Chapter 30
THIRTY
ALLERIA
My eyes open, heart slamming against my ribs.
For half a breath, I’m back in my bedchamber in the keep, braced for the tap at the window and the voice that follows it.
Will it be my father this time? Or Brennan? Or will it be the one I can least bear again, the mother I barely remember?
My body is locked, waiting for the Sluagh to mimic them. My jaw is clenched, my nails are biting into my palms, and my breath is thin and shallow. I lie there with every muscle drawn tight, listening and waiting.
But as my senses fire to life, it isn’t the Sluagh I hear. It’s the sound of waves on sand.
No tapping. No voice. Only the sea.
I drag in a shuddering breath and twist onto my side, my hand reaching blindly across the furs. The space beside me is empty, the furs cool where his warmth should be.
My stomach drops, the sudden panic dragging my mind back to the cell beneath the palace with a speed I’m not ready for.
The phantom chill of stone presses against my spine, the black so absolute I can see nothing around me.
I force my eyes wide, fighting the memories until the shelter takes shape again.
I’m not alone. I’m not trapped. I’m in the cove. He was here.
I push up onto an elbow, and look around. The shelter is dim, the opening a paler gray against the dark, but I can just make out the shape of the vaelcait. He’s sitting just inside the entrance, his head turned toward the beach, ears forward, his tail swishing slowly back and forth.
He’s watching something outside. I sit up more and follow his gaze.
Cairn is standing at the edge of the water.
His back is to me, and his face is tipped up to where the moon hangs huge and silver above the sea. The waves curl around his feet without breaking over them. But that isn’t what stills the breath in my lungs.
It’s the marks on his skin.
They’re moving.
The silver swirls he pressed my fingers to earlier, the ones that belong to the Sea Court, are alive.
Light gathers along the intricate patterns, brightening and dimming in a slow pulse that mirrors his breathing.
Then the marks begin to turn beneath his skin, spinning through his shoulders, his spine, his arms, as though the moon has hooked itself into him and is pulling something awake.
The glow bleeds outward. Into the green. The blue. The gold. And finally into the black. Every mark on his body catches, and the air around him shimmers silver.
That can’t be right. I must be seeing things.
I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes. When I look again, the glow is still there. Brighter, if anything. The moonlight pours over him in a stream, and Cairn stands beneath it like something carved out of the night and lit from within.
I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t think any human has.
I want a closer look.
The thought should bother me. Maybe it does. Maybe that’s part of the reason I reach for the tunic folded on the furs behind the vaelcait. I pull it over my head and stand before I can talk myself out of it.
The moment I step outside the shelter, the night air hits me. The sand is cool beneath my feet, and goosebumps rise along my arms, but none of it is enough to stop me.
I keep moving toward the water. Toward him.
Behind me, the vaelcait stays where he is, tail continuing its back-and-forth sweep.
I stop a few paces away from Cairn, and stare, caught by the sheer beauty of the scene in front of me. The still water, the moon, and the fae standing at the center of it all, lit from within, as though the night itself has opened beneath his skin.
It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen … and the strangest.
I don’t move. I barely blink. The waves, the breeze, the cold under my feet—all of it fades away, until there is only Cairn at the water’s edge and moonlight pouring over him.
I know this isn’t meant for me. I know I’m witnessing something private. Something older than names humans put on fae so we could pretend we understood them.
Still, I can’t look away. Because he’s not human. I’ve always known that. I’ve seen him kill. I’ve seen the markings, the pointed ears, the inhuman angles of his face.
But this is different.
This isn’t the dangerous creature who dragged me through the woods. It isn’t the warrior who cut down soldiers without mercy. This is something older.
And the small, human part of me finally understands why my people had to make monsters of the fae.
It’s easier than admitting we were afraid of how much we couldn’t comprehend them.
I fell asleep against his chest. I laid my head over his heart and settled against him, as though he were an ordinary man who would keep me warm until morning.
And I did it easily. I just wound myself around him and let go. I trusted him to keep me safe.
But this being before me is older than my father. Older than my father’s father. Older than the stories I was raised on, and every warning inside them.
The realization tilts the ground a little under my feet. By every rule I grew up with, I should be putting distance between us.
Instead I move a step closer.
The haze around him brightens. His arms lift, stretching out to either side, and the moon answers.
It pours down in steady streams, silver light spilling over his shoulders. The Sea Court markings flare so bright I have to shield my eyes against them. The glow sinks beneath his skin, then rises again.
The sea stills around his feet. Every wave pauses.
A gasp escapes me.
His head snaps around, eyes opening, that golden gaze finding me across the dark.
He goes still. So do I.
Then he turns, and comes toward me. With each step across the sand, the silver thins from the air. The marks fade. The brightness ebbs out of him, retreating until the impossible thing I just witnessed is hidden beneath damp skin and colorful marks.
By the time he stops in front of me, he almost looks like Cairn again.
Almost.
If my pulse wasn’t hammering so frantically in my throat, I could believe I dreamed the rest.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping.” His voice is low.
“I’m sorry.” I start to turn away. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“You’re not intruding.” He catches my arm, his other hand tucking my hair back from my face. The brush of his fingers sends warmth through the panic threatening to rise. “And you have no need to be sorry.”
