“Please.” Aiyanna placed her free hand palm down on the table and squared her shoulders. “Tarot has always guided us to those the Families discarded. We could never discern why they were so focused on bloodline.”
“Until one day,” Neira said, holding up a jar, “when a boy was left to die in our wilds and this came oozing from his ears, nose, and mouth.”
I frowned at the living silver contained in the glass jar. “I don’t understand.”
Nix took a step back, her focus turned inward.
Neira shrugged. “If we discovered an outcast soon after they’d been abandoned, we also discovered the remnants of this fluid. We have to move quickly, however, because it moves quickly and does not survive long outside the host.”
“It looks like it’s living in there.”
“Agreed. However, it’s sealed.” She picked up one the jars. “If we remove the lid.” She did just that.
The liquid rose to the mouth of the jar, but shriveled away, as if the air was poison.
Neira leaned over and blew into it.
The liquid solidified almost instantly.
I couldn’t quite figure out what I was seeing. “I’m trying to keep up. I really am.”
“The voices.” Neira flattened her lips against her teeth, setting the jar down with a clunk. “They each claimed to hear voices inside their heads, and someone trying to control them. It wasn’t until this liquid had left them that the voices disappeared.”
“Voices. Living metal. What are you talking about?”
“I remember…” Nix’s voice was small. “When I was a girl, when my Mark should have presented itself, I was brought before the Shankara elders. They made me drink from a metal cup. It was bitter and I thought something moved inside it.” She shook her head, heart-shaped mouth agape. “It was after that I was allowed to be betrothed. But there were moments when I heard voices inside my head.”
Aiyanna nodded. “This liquid was only found in those fleeing the Great Families. Those who were collected from other tribes never spoke of voices, never talked of…” She gestured to the jars. “…that.”
My frown was so deep it was starting to give me a headache. “What do these voices tell them?”
Nix raised her gaze. “Kill. They tell us to kill.”
“NO,” I SAID WITH A laughing snort, pressing my fingertips to my head. I couldn’t wrap my head around what they were trying to tell me. I’d heard the voice myself. But a liquid metal taking control of people? “You don’t get to use this as an excuse. You don’t get to say you killed people because…this told you to?”
Aiyanna lowered her gaze, her lips pinched pensively. “Just listen, Synn. When you hear everything we’ve gathered to date, you’ll see.”
Nix’s surprise slipped and was replaced by a carefully constructed mask.
I held up a finger, noting her surprise only after it had disappeared. It had seemed so genuine. “Are you trying to tell me you never knew about this?”
“I’d heard rumors, talk, but I never paid attention.” She pursed her open lips, her forehead folded in a frown. “Have you ever wondered why the Seven Great Families were so worried about keeping the blood pure?”
“No. I never wondered about that.” My face screwed up in consternation. “I’ve barely heard whispers of this. I’ve certainly never seen it. And, before anyone forgets, I’m El’Asim, one of the Seven Great Families.”
“You’ve seen it, Synn.” Nix rubbed her fingertips along the rock top, her gaze distant. “You simply did not realize it. Did you ever wonder why Ino Nami treated you as she did?”
I shrugged, shaking my head. “It was because of my Mark. I didn’t get mine until late.”
“Or how your tribe never allowed others to enter. The only people allowed in the El’Asim tribe were other El’Asim.”
“Not necessarily. We allowed the Umira.”
“They were of the same bloodline, Synn.”
The pieces were clicking together, but it only made me more irritated. “Our bloodline is mixed. The Umira. The El’Asim. We’re mixed. It shows in our Mark.”
“True.” Nix blinked, her gaze unfocused.
“Then, how do you explain the El’Asim and Umira being allowed into the Great Families if you need pure blood?” I slashed my hand. “I don’t know where you’re going with this, but you’re traveling down the wrong path.”
