Chapter Seven
Calista
The name Gloamthresher fit. The thing turned, and the lantern caught a cloudy eye like a cracked moon.
“It’s hunting the light!” A voice shouted.
“Douse the flames!” Another.
But before the oarsmen could move, the monster surged. Its jaw split open where no jaw should be, opening along the crown of its head in a seam of glowing cartilage.
“Port! Now!” the king roared.
Teeth, rows and rows of hooked slivers, sheared the air where our bow should have been if not for his warning.
Oars bit as one, and the boat jerked sideways. The Gloamthresher scythed past, missed, and slammed the wake. A second wave hit from nowhere. The hull shuddered, and the gunwale cracked hard against my shoulder.
“Get down, bride!”
I heard the order, but I ignored him. The word bride grated over every nerve I possessed. I reached for the weapons at my back on instinct. “I don’t think so,” I muttered, already on my feet.
The other two boats flared their lanterns wide to pull the monster off us.
Brave and foolish. For an instant, my thoughts went to Dorian aboard the other vessel.
I hoped we all survived this. The far boat’s stern swung hard and a young oarsman, no older than Suri, lost his footing.
I watched horrified as he tumbled over the side.
“Man overboard!” Marsten shouted.
Before he finished, I had the ring rope in my hand. I braced against an iron cleat, found the polished groove beneath my fingers, and threw. The ring kissed the black water and disappeared. For one awful heartbeat, I was certain I’d missed.
Then the line went taut like a live thing. The boy surfaced, eyes wild, clinging onto the rope.
“I’ve got him!”
“Hold fast!” Marsten barked.
The Gloamthresher’s back broke the surface again, closer now, angling toward the boy thrashing at the end of my line. Moonlight crowned its barbed spine in white fire.
“Calista!” the king roared. “Watch out!”
The creature lunged.
I planted my boots against the bench, wrapped both hands around the rope, and pulled. The line screamed through my palms. The cord burned hot as the Veil. The king was at my side an instant later, his hands closing over mine and then the rope, adding his strength to the haul.
The boy’s head broke the surface again, mouth open in a stolen scream.
“Climb!” Marsten shouted when he reached the edge of the boat.
Two guards grabbed him and hauled him over the gunwale in the next breath. I heaved out a sigh as he collapsed to the planks coughing up half the Moonglass Sea.
“Gods damn it, Calista.” The king’s hands clamped around my shoulders, turning me toward him. “When I tell you to get down, it is not a request.”
“I don’t belong to you yet,” I hissed, breathless and shaking, unable to hold my tongue. “And I wasn’t about to let the boy drown when I could save him.”
“So you risked yourself instead?”
“Yes.” The answer came without pause.
Because what else could I say? That I had left Hollowcrest in order to keep people alive, only to sit still while a boy drowned within reach of my rope? That I meant to become Frostcrag’s queen while pretending some lives weighed less just because the sea had chosen them first?
No.
I squirmed free of him and dropped beside the rower, pressing a hand to his shoulder. “Breathe,” I ordered, making my voice softer. “You’re all right. Breathe.”
He obeyed, eyes still wild and body trembling hard enough to shake the planks.
“You survived. That’s what matters.”
He swallowed and dipped his head the barest fraction. “Th-thank you, my lady.”
Before I could answer, the boat lurched again. The Gloamthresher shouldered into us. Wood groaned, and a bolt popped with a sound like a knuckle breaking.
The king moved. He caught a mast-lash, used it as a pivot, and drove a steel harpoon into the water exactly where the creature’s plates split at the seams. The shaft shuddered in his hands. The beast screamed, a sound like stone tearing underwater.
“Second boat!” Marsten bellowed. “Flare to port!”
A horn answered.
The left-hand boat burned its lantern full. The Gloamthresher twisted toward it, harpoon still buried deep, and the line sang as the king gave it only enough slack to keep it from snapping.
How he could hold something that size was beyond me.
The beast hit the other boat’s oar bank, and wood snapped. An oar flew toward me like a thrown spear.
“Calista, duck!”
This time I obeyed by pure luck. The broken shaft sliced past my shoulder close enough to tug loose a strand of hair.
“Mind the line!” Marsten shouted.
“I see it!”
The Gloamthresher rolled again, searching for the brightest target. The left boat doused its lantern, but ours flared a fraction. It turned back toward us.
The king’s voice dropped, meant only for me. “Don’t.”
Too late. I was already moving.
Twin crescents flashed into my hands as I climbed the bench and braced for the next rise. The monster slid in beside us, mouth opened again, all wrong and much too wide. I hooked one sickle into the seam of that terrible jaw and ripped the other down through the softer flesh behind the plate.
My stomach twisted, and dark blood clouded the sea.
The thing thrashed, and the boat kicked beneath my boots like a struck beast.
“Calista!” the king roared.
I dropped low, slid under the sweep of one barb, and snapped my ring rope around a gill-slot. I planted my heel and hauled with every ounce of spite Hollowcrest had ever hammered into me.
The gill split wider, and the scream that followed would haunt my sleep for the rest of my days. The rescued boy scrambled upright as if to help. “Stay down,” I snapped.
He obeyed at once.
The Gloamthresher slammed us again. The king hauled on the harpoon line, muscle and fury stacked beneath fur and leather. “On my mark!” he shouted.
The crew braced.
I wrapped my rope around a cleat, locked it, and stepped to the prow at his left without needing to be told. He spared me one quick look, then yanked hard. The line snapped taut, hauling the monster’s head high enough to show the pale hinge of its throat.
“I can reach it!” I shouted.
