Free The Cedna (Tales of Blood & Light Book 2) by Emily June Street Page B

matched his steps. “Is it much farther?”
    “Just there.” He pointed up the block.
    Onatos held the shop door for me. I stared at the racks as I entered, shocked again by sayantaq luxuries. Bright colors made a panorama along the walls—hundreds of dresses, blouses, and coats, more than I could have imagined. Onatos pulled the tailor aside and talked to him in a low voice while I wandered, awestruck, through the racks, touching dress after dress.
    It did not take me long to find the one I wanted. I pulled the black silk gown from its rack and wound through the shop towards the two men. “This one,” I said, holding it up. “I want this one.”
    “Black?” Onatos murmured. “Why black?”
    I touched my blackstone ulio, which I’d stashed in the leather girdle at my hips. I turned it so it caught the light. “Black is the color of my bloodlight.”
    Onatos’s eyebrows drew together. “Your aetherlight is black?”
    “My bloodlight, yes. Aetherlight.”
    “Everyone favors their aetherlight color, of course,” Onatos said. “But wearing someone else’s House color at court is not permitted. Find something in a neutral color.” He gestured to the tailor, who hurried down the racks and pulled forth a copper dress in shimmering shot silk.
    I frowned, for I did not much like the brown dress. Brown reminded me of everything I’d worn in Gante. “I don’t understand. You wear black.”
    “Black is the color of House Amar.” Onatos took my arm as the tailor wrapped the two gowns up in tissue and placed them in a box. “Don’t get me wrong, Beautiful. You would look stunning in the color of my House. I only fear Mydon’s reaction.”
----
    T wo days dragged by while we waited to see King Mydon. I wandered in Onatos’s house and examined his paintings, mostly formal portraits. I saw reflections of Onatos in the subjects, especially in a raven-haired woman dressed all in black. She had his same indigo eyes, though hers were unaccountably sad, and the artist had cared more for likeness than flattery, painting purple shadows in her cheeks and lines of sorrow at her mouth.
    “My mother.” Onatos’s voice floated down the narrow hall. “Odessa Amar.”
    “She looks sad.”
    “She was.”
    “Why?”
    Boot heels snapped on the blackstone floor until Onatos stood at my side before the painting. “She had a sorrowful life.”
    “How?” I was no stranger to that sort of life.
    He sighed, and his face took on the same sad lines I saw in his mother’s portrait. “Her brother, my father, forced himself upon her. He kept her for himself and would not let her marry.”
    “Do you mean that your mother and your father were brother and sister by blood?”
    “Do you think less of me, knowing that I came from a union of such sin?”
    I studied his mother’s portrait again. She had hands much like his, with delicate, slender fingers—nothing like my own hands, scarred from my misadventures with the blackstone, roughened by Gantean winters. “I do not know what you mean by this sin. In Gante we do not keep track of our blood-relationships as you do here. We cut the aetherlight bloodcords that connect us. Most Ganteans do not know their parents or their bloodlines.”
    “You know your parents,” Onatos pointed out.
    “This was not necessarily a good thing, on Gante.” My mother had refused to cut the bloodcord that connected us, and for this reason I had not been raised in the tiguat like most Gantean children. Instead I had been left in my mother’s care, a shameful status suffered by only the feeblest children.
    “You know what it is like to be an outsider, then.” I could see from Onatos’s expression that he had felt this way, an outsider looking in, for most of his life.
    “What your parents did, is it considered so awful here?”
    There was that pulling sensation between us again, that tug between our hearts. I wanted to touch him, but I kept my hands at my sides.
    “Oh, yes,” Onatos said. “It