Chapter Seventeen #2
“My cousin,” Kai had told him as he scanned the letter—but something about the strength and confidence in the boy’s tone had called to his attention, and he’d glanced up belatedly.
Simon had changed, even in the few days since Kai had last seen him.
His pallid complexion had erupted in golden-brown freckles, and his once tense frame was loose, as though all he’d ever needed was the sunlight to melt the frost from his joints.
Dhalias suited him; Kai had told him as much and could not help but laugh at the broad, boyish grin it had elicited.
“I’m a new man, Your Majesty,” had been the valet’s bright response.
And with no further insight, he’d left Kai to read his cousin’s summons, with promises to return with tea and a late breakfast for a still-sleeping Adeline.
Os’s letter detailed plans that some of the Merrow had made to meet for a leisurely afternoon on the shore.
I would have told you in person, had you not disappeared from the ball last night, he’d written.
Kai had smothered the boyish irritation that struggled to bleed through him at those pointed words.
And the ones that had followed, too. Perhaps this could be an opportunity to keep our people informed.
That same irritation squirmed within his chest now as he stood on the empty shore, but he breathed through it, unwilling to part with the weightless, buoyant feeling he’d found that morning.
It had all been far too heavy of late: Selma’s death, all that had passed between himself and Adeline, the pain he’d caused her, and the expectations he’d invited by promising his people a new home only to arrive in Dhalias and find they were not entirely welcome.
His body and mind had been aching beneath the weight, and however fleeting this respite might be, he was determined to enjoy it.
So Kai tilted his face to the sun and basked in the quiet lull of the waves.
His Adhlian pendant began to seep its cold into his sun-warmed skin, pulsing in time with the lap of the tide.
It was gently insistent, almost as though reminding him of its presence.
A reminder he did not need; in truth, the temptation had been there since the moment Daithí laid that cold shard against his palm, and he had been ignoring the dry ache in his veins for nearly two days.
He could not even say why.
But witnessing the rush of the sacred power that barelled through Adeline as he’d held her, and her euphoric daze after Wielding her magic, the temptation had only grown keener. This moment of solitude was the best opportunity he could have asked for, really.
Kai kicked off his boots and stripped down to his undershirt.
With the water so clear and the sun so keen, the warmth of the tide enveloped him with every wading step he took into the depths.
At shoulder height, he let the waters take his weight and lay back, floating for a moment on the gentle blue sway of the Dhaliaan ocean.
Here, in the swaying embrace of the waters, with the pendant all but calling to him, Kai’s veins were hollow and wanting.
Waters, his too-thick blood hummed within him. Call the waters.
Tentatively, he reached for them; cast out that secondary awareness, that call that had so long gone unanswered.
For a moment more, it was met with nothing but further silence.
And then, slowly and ever so slightly, the ache in his veins eased.
It was not anything close to what he remembered; the immediate rush of magic moving through him as naturally as his own breath.
His reverent call, and the Mother’s resounding response.
This was muted; a tentative question and a muffled reply.
But it was there all the same, and the relief that washed through him was a physical thing, a sigh felt through every nerve ending. There was a shift in the water on his skin; a current singing through it where it sank into his pores and roused something intrinsic.
And he knew, in the root of all that he was, that Adhlas had once more braided her Self to the fabric of his being.
Kai lifted a hand and saw his own palm splayed out against the clear summer sky; then, with his blood singing and his heart gliding like a ray on the waves, he slowly coaxed a thin rope of water up the length of his arm.
He felt the tug of it in his chest, the waters drawn from within him as much as from the oceans that buoyed his weight.
Kai watched that blessed magic, shimmering as it wove a path over his skin and caught sunlit sparks at his fingertips.
The salt that stung his eyes was indecipherable from the vast ocean around him.
“Koo!”
At the sound of Ceri’s voice, Kai rolled into the next wave, the Wielded waters still writhing over his skin, cool and distinguishable even in the split second he was submerged.
