Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Orvik
I follow the call of my mate through the water, pushed by my desperation to find her in time.
The scent of him permeates the water, brought to me by the current as I swim faster than I ever did in my life.
I come up from the depth like a creature of death, bolting from underneath her boat.
I don't surface gently. I come up between the two vessels with every muscle on my body screaming, my tentacle hair fanned wide, the water churning around me like in a high sea storm. I position myself between Jackie's skiff and Kael's vessel, my back to her, my body a wall between her and danger.
Kael is on his feet on a kraken skiff next to hers. He sees me and something moves across his face that I don't have time to read because I'm already moving.
I hit the water going down and I hit him at the same time.
The impact drives us both under. Salt water floods my senses and the fight begins in the element where krakens were born to live and kill.
I strike with my tentacle hair first, the heavy strands lashing for his throat, his gills, the vulnerable points along his ribs.
My hands find his shoulders and I drive him deeper, using my weight and the current to pin him against the rocks below.
Kael twists free.
I brace for a strike, covering my side, but he doesn't counter. He spins with the current, using my momentum to redirect me past him, and when I come around for another strike he's already moved, slipping sideways through the water with a precision that makes no sense. Why is he shying away from a fight when he’s the one who’s been stalking my mate?
I launch a wide swipe with my foot and he ducks it, then I lash with my tentacle hair again, but all he does is roll away in the deeper water, letting the strands pass over him. Every attack I launch, he answers with absence.
He's not fighting.
The Kael I knew was reckless and proud and would never let a challenge go unanswered. This Kael absorbs every strike I throw without returning a single one. His tentacles stay low, his gills flared but his posture defensive, and the wrongness of it throws me harder than any blow could.
Why won't he fight?
Above the surface, muffled by the water, I hear Jackie screaming my name. The sound reaches me the way all surface sounds reaches underwater, distorted and distant. I don't stop.
She's scared, but I need to focus on the threat before I can go back to her.
I drive at Kael again. He evades again. The cycle repeats more times than I can count. I strike, he slips, I strike some more and he slips farther away. This goes on until we both float in the water, our gills fanned out, breathless.
Then I hear the splash.
A body hits the water and all I process is that Jackie is in the ocean, all alone.
I pivot. Every instinct fires at once. She’s not far but the current is treacherous and those rocks are sharp. There’s no way she can fight against it, as good a swimmer as she is.
Kael is closer and he swims toward her, fast.
He covers the distance before I can close it, his body cutting through the current with the same infuriating ease he's been using to dodge me, and my entire being screams that this is the moment, this is the attack, he's going for my mate.
I watch him reach her. I watch his arms go around her. I watch him lift her out of the water and set her back on the deck of the skiff.
Then he backs away. Hands visible. Tentacles low.
I break the surface, gills heaving, and I stare at what just happened. Nothing in my understanding of this man accounts for it. Nothing in fifteen years of rage and grief and certainty has left room for the possibility that Kael Kelpwise would save my mate and give her back to me.
"Orvik."
Jackie is on the deck, soaking wet, hair plastered to her face. She's looking down at me in the water and her expression is one of fear and panic. But not fear for herself, I realize.
Fear for me? Fear for Kael? I don’t know.
"Orvik, you have to stop this," she says. "Listen to what he has to say."
I look at Kael, who has pulled himself onto the rail of his vessel and is sitting there dripping, watching me. I look at Jackie, who is standing on the deck, soaked to the bone, a rescued gannet screaming in a carrier behind her.
I get on the boat.
The transformation retracts as I pull myself over the gunwale. Gills closing, webbing folding, tentacle hair settling against my scalp. I'm still lit up, patterns pulsing, but I'm in my land-dwelling form and I'm on Jackie's boat and I'm looking at Kael across six feet of open water.
"Talk," I say.
Kael meets my eyes. He doesn't posture. He doesn't charm. He looks like a man who has carried something heavy for a very long time and is about to set it down.
"I confessed." His voice is rough and direct. "To Joren. To the council. I told them the truth about the smuggling and about your false confession. I told them every word you spoke was false and that you took the exile to repay your blood debt to me."
The words hit me like hail, with small, merciless blows. I feel them in my chest, in my gills, in the cold spot my family used to fill.
"When?" The word comes out barely above a whisper.
"Years ago. Not a year after you were exiled.
" Kael's jaw tightens and he swallows, but I see how hard he has to push the saliva down his throat.
"Your father lifted your exile the day I confessed.
As a measure to make amends for my sins, I was cursed with exile until I found you and brought you back home. I finally did."
The deck shifts under me. Or the ocean shifts. Or the entire axis of the world tilts on a hinge I didn't know existed.
My exile. I have been carrying that sentence for so long, I forgot what it felt like not to be cut off from my kind.
"Finding you is my way to be welcomed back on the Nautilus." Kael looks at his hands. "I've been searching for you ever since. I scoured the seas and the lakes, the coastlines of India and Antarctica. Everywhere. I looked for you until one day, I came to swim by a small town in New England.”
Kael looks back up at the open water, his gaze lost far away beyond the horizon.
“I’m not even sure I still hoped to find you by then. My soul was homesick and my mind tired. I was ready to give up, swim down to the Maw, and rest there among the black oysters until my body become one with the deep. Then I saw you."
He laughs, a humorless little chuckle and shakes his head.
“You were there on a land-dweller boat, dressed in land-dweller clothes. You looked healthy, but it was clear you were unhappy. Unmoored and lost, same as me. That’s the day I left the first buoy for you.”
“The buoy with the seashell I carved when we were kids.” I nod. "I thought you were taunting me."
"I just couldn’t find the words."
I stand on the deck of Jackie's boat and I feel fifteen years of certainty dissolve like salt in warm water.
