“Ariadna was an inquisitive person, much like others I’ve had the pleasure of encountering.

  And she could read.

  I’d never met a woman who could read, then—or many such people at all, really. My parents certainly had no need for the skill, and so none of us ever saw an opportunity to learn it.

  But she taught me. Ariadna insisted that I learn, always saying that the knowledge of letters and numbers could save one’s life, make one powerful, or even give one a source of invaluable entertainment if in the possession of books—and that, she was.

  And so, over the course of months, and taking much more effort and time than I suspect is normal, I painstakingly learned the tedious matter of written language and basic mathematics from some of the most expensive books I’ve ever, to this day, laid eyes on.

  For Ulises was a literate man—and a former tradesman of the rarest pirate goods in Yriaa—and he kept reading material in his home. Farren, the fucking imbecile, never cared to keep any of the books he ever acquired, preferring instead to turn them into more useful money. But Ulises fancied himself a finer man than he was, and he enjoyed owning those intellectual treasures if not for their value in wisdom, at least for how worldly they made him appear.

  Among his collection, Ariadna found a peculiar book one day, an aged tome written in the old language of the Carmeem empire of the southern continent, that caught both our eyes. It listed and described the ancient deities our ancestors once venerated.

  So we gathered in her house to study it under the cover of darkness the next day, after our husbands had fallen unconscious with sleep by our sides like sacks of three-day-old meat, and by the light of a candle and immersed in the strange smells of old and rotting parchment and leather, we attempted to read it.

  The letters were the same, sharing our symbols to represent each sound in a word, but the words themselves were completely foreign, empty of meaning when spoken aloud.

  There were some vague translations in charcoal, however, on the margins of the vellum. Someone had once tried to decipher the enigma behind the text, jotting down only the most crucial bits of information on each page.

  And that is how I learned of Ombira.

  But Ariadna was interested in another. She was consumed with curiosity over a God of Wisdom named Ikelles, said to be the bearer of all knowledge. She thought one such as he might have answers unknown to all about the creation and purpose of our lives and souls, the true meaning of life—that sort of horseshit.

  Ha!

  But, as is expected, we were too afraid of the Gods, then, to attempt to do something with our discoveries. If we knew anything at all, we knew that the Gods were bloodthirsty creatures lacking the capacity to value human life. And so we put the book back where it had been and returned to reading guides on medicinal plants and herbs, short stories and old myths, foreign scholar’s journals—all the written gold Ulises kept. Whatever we could get our hands on in Ariadna’s husband’s collection, we secretly read, and for years we took great pleasure in that forbidden power that we stole for ourselves.”

  It was a seven-day journey to the Sun capital. Teela spent most of it looking sideways at her brother, who was not doing well at all. She didn’t know what to do, how to help beyond supporting his grieving wishes, so she only kept her distance and felt guilty about it.

  On that first day when they left Pirn, Mantis stole a coach, one that had belonged to a driver neighbor who Teela had often seen riding one way or another on the street that fronted the tavern carrying more moneyed people than herself about their daily business.

  The theft bothered Teela a bit, but she said nothing about it. That man was probably dead, anyway—or, at least, it was certain that he would never return and miss his stolen property. So she ignored her inner protestations and pretended to not care. Soon enough they were on their way north, riding away in a horse-drawn carriage driven by Mantis.

  On that Sunny day, Leroh and Teela left their place of birth behind, never to return again.

  The siren had come, somehow. That was an unexpected turn of events, and Teela was not certain if it pleased her to again be in the company of a person who’d wanted to kill them upon their first encounter, but it could be no worse than mingling with one who’d succeeded at it, she told herself.

  The environment around them transformed into more deserted terrain. Only tall grasses and knolls surrounded them for a long while, the tingling smell of nature and the feel of life dulling to a quiet murmur in the background of Teela’s thoughts from the sudden lack of vegetation.

  Birds cawed in the far skies and insects trilled; the breeze flowing in through the open window smelled of zinging harmony and peace. Life moved on, uncaring of and unaffected by the atrocities so recently committed by the God who ruled it.