Nix met my gaze, though I doubted she actually saw me. “Do you know what we called you? The rest of the Great Families. The Shankara, the Ino, the LeBlancs, the Bahrains and Fursts?”
I rolled my eyes. “Do I care?”
“Blood bastards.” Nix’s mouth fell open as her gaze drifted to the ceiling. “We called you blood bastards and looked down on both of your tribes. When the rest of us gathered, you were never invited.”
Gathered? “What? The Great Families only gathered for the ice thaw and even then, it was only to break the letharan out of the ice.”
Nix chuckled, her smile demeaning. “We allowed you in because your Marks were stronger, stronger than some of the original Family Marks, but you were never truly one of us.”
“Us.” My incredulity dampened as the full force of the truth in her words pounded me in the face. I couldn’t ignore it. Too many things were finally starting to make sense.
“Them.” Nix’s pink tongue darted out from her lips for a brief moment. “The Umira and the El’Asim were close, not because you made good partners, but because you were the outcast tribes of the pure five. They wanted the power of your Marks in their ranks. Nothing more.”
I rubbed my eyes. All these years, I’d thought—well, I didn’t know what I’d thought. I hadn’t really cared. The Furst and the Bahrains had been destroyed when I was little. The LeBlancs followed quickly afterward, and I’d never had any associations with the Shankara. I’d never felt the impact of having them in our society.
But now they were, larger than life, and reunited with the remaining true Great Families.
Aiyanna raised her head, biting her lips in thought. “The priestesses of Tarot were deeply vested in understanding the nature of the Arrows.”
I sighed. More stories. The Arrows supposedly had infiltrated all levels of government, society, and religions. They sought total power. They’d manipulated people, killed leaders, planted others. When my father had talked about them, he’d had gooseflesh. He’d been a part of getting rid of the Arrows. “Really? The Arrows? Now?”
“They were very real, Synn. They were the ones who created the Great Families in the first place.” Aiyanna picked up one of the jars. “Think, Synn. If they created the Great Families, if they started the blood purification requirements, and they gave the Great Families this?”
I was finally catching on. The Arrows had infiltrated politics, every high-powered tribe or religious faction to shape the world. That had been then, in my father’s time. If they had shaped the political structure of the world, if they had planned for this moment…It seemed like an awful lot of work, careful planning. There had to be a reason. I needed to hear what reasons Neira or Nix or Aiyanna had puzzled together. “Father said the Great Families allied to destroy the Priests and the Arrows.”
Neira nodded, her eyes narrowed. “That’s what made finding the Arrow’s movements so hard. They act behind others.”
Act behind others. Like Mother? It had certainly seemed like someone had been controlling her. The bond?
Nix thoughtlessly rubbed at a spot on her cheek. “Everything is making so much more sense. Do you ever wonder why the queens supported me, why I was allowed the power of Tarot?”
I glanced at Aiyanna.
She sighed, resignation settled over her heart-shaped face.
“Because you took it?” I shrugged. “You were unstoppable. You frightened everyone around you.”
Nix shook her head. “I don’t think you realize how very little power I had.” She laid her palms flat on the table. “I was carefully selected, chosen, honed.”
>
“Why?” According to everything Aiyanna had just finished telling me, Tarot believed in empowering people, not destroying them.
“We were eradicating what we perceived as a disease.” Nix turned her gaze to Aiyanna. “We simply couldn’t see the full picture, not until we’d taken several of their children.”
I jerked in shock and surprise. “You’re saying that you had a reason for taking the children?”
She nodded.
“And making them watch as their families were murdered? That’s not possible. There is nothing on this world that could make that good.”
Nix raised her face to the ceiling, her eyes closed. “It’s something we discovered early on. If we could catch the children before their Marks are fully seated, if we could catch them before they were infected, we could save them. If we caught them too late, they are beyond hope.”
“Beyond hope? Neira’s people were able to purge the liquid out.”
Neira winced. “I didn’t say they survived, Synn.” She looked away, her eyelids down cast. “Most did not.”
