"Why did you do that with Lord Oren? Why didn't you submit and end the fight? You wouldn't have gotten as many cuts and bruises if you just gave up early."
"I don't...really know how to give up. Plus, I wanted to beat him. Someone needed to put him in his place, after all."
The group of Sirens gathered around the flickering fire in the middle of Hefeta tittered with laughter, and the young girl who had asked me the question seemed to blush under my attention.
Her dark brown skin matched that of her mother, Minna, who I had found the night before sobbing uncontrollably on the ground begging for someone to save her child.
I supposed that someone had been me, in the end.
"Is it true you were raised by your sister all alone in Avanth?"
I turned to the girl once more. She'd only just introduced herself to me once the battle had ended and Inala had chastised me and forced me to sit upon a log in front of the newly lit fire in order to tend to my wounds.
She'd come to thank me for saving her life.
Sigrid was a young girl of about eleven or twelve years, her hair pulled straight back by dark as night braids that gleamed in the bright moonlit expanse in the sky.
Sparkling brown eyes met my own, and she smiled tentatively at me.
It was strangeâbeing a life saver instead of life taker.
It felt...good. Satisfying.
It felt like power.
Having the means to save someone's life instead of taking them out of this world would be a blessing more than the curse bestowed upon me by the gods of old.
The rest of the Sirens gathered around were waiting for my answer, and I glanced around at all who had come to sit and listen to my stories.
Erinna and Sabira were seated next to Warrick, who held his love's hand in his own. Inala was astride a log while attempting to ignore Soraya's presence beside her, and Yuni was busy trying to flirt with a Siren who seemed to be twice his age.
None of the Elders were in attendance, but I had come to know that just because you couldn't see them didn't mean that they weren't somewhere nearby, listening intently.
"We weren't only in Avanth. We traveled as far west as Port City, as far south as Caprici, and as far north as the small village of Laria in Avanth. Sometimes we'd get there on our own but most times we'd be captured and have to fight our way out and that was how we ended up somewhere new."
"You used to live in Caprici? My father is from there," Sigrid offered up, her mother beside her smiling lightly as if remembering fond memories of her time somewhere else.
"We haven't left the safety of Hefeta in over twenty years. It's become too dangerous. Anytime someone leaves, we say goodbye to them as if it's the last time we'll ever see them again."
I didn't miss the sad cut of her eyes toward Inala who was only paying attention to the small knife she was using to clean the underneath of her already immaculate nails.
Minna had been one of the first Sirens that I'd allowed my powers to siphon and sing from her past as if it were my own, and I remembered bits and pieces of her story.
Her child's father was in love with her but his family refused for him to marry a Siren, so she had to return to Hefeta. Eight years later, he showed up unannounced, and they were happy together for a time.
Until the King of Valencia led a raid on the outskirts of the community where the men slept.
Some of the Sirens around me had more reason to hate the king than I did, but that didn't mean the rage I carried for him lessened within me.
"Oh come on, it's not that bad. Soraya and Yuni left, and so did I. We're here in one piece, right?"
Inala's words were spoken a bit too harshly, with a tinge of hysteria crawling into her voice.
"If you could call it that," Soraya quipped back under her breath, but it wasn't like she was completely silent either. Everyone heard what she had said.
"And what is that supposed to mean?"
"It means," Soraya began, leaning over to brush her shoulder with Inala's before continuing, "that you didn't come back in one piece, did you? Even after I told you how awful it was out thereâ"
"Oh, so now after I return and you learn of what I faced, you've come to rub it in my face in order for me to fall at your feet and beg your forgiveness?"
"Well, this just got uncomfortable," Yuni spoke, alerting his sister to the fact that she was having a fight with Inala in front of at least twenty other Sirens and soldiers.
"I only mean to say that had you stayed like I asked you to, you wouldn't have been so hurt by what the outsiders have done to you."
"That's the exact same thing I just said. You know whatâI don't need to take this from you, of all people."
