17. Zendaya

Chapter 17

Zendaya

I am Cathal Báeinach's mate.

I have a mate.

Does that mean that Fallon is ours , or did he have her with that other female she refers to as Mamma?

My fingers pace the scar around my neck, back and forth, back and forth. Cathal said Meriam killed her daughter. If my mother killed me, then how?—

The Mahananda! That's what Behati meant when she said it had brought me back. She meant it had resurrected me.

The scars that blemish my skin and scales must be remnants of Meriam's attack. How brutal was my death?

I spring my hand off the paler band of flesh and onto the cushion beneath me as I try to recover from the blow of Behati's words. I feel drained and laid bare like the Amkhuti, unrecognizable yet composed of the same bones, a trench instead of a river, a wasteland instead of a thriving milieu.

Heat bursts through my chest at the sudden realization of all I've lost. It claws up my ribs and grips my heart before moving farther upward to throttle my throat. I want to rage and scream. I want to run through the courtyard to the Mahananda's edge and demand why it had to steal my past when it breathed human life into my scales.

But I don't.

I just sit there, motionless, my lungs barely filling, my heart barely beating, strangled by shock and horror and—and devastation.

I had a daughter.

I had a mate.

I had a life.

The heat seeps into my face, into my cheeks, into my eyes before collapsing out of me, draining me some more.

"What exactly did you tell her, Behati?" Cathal's voice booms against my buzzing eardrums like waves crushing stone, and then smoke sweeps up my trembling arms, becoming more solid as it strokes and enfolds.

"I only told her what Meriam did to Shabbe and to her as a child."

"Daya, look at me."

I can't. Not yet.

"What else did you fucking tell her, Behati?"

"Great Mahananda, you have no manners."

"For fuck's sake?—"

"The last thing I told her was that she didn't have a dead sister. I don't know why she'd even ask me that. Did you tell her she had a sister?"

"Leave," Cathal growls.

"Pardon me?" Behati wheezes.

"Please. Please leave us."

The cushion beneath me shifts. "Zendaya, would you like me to stay? Because I will if you don't want to be left alone with Cathal."

I've neither enough air to breathe out an answer nor enough energy to shake my head.

"Zendaya?"

"She and Fallon are my only reasons for existing, so if you think I'm going to harm her, then?—"

"I do not stay because I fear you will harm her, Cathal. I stay because I worry you'll take advantage of her."

The silence that ensues is so terrible that it makes my lids snap up. Although Cathal's hands are on my body, his incendiary gaze is on Behati.

"Planning on draining me of blood, Crow?"

"Leave," he says. "If you ever imply that I might take advantage of Daya, so help me Mórrígan?—"

"Mara," Behati snaps. "Not Mórrígan. And I'll leave only if Zendaya wants me gone, otherwise?—"

"Go, Behati." My voice is as thin as a sea fan. "I no want anyone get hurt."

Cathal's next breath is abrupt.

"I don't fear him, Zendaya." She tries to reach for my hand but retracts her fingers when she encounters smoke.

"Thank you for truth, Behati, but you go now. I deal with…mate."

Her lips purse while Cathal's part around a sigh. It's almost as though the word has tugged at some thread keeping them stitched shut.

Behati stands, smoothing her robes. "Walk me to the door of your chambers?"

I look up, and then nod. My legs prickle as I stand. Cathal must sense it because his grip on my arms tightens.

"Alone," Behati says.

"Is this some trick?" Cathal glares at my grandmother's advisor.

My flesh and blood grandmother…

"No. We Shabbins don't trick people. Unlike the Faeries. Unlike the non -Shabbins."

The accusation— unlike you —glimmers in the air between them. I suppose Cathal does merit this, for he did trick me, but didn't they all in some way?

"It's my only condition for leaving her here alone with you."

"Is all right, Cathal." I shrug his hands off my arms.

Though his reluctance to let me go is whittled into every line and hollow of his face, when I walk Behati to the door, he stays put.

Right before she reaches for the handle, she slashes her finger on the back of her pearl earring. "I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have. I fathom you have many."

Since I imagine this isn't what she stole me away from Cathal to say, I remain quiet as she paints a sigil on my door—the one to slip through walls.

Sure enough, before pressing her palm to it, she leans over to kiss me on both cheeks, except she doesn't do it to wish me farewell but to disguise a whisper. "That male isn't your mate. Not anymore." She moves her mouth to my other cheek, brushes her lips against it, and adds, "I had a vision." And then she presses her palms to my forehead. The scene plays out in devastating detail.

