Chapter Twenty-Two
Adeline
All was still in the family dining room.
Silent. The only sign of life came not from the three people seated at one end of the long table, but from the salt breeze that tumbled and danced with the gauzy drapings of the balcony.
And if that same breeze carried the vaguest hint of smoke, of distant violence borne all this way to them on a forgetful wind that toyed with Adeline’s hair, it was hard to tell.
It could, after all, be the soot that still burned in her sinuses.
The smoke that clung to her damp curls. The charred remains of Kai’s shirt over his raw, shining shoulder.
She couldn’t be sure, because really, it felt like she’d never left the Arabidae.
The ground beneath her seat was still shifting and inconstant.
That grey haze still coated the world around her, Eleni’s words distant and muffled, though she sat close enough to lay her palm over Adeline’s rigid fingers.
Even the weight of her Aunt’s hand was indistinguishable from her own.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
No. Yes?
Maybe she would, if she could make herself focus.
She hadn’t taken in a word; would have assumed Eleni was speaking to Kai, actually, were it not for his silence.
He’d been given a numbing tonic by the rescue crew who met them on the shore; something to help with the pain until he could be seen by a Healer.
She wondered distantly if she’d taken some too and somehow forgotten.
If that was why she felt this way. Why it took such effort to lift her head and find Kai.
When she did, he wasn’t even looking at the Empress.
He was staring at a square of parchment held in both hands; it was half-crumpled in the force of his grip, and the tremor of that tension ran all the way down his forearms, absorbed into the wooden tabletop where they rested.
The letter had come from home, delivered on the supply ship that had arrived that morning, complete with an envoy of the Eisalaan Gard.
Adeline wasn’t sure what it said. She hadn’t asked.
Because Eleni’s messenger had handed it to him, then turned to her and said that her father—
“Adeline?”
She turned her head. Her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth, and it took two briney, smoke-tinged swallows to get it working.
“I don’t—” she tried, half-spluttering. The words were rough with the grit and grime that still coated her throat. “What did you—”
With a squeeze of her hand, Eleni spared her the effort of admitting she wasn’t listening.
“The news from Eisalaan,” she said slowly. “And the fire.”
Adeline focused on her aunt; really tried. She was drawn, hollow in a way that didn’t sit naturally in the softness of her face. Her eyes were a mirror to Adeline’s own, red and swollen to slits with only a glint of brown, its warmth dulled to the same ashen shade as the Arabidae’s remains.
“Do you understand, Adeleni?”
She didn’t understand. She truly didn’t.
None of it made sense, none of it felt real, and she could not reconcile what happened on the Arabidae and whatever was unfolding back home, all the way over the Common Crossing.
Couldn’t braid them together into anything she could grasp; the pieces simply unravelled in the palm of her hand.
But the silence was starting to sound like the roar of those flames over the crash of the waves, so she said, “Mareda’s taken the throne. The Frost—”
Her mind stopped. Just stopped, like her thoughts had hit a pane of glass. She could nearly hear the thump and screech. And then she heard the messenger’s voice in place of her own.
The new queen has created bleak conditions, Your Highness, a winter unlike anything we’ve known. The Laune is closed for trade, the ports have all but frozen over. Scores of people have gone missing. I am sorry to say … your father is among them.
A slow roll of warmth down one cheek startled Adeline back to the present. She swiped the rogue tear away and sniffed to clear the sting in her sinuses.
“They repaired the Frost somehow,” she said thickly. “Mareda, and Edward.”
“No.”
It was the first word Kai had spoken in hours; the first thing he’d said since Pike had half-hauled him onto the rescue boat, his entire face slack, Eda nowhere to be seen.
Soot blackened his gills, and his voice came out ragged and ruined, but it was enough to turn the gaze of both women.
Eleni made a soft noise, understanding or agreement perhaps—but it was Adeline he looked to as he set down the parchment.
“That new queen,” he said, all on one flat, rasping note. “It’s not Mareda.”
Shimmering ice caught the candlelight as Kai slid the parchment across the table; overlapping patterns of frost for a pretty border on palace stationery. A Wielder’s touch that left the page cool beneath Adeline’s hand when she picked it up.
A summons, addressed to Kai.
