13. Maren
13
Maren
S ighting the first coastal bird in Rivea quenched a drought in my bones. I hadn’t realized how often I’d searched for signs of animals on land. How often I’d missed them. A sandpiper, sleek and brown, picked at rocks in a murky tide pool. It twisted to look at us, cocking its head sharply before flying away.
I smiled after it.
Trees propped up through the rocky outcrops. Beautiful, mystical trees, ordinary in every way, yet divinely alive .
Though I pushed myself, I moved slowly. My bones shook with each step, my legs weak. When it became clear we wouldn’t reach the city before nightfall, we stopped at a rocky cliffside pond just outside of Vranna. Crayfish skittered across its floor. Kye netted them in a shirt, boiling them one at a time in the tin cup. We watched the lights of Vranna flicker, the houses still and somnolent like grazing flocks of sheep.
Kye leaned under a half-dead, wiry tree. I watched its sad leaves rustle over his head and wondered what kind of tree it was. Why half of it had gone skeletal, dead branches reaching to the sky like a corpse praying to the sun and moon.
A lack of phosphorus, perhaps? A disease set in by cold moisture?
The ocean thrashed against the rocks, hard and then soft. The skin at my scalp tingled, and I found Kye studying me. Arm resting carelessly over his propped knee, he gazed at me with his head tilted back, a picture of lazy confidence.
My eyes met his. We’d barely spoken since he’d told me I couldn’t enter the water, but clearly he’d been waiting for my attention now.
“Yes?” I asked, failing to keep the bite from my voice.
His chest slowly deflated. He rubbed his chin, adjusting his posture to sit higher. “We should make a list of things we need before we reach the Vranna market.”
A flare of disappointment cooled my irritation. From the way he’d been surveying me, I’d thought he’d carried a discussion in his mind that delved a bit deeper than a shopping list. I straightened my legs out from under me. “Alright.”
“If we’re preparing for a ride through the mountain pass, we’ll need warm clothes as well as gear. You don’t handle the cold well.”
He waited for me to argue. I simply nodded, wrapping one arm around myself and wondering if he might try to persuade me to take a ship instead. If this was the beginning of a conversation based on reasonable, sound choices, of which I was certain he believed I lacked.
Wooden walls rose around me. A ceiling hovered over my head, footsteps clanking across the plank boards. Someone’s breath tickled my ear, sour with the scent of stale liquor.
My breath caught, suddenly tight. If he thought he’d convince me to board a ship, he was entirely mistaken. I wouldn’t. I’d rather take up residence on this cliffside until I starved.
I arched my back, trying to shake the sudden rigor mortis from my limbs while remaining calm. “I’d say you’re hotheaded enough to keep us both warm.”
Cuffs cut into the skin at my wrists. Hands wrenched my knees apart. Pain exploded over my cheek, a sharp ringing piercing my eardrum.
He raised a brow. “ I’m hotheaded?”
I closed my eyes, banishing the ringing in my ears. “You have a temper.”
Kye gave a short bark of laughter. The wind played through the channel like a mouth on a flute, woody and breathy, catching his strands. “Are you looking for a reason to share my heat, Leihani? Is that why you want to get back in the water?”
His tone was playful, but as I peeped an eye open to steal a glance at him, he gazed out at the twinkling city lights, brows furrowed. He crossed his arms, hiding his thoughts. I wished I could crack open the door to his mind, if only to steal a glance inside.
Huddled into the rocks, I smoothed the legs of my pirate pants and cast my eyes out over the sea, ignoring the flush his comment sent through my skin. “No. It’s not that cold.”
Across from me, he laughed darkly, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Just think it over—what you might need in the city. I want to be ready when we enter town so we’re not trying to imagine everything we might need on the spot.”
“Fine,” I said, eyes still on the waves.
He watched me again, though he didn’t say anything. Another sandpiper landed on the ledge above, twitching its neck to stare at the crawfish we’d boiled. It gave a low squawk then hopped out onto the sea air, catching the breeze between its feathers.
“What is it about the water, Leihani?”
My brows twitched. “What do you mean?”
“You’re always staring at it.”
I opened my mouth to disagree and faltered. Was I always staring at it?
“In Leihani, you’d sit and watch it in your canoe,” he said, tilting his head. “In the City of Towers, you did the same from your balcony. The night of our engagement, you went to the edge of the cliffs outside to study them. You were so deep in thought, I didn’t want to interrupt you. But you stood so close to the edge I thought you might jump. It scared me enough to say something.”
Absently, I smoothed my pants again, remembering that night.
If you’re going to jump, you might as well time it right. Just in case you have any second thoughts.
I scoffed. “You told me to jump.”
“No, I told you to calculate so you'd hit the waves the tide would pull you under. But I knew you wouldn’t jump if you realized someone was watching you.”