The level of severe disbelief that hit me hurt my face. “So you did that for a reason? You burned people alive—mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles—alive for a reason?”
“Yes.” Something shifted on Nix’s features. Her lips and eyes softened. “We learned that by taking the refugees into our care, we were allowing their spies in. They nearly destroyed us, Synn. That’s the reason we took Pleron City, why we stole the Librarium, why we took our city to the sky. It was the only place we were safe.”
“And forcing the children to watch their families die?” I really needed a valid reason for that. It was the cruelest thing I’d ever experienced.
“Their Marks,” Aiyanna said, quietly. “That was the key. Marks can hide on a child. Your Mark probably surfaced a lot sooner than you realized. They’ll pop up occasionally, usually during tantrums. The child doesn’t recall the incident, but the parents do. When the Marks start showing themselves on a regular basis, that’s when they’re taken to be initiated into the Family.”
“Made to drink that tea.” Nix shivered.
“That’s when the liquid is introduced.” Neira fingered one of the jars. “It has to be. The liquid isn’t found in children who haven’t Marked yet.”
I massaged my furrowed forehead. “What does this have to do with anything?”
Neira slid a jar over toward me. “What we witnessed after the Arrows is that the Great Families came together and began seeking resources. A lot of them. They’re working toward something, though we can’t discern what that is.”
“What do you mean?”
“List the Great Families.”
I rolled my eyes. “Bahrain.”
“They sought land, but not only that. They sought lands rich in pleron.”
My face screwed up. “They were farmers. Why would they be interested in a metal that had be mined?”
“They were farmers before the Arrows.” Nix traced a crack in the stone. “They mined the pleron, but we had no idea where they were sending it.”
“What about the Furst?”
“Landsmen, originally. But after the Arrows, they took to the sea. We think they were the ones transporting the pleron, but we could never be sure.”
“So, the Hands destroyed them anyway, just to be sure.”
Neira rubbed the bridge of her nose. “What you’re not seeing, Synn, is that they had viable reasons for eradicating them. When the Furst took to the seas, they started killing all others on the sea. They were the reason the Hands took to the sky. When the Bahrain took to the islands, they used the Han’s tribe to destroy all previous inhabitants. The Bahrain created the Han. The Umira were used to mine pleron, but they were better able to mask their activities. We believe it was because they were more nomadic. They mined the deserts.”
“How do you know so much about this?” I demanded. “You hide on an island where you’re rarely seen and never heard from.”
Neira struck me with her gaze. “Because we’re sitting on the richest pleron reservoir we know of. I make it my business to know why people want to attack my lands.”
I wanted to throttle people. This all made entirely too much sense. Things that hadn’t fit together all of a sudden did now.
My hands shook with rage and disbelief. My entire life, I’d been a tool, a puppet. I’d always needed someone to pull my strings, to guide me. To what? To what?
“We raised Sky City,” Nix said, “to gather more information about the Families, about their movements, but also, to stay safe. We built laboratories to learn what we could about this liquid.”
“And?”
“I was not a part of that, Synn.” She raked her teeth along her top lip. “I concentrated on advancing our technologies to continue the battle.”
“What we discovered,” Aiyanna said, “is that the liquid lives and that it emits a type of frequency. We haven’t been able to ‘listen in,’ as Joshua calls it.”
Whoa. He’d developed into what I called a friend while I’d been imprisoned on Sky City. So much so, that I entrusted him with the technological advances of not only the League of Cities, but my fleet. “Joshua knows about this?”
“He has been rather key on a lot of things,” Aiyanna said firmly. “He was the reason you escaped Sky City.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. His plane was rather instrumental.”
Aiyanna winced. “He was the one we were trying to get out of Sky City.”
My mouth fell open, my mind scrambling to understand what she’d just said. “I escaped. With help from Joshua and Keeley.”
