Page 11 of Hymn of Breath and Bone

It was hard not to stop at every shelf, each one crammed with books and scrolls in a way that was simultaneously both haphazard and excessively organized. Letters and numbers carved into each shelf indicated the type of book or manuscript stored there, and I wondered if Ana had it all memorized.

Seas, we had lost so much more in the Exile than I had ever realized.

“You’re here,” Ana said, beaming brightly as Caspian practically dragged me from the shelves. “I’ve pulled far too many books for us to get through in one afternoon, but I was too excited to restrain myself. Are you alright?”

I looked up to find Ana frowning slightly, Caspian’s lips tilted in a bemused grin. “She’s just overwhelmed,” he drawled, giving my hand a squeeze as he jerked his head toward Ana. “Do you plan to say hello, Urchin, or do you need a moment alone with the books?”

I blushed, trying to hide the flare of heat at his suggestive tone with a scowl. Caspian raised his brow as if he saw right through me. “Libraries should not get you so hot and bothered, Marina,” he murmured, leaning in close so Ana couldn’t hear. “But it’s good to know we have options.”

“You’re an ass,” I hissed, trying to quell the flood of heat.

His knowing smile made me want to smack him. “You like it.”

“Ahem,” coughed Ana, flushing pink under her brown skin. “Do you two need a moment?”

“We’re fine,” I said hastily, casting another scowl at Caspian, which he returned with a wink. “His feathery majesty was just leaving.”

“I leave her in your capable hands, Ana,” Caspian said with a short bow.

“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Ana said, looking interestedly between us. “Want me to fly her back later?”

“I’ll come get her,” Caspian replied, turning to me and putting his hands on my shoulders. “Make good choices, Urchin,” he warned, leaning down and brushing his lips against my cheek. In a low voice meant just for me, he added, “We’ll talk about everything tonight.”

I shivered, both at the brush of his lips and at the promise of all of our secrets finally coming out. He waited for me to nod before sweeping upward, a gust of wind conjured to take him flying up, up, up toward the windows in the ceiling.

“He likes to make a dramatic exit, that’s for sure,” Ana sighed, her hands on her hips and her face tilted up as she watched him fly away. She looked back down at me and grinned. “Ready to dig in?”

It was possibly oneof the best days of my life, and certainly interesting enough to push thoughts of bedding Caspian temporarily from my mind.

Any question I had about siren history, Ana not only answered, but found a book that gave me far more detail than I truly needed.

Many of the stories were ones I had read already about their warrior people and the magic of their song, but she also showed me a collectionof manuscripts from when the selkies and sirens ruled the Silent Isles together.

“It’s strange to see,” I mused, poring over my fifth or sixth manuscript about everyday, mundane rulings between the two intertwined kingdoms. “And they really just ruled side-by-side like this? For centuries?”

We had settled into one of the reading areas, books and manuscripts piled high around us. Ana sat across from me, her blue dress a flowing waterfall of silk, so unlike Zephyr's preferred attire and my borrowed leathers for training. She watched me intently as I marveled over her people’s history.

“They did,” Ana said, riffling through the manuscripts and pulling one that looked even older than the one I had been examining. She had donned special gloves to handle the ancient paper, and she laid it out gingerly on the table before me. “But before that, they were truly one kingdom.”

She pointed to the top of a chart—some kind of royal genealogy—and I traced the various branches with my eyes. “A siren queen and a selkie king,” I marveled, looking down at generations of mated kings and queens who ruled their people as one. Near the bottom, the tree stopped. “What happened here?”

Ana frowned. “This is where the original royal line ended,” she said, pointing at four female names. “The final mated selkie and siren pair had no children, and when they passed, several warring houses fought for dominance over the Isles.” She grimaced as if this part of history were distasteful, reaching for another document that she unrolled atop the genealogy. It looked to be some kind of treaty or contract, signed by two hands. “The only thing that ended the warfare was a truce between a selkie house and a siren house. Both lords had mated one of their kind, and their sons becamedual kings, rather than mated monarchs. For some reason—possibly our peoples’ own hubris, or a desire for power, or just intolerance—there were no more mated sirens and selkies in the royal line for several centuries. It became a taboo, and intermated pairs chose to remain hidden or leave the isles rather than face discrimination for their love.”

“Until five hundred years ago,” I pointed out, looking at her with a raised brow. “When the siren princess and selkie prince were mated.”

“Yes,” she replied sadly. “But we know, of course, how that ended.”

“And we all just forgot?” I asked, waving my hand at the royal family tree. “We forgot that, for centuries, we’d been united?”

Excitement was building in me. Selkies and sirens had mated in the past. Had ruled together. Caspian and Icoulddo this. I could tell him that we were mates, let myself love him the way I wanted, and we could bring our people together once again.

“This happened thousands of years ago,” Ana said, gesturing to the manuscripts on the table. “Thousands of years for the stories of the mated selkie and siren royals to fall to myth. Our scholars only rediscovered this after the Exile, when we had fled with as much of our history as we could. And some of the sirens who lived through the Exile are unwilling to imagine a reunified kingdom. I suppose that the scholars and kings who let history be buried wished our people to remain at odds. Perhaps it was easier to seize power with a common enemy. Or perhaps they simply stopped believing in the blessing of Melusine.”

“Melusine?” I echoed, frowning at that unfamiliar name. “Who is Melusine?”

Ana smiled another sad smile and dug through the pile of manuscripts. “I suppose her stories have been buried by the selkies, if you don’t knowher.” She had to move a stack to retrieve the scroll she wanted, far at the bottom of the pile of historical documents. When she unrolled it, I gasped.

The text was indecipherable, some long-forgotten language that I couldn’t hope to read. But the top half of the manuscript held a beautiful illustration of a female with both siren wingsanda selkie tail.