Inala stormed away with fire coating her heels.
"What? What are you all looking at?"
And though she couldn't see, Soraya had felt the weight of all our stares like a branding iron upon her skin.
We all looked away.
"Princess Josephine, did Lord Oren really kidnap you?"
Soraya snorted derisively at the question posed by Sigrid and rolled her eyes before stomping away much in the same fashion as Inala had and everyone ignored her as every stare pinned me to the spot.
Clearing my throat, I debated on how to respond until I realized that though these Sirens wouldn't know if I was lying or not, there was no reason for me to not be truthful.
"Yes. I tried to fight him off but he was stronger in his beast form and he drugged me then tied me up and put me in his carriage. We were in the caves in the Ness mountains when we found Inala and brought her back with us."
"Why would he do that instead of just asking you to come with him to Hefeta?"
Sigrid's innocence was shining through, and for that I admired her character, for if I had been chased through the only home I'd ever known by the soldiers of an evil king intent on kidnapping me, there wouldn't have been as much light left in my eyes as there were in hers.
Then again, growing up in Hefeta, she'd probably never killed an innocent before on accident as her voice grew out of her control.
"I wasn't trusting of what he was saying, and he was impatient. I fought and ran and almost escaped from him, but then night fell, and he transformed."
As if on cue, Oren's roar ruptured the calmness of the night around us, shattering the silence into a million pieces.
"He can be pretty scary, but he's not evil. Not like the king..."
Oren's character had yet to be determined by me, but I didn't contradict Sigrid. She still had her childlike optimism and I didn't want to ruin that.
"He's been with the community for over ten years, working for the Elders to see if they would finally agree to meddle in the affairs of the Gods for him. Apparently all it took was for him to kidnap our princess," Sabira spoke, and I couldn't help but notice the mischief on her face.
"Maybe I should call him over, and we can ask him his side of the story? Perhaps Josephine here was a particularly difficult assignment."
"I am no one's assignment," I snapped back a bit too harshly at Sabira but her eyebrows only raised as if it was through her taunting that she wanted to pull a rise out of me.
"And besides, even if they do manage to summon the god, how are they planning on breaking the curse? Seems to me like they were only using him with empty promises to get him to do their bidding."
"And now you're thinking like Velda. Maybe you are cut out for leadership after all."
My head whipped to Sabira sharply.
"You mean they truly have no way to reverse his curse?"
"His mother is a Goddess. We are just a group of Sirens; I'm not sure what he believes we can do when he is more powerful than most of us combined, but for some reason he feels we are the answer."
Ruminating over Sabira's words, I thought back on Oren's hot and cold behavior, how he was adamant about protecting me one moment, then ready to place his hands around my neck to choke the life out of me the next.
My throat was still sore from our sparring.
"Maybe he's tried everything, and you're his last resort," I supplicated, even knowing as the words fell from my lips that they weren't the truth.
Oren was hiding a secret, and due to the fact that it seemed like that secret had much to do with my demise, I was making it my mission while here to figure it out.
"Are you ready for the summoning, Princess?"
Sigrid's question brought me back to the present.
"For the God Nicos' wrath not to fall upon me, I should hope my new friends here would help me to get ready for it in time."
"Bright and early tomorrow morning, we will be learning chants, practicing the dances we'll be performing, as well as the proper way to act in front of a God."
I turned to Erinna, grateful for her plans.
"What if he chooses a Siren consort?"
One of the Sirens closer to my age spoke to the smaller crowd of younger Sirens around her, and they all giggled with barely restrained glee.
"Could you imagineâbeing a consort to a God?"
"Would he give you a child if you were his consort?"
"Hush, girl. While we are to be grateful to the God for choosing to help us should he decide that route and not slaughter us outright for daring to summon him, we don't need to insult his name by even thinking he would choose one of us as the honor of being his consort. Those roles are usually filled by demigods of great power."