“What were you doing out here? What … what was that?”
He glances back at the water, then to me. “I was drawing on the moon.”
“Drawing on—I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
“Tonight is the first time I’ve stood under Underhill’s moon since the Sealing.
The Sea Court draws its power from the moon and the tides.
In your world I could reach it, barely.” His head tips up, and his eyes close briefly before he looks at me again.
“The mortal moon is a pale thing in comparison.”
“But you had power there.” I frown, thinking of all the times I’ve seen him and the others make shelters, or clothes, and heat water. “I saw you use it. If you could barely reach it, then how could you do all the things I saw?”
“Because I am not only a Sea Court-born fae. What you saw was never one thing, Moirthalen. Watch.”
He lifts a hand, and the air beside him stirs. A length of cloth forms out of nothing, and drapes over his arm.
“Common fae magic. Any of us can do it, anywhere. Shelters, clothing, small workings. That’s what raised the camps you slept in.”
The cloth dissolves into nothing, and he turns his head to the side.
Selveryn comes out of the dark between one breath and the next.
And this time, I feel it. The thread that ties me to Cairn draws tight, pulling low behind my breastbone.
The hair on my arms rises, and the strangest sensation climbs over my shoulders, up the back of my neck, then higher until it gathers pressure behind my ears.
Selveryn tosses his head, pawing at the sand, and the intense pressure fades.
“Nightwild magic. The steeds. The blades I carry. The way I can reach you across the bonds.” His eyes hold mine.
“The blood bond and the Nightwild bond. Neither the common magic nor the Nightwild magic needs the moon. I could still use both in your world, weak as I was. And that is why you feel this one, when you felt nothing of the first. You carry a piece of it now.”
A glance from him, and Selveryn dissolves back into the dark. He turns toward the sea.
He doesn’t speak this time, merely reaches out. And the sea answers.
A column of water tears itself free from the black ocean, rising higher than the shelter, higher than the rocks, twisting into a violent, spinning vortex that drags moonlight through its center. The sound of it fills the cove, a deep roar that makes every instinct in me want to step back.
But I don’t. I hold where I am, and trust in his control.
His fingers curl. The vortex tightens until the water spins so fast it turns silver-black beneath the moon. Then his hand opens. The water drops.
It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t break. It falls flat, spreading into a perfect sheet of stillness at his feet, mirror-smooth and wrong beneath the moon.
“Sea Court,” he says quietly. “That is what needs the moon. What I was drawing into myself when you woke. The one part of me your world could never feed.”
I stare at the sea lying unnaturally flat at his feet, an entire tide made still by nothing more than his will. The sheer scale of it drives the air from my lungs.
All those stories I was raised on shift sideways in my head.
The fae started the war. The fae wanted human lands. The fae came because they were hungry for power, for territory, for conquest.
But people who can do what he just showed me never needed to take anything from anyone.
They could have walked into the mortal world whenever they chose. They could have drowned our armies where they stood. They could have crushed every wall and every palace.
They didn’t.
Not until one of their own was taken.
I pull my gaze from the water, and look at Cairn, and find him already watching me. The thread connecting us pulls taut, vibrating with a sharp, spike of energy that he immediately stifles. His eyebrows draw together, his head tilted, studying me in a way that makes my skin prickle.
“What?”
He says nothing, turning away and flicking his fingers toward the sea. The stillness shatters. Waves rush back over the sand, but the sudden movement doesn’t distract me from the shift in his expression.
“Cairn? You just thought of something. What was it?”
“Nothing.”
“Cairn.” I plant my hands on my hips. “Don’t do that. You just got that look.”
“What look?”
“The one where you’ve decided something and you’re not going to tell me. What is it?”
He turns back toward the shelter. “We should try and sleep. Tomorrow will be busy.”
“Busy with what?”
“Many things. Come.”
“You can’t tell me to go to bed.”
“I can, actually.” There’s a thread of amusement in his voice now. “I find I’m very good at it.”
He walks away, leaving me to follow or not. I stare after him for a heartbeat, then jog to catch up to him.
An hour ago, I woke up braced for the Sluagh, certain something was coming to hurt me. Now I’m chasing a fae who can command the sea across a beach in the middle of the night because he won’t answer my question, and the only thing I feel is irritation.
The fear has gone.
I don’t tell him that.
“You’re so annoying.”
“So you keep telling me.” He doesn’t slow.
“I mean it.”
“I’m sure you do.”
I scowl at his back, which does nothing, because he can’t see and wouldn’t care if he could. He ducks into the shelter ahead of me and settles back onto the furs, holding out a hand.
“And yet here you are, following me to bed regardless.”
I open my mouth to argue, then snap it closed.
“I don’t like you.” There’s not an ounce of truth to my words, and the smug tilt of his lips says he knows it.
“Sleep.”
I let him take my hand and guide me down against his chest. His arms wrap around me.
He’s insufferable. I want to wear him down. I want to drag an answer out of him. But I know the more I push, the less he’ll give, so I settle against him, and let the sounds of the sea and his heartbeat beneath my ear lull me to sleep.
Tomorrow.
I’ll get it out of him tomorrow.