For long seconds after she leaves, I stare at the door, at the bloodied drips of the cross circled in more blood.

I didn't think anything could stun me more than learning I had a life before this one, but I was evidently mistaken, for her last confession has rooted my feet to the stone and the air to my lungs. I close my eyes to gather my bearings, but all that does is drive her vision back to the forefront of my skull.

"What did that woman say to you, Príona?" Cathal's voice strokes over my forehead.

I startle and winch my neck. Anger exudes from his stare like smoke from his pores. In silence, he watches me and I watch him back. It's become so quiet that I can hear my white nightgown move over my pounding chest as though it were crafted from rows of pearls instead of silk and lace.

I sense his shadows wanting to devour the distance between our bodies, the same way I sense him restraining them.

"What did she show you?" he grits out. "Why have you lost all color in your cheeks?"

His anger used to scare me, but not anymore. Not now that I understand its source. Mates are sacred to Crows, and he lost his.

"In past, we mind-speak?" I twirl my finger to indicate him and me.

"Yes."

"Is it?"

He frowns. "Is it what?"

"What make mates? Mind link only? No mark on skin? Or…" I shrug. "Or other?"

"The mind link is the most obvious sign."

"What else?"

He takes a step toward me, but I hold up my palm to keep him at bay.

"Mates cannot live without one another, Daya. When my sister-in-law was killed, my brother—" His voice breaks, but then he repairs it with a deep inhalation. "My brother asked Lorcan to end his life."

"When Meriam kill me, you ask die?"

"I—I…"

I wait, not even certain why I want to know this. What does it matter anymore?

"I didn't know she'd…I didn't know what…" He balls his fingers as though he wants to strike some invisible wall. "I felt you were still alive, Daya. And there was Fallon to consider. My brother didn't have a child to live for."

That's fair. My mother may have picked her lover over her child, but she also ended my Shabbin life. Cathal doesn't strike me as the sort of man who'd ever inflict harm on his daughter. Speaking of which. "Is Fallon… our ?"

"Yes."

I want to weep again. I don't. "Why she no say?"

"She tried, at the beginning. But then, once we realized you didn't remember your life… us …we decided to wait."

"For what?"

He hangs his head and palms the back of it, mussing his—for once—tamed locks. "For you to understand our tongue, our customs, the way the world worked. We were afraid that telling you too soon would confuse and frighten you."

It still does. I am confused and I am frightened because I'm not sure what to do. How to act. What is expected of me now? Does Fallon even want a mother? She's all grown up. Not to mention that I don't even know what being a mother entails. I imagine it's loving your child and not killing her.

I have a child.

Yet something keeps niggling me. "What Mamma mean?"

"It's the Lucin way of saying Amma or Mádhi in Crow. Why?"

"Fallon call Agrippina Mamma."

"Ah. Yes."

"Yes…?" I prompt, when he still doesn't shed light as to why Fallon would call someone, who didn't give birth to her, Mamma.

"Agrippina and Ceres raised Fallon."

Because I couldn't. Because my mother ended my life.

I didn't get to raise my child because of Meriam. Cathal didn't either.

I swallow, suddenly mad, but not at Meriam. Mad at myself for not realizing who Fallon was. My hands land on that place on my body that the queen showed me rounding when a female grows a babe. I feel hollow, like a shell that's lost its dweller.

"I'm so sorry." Cathal's fingers sink deeper into his black locks.

I, too, am sorry. Sorry that Meriam stole so many years of his life. "Maybe, if ask kindly, Mahananda give me back memories."

His face lifts, his gaze filling with surprise, but also hope. "You'd want them back?"

"I forgot daughter and Taytah. I forgot"— you —"Meriam." Her name tastes foul upon my tongue, but speaking his will only feed the flames crackling between us. Besides, do I really want to recall my life with this man when I am destined for?—

"If the Cauldron doesn't give you back your memories, Príona, I'd be glad to fill in all the gaps. I'd be glad to tell you about us ."

"No."

"No?" he repeats.

"No tell me, Cathal." If he reminds me of all the ways he loved me and I loved him back, because I imagine we must've loved each other a great deal if I bore a child, I might not leave for Luce in the morning. I might stray from the new path the Mahananda has traced for me.

A fissure forms along my heart, a hairline fracture that cracks farther apart when I catch Cathal's eyelashes batting as wildly as his wings when he's in his other form.

"You are free, Cathal," I tell him to unshackle him from his past and from me.