  When the black smudge that was Pirn started fading in the horizon and its influence was no longer as strong on her heart, Teela made an attempt at conversation: “Yilenn, you have legs.”

  The red-haired woman turned from where she sat beside Teela on the coach’s inner seat. Leroh, who faced both of them from the other seat, lifted his depressed eyes to regard her with a mixture of disinterest and disapproval.

  “Yes. I have legs,” Yilenn answered with some amusement in her gaze.

  “Well, how come?”

  “So that I can walk.”

  “Yes, but I thought sirens were supposed to have tails, like fish.”

  Yilenn laughed a little and Leroh gave a sigh but continued to stare out the window of the moving carriage without saying anything to reprimand her or to interfere. Teela frowned with deep concern over that.

  “That is also true. You thought correctly,” the siren said with a friendly smile, and bent down to roll the fabric of her leggings up to her knees, exposing the scaled blue skin of her lower legs. “See? They interlap.” She pushed her legs together. In the middle, where the scales of one leg met the scales of the other, the shiny, circular things subtly lifted to make space for their fellows and settled down again to form a smooth pattern, seamlessly uniting her previously-separate legs into one bigger limb where her calves and shins touched.

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  Teela was astonished, looking very closely with her head bent down to get a better view. “It’s marvelous,” she said. “Do you lift the scales or do they do it on their own?”

  “Hm.” Yilenn gave her question some honest consideration. “I raise them, I think. I can feel each one, like you would an individual hair if it was pulled.”

  “Oh. I see.” Teela smiled at her, unsure of why. “I saw your fins earlier, too. They are interesting.”

  The siren smiled back. “Thank you.”

  They made camp that night a ways off the road to try to avoid encountering any God servants or common highwaymen, and, once they’d taken care of all their basic necessities, they quickly found their sleeping spots on the orders of a particularly short-tempered Mantis.

  Leroh and Teela went in the tent, as had been their previous arrangement, with Mantis taking her place atop her cloak just outside their shelter. What was new was that, to sleep and use for privacy, the siren was offered the whole coach to herself—a space with more than enough room for two or even three people to take shelter in and rest more comfortably than on the cold hard ground.

  Mantis’s treatment of Yilenn was a little odd, Teela thought. She probably should not say anything about it. She probably would, at some point.

  As they settled down for the night, Teela tried getting her brother to speak. “Have you had enough to eat and drink?”

  “Leave me alone,” he said with his back to her.

  They slept.

  The next day was much the same, and so was the one after that. Leroh remained despondent and more bitter toward Teela than he’d been since they’d first left Pirn with Mantis. He preferred to keep quiet and rarely ever interacted with any of them, and Teela resolved not to press his decision to mourn in cold solitude.

  After all she’d done to her brother, Teela thought she should afford him that minor respect, at least.

  As for the God servants in their company, Mantis and Yilenn quickly fell into a sort of camaraderie, often choosing to sit together at the front of the carriage to talk quietly and laugh, or just to ride side by side rather than separately. Perhaps they found comfort in each other, Teela speculated, some natural understanding and solidarity from their shared hardships as God-sworn.

  Mantis was herself, a bit morose for having to embark on this unwise journey against her better judgment, but the presence of the siren seemed to take her attention away from her objections. She’d only initially complained, saying that it was stupid and suicidal to defy the Sun, that nothing could be done to help those enslaved to him. But when she’d looked deeply into Teela’s eyes and found there what Teela assumed was her unvoiced resolve, she’d yielded with a grunt of dissatisfaction and a muttered plea for mercy from the whims of the reckless.

  And Yilenn, on her part, was struggling with something.

  Teela often saw her wringing her hands and clenching her jaw, biting her lips compulsively or even hyperventilating at seemingly-random times. On that third day, Teela commented on it: “Is everything alright? You look troubled.”

  Yilenn only forced a polite smile and nodded stiffly at her. “Yes. Yes. I attempt to defy my God’s command, that is all. It is rather unpleasant, I must say.”

  Teela, sitting beside her on the inside of the moving coach, observed her from top to bottom. Physically, she looked fine. More than fine, perhaps. Had her beauty increased?

