Cypress Ashes (San Amaro Investigations Book 7) by Kai Butler

Author:Kai Butler [Butler, Kai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-18T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

With a dramatic huff, his eyes rolled up like a teenager in a ’90s movie, Trickster began, “The Sun god hated his father. This was well known. Although it was not a normal hate, not the sort you would feel for a bitter enemy. No, the Sun god’s hate grew in his jealousy and in his anger at how his father was ruling over his brothers and sisters. The Sun god had very clear ideas of right and wrong. When you are a god of light, it is very easy to tell where there is darkness, and the Sun god felt there was much darkness being allowed to flourish in the thousand realms.

“So the Sun god waited and bided his time, looking for weaknesses. Eventually, he found one. On the sunniest day of the year, he heated the throne room until it was near boiling. All the gods were sweating. But for the Sun god’s father to ask him to turn down the heat… well, that would be weakness. So instead, we all sweltered.”

Trickster watched me as though I was the one telling the story, his eyes searching my face for any hint of what I was thinking. “When it was so hot he could not bear it, the Sun god’s father removed the bear pelts he always wore, the ones given to him by the great bear, Ursa. As soon as he did, the Sun god struck, using his blade to cut off his father’s head. There was much screaming and blood everywhere. I’m not sure how long it took for servants to scrub it from the floor.”

Trickster finished without his usual flourish. No moral, no questions. Even his saucy smirk had faded.

“The bear pelts,” I said immediately. “What happened to them?”

Trickster nodded as though I had answered a question he had asked.

“You are going to use them to protect yourself from the Sun god.” He leaned back in his chair, tapping his chin. He clicked his tongue against his teeth again, and it somehow sounded like the tap of spider legs in an empty room.

“It’s not the worst idea,” Shannon said from the door.

I jerked, spinning around. She was leaning against the doorframe, her long chestnut hair pulled into a braid. She had put on a soft button-up shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. There were wrinkles on her face, small creases at the corners of her eyes. She looked tired.

“Trickster said you were up all night fixing the seven realms that had been pushed off the World Tree’s roots,” I said.

Nodding, Shannon came in. She looked around, then gestured into the air, a comfortable chair appearing under her hand. I recognized it as her reading chair, the one Laurel and I had donated when we had been forced to sell the house to pay for her care.

“The guardian of the World Tree is right,” Shannon said. “The realms were burned from the roots, forced off by an explosion of magic that cauterized the root. An entire network of them would have died.

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