“And how would you know that?”
One of his fingers twitched behind his head, but the rest of him sat, unmoving against the tree. “No one jumps when they think someone is watching. That’s something you decide to do only when you’re alone.”
The wind shifted, sending a sudden chill down my spine. My gaze traveled slowly to meet his. “Had you been considering it?”
His eyes twinkled in the dim light of dusk, but the rest of him remained impossibly still.
A weight anchored in my chest at the sudden notion that our engagement had driven him to visit the edge of the sea with nothing but a bottle of liquor as his only company. From the way he watched me under his lashes, I didn’t need the question answered. I knew. We both knew.
Kye sighed through his nose. A flat pebble sat beside him, and he picked it up, turning it in his hands. He swallowed. “No. Not that night.”
“But a night.”
His mouth opened and closed. “A night.”
“Tell me which night,” I said softly. “And I’ll tell you why I love the sea.”
Kye resituated his head against the tree, eyes on his pebble. “My earliest memory was the day Jonet was born,” he murmured, rotating the stone between his fingers. “I remember the servants bringing Hadrian and me into the nursery. They told us we needed to keep our voices soft for the baby. Hadrian was five, I was almost three. He’s been a sun-damned king since birth, you know. Always so calm and serious. He took one look at Jonet, nodded his approval, and went to his corner of the nursery where all his books were shelved to practice his letters.”
The corner of his mouth curved with humor. Mine did as well at the thought of a miniature Hadrian, studious and resolute.
“But I’d never seen a newborn before. I was mesmerized. I wanted to hold her, touch her, kiss her cheeks, run my fingers through the soft fuzz of her head. She wasn’t pink-skinned like Hadrian. Her skin was olive like mine, her hair rich and curly like mine. Like our mother. Cressian skin and hair. And my mother—” He paused as his eyes flickered over the rock. “I don’t know if it was pregnancy, or childbirth, or if I was just proud . But I had never seen a woman more beautiful than my mother in that moment. I can still see her in my mind, gazing down at me as I sat in her lap holding Jonet, her arms around us both.”
Kye ran a hand along the back of his neck, turning his face into his palm. “And then the King came in to meet his newest child. I remember my mother looking up as he entered the nursery, then frantically passing Jonet and I to a nursemaid. She stood in front of us like a shield with her arms out, like she didn’t want the King to see us. He just—shoved her aside. It was the first time I’d seen him do that to her.”
He blinked at the haggard floor, memories swirling quietly in his head. I leaned into the cliff wall, taking in his words, the weight in my chest growing. I’d only spoken to the King once, if it even counted as speaking. The engagement announcement he’d made to the lords and ladies of the palace hardly qualified as open conversation.
“He took one look at Jonet and grabbed my mother’s elbow, yanking her away. He kept saying, Another one, Cemre? Another one? He dragged her down the hall, and I remember the terror on her face. I still see it in my mind when I let myself. And no one stopped him. They all just stared in shock—Hadrian, the nursemaid, the servants. I didn’t understand why everyone just stood and watched as he marched her down the corridor, her feet sliding and her arms clawing at him to let go.”
“Hadrian was a child,” I said softly.
“I know. I even knew then—why he did nothing. But I couldn’t stop myself from running after them, throwing myself in their way. I yelled at him to leave my mother alone. The next thing I remember was waking up in the nursery.” His mouth lifted in a humorless smile.
Sudden horror carved up my throat. “He hit you?”
Kye tilted his head vaguely back and forth, weighing the idea. “I think he shoved me aside and I hit the stone wall. I don’t know for sure. I didn’t understand any of it, but I knew something had changed. My view of the world had changed. For weeks, I repeated his words in my mind. Another one, Cemre? At three years old, I didn’t know what it meant. What about Jonet had set him off, and how my mother had known it would before he’d even looked at her.”
He emptied his lungs sharply, his eyes finally lifting to meet mine, gauging me as I rolled the same words around in my own head, wondering at their meaning.
“I learned to fight because of him,” Kye said. “Because I knew that as second born, I could someday be a general for my brother. Swords, knives, fists. Formations of attack; formations of defense. Military tactics. War strategy. Counter strategy. Subterfuge. All the dirty tricks: deception, distraction, intimidation. I think Hadrian did the same. He studied politics and language and diplomacy to keep our father happy. Jonet became a porcelain doll. Something pretty and breakable that you put on a shelf to look at. Something that never speaks unless you put words in its mouth. We all knew our place. Hadrian had unparalleled expectations placed on him. I was expendable. Jonet was a bargaining chip for a future alliance. I think we were all just trying to survive without drawing his ire…until my mother became pregnant again.”
