6. Maren
6
Maren
“ I s every western coast made of rocks and heights?” I asked, watching water thrash fifty feet below. I missed the warm, golden beaches of Leihani.
Beside me, Kye’s mouth quirked. “Just about.”
He estimated we’d traveled halfway through the channel. We hadn’t seen anyone—ship or human. We hadn’t seen any sign of life either. The sparse creeks we’d happened across had run out, and we hadn’t found one for two days. Nothing came and went but the hum of the tide and the breath of the wind.
I called water vapor into the glass bottle we’d emptied. If Kye noticed our water supply seemed unusually healthy despite our meager success in finding freshwater—and I suspected he did—he didn’t mention anything.
Kye shifted, throwing driftwood onto the fire. It wouldn’t burn for more than a few hours. There were more minutes left in the night than there were branches scattered across the rocks, and the flames ate through the dry wood, as ravenous as we were. I’m not sure how he even coaxed the flames to stay as long as he did. Fire had never cooperated with me the way it did with him, though I suppose it made sense that it didn't.
I was born for water.
“Better get started,” I muttered, climbing to my feet to hunt for fish in the sea, although my expectations were low.
Kye’s head turned sharply, though he didn’t look at me. “Leihani.”
Pausing at the edge of our camp, I waited.
He scratched his incisors along his lower lip. He always did that when hesitating. When choosing his words with care.
I crossed my arms.
“This isn’t a pond or river. Don’t swim in the sea. You don’t need to enter the water to catch fish, do you?”
Caught off guard by the question, I stared at him. My silence must have been telling, and his eyes finally lifted, catching my gaze. “The channel’s cursed. Don’t enter these waters.”
I scoffed quietly. “I grew up in the sea, Kye. Named for Darkness or not, I’m not afraid of it.”
He didn’t move. His eyes drilled into mine, unwilling to let me leave without agreeing.
But we hadn’t eaten since the day before. The moon grew a little more each night, but it would be another week before Mihauna fully bloomed again. The cured beef and hard-tack on the pirate ship had left my Naiad body malnourished. Kye might be able to subsist on nothing but algae scraped off rocks with the tip of his knife, though I doubted that was true—but I needed something more substantial if I was to make it through these cliffs on foot. Already, I felt my strength thinning as the days passed. My thoughts flickered to Thaan. How I’d never seen him in the sea. How his body seemed to have betrayed him for it. Dry and cracking.
I needed mercury and iodine. Salt on my skin. The pressure and weight of a deep dive and slow ascent.
I needed the sea.
“I won’t,” I lied, avoiding his eyes as I swiveled on my back foot and began climbing down the cliffside. My feet wandered just far enough I was certain he couldn’t see me. Grumbling quietly to myself, I shucked off my clothes. Then, with a quick glance at the edge of the cliff above, dove.
Ice immediately drank me whole.
In an instant, the cold hardened my muscles. It stifled my breath when I surfaced, leaving me to swim with my lungs and limbs in a vise. My tail, usually streamlined and fast, dragged with heavy inefficiency as I called into the waves, searching for the answer of swishing fins nearby. The frigid water delivered a cold pounding inside my head, my arms and hands inept, my fingers ceasing to work altogether.
Still, I pushed, determined to find fish.
Thirty minutes later, I climbed onto shore, huddling against the rocky outcrop, my arms empty.
My legs shook as I returned to our camp. Kye’s face hardened as he took me in, hair dripping, clothes plastered to my wet body. I curled into a shivering ball next to the fire, too ashamed at my failure to even attempt a reason for openly disregarding his warning.
He sucked his teeth and glared at the rock under his knees, the scent of molten iron ore seeping from him. Then, a moment later, pushed to his feet in a motion that was more like punching the ground. His footsteps faded, whether to try to catch his own fish or because he couldn’t bear to look at me, I wasn’t sure.
My eyes closed to the feeling of the sea, the climb and fall of gentle waves. Then I was sitting up, someone lifting my hands, tugging the back of my shirt up my spine. “Don’t fall asleep.” Kye’s voice wrapped around me, softer than I expected. “I have to take this off you. You’re blue, you’ve lost all color.”
Despite the resolve in his tone, he paused, waiting for my permission. My eyes met his. Quiet thoughts flew behind his gaze like a flock of birds, changing direction with the wind. The sea air nipped me as I arched my back, helping him draw the shirt up over my shoulders. He tossed it onto a tall, rust-colored stone, then came back to help with my pants.