Minna snapping on the other girls made the rest of them snicker at the reprimand, but then another girl pinned her stare on me.
"So does that mean Lord Oren is taking you as his consort? Since he likes you so much?"
If Sabira had handed me the meat stew in her hands a moment sooner, I would've been choking on warm broth and green vegetables.
"No, no he is not taking me as his consort, nor does he like me. At all."
"Oh," the girl pouted, head falling down sullenly as Sigrid continued the line of questioning.
"Well, then there has to be someone else. Another man or woman that you're in love with?"
"No, I'm afraid not."
The wind rustling through the trees flowed over to where I sat on the logs in front of the fire and the sour sweetness of apples brushed up against my senses just as sugary honeysuckle coated my tongue.
"Why not?"
It was an innocent question, but not one I was prepared to answer.
The wind seemed to calm me, tracing its invisible fingers down my skin as if in a caress. The slight chill in the air was replaced by the warmth of a shadowy tendril of wind.
"Any time I find love, it always ends in tragedy. I've already felt true love, and I don't know if I want to feel it again if that means forgetting my past."
I didn't want to love again if it meant Peter wouldn't be the last man I'd spoken those words to.
Sigrid stood and grasped my hand within hers.
"My mother was very sad after my father died, but she's happy now. She found someone else to love, but that doesn't mean she forgot about my father. We still talk about him all the time."
Minna stared at her daughter with wide, teary eyes before addressing the men before us.
"Warrick, Yuni, do you mind?"
The men seemed to understand the innate draw to the song and stood to leave, but not before giving swift and sweet goodbyes to the Sirens they had been accompanying.
When the men were out of earshot, I couldn't help asking Erinna the question on the tip of my tongue.
"Are you two betrothed?"
A sweet smile fell on her lips as she turned her face down to her hands.
"Not yet."
"But it's coming," Sabira spoke, causing Erinna to swat her friend on the leg playfully.
"You don't know that."
One of the Sirens in the back of the crowd began singing a melody about a sailor who'd fallen in love with a Siren.
He found out too late what she was, and by then his prejudice was too far gone. He couldn't separate the woman he loved from the creature she was.
He forced her to sing and kill a man.
He dipped his bronze blade in that man's blood and stabbed her through the heart.
I shivered as the rest of the Sirens began singing, finishing off the tale just as another one started.
This one was of an imprisoned woman forced to bear the children of an evil man.
He killed every girl the woman birthed, and kept the boys.
Tears were lining my eyes as again and again, the stories kept coming, the songs building to a high crescendo exploding in the atmosphere as the warm wind scented with every good memory stored in my mind continued soothing me, its invisible fingers lulling me into quiet comfort even as my heart raced from the cruelty of what the Sirens around me had endured.
Our hands joined, and suddenly I was the only one singing out the unfairness and brutality of what they had endured while my gift siphoned their energy from them and pulled into my body, the cuts on my arms healing before my eyes as the song tore from my throat.
The throbbing in my neck subsided as the pain doubled, tripled, danced inside of me to a torturous beat that pulsed just as surely as Oren's powers once had.
I was suddenly missing the soft sweet stroke of his powers against my mind as they pulled me into a false sense of security.
I would've given that over the pain of twenty Sirens and the hardships they'd faced, because once their stories left me, mine came swirling to the forefront, and I battled with everything within me to close my mouth, but I couldn't.
They heard it allâkilling my father, being cast out from my mother, running with Marlisa, the mistreatment of the families who had taken us in, being too late to save Marlisa from the men who'd defiled her, finding Peter and what I could only describe as true love and then watching as I was powerless to stop his death, because it had all been my fault.
The song broke, and then Sabira's arms were around me. Then Erinna's.
Sigrid, Minna, the rest of the Sirens crowding all around us as they chanted.
"When the songbird trills its last song, do not be afraid to sing along."
I smiled through my tears.
***
Author's Note:
What did you think of this chapter?
***
The World of Irena: