Chapter Two
Adeline
At the surge and slope of each wave, her insides sloshed like hot tea in a flask—Adeline was going to be sick.
Behind her, a number of voices hissed angrily, overlapping in argument. Through the fog of her nausea, Adeline could just about pick out Ceriwyn’s soft tut.
“Considering she’s a Princess of Eisalaan—”
“Don’t care if she’s the Queen of the Four Waters,” a gruff voice cut in. “She’ll not be spilling her belly down the side of my boat.”
The water swelled beneath them and took Adeline’s stomach with it, soaring for her lungs before free-falling toward the shifting wooden boards beneath her. She heaved, and someone gave a wordless cry of panic, answered by Ceri’s exasperated sigh.
“Adeline?”
She acknowledged Ceri’s voice in her ear with a whimper, fingers curling tight around the ship’s edge, eyes screwed shut.
“We need to get you below deck. Apparently, our delightful Captain would prefer you vomit in the enclosed space we’ll be inhabiting for the next ten days.”
“The ship’s just been painted,” said the gruff voice, pitch rising to a slight whine. “Daughter’s love, I’m not asking her to spew in the hallways, we’ll get her a bucket!”
“Hear that, Your Highness?” said Ceri. “You get a bucket!”
“Can’t—” She gasped, another heave rising through her body, and another wail behind her.
“Oh, hush, will you?” Ceri hissed over her shoulder.
Adeline tried again. “Can’t—Can’t m-move.”
Ceri patted her shoulder, but the next words she spoke were directed away from her again, spoken a bit sharply under her breath.
“Think you might help, or are you content to watch?”
After a moment, a broad hand replaced Ceri’s and settled on her back, light and warm and moving in the slightest soothing circle. Even with the dizzying nausea tugging her every which way, Adeline recognised the touch.
Kai said nothing for a long moment; just kept up that rhythmic, soothing circle until her breath evened.
“Adeline, it’s Kai—”
“I know.”
His hand faltered for just a split second—then resumed, slow and soothing as before.
“Can I help you get below deck?”
The ship gave another merry lurch, rocking back and forth like an oversized cradle. Adeline groaned and shook her head, then groaned again at the terrible spinning the movement incited.
“Could I carry you?”
His hand slid around her waist and paused, awaiting her answer.
She couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth again, but the thought of Kai’s steady arms around her, of not bearing her own weight on the shifting, swollen floorboards of the deck, was a relief in itself.
She turned into him without a word, opening her eyes for just long enough to slide her hands over his shoulders and bury her face into his chest. Kai’s hands went around her almost reflexively, behind her back and beneath her knees.
He bundled her tighter against him, and then they were moving.
“I thought you’d made this journey before?”
He spoke quietly, but the words rumbled pleasantly through his chest, and she couldn’t bring herself to feel ashamed that she’d instinctively burrowed closer.
“Long time ago,” she mumbled into his shirt. “Forgot about this bit. Father had a tea. Slept a lot of the time—”
“Root tea, she means,” the gruff voice cut in, its owner apparently having followed them across the deck to be sure Adeline didn’t jump up and make a break for the side of the boat. “Long-brewed valerian, mostly, some other herbs too. Must be sea sickness.”
“Oh, do you think so?” Ceri said, each word thick with sarcasm. “I assume you have some of this tea on board, then?”
“Aye.”
“Do you think perhaps you should fetch it? Might be the courteous thing to do, no?”
A grumbled response, and then his heavy, truculent footfall sounded in the opposite direction.
Kai kept moving, his grip on Adeline tightening as he descended the stairs, moving slowly so as not to jostle her.
When the light dimmed behind her lids and the sound of shifting waves dulled, she assumed they had found their way below deck.
Adeline opened one eye and immediately regretted it. Even in the dim, even with Kai’s steady embrace locked around her, the sudden tilt of the hallway turned her insides to thick, roiling liquid, and she had to clap a hand over her mouth.
“Almost there.”
“How do you stand it?”
Kai huffed a laugh, then absently brushed his lips over the crown of her head— his chest went taut beneath her.
She might have tensed, too, if sickness hadn’t turned her muscles to the consistency of boiled cabbage.
Had she been able to open her eyes again, she’d have looked up at him, caught whatever expression he wore in that frozen moment.
She’d know if she looked at him.
Had he meant to kiss her like that?
The thought was dim and distant beyond her growing exhaustion, but it hung there all the same. Until Kai laughed again, out loud this time, as though nothing had happened.
