard not to be enthralled by him. The whisper quiet way she could feel him all over her at once, even when he stood paces away. The way his voice lingered in the recesses of her mind, beckoning her closer. She glanced again at Ander, his devilish grin and fiery gaze burning straight through her.

“Ah-hem,” her father coughed, breaking up the extremely awkward electricity buzzing through the room. “As much as it amuses me to hear how my lovely daughter can take on the prince, there are more pressing matters to discuss.”

“And what might those matters be—other than the arrival of your daughter?” one of the other soldiers asked. This one was younger, around the same age as Katrin. He had a similar tattoo to Kristos, except his was only across his chest, the black ink a stark contrast to his pale olive skin.

“If Katrin is to fight for our cause and convince the people of Alentus and the Spartanis to as well, she must learn the truths of Cyther, all of them. I know this is a lot to ask of each and every one of you, the pain that speaking of that place may bring, but it is only through those stories we can truly make people believe.” The soldiers were silent once more, eyeing each other to see who might speak first. Who may be bold enough to share their story, whatever that might hold.

The nauarch stepped up first. “I have spent the most time with Katrin—” He was the only one she had spent time with, but Katrin was not sure that really mattered. “I will tell her my story first, but I ask that I am allowed to do so privately.”

Aidoneus nodded, as did Ander and Kristos. They stepped aside letting Leighton shift himself in front of Katrin. He held out his hand to her. “Follow me, Princess. I find it easiest to talk while my feet are buried in the sand.”

Katrin looked at him with curiosity, the corner of her mouth ticking up. Whatever these men had to share was clearly a mix of trauma and pain. She knew how hard it was for her to speak of her own, so the princess appreciated his willingness to let her in. To give up a piece of himself, so that she could make better decisions for herself and eventually for her people. “It would be my pleasure, Leighton.” She laid her hand in his as he guided them out of the underground room into the crisp coastal air.

“How much has the captain told you about me? How I came to be aboard his ship?”

“Thalia mentioned you knew Ander before he bought her in the markets of Lesathos; otherwise, I have heard nothing. I assumed you two had known each other from—well, from here I guess. Or wherever home is.”

Leighton buried his now bare feet in the powder soft white sand as they sat along the waterline of the shore, his dark skin a stark contrast to the pearlescent beaches of Skiatha. “Home is quite far from here. A place I haven’t seen since I was very young.”

Katrin cocked her head to the side, empathy growing in her expression as pain grew in Leighton’s. His hands gripped fistfuls of the sand, letting them trickle out through his fingers. Again and again he repeated this as he spoke.

“The coastal village where I was born in Votios was raided when I was around nine. My parents were both fishermen; the raiders were looking for warriors. Nonetheless, they were both violently slaughtered in their sleep.” Katrin reached for the nuarach’s hand, and although he flinched slightly, he let her keep her palm laying in his.

“My uncle, on the other hand, had been the leader of our village’s small fleet. He was our chief, our king you could say, the best warrior I have ever seen fight—even to this day. But these men, they possessed something else. A persuasion of sorts. I did not know it then, but it came from a deep rooted and forbidden form of blood magic practiced in the deserts of Votios. All recollection of that sort of sorcery had ceased to exist after the Peloponnian War, or that was what we had been taught to believe. Yet these men arrived, with an oily way to their speech, promising riches and land until the moment they cuffed us as slaves.

“So there was my uncle—brave and fierce and strong—being bound and captured. My two older brothers and I, it seemed, were young enough to be thought malleable. My older sister—” Leighton’s voice cracked as Katrin could see water begin to line the rim of his emerald eyes. “Her fate ultimately was worse than death, at least for a time. The men shoved all of us into a hold beneath their ship, about fifty from my village, I guess about twenty-five more from a village nearby. I thought that would be the worst of it, the smell of sweat and defecation, the thirst and hunger, lack of nourishment, the feeling of suffocation from being chained.

“We did not know where we would be sailing, the men never told us. Even when we arrived on that gods-forsaken isle, we did not know its name, nor the power that had lingered in the mountains. It wasn’t until some of us escaped that we were told where we had been held. I warn you Katrin, where we are going is a place worse than any you may have seen or read about before. Cyther makes the tales of this isle surrounded in an all-engulfing flame seem like a child’s bedtime story meant to soothe not frighten. But what we left behind—it is why all those men’s faces went pale when your father asked for their stories. For sixteen years, I was held captive on that isle. I went from a young innocent boy to the warrior I am today. Yes—they trained us, hoping one day that we would side with their forces, that we would be enthralled by the lure that is Hades. The lure of a life everlasting.