“And Yvette.”
I shook my head and flapped my hand at Nix. “You said you were kicked out of Shankara after your Mark showed itself as fire. But that was after you were married and had children. That doesn’t make any sense.”
Nix pursed her lips. “When I was a child, my Mark was air like all of Shankara. I was given the tea, I was provided a husband, I had children, and then one day my Mark changed. I didn’t know how.”
“So, you have this liquid inside you.”
Nix glanced at Aiyanna.
The priestess raised her eyebrows. “Nix has a unique ability. She can take the power of other people’s Marks. When her Mark first appeared, she was surrounded by the Shankara, air Marks. But the day she was banished, Ino had come to visit.”
I frowned. “Then…she could use the power of any of our Marks?”
Nix straightened. “Any but yours. Do you wonder why I kept you as long as I did?”
“You wanted a play thing?” That’s what I’d thought before.
“I wanted your Mark. Once I borrow a Mark, I have that ability forever.” Pure ice laced her dark gaze. “But I was never able to grasp yours.”
“We think,” Aiyanna said, “that because of her Mark, the liquid affects her differently.”
I shook my head.
“And we think,” Aiyanna said, widening her eyes and raising a hand to calm me, “that you’ve been introduced to this as well.”
“I was never given any tea.”
Neira leaned in. “Think about it, Synn. You bonded with Nix. You bonded with the letharan you have in your ships. You even bonded with spitfyre falcons who were never supposed to be bondable after their humans died.”
“That doesn’t mean—” I stared at the jar closest to me and took a stumbling step back. “No.”
She nodded. “Your father had to have seen how powerful your Mark was, Synn. You couldn’t have hidden it. Not really. Look at how he treated you. He should have given the fleet to your sister, Zara.”
“She didn’t want it.”
“Didn’t she?”
“No. She told me that since the day I was born.” Which was an exaggeration. She’d told me that since the day I could remember.
“Everyone likely knew how strong your Mark was. There was no question. The Fleet would go to you. They simply had
to wait for your Mark to awaken.”
“But I don’t recall drinking a tea.”
Nix shrugged. “In the Shankara, there was a great deal of ceremony. In the El’Asim, maybe there was not.”
“Then am I doing things I wouldn’t normally? Are they taking control of me?”
“We think,” Aiyanna said, “and this is merely theory because we do not know, but we think that the liquid does not control you because of the power of your Mark. You overpower it, and instead use it, somehow, to bond to people and things you normally would not be able to.”
“But earlier, someone took over my body.”
“The liquid.”
“It speaks?”
“People say they hear voices, but it is the liquid? Or is it someone else somewhere else who has the ability to communicate through the frequency the liquid uses?”
I looked to Neira. “And you’ve known about this?”
“The Hands were doing their research. We were doing ours.” The warrior woman ran a hand along her tight braid. “We take in refugees all the time, Synn. We don’t immediately accept them into our circles. There are a tests they must complete.”
The blood drained from my face. “The Ino refugees. If you attempt to remove this from them, they will die.”
Neira nodded. “Your mother knew what she was doing in imprisoning your sister. She knew that some of her people would choose to come to you, and if they have this liquid in them, then they could be used as spies.”
“Without them knowing?”
“We have noticed people walking around with different personalities, who wake up as themselves and have no recollection on how they got to the location where they were caught.”
I stalked away, raking my hands through my hair, pulling it from its ponytail. I turned on them. “What am I supposed to do? What does this mean? Why the Families? Why the blood?”
Aiyanna raised a finger. “We’ve been able to determine the answer to that one. In studying the blood—and after Joshua’s brilliant Marker Disseminator—we were able to discover that the Great Families all have a blood marker in common. Doctor Carson was able to isolate it. It’s strongest in the Great Families, and the more other tribes are brought in, the weaker that genetic marker becomes.”
Whispers of the Skyborne (Devices of War Book 3) Page 14