“I’m not entirely certain merrow can become seasick. We’re born to the waters.”
A door creaked, and Adeline felt the brush of the frame against her skirts as they backed into a cool, dark room.
Then she was being lowered and released, a too-soft mattress swallowing her whole; her body curled in on itself desperately while she tried to breathe through the next suffocating wave of sickness.
Kai’s weight shifted the mattress at her back before his hand came to rest on the clammy skin of her forehead, sweeping her curls from her brow. A soft, sighing sound escaped her—one she absolutely would not have made for her possibly-former-lover if she’d had any control over herself whatsoever.
Kai pulled his hand back.
“I–ah—”
Flustered. Goddess, how she used to enjoy a flustered Kai. Might still, if his blushing and weighted gazes didn’t stir an all-consuming guilt in her chest, a guilt so tangled and layered she could barely understand it.
Not that she could understand much of anything right now, with her organs stirring and swaying within her and her head beginning to pound.
Kai cleared his throat.
“Shall I keep going or do you want me to go and get—”
“Stay,” she said. The guilt that should have followed was once more numbed by nausea and exhaustion. “Please. Feels nice.”
Kai didn’t answer, but his hand resumed stroking at her hair and kept at it even as she drifted in and out of a fitful half-asleep.
It was hard to say how long had passed by the time the door creaked open, and Kai’s hand finally paused on her brow. Adeline surfaced vaguely from the depths of unconsciousness to hear Ceri murmuring to him, something she couldn’t hear.
“I can do it,” he said softly.
Silence.
Kai’s voice turned firm. “I can do it, Ceriwyn.”
Another silence passed, this one weighted enough that Adeline had to pry an eye open, curiosity overcoming her exhaustion for just a moment.
Ceri stood in the shadowed doorway, cradling a tin mug, her lips tugged down in a worried curve as she held her brother’s eye.
She must have felt Adeline’s half-lidded stare, for she turned slightly, forced a brief smile, then handed the mug to Kai and left without another word.
“Do you think you can sit up?”
Adeline couldn’t move her head to shake it; the small cabin was already spinning, and she desperately needed to close her eyes again. She groaned a wordless complaint into the covers, but Kai seemed to understand.
“I’m going to lean you against me, alright? Just for a moment. Just so you can drink, and then you’ll sleep as long as you need. Ready?”
She was not, but Kai was gentle as he pulled her up and against him, coaxing her to lean her back to his chest. Her head lolled against his shoulder, and for the first time since they’d boarded the ship, she caught a shadowed glimpse of his face as he turned to reach for her tea.
A weak glow lit him in profile; candlelight, perhaps.
It fluttered along the strong lines of his face, so familiar in both their beauty and their tension.
His dark brow was creased, as it so often was, his jaw set so the angles seemed sharper than ever, even beneath days of thick, black stubble.
He turned his head, and that stubble scratched gently at her brow; that was familiar, too.
The feel of his skin on hers, how he’d wake her with his coarse chin and soft mouth pressed into her neck, rough and gentle all at once.
Amazingly, a weak blush crept into her cheeks at the thought—though it hardly registered when she was already so hot and flushed all over, her stomach still swirling ominously.
“Small sips, alright? You’ll want to keep this down.”
Kai supported her head with his free hand, fingers combing through her curls to spread at the base of her skull. He pressed the tin rim to her lips, and she drank.
“Ugh.” She winced between sips; the tea was bitter and earthy, with barely enough heat to dull the taste. “S’pose a drop of honey would be a tall order?”
He snorted. “I’m glad you’re well enough to make jokes.”
The last of the bitter liquid slid down her throat, and she let her head fall back again, just for a moment.
“Wasn’t joking.”
Adeline almost didn’t hear his answering laugh, but it hummed through her chest, warm and oddly intimate. Her eyes slid shut before she could stop them.
“Do you want to go to sleep now?”
“Mm. In a minute.”
Kai stiffened beneath her, but then there was the soft tap of the tin setting down on a nearby surface, and the warmth of his arm came around her, loose against her troubled stomach.
“Alright.”
???
She woke, as she had so many times, to the lull of Kai’s breath and his steady heartbeat beneath her head. Content to be in his arms, with the damp air breezing over her cheeks, as though reminding her that this warm bed was the ideal place to be.
In those slow and sticky waking moments, she curled instinctively closer, his arm tightening around her even in sleep.
Then her eyes flew open.
Bollocks.