I’d already pushed onto my knees, but numbness had taken control of my fingers. They trembled as I fumbled with the button, refusing to bend. I didn’t dare look at him. Humiliation washed through my bones as I shivered on the rocks, goosebumps raised over my bare breasts and stomach, teeth rattling.
Kye knelt on one knee, gently waving my hands aside and unbuttoning my pants for me. His heat drew me in like a cloud, and I found myself leaning into his chest as he reached around my waist, shuffling the pants down my hips. He paused as I burrowed into him, and I thought I heard his breath catch, but then he grasped my arms, gently peeling me away.
He cleared his throat. “Come on,” he said, inclining his chin at the divot in the rock we’d surmised would best protect us from the wind. Warmer than my skin, the hard stone ushered me in as I curled against it, watching as Kye turned around and wrenched his own shirt off, his Leihaniian tattoo stark even under the dim moon. He laid it over me like a blanket, his pants following next, stripping down to his underwear. Then gathered the sum of our stolen clothes on top of us into a small mound, nestling himself against my back.
He swallowed, his heart rate increasing as he pressed his skin against mine. His arm wrapped around my waist, drawing me closer, chin navigating to the surface of my damp hair.
I tried not to think about the places our bodies touched.
We’d crossed into unfamiliar lands with each other on our wedding night. Then again on the beach of Cynthus Castle. Maybe, if we hadn’t been interrupted—if we’d cordaed then and there—the hesitancy I sensed from the both of us would never have come. But whatever we’d started on the beach had been impeded by a sword aimed at Kye’s throat. By a fight that left us captured, and two weeks of believing we might soon be dead. In all the time we’d spent chained inside the ship, Kye hadn’t brought up our near-miss at something more substantial than long stares and the accidental graze of skin. Neither had I.
Somehow, it felt like salt in a wound to mention that we’d come so close, and then lost our chance.
And it might not have even mattered. But Burien had changed everything that last day on the ship.
Keep your hands off my wife.
I’d thought about it often enough since we’d escaped. Kye had claimed me as his—but only to a pirate intent on our harm. In the days since, he hadn’t said anything about it. I wasn’t certain where that left us.
And I was too much of a coward to ask. Too undecided of which answer I was more afraid to hear.
I didn’t know how to return to the place we’d tried to go. I didn’t know if I could return there. Or if he wanted to.
Breath shifted the strands of my hair. The scent of rain and mint leaves mingled with the salt of the water. Needles stabbed at me where his skin breathed heat back into mine, suffocating the comfortable weight of my muscles, leaving me stiff and ungainly. I wiggled my toes and felt Kye lift his head to gaze over my shoulder at me.
“Thought you fell asleep,” he murmured in my ear. His thumb slid around the curve of my elbow, sending raised pimples of another nature down my arm.
I closed my eyes, pressing my cheek against his arm like a pillow, letting myself melt into him. But I couldn’t sleep. “What are you thinking about?” I asked softly, for no reason other than the sudden desire to hear his voice, to feel the rumble of his chest against my shoulder blades.
Body pressed against my own, he gave a dark laugh and didn’t answer. The sound and vibration of it woke something in my core.
The needles in my skin grew sharper. I fidgeted, working my limbs to banish the pinch of returning body heat, until he hissed, “Please stop.”
His tone sent a squirm further into my belly. A small smile invaded my mouth. “I can’t help it.” My bones had a mind of their own whenever I was doused in cold, restless and impatient, and I was reminded of those first few days after my failed transition in Leihani, the sensation of crawling insects over my legs.
“Find a way to try.”
“Distract me, then.” I rolled enough to glance at him sidelong, and he narrowed a single eye at me.
Heat flickered in his gaze. “How would you like me to distract you?”
My mouth went dry. Despite the chill in my bones, a flush set in, creeping under my flesh. “I don’t know. What’s your favorite food?”
He paused, considering me. “Leihaniian tuna wrapped in banana leaves and baked in an underground oven.”
I snorted. “Liar.”
“Mashed breadfruit, grown in an island garden.”
I shook my head at him, wondering if his willingness to tease me meant he’d overlooked my disregard for his warning.
“Soup from clams hunted on the beach of a cursed island.”
“Never mind,” I said, pulling his shirt over my shoulder, though my smile hadn’t yet dissolved.
“Hadrian and I used to play a game when we were younger. You ask the first question that comes to your mind, and then the other person must answer without giving themself time to think about it.”
“Okay,” I said, crossing my arms in front of me. Against Kye, my back had thawed considerably, but my front remained frozen. I forced away the urge to turn around.
“You start.”
