Chapter Five #2
The Arabidae anchored with a soundless thud that sang beneath their feet, and within minutes, the crew had hauled up a wooden gangway handed overhead by their peers on the dock.
Ceri was the first to scramble down from the ship, and she’d already thrown her arms around Al and Eda before Kai had even turned away from the bow.
He went to follow her, but something nagged at his attention; Adeline was still rooted to the spot, her hands curled over the bow’s railing with painfully bleached knuckles.
“Adeline?”
He called her name as gently as he could over the now deafening roar of the small crowd below, but even so, she jumped as though he’d screamed it.
“Coming,” she said vaguely. She looked nearly nauseated; as ashen and jittery as she’d been on their very first day aboard.
Kai felt his brow knot and his feet move beneath him, an absent step toward her before he forced himself to still.
Space, he reminded himself. Distance. It’s what she wants.
But even forcing himself not to close that distance, Kai couldn’t tame his expression, nor force his gaze away from hers. Adeline’s tight smile gave way to a true one, soft and warm and reassuring.
“I’m fine, Kai. Lead the way.”
So he did.
Pausing at the gangway to offer his hand was second nature.
He knew her acceptance was too, but that didn’t stop the jolt of warmth that bolted down his arm at her touch.
It took a concerted effort to let her go as she stepped over the ship’s edge, and even then, her warmth remained.
He closed his palm around it, as though he could hold onto the feeling.
As though he could keep it as a reminder of all they’d been to each other.
“Koo,” Ceri hollered from somewhere beneath him. “D’you fancy yourself a sailor now? Get off the bloody boat!”
Sighing inwardly, Kai followed Adeline down the gangway.
Alun had stepped up to greet her, though he hadn’t quite let go of Ceriwyn either, and the three of them laughed as they folded into one messy embrace.
Os moved around their giddy huddle and stopped short just a few steps before Kai to offer a stilted, hesitant nod.
Kai wanted to pull his cousin into a hug, to say something reassuring, and sweep the awkwardness between them aside. But he was, quite plainly, exhausted—and, if he were honest with himself, some petty, rotten thing within him was not quite ready to forgive Os for all that he’d implied.
For being right.
You walk chest-first through life, without a scrap of armour.
He wondered, as he returned his cousin’s greeting with a stilted nod of his own, whether Os felt vindicated, or just annoyed that Kai hadn’t listened to him in the first place.
It was hard to tell; it always was with Os, and not least in the moment that his cousin’s blank stare was drawn away by a chorus of clinking metal.
Kai followed his gaze as he stepped off the gangway; Eleni Vanjir was crossing the dock to greet them, ringed by her armoured guard—and with her eyes trained on Adeline as the princess untangled herself from Al and Ceri.
Kai moved without deciding to, but the Empress was undeterred by his swift step in front of Adeline. She nodded at him as he broke into her line of sight and smiled her glittering, enigmatic smile. So familiar, yet so hard to read, even now that she’d opened her home to them.
“King Cumhaill,” she said, a cursory greeting. Her eyes drifted away, back to Adeline—and that smile broadened.
“And my darling Adeline, home at last.”
Kai frowned, struggling to decipher his own thoughts through the sudden swell of whoops and cheers from the Dhaliaan onlookers across the dock.
Her darling Adeline?
Before he could even attempt to decipher the context, Adeline stepped past him with a coaxing brush of her hand on his arm. Her smile was more strained than he’d seen it throughout the entire crossing; not sad and unsure, but tense. Unmistakably so.
Tenser still when she finally swept into a curtsey and said, “Hello, Aunt Eleni.”
???
“I thought kings were meant to be smart?”
Kai turned away from the open trunk on his bed and flung his discarded shirt at Alun, who leaned neatly aside and continued to sip his wine, unfazed.
It soared past his head and caught in the branch of a nearby tree, swinging gently in the sea breeze.
Al grinned gamely from where he sat on the small balcony that opened out from Kai’s quarters.
Like the rest of the manor, the room was vast and airy with large windows and open arches sealed by nothing but gossamer curtains that danced in the salty air.
Alun was at ease wherever you placed him, but Kai had to admit that even Os seemed content here, in just a few short weeks.