Watching him, I released a long, silent breath. After Jonet came Kye’s two half-siblings, Mallus and Breer. I’d never heard anyone mention Kye’s mother having a fourth child.
Kye shook his head, reading my thoughts. “The doctors said she died of pneumonia. Of fluid in her chest, leaving her weak with cough. But I don’t think she did. I think my father slowly poisoned her. And I think she knew it. But there was nothing she could do.”
He gyrated his jaw, avoiding my eyes. My chest twisted, suddenly heavy. I thought of my own father. Still madly in love with my mother, even after all the years since she died. What might it have been like, had I grown up with the opposite?
“I think…” He scratched his jaw slowly, breaking me from my reverie. “I think maybe all kings go mad. I don’t think they can help it. All that power in one person’s hands—I think it’s more than any one mind can handle. Somewhere along the line, kings believe they’re gods. They forget they’re human. They don’t realize that as their pride grows, their self-control shrinks. Everything becomes personal. Everything is a threat. Maybe it’s greed. Or wrath. Or paranoia. Whatever it is…kings fall because of it. Not physically. But in their mind…they fall to madness.
“I thought I could escape it,” Kye said, tossing the stone over the cliff edge. “Sneak from the castle and live on a farm or in a tavern for a few nights at a time. I longed for the day my father died and Hadrian married. Then it would be my brother’s kingdom. His palace. And I’d be excused to go live in a manor somewhere as a prince lord like my uncle, Marcus. So, I snuck out of the palace and learned to hunt and fish. To forge steel and raise homes. To work with my hands. I know a little of everything, but not a lot of one thing.”
He flashed a self-depreciative grin, but it quickly dropped from his face. “I kept it up for several years, ignoring the King when he raged at me after I returned. I’d wait for things to blow over and then go do it again. The people found it amusing, which only angered my father more. But I didn’t care.
“Not until one night, when I was in Hadrian’s rooms, the two of us talking after I’d spent the day training in the yard as punishment for my escapades. He was laughing at my stories—I’d just returned from the mines, my pockets lined with jokes so detestable they’d make your hair curl. We’d done a fair bit of drinking. It was late and no one expected us to be awake. No one expected me to be there with him.
“We’d just blown out our candles. Hadrian went to sleep in his bed, but I laid awake on his couch, musing about what far-off place to sneak off to next, when the door opened and a figure crept inside.”
Kye’s jaw hardened. He leaned forward, scrubbing the dark stubble over his chin. “They made it to the bed before I was even on my feet, and I heard a knife unsheathe as they yanked the blankets back. I shouted, Hadrian rolled away, and they slashed at the mattress. Then the man turned and fled. I chased him down the hall and out the door to the palace wall—but he flung himself up and over, dropping down to the rocks below.”
My eyes widened. “He jumped? Did he die?”
“Well, he didn’t fucking live.”
“Were his eyes—” I bit my lip. Kye waited. “Did you see his eyes?”
The fire crackled. Kye paused, his mouth still slightly open. “No. It was dark. Why?”
A small warning flared within me at how close the subject came to things I couldn’t talk about. “In the forest, you and Hadrian said you didn’t trust Thaan.”
He stared at me, waiting for me to continue.
“Eyes are one of the ways you can tell someone’s been seduced.”
“In what way?”
“They dilate,” I said, though I frowned at myself. Thaan was skilled enough to hide the clues of his incantations . Skilled enough I hadn’t realized he’d made Kye a vacous until the night of our wedding. Eyes might not be a clear indication. Still, the idea that the man had leapt to his own death… “How did he get in?” I asked.
Kye shook his head. “I don’t know. I was mad enough to find the guards and give them a lashing for allowing someone to sneak through, but Hadrian tugged me back to his room, barred the door, and spent two hours convincing me not to tell a soul.”
“Why?”
“Because—” Kye sighed, letting his hands fall back into his lap. “Because he said someone had been trying to kill him for the past three years. That he didn’t trust anybody in the palace and was only telling me now because of what I’d just witnessed.”
“Why not alert the guards, though?”
He tilted his head slowly at me, a stitch creasing his brows. “Did you tell anyone in Leihani when someone was trying to kill you?”
I closed my mouth, effectively silenced. But it wasn’t a fair comparison. In Leihani, I’d been the most hated person on the island. Hadrian was a crown prince. Thousands of people cared whether he lived or died.
Kye stretched his shoulders against the base of the tree. “Paranoia is paranoia, Leihani. Hadrian might have a kingdom of future subjects who love him, but in the City of Towers, he has few friends. When you’re born into a political game, you don’t tell the other players that someone’s trying to take you out. It leads to questions of why , and Hadrian can’t expose his sickness. It puts a target on his back.”
