He made a face. “The one about rivers bleeding into the sea? Morbid.”
“You liked it,” she teased.
“I liked the way you read it,” he admitted, almost inaudible.
She stilled, the book half-open in her hands, and for a moment neither of them moved. Then she pressed it gently back into its place. “We’ll find better words,” she said.
Later, on a bench overlooking the cove, they shared flatbread stuffed with fish and herbs, steam curling in the cold air. Aurelia burned her tongue and laughed. Aeryn barely ate, gaze fixed on the horizon.
I stayed quiet through it all, listening to the rhythm between them. Her teasing, his half-smiles, the silences filled with more truth than their words. She tethered him with such simple, stubborn love.
And I understood, then. This was what she’d bleed for. This was why she’d give herself to Kaelith, why she’d bind herself to a crown she did not want.
Not for power. Not for glory. For this fragile, ordinary thing: a brother eating bread beside the sea.
And in that moment, I knew what it’d cost to take her back to Nyxarra.
60
Aurelia
We finishedour afternoon at the docks.
“I have a plan,” I repeated to Aeryn, gentler this time. “And we’re going to have a future.”
He didn’t smile. Not quite. But he leaned against me, slouching down to rest his head on my shoulder the way he used to when he was small, when he believed I could hold the dark back.
“You always did dream too big,” he murmured.
“Someone had to,” I whispered, pressing my cheek to his curls.
For a moment, the world felt still. Like maybe we could freeze this hour in amber and keep it forever.
But the tidealways turns.
We made it back to the house. Malachi pressed to rest, to leave at first light. We’d slip out as everyone gathered for the patron ceremony. The others sided with him. I didn’t, but I was outnumbered.
I woke to shouting—Hayat’s voice, raw and cutting, like someone tearing linen apart. For a breath I lay still, trying to hold the softness of dawn, to remember Malachi’s weight beside me, the small orbit of ordinary things. Then the yelling came again, closer. I was up and across the floor before I could think, hair tangled, fingers fumbling at the door.
Hayat was already in the kitchen, face flushed, hands braced on the rough-hewn table. He didn’t wait for me to ask. “He went,” he said, voice a dry thing. “Aeryn—he’s at the patron ceremony. They left before dawn.”
My heart dropped into my stomach like a stone. “What?” The word came out thin. “Why would he—when? Who took him?”
Hayat’s jaw tightened. “The town called it. He went willingly—said he needed to be the one.” He looked at me then, something like pity and something like blame both in the set of his mouth. “They’re at the shrine.”
The place of vows and old claims. I could see the white stone in my head, the carved steps, the way the air there tasted of salt and metal. I wanted to go—wanted to run—but the world slugged me with a new thought so cold it numbed: he might already be bound.
“Let’s go,” I said. My voice was a blade I did not feel. Malachi was at my shoulder in two steps, eyes still sleep-heavy, but alert like a predator roused. The house was a blur. We moved with a single thread of purpose.
I knew we should have left last night.
The path toward the shrine was packed with people—town leaders, a scattering of fishermen and traders, faces I knew andsome I didn’t. The air smelled of sea and fragrant incense. The town had gathered in a loose ring in front of the shrine. On the raised terrace, three figures stood where the carved altar waited—the goddesses. Below them, arranged in a half-circle, stood the elders.
They were not exactly what I had expected.
Stories had painted them in marble and myth, but I had never been permitted to see them—not truly. And yet here they stood, not distant at all, but immediate, woven into the very light.
Nerissa’s moon-pale hair drifted in unseen currents, threaded with silver and coral. Turquoise eyes shifted like shallow seas—mercy and storm in equal measure—her layered blues and silvers shimmering as if carved from water.