They looked like little human lordlings in their bright, embroidered tunics, basking side by side in the setting sun and sipping fragrant wine from fine bronze goblets.
Kai narrowed his eyes at Al, suppressing the laughter that swelled at his friend’s smug and inflated expression.
“How long have you known, then?”
“Since we arrived in Dhalias and the Empress enquired after her brother.”
Kai scoffed. “It hardly counts if she told you. Os?”
Os blinked slightly at being addressed; it was the first word Kai had said to him directly since he’d arrived, and that realisation made his chest twinge uncomfortably, just for a moment. His cousin recovered and swilled his cup, wafting a tangy, floral scent from across the room.
“The Duke’s surname is Vanjir, Kai.”
Al barked out a laugh, and Kai reached into his trunk for something else to chuck at his friend, but just as his hand curled around a rolled-up pair of socks, a clanging sound from the hallway stilled him, muscles tensed.
“It’s the door,” Al called.
“There is no door,” said Kai.
“Exactly.”
“Helpful.”
Grumbling to himself, Kai rounded the bed and crossed to the large archway that led from his room to the open-air hall beyond.
He lifted the curtain to find Simon waiting, his hand curled around a large bronze knocker fixed to the outside wall.
Over his other arm, he had draped swaths of deep-green cloth, glimpses of gold embroidery shimmering beneath its folds.
“A gift from Her Imperial Highness,” said Simon, to Kai’s questioning brow. “She asked that you wear it to dinner. To acclimatise, as I understand it.”
Kai glanced at the boy’s own tunic, the colour of warm sand with a simple blue embroidery around the cuffs and collar.
It seemed Eleni was eager to shred any trace of Eisalaan they happened to carry over the Crossing.
He recalled now that she had been less than fond of the Silver Kingdom.
Very clean, she’d called it, as she wrinkled her nose with distaste.
Not that he disagreed in the slightest, but adult man that he was, Kai had grown rather used to dressing himself.
He took the clothes from the valet, all the same.
When he turned inside with his new clothing, Al spread his arms wide, goblet held aloft as he displayed his own tunic with a theatrical wink.
“Well! I didn’t take you for the envious type, Your Majesty.”
“And I didn’t take you for a fan of such vivid orange.”
“This is apricot,” said Al, earning a derisive snort from Os.
Kai pulled the tunic over his head, emerging just in time to watch his cousin teeter dangerously in his chair, scowling with his goblet held high as he dodged Alun’s swiping arm.
“You’ve been happy here,” said Kai. They stopped shoving at one another and looked up in unison. “Both of you.”
Os shrugged, then nodded, which for Os might mean, I suppose, or This is the happiest I’ve felt in my entire life.
“We have,” said Al simply.
“And the others—”
“Everyone is happy, Kai. Everyone is safe. Eda’s been singing about her joints for weeks; apparently, they’re no longer “stiff with cold.” Though I’m fairly certain the fountains of wine have helped, too.”
Kai could not help but smile at that—it was not a euphemism.
The merrow had been housed right here on Eleni’s vast grounds, in a manor that bled into the open walls of the main palace.
Their new home was dotted with small stone basins that flowed with the same fragrant wine his friends now sipped.
From the brief impression he’d had on his way to his rooms, it was not uncommon for courtiers and palace guests to go about their day with an empty goblet strapped to their person.
“Fair,” he said, nodding. He could see how such an amenity might make day to day a touch brighter. “But the doors?”
“What about them?”
“The lack of them,” he said dryly.
Al shrugged. “You get used to it.”
“But—” Kai floundered for a moment. Mother knows he had not settled easily into Selma’s court, but he had been grateful for a place to shut himself away with his thoughts. To pace and agonise behind closed doors, since he’d had a door to close. “What about privacy?”
“That’s what the knockers are for.”
“But surely you can hear everything that happens from room to room—”
Al cut him off with a groan.
“Then learn to wank off quietly. Or were you hoping to find privacy with someone in particular?”
Os threw his head back to the skies and pleaded for the Mother’s mercy, but Al just gave a suggestive pump of his brows. Kai spun around to find that rolled-up pair of socks he’d been planning to throw, and aimed directly at his friend’s smarmy grin.