“It shouldn’t be that way,” I murmured, returning to the folds of my pants. Creases gathered across my thighs, the salty air mutinous against the rough fabric. I swallowed as I ran my hands across them, a tightness in my chest. I’d spent my childhood building castles in the island sand, convinced that the royal family lived ideal lives, raised in a lavish palace, eating exquisite food and attending private parties.
It had never occurred to me that such a fate could be as isolated as my own.
“I vowed to find whoever it was,” Kye said softly. “I promised I’d stay by his side and protect him. I refused to do what he asked. To pretend nothing was wrong, waiting around for him to die. But then he told me that he was sick—” Kye’s voice faltered. He swallowed, staring into the rock formations with eyes suddenly bloodshot.
“I’m a coward,” he finally ground out.
“What?” I abandoned my pant wrinkles to gape up at him in surprise. “You are not.”
“I am,” he sighed. “Hadrian told me that either from sickness or murder, he’d likely die in the next few years. And I was fucking devastated. But underneath my worry for him, I couldn’t help but think about where that left me. That his death sentenced me to the throne. I’d spent my whole life trying to escape it, and in the breadth of a few spoken words, I realized I never would. I’d be forced to take the crown, and then I’d slowly lose my mind to madness, like all the kings before me. I’d beat my wife. My children would grow up terrified of me—”
“Kye,” I cut in, but he shook his head.
“I’d live drunk on power from an endless cup. The people I considered my friends would only pretend to be loyal. My advisors would jostle for influence through me. I’d live more surrounded than any person in the kingdom, but I’d be utterly alone.
“And then I realized that was all I’d needed. The simple idea that someday I’d have to take it on. That was all it had taken for madness to begin creeping in. That it was taking hold already. I could feel myself spiraling from it, and I couldn’t pull myself out. It was like suffocating from too much oxygen. I spent two weeks drunk, trying to forget it. But I couldn’t.” He swallowed, gaze fixed on the sea. “Everywhere I went, I was surrounded by my own fate. And the words burrowed into my mind. Future king, future king, future king. I didn’t care about anything anymore. Training in the yard, sneaking from the castle, learning to farm and cook and forge. I didn’t…” His eyes closed, his voice falling into something just outside a whisper. “I didn’t care about being alive if that’s the road my life was headed down. A prison made of glass, disguised as a palace. I stood at the cliffs for an hour, waiting for the courage to jump. And then took a carriage into the city and stole a rowboat from the shipyard because I was too much of a coward to even take my own life, but I figured the sea would take it for me.”
He darted a glance at me, looking away just as quickly. My eyes trickled over him, a perfect illustration of laziness as he leaned into the tree, the delineated muscles of his torso exuding all the arrogance in the world, and I wondered if it was all for show. If it had been conditioned into his body, as instinctive as the need for his heart to beat. If survival for a prince meant he couldn’t show fear. Even now, alone with me.
I swallowed the knot in my throat as his words from a few days before returned to me.
I didn’t think I’d come back from Leihani.
Kye exhaled, long and hard. “The cruelest part is, Hadrian wants to be king. He’s spent his whole life preparing for it. He’s studied harder and knows more than any heir I’ve ever heard of. I’d be half the sovereign he’d be.”
“That’s not true,” I whispered.
Kye didn’t answer. Gazing ahead, he watched the water crash against the rocks. “Two days ago, when you dove underwater and didn’t come back, that thought kept surfacing in my head,” he gently rasped. “That you’d asked so many times why I came to Leihani. On the island, I’d wanted you to believe that it was because I’d sought some sense of adventure across the sea. That I was brave and daring. But I’m not. I was running from my future. Hoping the sea would steal it from me.”
A flock of birds passed overhead, fighting the air currents as they traveled out over the channel. I swallowed, watching them dip and glide. “You’re not a coward, Kye.”
His lips quirked, a sad smile. “Why do you love the sea, Leihani?”
I opened my mouth, not ready to let him drive the conversation in a new direction. But at the look in his eyes, pleading with me to leave it, I halted, shifting uncomfortably. Confiding my half of our bargain suddenly seemed like an unfair trade. “It’s not a long, articulate answer like yours was.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “I still want to hear it.”
“The sea.” My chest surrendered a breath in a soft heave. “The sea just lives in me. In my body. In my blood. It’s my oldest friend. And at times, my only friend. And nothing else calms me like the sound of its voice. The stroke of its tide. It’s just… my home.”
Not meeting my eyes, a small smile ghosted across Kye’s mouth. He swallowed, nodding slowly, and I wondered what he thought of my diminutive confession.
“The sea suits you. I think you’re its home as well.” Beside us, a log in the fire gave a loud pop . Kye drummed his fingers against his thigh again, and when he finally looked up, I knew our conversation had ended. “We need to go over our plan.”
Sighing through my nose, I gave a solemn nod. “Okay. Where should we start?”