“No.” He scanned for another free hand, but there wasn’t one.
So I moved anyway. I leapt, caught the seam of that hideous jaw with one sickle, and jammed the iron ring of my rope into the hinge like a doorstop. The mouth tried to close and failed.
The king didn’t waste his chance. He stepped into the throw and sent a second froststeel spear straight through the exposed hinge. It hit and slid out beneath the jaw.
For one heartbeat, the sea went quiet. Then as if the Gloamthresher had forgotten which way was up, he dropped.
The line tore free, and the boat’s cleat screamed. The bow pitched beneath my feet. The world became black water, spray, and the violent certainty that I had finally misjudged one reckless choice too many.
Before the icy waves came up to greet me, an iron-hard clamp banded around my ribs and yanked me back.
The king caught me against the coiled wall of his chest, his mask at my temple for one ragged breath as he dragged me away from the edge.
All the air disappeared from my lungs. For one impossible second, all I could feel was him.
Heat. Pine. Frost. Strength wound so tightly beneath his skin it felt like a second pulse.
“On your feet,” he growled against my ear. “And when I tell you to stay down, bride, you stay the fuck down.”
Bristling, I somehow, found my footing. “You’re welcome,” I hissed.
He made a sound that might have been disgust or maybe reluctant amusement. I couldn’t quite tell.
The captain was already turning the craft wide to avoid the dying thrash. The other boats limped but held around us. Thank the goddess, the creature sank instead of rising beneath us again. The second harpoon bobbed back to the surface, and the king hauled it in with a few sharp, practiced pulls.
Little by little, the noise faded. The panting, the water dripping from wood, the priestess whispering what had to be a prayer. It all fell away, and then silence settled around the boat in an ominous ring.
My hands shook. I flexed them once, then again, until the tremor retreated to the bone.
The king still stood beside me, close enough that the heat of him felt banked like a fire beneath all that fur. “You saved the rower.”
I looked past him to the boy, who clutched a fur to his chest like a shield. “He saved himself. I only tugged.”
The king tipped his head once. “You still ignored my command.”
“You were wrong.”
His eyes flashed colder through the slits. “Never disobey me again. Especially not in public.”
“Then don’t ask me to do something I can’t.”
A long pause. “By the goddess,” he muttered, “are you always this stubborn?”
I shrugged. “Some say it’s my finest quality.”
That actually earned me the faintest sound from him, too rough to be called a laugh, but it came close. “I disagree.” He paused for a moment, inhaling a sharp breath. “But you are good with those blades.”
I blinked. “Was that a compliment, Your Majesty?”
The king’s gaze lowered briefly, and only then did I realize my fingers were worrying the cord at my throat where the small wolf carving hung. The old leather thong was worn soft with time.
His eyes caught on it. “What is that?”
My hand stilled. The familiar scrape of memory slid over me. Frost. A snow-white wolf pup with too-big paws. Bright blue eyes. Warm fur under my fingers before life had hardened into this.
“A keepsake,” I finally answered.
He waited.
I had the oddest sense that he actually wanted the truth. “From an old friend,” I admitted. “A reminder of a wolf cub I once saved.” Jameson had carved it and gifted it to me for my nineteenth birthday, right after I’d been forced to give up my pet and right before I’d been chosen by the goddess.
The king was silent for so long I wondered if I’d said too much. “And where is this wolf now?”
A thousand answers rose in my throat.
With his family. Gone and grown. Or maybe lost to another life with a rogue Wolvryn.
“In his proper home, I hope,” I said at last. “Better off for it.”
Something unreadable passed through the rigid set of his shoulders. Not much. Just enough to make me think the words had landed somewhere strange. “I see.” He turned away then, hard gaze set to the horizon.
The rower scrambled toward my bench, then hesitated as if unsure whether he was permitted to approach. “Thank you again, my queen,” he said, voice still cracking. “I… my name is Kellan.”
“Breathe, Kellan,” I replied. “And if your hands won’t stop shaking, sit on them.”
He obeyed, and to his credit, a watery laugh escaped him when the trick worked. His eyes lifted to my crossed crescents. “You fight like a real Wolvryn.”
Before I could answer, the king’s voice filled the air. “She is a real Wolvryn.”
The words landed harder than they should have. Not because I believed him fully, but because the whole crew heard it. In the wake of that monster’s blood, not one of them looked at me like I didn’t belong on the deck.
The lanterns stayed low after that. The oars returned to rhythm, cautious at first, then surer. I wiped my blades clean with a strip of linen and rewound my rope, noting the new scuffs on the iron ring with a strange flicker of pride.
Kellan fell asleep at my feet sometime after that, still sitting on his hands. My own lids felt heavy, but I refused to close them. Instead, I watched the priestess scrub blood from her veil with ruthless care.
To my surprise, the king finally sat. He folded that enormous body onto the bench beside me, his heat immediately cutting through the damp cold clinging to my cloak.
I didn’t look at him. Mostly, I refused to acknowledge that some part of me noticed that his nearness no longer felt only like a threat.
It felt like a presence. Dangerous in an entirely different way.
The boats slipped into the lee of the last point, and the wind eased as if the island itself had cupped a hand around us.
Behind us, the sea swallowed all signs of the Gloamthresher.
Ahead, night pooled dark and deep, and somewhere beyond it waited Frostcrag Fortress and the life I was still trying to convince myself I could bend toward Hollowcrest’s good.
If this alliance was to hold, I would have to learn to hold two truths at once.
I did not belong to the Savage King. And yet, for Hollowcrest’s sake, I might still have to learn how to stand beside him.