“See, that is what he promised them. The sorcerers who shielded that isle from the rest of the world. The men who hailed from the deserts. To give the blood of life to the gods as a trade for the years they may live past their time. So they slaughtered the young maidens they took from not only our piece of Votios, but from across all of Odessia. And those whose maidenhead had no longer been intact—they used to warm their beds. Ileana, my sister, was eighteen when we were taken. A charming young woman with so much life left to live. She was a prized bride in our village, set to marry a chief from a nearby tribe. Because of that, she was gifted to their leader. I never saw her again. Never heard her sweet voice whisper bedtime stories in the dark. Never felt the clutch of an embrace since the day they pried her hands from around me and my brothers. I was told after a few years she slit her own throat, desperate to escape the life to which she was bound. That the leader of those men let her body rot in a ditch, never buried, never burned. A lifeless soul to wander the everlasting abyss in between.”

Leighton stopped there for just a moment, looking out into the vast expanse of the sea before them. Katrin rested her head on his shoulder, still gripping his palm tight as he spoke. She understood—why Ileana had done it. When Katrin was swept away on the tides she had tried to do the same thing, yet she lived, while Leighton’s sister lingered in death. Why the gods favor some and not others—a mystery she may never solve.

“The boys, the men, they sent us all to the mines beneath the mountain. There was no light there. No reprieve from the dust in our lungs and slashes at our backs. A black hued substance was held there in the rock. One we would pick away at day in and day out. They would position the pieces we hacked away into a dais every full moon. And every full moon a maiden was laid upon that dais, tied down with black rope as their throat and wrists and thighs were slit open, blood pouring over onto the rock. But it did not trickle down, instead it seeped into the black substance, turning it a golden hue. We saw it tested on others. Men and women who bore similar powers to those of the sorcerers we learned ruled Cyther. It stripped their power, fed off their will to live. If you ever encounter this, if someone ever tries to give you something made of what you may think is gold, do not accept.

“Finally, after sixteen years, a group defected; men who did not believe in blood magic, who learned their craft by the means of the earth, of the flowers that bloomed, of the animals that thrived in the mountains, not of death. They were able to smuggle a small band of us out. The men you met today. Myself, my uncle Kristos, and nine from our village.”

Katrin lifted her chin toward him. Kristos was his uncle. But she had seen it, the same deep color in their eyes, the way Kristos’s expression pained when Leighton offered to tell his story. “And what of your brothers?”

Leighton shifted his gaze away from her. “They did not make it. I am the last—I am the last of that line.”

The tears Leighton shed began to dry against his heated skin. “I want them all dead. Everyday I think of the people we lost, their souls condemned. They never reached the hallowed halls of Aidesian, your father never greeted them as they passed into the serenity of the afterlife. The blood sacrifice captured their souls for Hades and Hades alone. To fuel his power. To fuel the power of the other Olympi kept locked away on that endless pit of an isle. You think the creatures that roam your father’s dungeons are horrifying? You should see what lurks in Cyther, protecting those mountains. Protecting that rock. Protecting him.”

Katrin’s whole body stiffened while her mind filled with anger, confusion, and hatred. Pure unadulterated loathing toward these people. Ruthless men torturing innocent mortals, gifting their bodies away as if they meant nothing. “And what of my mother? If she truly sailed there, thinking it was a place of grace, of everlasting life? If she bore those golden cuffs that drained her very soul and muted her power?”

Leighton looked down at his hands, uneasy breathing coming from his throat. “If Kora was sent to Cyther—by her own choice or not—I don’t know how to tell you this, Katrin. Your mother would be dead.”

Although the words stabbed through her chest like a knife, a little piece of her had already known it to be true. There was nowhere in this realm or another that her parents could not sense each other. If Aidoneus could no longer feel Kora, then Leighton was right. Her mother was gone.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Katrin

After Leighton had told her about Cyther, they remained on the beach until the sun began to set, turning the sky a scarlet and saffron hue. It was the calming end to a conversation which had caused the nauarch so much pain. She could feel the guilt seeping from him, for his parents who were slaughtered, for his brothers who did not make it out of the mountain in Cyther, for Ileana.

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