I scoffed. “I already asked what your favorite thing to eat was.”
“You asked what my favorite food was.”
Shooting him a look of impatience, I paused as I was met with a mischievous stare. “You’re disgusting,” I deadpanned, narrowing my gaze into the cliffs again. His answering chuckle sent electricity under my skin, the velvet in his raspy voice waking something deep within me. I hid my smile in the crook of my arm, trying to drum up a question he’d actually want to answer.
What sorts of things interested Kye? I realized I didn’t know very many. He had a penchant for disregarding expectations of the crown. He liked to sneak out of the castle. He was a commander. A master of military strategy, training recruits, sword play.
“What’s the easiest way for two countries to settle a dispute? Besides war,” I quickly added, feeling his mouth already shaping the word against the back of my head.
He snickered. “Do you not understand the point of the questions game?”
“No, not really.”
“Fair enough.” He grinned into my hair. “The easiest way is probably to buy an enemy out. Give them money.”
“What if you have no money?”
“Give them what they want, then.”
“What if what they want takes away your freedom?”
“Then you go to war.”
I lay quietly, soaking in his answer.
“Are you planning a war with someone, Leihani?” he asked softly, propping up high enough to study me.
Thaan’s face flashed in my head, quickly trailed by the Breath of Safiro, a gleaming blue weight in my hand as I passed it to Nori, never giving it a second thought until I’d read Selena’s diary. I still hadn’t concluded how a stone could break me free of my blood vow, but it was enough to know that it could , if I ever got my hands on it again.
It was my only hope. Unless I settled for the alternative of killing Hadrian and waiting for the day I was named queen.
“My turn,” Kye said when I didn’t answer. “How long can you hold your breath?”
“Why?”
He sighed. “You’re not allowed to question my question.”
“Fine. I’ve never timed myself. But longer than you, I’m sure.”
“Is that a challenge?”
“No.”
He snorted. “Yes it is.”
A glowing spark drifted from the fire over our heads, the wind dousing its flare, leaving it to float in the breeze. Staring at the night sky, he waited quietly for me to accept. My brows furrowed at the dark cliffs as I felt his self-assurance grow with every passing moment, the smugness rolling from him as thick as the waves of heat from his body.
“Fine,” I snapped, pivoting to face him. Kye lifted his arm just enough to let me. Then rested it over the valley of my lower back, drawing me in again. I pressed my side against him, drinking his warmth into my bare shoulder and hip.
“Ready?”
I nodded.
We each pulled briny air in, the snap of it lining my chest. My lungs inflated, and I sent Kye what I hoped was a look of intimidation. His own mouth clamped, he gave me a tight smile and poked me in the ribs.
My breath escaped in a bark of shock.
Kye immediately expelled his own air, not even bothering to gloat. Lacing his fingers, he laid his head into his hands, adopting an expression of sheer boredom.
“You cheated,” I spat.
He shrugged. “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”
I scoffed.
“So, Leihani, if you were to guess?”
“Guess what?”
“How long you can hold your breath.”
I chewed at the inside of my cheek. For the briefest moment, I imagined telling him the truth. Not only about breath-holding. The entire truth. That I was a Naiad, a creature of the sea. That my body housed four lungs, not two, and that I could track his emotions and distant water as easily as he could the scent of baking bread. That I’d been waiting for him to fall asleep the past week, then calling to the fluid inside him, using his own blood to mend his wounds.
How easy it would’ve been, to share it all.
How deadly it would make things, if I ever needed to take it back.
The life of the human I reveal myself to will be forfeited.
I swallowed my thoughts down, banishing them away. “Two minutes, maybe.”
“Mmmm.” His chest vibrated against my shoulder. “That’s quite a lot for a pair of little lungs. You were under longer than that.”
Eyes on the silver moon, I fought against the urge to look at him. “Did you time me?” I asked, striving for curiosity to furnish my voice rather than the alarm sinking in. Had he seen my tail?
No. He couldn’t have. I’d waited until I’d been well below the waves to transition, and I’d changed back before I’d even neared the surface.
“I went to find you after you left. You’d forgotten the lure and fishing line.”
“I catch more without it,” I murmured. “Leihaniians catch fish with their hands.”
“Mmmm,” he said again, drinking in my words with faux consideration.
I waited for him to call my bluff. He’d spent four weeks on Leihaniian fishing boats; he knew we didn’t catch them bare-handed. Not in the center of the wide-open sea.
But he said nothing, his dark lashes ticking as his eyes roamed the sky. “Don’t go into the channel again, Leihani.”