He found his footing on the sand and emerged, facing the shore—and his sister’s awestruck face.
Kai lifted his hand, the waters spinning faster over his forearm, catching the light as he waved.
Ceri broke into a grin and then a sprint.
He watched her tear through the shallows like an excitable pup, and the burst of laughter in his chest was warm beneath the chill of the pendant’s green glow.
Ceri arrived at his side breathless and splashing, and with no preamble, she spluttered, “It works?”
“It works,” he confirmed.
She grabbed his arm and examined the spinning circlet of water.
“And you’re not going to grow scales?”
“No,” said Kai. He turned his arm in Ceri’s grasp so she wouldn’t twist it clean off in her eager exam. “That’s the opposite of how this works. Daithí believes that wearing the pendant delayed the evolution for a number of their people.”
Of course, wearing the pendant had also driven the Sealgair mad and vengeful.
It offered a rather clean segue into the discussion he needed to broach with Ceri and with the merrow wading into the waters behind her.
But somehow, Kai could not bring himself to raise the topic—not yet.
Not with Ceri’s eyes lit up as they were, a vibrant sort of wonder that he hadn’t seen from her since she was a child.
A touch of longing too, one he recognised so keenly that it sent a pang of sorrow beneath his pendant.
He watched Ceri trace the line of the water around his wrist, and grinned at her gasp when he sent the glittering rope spilling over her own wrist. Ceri stepped back to raise her hand and admired the shimmer of the water as it snaked over her skin.
“Wow,” she breathed—then sent him a sideways smirk. “A little pathetic, though, Koo, I must say. You really are out of practise if all you can do is make pretty little bracelets.”
With a scoff, Kai spun his thoughts out to the lap of the waves behind Ceri’s back and pulled a sheet of water over her head like a blanket.
His sister’s squeal was drowned for a moment as she bobbed beneath the surface of the water, then emerged from the foamy crash with her hair plastered over her face and her eyes gleaming.
“You prick. Give me a go.”
He twisted away from her reaching hand, still chuckling.
“So you can retaliate? I think not.”
“Kai!”
Kai rolled his eyes but relented, as he was always going to.
He’d known from the moment Ceri grabbed his arm, that ache audible in her very breath, that he could not deny his sister a chance to call on the waters so long absent from their hearts and veins.
As Kai lifted the Adhlian pendant over his head, an odd sensation settled in his chest; at once hollow and warm as though the magic had both chilled his blood and given it vital substance.
He tried to ignore it as he handed the pendant to his sister and watched her draw it over her own head—and in the next moment, he was distracted from his disquiet when Ceriwyn, rather predictably, called on the Mother to dunk him beneath the waves.
Kai let Ceri experiment with the pendant for long enough that other Merrow began to gather tentatively around them.
They swam over in twos and threes to watch Ceri spin great arcs and spirals of water in the air like a shimmering display of fireworks against the sunlit sky.
She ended her impromptu performance atop a pedestal of foam, bowing before she dove gracefully into the waves to raucous applause.
Kai did not stop her as she handed the pendant to a teary-eyed merrow woman; he had taken this from them, after all. Who was he to deny any one of them a moment in the Mother’s lost embrace?
“Stop,” Ceri said firmly, gliding over to join him where he stood a little ways apart from the others.
Kai blinked at her. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re brooding.”
He scowled. “I am not brooding, and Mother help me, I’d appreciate it if my entire Court would stop accusing me of such.”
She ignored him. “We are where we are, Koo. There’s nothing you can do about the past, and you’ve done all you can for our future. You found us a home.”
A new kind of ache compressed Kai’s ribs, and he could not withhold the sigh that came with it.
“Kai?”
He couldn’t find his voice at first; just stared, for a long moment, at the distant splash and shimmer of the waters.
The laughter of his people rang in his ears as he forced his gaze away from their merriment and settled on Ceri, watching her face sink in time with his own heart as she took in his expression.
“What is it?”
“I have to tell you something, Ceri. All of you.”