And the signature drew that chill beneath her fingers, sent it racing up her arms, bolting down her spine like lightning. Because that was the name of the woman known to have disappeared into the Frost hundreds of years ago. A woman who should have been swallowed by her own curse.
“It’s Avette,” said Adeline. Her voice sounded quite as dead as Kai’s, but it raked at her swollen throat with each sparse word. “How?”
“The Thaw,” was all he said.
The Thaw.
The Thaw that had killed her mother.
And a summons from the woman whose curse had started it all. Had torn magic from the world. Split Merrow from their home, and their families, and their own futures. Ruined Kai and destroyed all he held dear.
A different kind of thaw crawled over her skin, rousing every numb nerve ending and setting them alight. Sinking heat through her muscles until liquid fire filled her belly and rose in her throat like a growl.
“She doesn’t get to summon you.”
Kai said nothing—and Adeline felt her stomach pitch.
“Kai,” she said, his name sharper on her tongue than it had ever felt before.
She leaned across the table, straining to place herself in his vision even as his gaze dropped to his own hands splayed on the wooden surface.
“She does not get to make demands of you. Of anyone. She doesn’t get to act as though it’s over, as though she’s won—”
“And as little as I want that, this is not a decision I make for myself,” Kai cut in, with just enough heat that she could tell the burn in her veins was catching.
She saw it in his eyes, too, when he finally raised them; the anger that crackled there.
The frustration that fissured every taut word. “I have others to consider.”
“I know you don’t believe they’d want you to bow to that woman. They want to go home.”
“Yes, they do,” he said, too evenly. “And so do you. So what will I accomplish for either of us by sitting here sunning myself while your kingdom falls to the same fate as my own? I have been too selfish for too long. But when I tell you I need to do this, I can promise you I am not thinking of myself.”
Adeline’s heart squeezed itself into her throat, but she strained to press her voice past it, needing him to hear her even if it came out reedy and thin.
“I don’t need you to accomplish anything for me, Kai. I need you to take a moment to breathe, to think. I need you to understand that you can’t go back to Eisalaan armed with nothing but a festering grudge. I need you alive, and so do your people—”
“My people?”
A pulse of green lit Kai’s features, casting him in a ghostly glow that hollowed his cheeks and eyes and etched shadow into the crease of his brow. He looked angry and exhausted, and his fingers tightened on the table’s edge until a low judder sang beneath his knuckles.
“My people needed my protection,” he gritted out, the green light pulsing brighter, “and look how well I’ve served them.
Alun all but lost his family. I have let my sister down more times than I can count.
Oswalt second-guesses my every move, as he very well should, because it’s clear I have no damned idea what I’m doing.
And none of that, none of it, compares to Eda.
If we had listened to her, if I had only listened and believed her—”
Kai’s voice cracked, but he growled past the strain and at the head of the table, an untouched jug of water rippled in time with another bright pulse of his pendant. It was only when a hand reached out to steady the jar that Adeline jolted.
“Aunt Eleni,” she said abruptly, and watched surprise leash Kai’s entire taut frame even tighter. His knotted brow went flat for a split second, his gills tensing through a harsh swallow, the green glow blinking out.
He’d forgotten they weren’t alone; a Vanjir talent, Adeline suspected.
They could shine as bright as they chose, but they knew how to dim themselves too; how to still the shimmer of their own airs when they needed to.
Hadn’t she honed that same talent for all those years in her mother’s court?
Learned to blend with the frozen scenery?
A sideways glance told her that was exactly what Eleni had been doing.
Guilt tugged the curve of her lips to one side as she met Adeline’s eye with a polite and expectant smile.
It didn’t seem right to kick the Empress from her own dining hall, but her Aunt seemed to accept it; she was already pushing back her seat, poised on the edge of it and awaiting dismissal.
Adeline forced her stiff face into a grateful smile and managed to hold it for a second or two, even as her heart renewed its valiant attempt to climb into her airways and strangle the breath from her lungs.
“His Majesty’s shoulder is badly burned, and I’m sure the pain is more than a little bit distracting. Perhaps he’d be able to think clearly with some relief.”
She could feel the dry heat of Kai’s blazing gaze on her, but she ignored him a moment longer. They’d be alone, and he could rage at her all he liked.