I look at Jackie. The pearl is bright at her throat, glowing. It's still and luminous and at peace, the way it went quiet the morning I placed it around her neck.
I frown, because Jackie is paying me no attention.
She's not looking at me. She's not looking at Kael. She's looking past us both, her lips parted, her hand rising to point at something behind me.
I turn just in time to see the ocean opening.
The water swells and parts, and the largest kraken vessel in all the seas rises from the deep.
The Nautilus.
The living hull breaks the surface first, enormous and dark and pulsing with life.
Barnacles and deep-sea coral encrust its sides.
Bioluminescent organisms run in patterns down the hull in waves of blue and green and gold.
Water pours from its flanks as it rises, great sheets of it falling back into the ocean, and the sound of it is the sound of something ancient returning to the light.
The vessel is immense, longer than any ship in Saltford Bay's harbor, its lines curved and organic, the seashells and coral and living tissue of it fused into something that is part ship and part creature and wholly, unmistakably kraken.
Smaller vessels surface alongside it, skiffs like Kael's, their hulls gleaming wet.
And on the deck of the Nautilus, standing at the rails, lining the rigging are my people.
Dozens of them. Krakens in their land-dwelling forms, tentacle hair moving in the wind, faces turned toward the small human boat where I stand in the afternoon sun.
At the prow, a figure I would know from any distance, in any form, in any ocean on this earth.
Him.
My father stands at the bow of the Nautilus dressed in the deep-ocean finery of a kraken captain.
A long coat of dark scaled material falls to his boots.
A wide-brimmed captain's hat sits over his tentacle hair, which spills out from under it in thick, silver-streaked strands that move with the authority of a man who has commanded the deep for longer than I've been alive.
He looks exactly as I remember and nothing like I remember, because fifteen years have silvered his tentacle hair and deepened the lines around his eyes, but the set of his jaw and the breadth of his shoulders are unchanged.
He descends from the Nautilus on a rope ladder, drops onto Kael's skiff, and crosses the gap between the vessels. He pauses before stepping onto the land dweller’s deck, looking down at the fiberglass hull with an expression of open suspicion, his tentacle hair twitching as if the material offends him personally.
Then he steps aboard, steadying himself with a hand on the rail, and the small human boat dips under his weight.
He stands in front of me. We are the same height, I forgot that.
Then Joren Fenmoor, Captain of the Nautilus, kneels.
He bows his head low, exposing his vulnerable back for all to see, and the gesture is so foreign to everything I know about this man, that something in my chest cracks open and will not close again.
"Forgive me," he says. His voice is deep and steady and brings back a trove of memories in my mind. "I failed you. I believed a lie, and I cast out my own son and I have spent every year since trying to undo what I did."
I look down at my father and I cannot speak. So I open my arms.
He rises and falls into me and I hold my father for the first time in fifteen years.
I hold on. I hold on and I don't let go for a long time.
When we finally step apart, Joren turns to Kael. His voice is formal, carrying across the water to the crew watching from the Nautilus rail.
"Kael Kelpwise. You were given a task. You have completed it. You are welcome aboard the Nautilus and among your people."
Kael nods once and the corners of his mouth lift in a true smile.
Then Joren's eyes find Jackie.
He looks at the pearl at her neck. At the bioluminescent marks on her arms, permanent and bright even under the afternoon sun.
"Does this mean what I think it means?" he asks me.
"Yes," I say. "This is Jackie, my mate."
Joren studies her for a long moment. Jackie meets his gaze the way she meets everything directly, without flinching, her chin slightly raised.
"You are both welcome on the Nautilus," Joren says after a few moments. "Your mate's place is among your people, at your side."
I feel it, the pull. The Nautilus at my back, its living hull humming with the resonance I grew up inside.
My people on the deck. My father in front of me, offering back the life I mourned for fifteen years.
The ocean, the deep, the world I thought I'd never see again—all of it, in a single sentence.
Then I look at Jackie. She's watching me, and I can see in her face that she would say yes. She would leave Saltford Bay, leave her center and her career, and she would follow me into the ocean because she loves me. I can see it and it breaks my heart.
It also makes my decision the easiest one I've ever made.
"My home is in Saltford Bay," I tell my father. "Jackie is a land dweller. Her life, her work, everything she's built is on the shore. I won't ask her to leave it." I hold his gaze. "My place is with my mate. Wherever she is, I am."
Joren is quiet for a moment. Then something softens in his face.
"Your mother would say the same thing," he says. "She always said a mate's happiness comes before the tide." A ghost of a smile lifts the corner of my father’s lips. "I didn't listen enough when she was alive. I'm listening now."
He puts his hand on my shoulder. His grip is strong and warm and steady.
"Then Saltford Bay is where we will find you," he says. "With your permission, the Nautilus will visit when the currents allow. Your father would like to know his son's mate."
"You don't need permission," I say, and my voice breaks on the last word. "You never needed permission."
I embrace Kael. He stiffens at first and then his arms come up and he hugs me back.
"Thank you," I tell him. "For finding me."
He doesn't answer. He holds on for a moment, then steps back.
I embrace my father one more time, then he turns and steps off the boat onto Kael's vessel.
Jackie's hand finds mine. She presses herself against my side, warm and human and solid, and I put my arm around her and hold her there.
The Nautilus begins to descend. The living hull sinks slowly, the bioluminescent patterns brightening as it goes deeper, the crew on deck raising their tentacle hair in farewell.
The water rises along the hull, swallowing the coral and the barnacles and the ancient living things.
The smaller vessels follow, slipping beneath the surface one by one.
Joren is the last figure visible, standing at the rail, his hat silhouetted against the sky.
The ocean closes over the Nautilus, and the water goes calm. The afternoon light falls on an empty sea as I hold my mate. I am at peace.
I am home wherever she is.