Chapter Twenty-Five #2
“Yes, you did.” Certainty wreathed Aleksi’s words. He could not possibly have known . . . yet he did. “You swore that you would protect her people.”
Aleksi would have understood the importance of it instinctively.
No one would have had to extract the promise from him.
But in those first terrible days, Theron had seen the people only as an obligation—the bitter duty holding him to life, when he longed for the escape of death.
They hadn’t even needed him . . . at first.
“The world changed after we lost you,” Einar said, leaning back into the Lover’s strength.
“The currents in the ocean changed. They cooled. Winter started earlier, and lasted longer. Tona was only seventy the first time summer never truly came. Some of the plants and animals adapted, but too many . . .”
“They didn’t make it.” All the pain and turmoil that Naia had missed was crashing in on her now.
He stroked his fingers over her hair, comforting himself as much as her.
“I returned to my home islands for the first time in centuries. We loaded ships with things that thrived in the cold. The reindeer, and the tundra cotton . . .” The words broke on a hoarse laugh as tears stung his eyes for the first time.
“It had always grown white in my homeland, but here . . .”
The islanders had come to him after that first harvest, eyes wide, hands overflowing with fine fibers of the most vibrant teal, and he had cried as he curled scarred, tired fingers around the impossible beauty of it.
Aleksi folded his arms around them both and pulled them close. “The goddess’s favorite color.”
“She was still here,” Einar agreed. “Some part of the goddess lived on in the blood and bones of this island.” He brushed a thumb over Naia’s cheek, swiping away her renewed tears. “I could still feel you. So I stayed.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough.” And as much as the memories held grief, there were other emotions there. Pride, and satisfaction. Blunted, perhaps, by how hard it had been for Theron to open his bruised heart. But the work he had done in those centuries had mattered.
“I taught them how to build for the cold, and how to fish icy waters. They were your people, and they were so smart. They learned to weave the tundra cotton and became traders. They thrived. And when the last great-grandfather who could remember a world without winter was given to the sea, I thought they no longer needed me.”
The hope that had bloomed in Naia’s eyes dimmed. “Oh, casara. You didn’t.”
“It wasn’t sad,” he protested, stroking her cheek again.
“I was tired, and I wanted to rest. I walked into the sea and let the deep take me home. It should have been peaceful, except . . .” The guilt slicing through him didn’t belong to Theron.
Theron had never known what followed. “I didn’t know the Empire would invade. ”
She drew in a sharp breath, then released it on a ragged sob. Einar pulled her into him again, letting her tears scald his throat as he cradled the back of her head. For her it was only grief, but for him . . .
Theron had lived his life and met his end.
A peaceful end, closing his eyes with the conviction that he would find Naia again, even if only in the currents of an endless ocean they had both become part of.
It was Einar who had been born into the world shaped by his absence.
Einar, who had lost everything because Theron had given in to the temptation to lie down and let the tides sweep him under.
But if he had not done so, would Einar even exist?
The man who stood in the Lover’s protective embrace, cradling Naia against his chest, had been shaped by so many things that Theron had never known.
A human childhood shadowed by loss. Hunger and fear and hard work as a teenager.
Mortality, breathing down his neck, making every moment feel precious in a way that you could never understand if you had always had forever.
And he’d had Petya. A woman who had raised him to understand duty and honor.
Who’d taught him lessons Theron had never learned—that every life was precious, because every person held within them an entire world.
And that those who wished to rule must be willing to shoulder the responsibilities of having those fragile lives under their care.
If Naia had lived, Theron might have learned those lessons in time.
But he had been too wounded by her loss to ever open his heart again.
Theron might have destroyed the Imperial invaders .
. . or he might have only drawn Sorin’s direct intervention.
More likely than not, Rahvekya would have been obliterated in the clash of power, its people erased from memory as Sorin had erased so many.
But even if Theron had persevered, he never would have become the kind of man who could stand as a worthy guardian of this island.
“Let it go?” Naia whispered, a suggestion but also a plea. And maybe she knew exactly how he felt, because her next words washed over him like a soothing breeze. “And so will I. Because I think, perhaps, that what needed to happen . . . did.”
“I think maybe it did,” he murmured, and they needed no more words.
The breeze that rose this time was real, not the storm god’s power stirring the wind, but the island offering silent comfort.
The scent of the flowers weighing down Einar’s impossibly blooming tree might waken Theron’s memory of a simpler time, but Einar did not envy it—or him.
He no longer wished he could be worthy of the man whose name he had taken, because the reality of the storm god was so much more complicated than the myth.
Theron had loved Naia the best he could, but he had not been able to love her the way she deserved.
He hadn’t been capable of understanding why the people of this island mattered.
Perhaps, if he had, instead of fighting her in those last terrible days, he would have put his power into finding a way to protect them—and perhaps by doing so, saved Naia as well.
When Sorin arrived, Einar would not repeat the storm god’s mistakes. Einar didn’t need a coronation to know in his bones that these were his people. He would be betraying everything Naia was if he turned his back on them in order to protect her. And as for the Lover . . .
If things had happened differently, would they ever have found him?
Would he have made his way across the sea on a diplomatic mission and recognized something in them?
Or would Theron’s stunted heart have killed any possibility before it had a chance to take root?
Einar could still remember the terrifying intimacy of letting the Lover look inside him and see the truth of him—his fear that Aleksi would find a frozen heart, or worse, no heart at all.
If Aleksi had looked into the storm god’s heart, Einar suspected he would have found little there to love. That would have been a tragedy.
“Never again,” Aleksi growled suddenly.
Naia lifted her head to cast a confused look at him. “What?”
But all of Aleksi’s attention was on Einar’s face. “Never,” he repeated. “You’ll not lose Naia again, not like that. I won’t let it happen.”
The words sounded larger than mere sounds, as if he had spoken a vow of the heart backed by the power of the Dream.
Einar lifted his hand to Aleksi’s face, stroking one roughened thumb over the smoothness of the Lover’s cheek.
When his eyes blazed so bright, it was impossible to doubt him.
“We will not lose anything,” Einar said softly.
“Because together, we are strong enough to beat him.”
Aleksi covered Einar’s hand with his, and this time, his words were definitely a vow. They shook the temple beneath them and rang through the cold night air. “Sorin will not have you. Either of you.”
It was a reminder that Einar and Naia were not the only ones here whose life had been shaped by Sorin’s choices. How terrible it must have been for those who once called him friend. To watch a man you knew spiral down into darkness so destructive, it had nearly fractured their very world.
Einar wanted to destroy the Emperor for so many reasons. For Rahvekya, for his parents, for every other conquered people who had been scrubbed from history by Sorin’s ravenous hunger to own everything.
In this moment, Einar wanted to destroy him so Aleksi would never again have to fear losing someone he loved to the monster Sorin had become. “He will not,” Einar agreed quietly. “He will not have anyone we love.”
Aleksi turned his face into Einar’s hand, and the kiss the Lover pressed to his palm felt like the sealing of a vow. Einar stroked Aleksi’s lips, then lifted his other hand to do the same to Naia.
He could have stayed in this moment forever, but he had one more task to complete before he was ready to face Sorin. One that would likely not go as smoothly as this had.
Somehow, Einar had to convince the crew of the Kraken to leave this island before they got caught in the middle of a war between gods.