  “What is the command?” she asked.

  “Don’t answer that. Teela, stop with the questions,” Mantis ordered in a loud and stern voice that reached them from where she sat driving the vehicle outside.

  Teela only frowned and crossed her arms on her chest.

  She found it ridiculous that there were so many things being kept from her still, so many questions deliberately left unanswered.

  Had not she experienced enough horrors and witnessed enough cruelty done in the name of the Gods to be spared the secrecy reserved for children? Had not she learned so much by her own means that the ‘protection’ of ignorance no longer applied to her?

  Teela didn't even know who the Gods were!

  She’d learned of the Sea and the Sun, and Ombira, yes—and Mantis had cursed in the name of the Moon, once. That’d be another. But who else? What other deities existed? Where had they come from?

  And the magic! Did they produce it within themselves, somehow? Or harvest it? If so, from where? And why was it that humans could not command magic as the Gods did? What made them so different?

  Why was everything the way that it was?

  There were so many things Teela yearned to know that she could have compiled an endless list with all her questions, but no one was willing to enlighten her.

  Simply because she was young.

  A nonsensical reason!

  That night, Mantis parked the coach just outside the dark woods, a massive forested area of evergreen trees that spanned the distance from the capital nearly through to Pirn. They all ate and drank from their dwindling provisions and assumed their usual places without much talk. The atmosphere was particularly glum.

  Once in the safety of her tent, with her brother already asleep beside her, Teela rested her head on the cushion of her raised and bent arm, and her mind began to wander toward a more perilous area.

  Mother was dead.

  Teela didn’t know how to react to that, how she should feel. Mother was dead—gone. Forever.

  The tavern was gone, as was Leroh’s and Teela’s bedchamber upstairs with all the carved wooden toys from their childhoods and the trinkets and personal belongings they’d gathered throughout the course of their lives. Mother’s kitchen, that feared space of hostility and punishment but also of so many memories, Father’s stables, so beloved to Teela, the smelly pinewood flooring she’d memorized every line and swirl of, the chipped and perpetually sticky tables she’d cleaned and eaten at and played under and hated and loved, all gone. The whole house—the whole town was nothing but a memory, now.

  And Teela wanted to be broken to the core about it like her brother was.

  She was. She was.

  But perhaps for different reasons.

  The least of her grievances was the loss of the woman who’d brought her into the world. Teela could not find it in herself to be torn about her death, and a small, repressed and silenced part of herself whispered that she felt relief, but a louder and more righteous part adamantly denied it. She was not glad to be freed of her mother’s care, only shocked, and devastated over the unjust loss of life. Hundreds—perhaps close to or even surpassing a thousand—innocent people had been mercilessly murdered or enslaved, and that tragedy did have the power to make Teela’s eyes fill with tears anytime she was reminded of it.

  Hopefully Leroh’s friends had survived. Hopefully there would be someone left to rescue when they arrived in the capital.

  That was the only thing Teela could wish for.

  She didn’t know the character of the cobblers’ boys. They had always ignored her for the most part. But, if she was lucky and either of them had a cowardly heart, there would be a spark of hope left for her brother. If at least one person Leroh loved had valued life over morality and chosen to remain alive, if just one was weak of spirit, Leroh could have a chance of overcoming what had befallen him. Otherwise…It was uncertain what would become of him.

  There was a sound outside, not too far from their camp in the direction of the nearby forest; slow, crunching steps.

  Teela heard Mantis getting up just outside the tent and got to her knees to peer out through the opening at the front of the shelter. Mantis was standing in a defensive position with her legs braced for confrontation. Her expression was one of terror in the flickering light of their fire.

  “What in the Sun’s damned name is that?” she breathed, eyes wide and fixed on the dark woods.

  She was scared.

  Teela came out to stand beside her and followed the direction of her gaze. Just behind the reach of easy view stood a large creature with the body of a man and the head of a ram. Its figure was a human’s, but three times as large, and entirely furred in dark brown, coarse hair. Its horns gleamed pale in the Moonlight as it looked at them.