Chapter Nineteen #2
She was breathing too deeply, one withered hand coming up to rest over her heart, her other hand searching blindly for Kai. He sidestepped closer at once, shifting the sleeping baby into the crook of his arm so he could gather Eda to his side.
“What is it?” he whispered, brow tense and voice urgent. “What’s wrong?”
“Behold the Silver Winds that blow,” Eda whispered back.
Her eyes turned glassy, fixed on nothing at all, and her voice took on a ghostly quality that made hairs rise at the nape of Adeline’s neck.
The merry noise of the children faded into a low roar, a nameless sort of tension knitting up her spine.
And then Eda blinked those haunting eyes and slowly turned her head to face her king.
“Kai,” she said. “That chant. It’s my prophecy.”
???
“Behold. Behold.”
“Colm, no, I can’t let you strangle your sister. Because your mother would strangle me.”
“What in the hell is happening?”
At the trill of Ceri’s voice, Adeline’s head whipped around to find her peering over the edge of the ship.
“Oh, thank fu—” she choked off when a small blur caught the corner of her vision, and found a wide-eyed Merrow child staring up at her from somewhere around her knees. “... Fun. Ceriwyn’s here!”
The child tilted her head.
“Distorted gift of silver daughter,” Eda murmured from Adeline’s other side.
“What is happening?” Ceri asked again, scrambling to swing her legs over the railing.
It was a fair question.
Beneath the rosy wash of the sunset sky, the Arabidae was lit with gold, bobbing in the languid tide—and heaving with utter chaos.
Amid Eda’s descent into a twitching, muttering stupor, a second dinghy had appeared, a third and a fourth in quick succession, each bearing another load of Merrow, sailors, and familiar faces from around the palace.
This latest wave of passengers were giddy and loud, and despite his best efforts, Kai hadn’t been able to get an explanation from anyone until his valet, Simon, heaved himself over the side of the ship and crumpled to the deck.
Here for the party, he’d said brightly as Kai helped him up, though when pressed, he couldn’t say who or what the party was for. Celebrating the Merrow’s new home, I think? And the crew’s secret wine stock.
Said wine stock was now being hauled out by the crate under Pike’s loud and grating instruction while Kai fought to herd the children, who seemed determined to be crushed underfoot by the Arabidae’s crew.
They were growing restless and cranky, the younger ones wailing, set on edge by the descent of all these excitable adults.
Much like the children, Captain Aegus was slightly less than delighted at the unexpected company; he was currently stomping around, scoffing to himself and yelling at anyone who would listen about a lantern some idiot had set down on the wooden deck.
Meanwhile, slumped in the arch of Adeline’s arm, Eda had more or less stepped out of reality, drawing instead on her every reserve to quietly mutter snatches of cryptic verse.
“I wish I had an answer that made sense,” Adeline said to Ceri’s expectant silence.
Ceriwyn hurried over to slip a hand around Eda’s back, and Adeline breathed a grateful sigh at the shift in her dead weight.
“Years and ice and sorrow,” Eda mumbled helpfully.
“What happened to her?”
“She said something about a prophecy, and then the boats—”
“Ceri,” Kai called, so loud in his relief that even Eda startled. “Thank the Mother—I need a hand. Several. Two will do.”
With some shifting and untangling, and not a small amount of grumbling on Ceri’s part, Kai drew Eda away from their embrace and half-carried her below deck.
Between the two of them, Adeline and Ceri made short work of guiding the children into their dinghy, then Ceri set sail across the short distance to the neighbouring ship.
The sun was bathing in the waters by the time Kai emerged, and had he not been squinting into the twilight after the dim of the lower deck, he might not have walked directly into the awaiting huddle. Adeline, Ceri, Oswalt and Al all stood staring back at him.
“Adhlas, what the—why are you all crowding around my ankles like half-starved cats?”
“What an interesting analogy,” said Adeline. “Do they have many cats on the Laune bed? Or did you mean catfish?”
Kai made a subtle attempt to step around Os, but his eyes flicked sideways at her musing, the tight line of his lips briefly flickering. “I’m familiar with cats, Adeline”
“I love cats,” said Ceri, moving into his path. “Evil little sweethearts. You know, when I was staying with the Marchioness, her cat, Mister Flurry, used to do the sweetest thing where he’d claw—”
“What do you want?”
Alun leaned past Ceri to press an open bottle of wine into Kai’s hands.
The king considered it for a long moment.
He let his gaze drag wearily over each of their faces; then muttered a curse and took a deep glug directly from the bottle, the column of his throat shifting once, twice, thrice.
When he came up for air, Adeline gently took the bottle from him, and he caught at her hand to keep her close.
“You want to know about the prophecy,” he said to them all.
“They want to know about the prophecy,” said Os, flat if not outright bored. “I want them to stop spiralling.”
Ceri barely gave her cousin’s comment time to land. “Is it true that Eda warned you about it weeks ago?”
“How on Adhlas do you know about that?”
Alun shifted guiltily, and Kai pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand, the other twitching in Adeline’s grasp. She squeezed back, and he returned the pressure through a deep, steadying breath.
“If we’re going to do this, we’ll need more wine.”
An easy request to fulfil, as it turned out; Pike had apparently been hoarding discarded shipments for the better part of a year, and his crewmates were only too happy to relieve their stores of some weight.
The floral musk of Dhaliaan wine hung heavy in the air, and the chatter had thickened right along with it.
Somewhere in the throng of the main deck, a clutch of sailors led the crowd through a rowdy sea shanty made up of indecipherable growls and grunts and a whole lot of rhythmic stomping.
It was a pretty scene, the cloudless, velvet sky awash with sparkling starlight, lanterns flickering throughout the deck like fireflies, and all that gold and silver light rolling fluidly over the dancing bodies that weaved and twirled in time with the sailors’ footfall.
Adeline watched them as though from behind a frost-laced window; she could see the light, hear the muffled merriment, but it was all beyond their reach.
She sat cross-legged on the forecastle with Kai and his Merrow Court, and with a glance around their small circle, she was reminded irresistibly of a night in the forests of the Queen’s Village.
The Mid-Winter Faire. They’d been gathered just like this, with Ceri at Adeline’s side, and Kai holding her eye from across the way where he sat drinking with Al and Os.
He’d been laughing that night. She’d never seen him laugh like that before, with his whole body, his brow and shoulders loose.
Now, they were knotted and tense. Now, there was no laughter, and the night of the Faire seemed an age away; the bittersweet memory of a shared innocence.
There was drinking, though.
Kai swiped the sheen of wine from his bottom lip with a thumb and took a long moment to gather his breath and his thoughts.
He looked up, and at once Adeline wished she’d squeezed herself between Kai and Os so she could hold his hand; he needed that, she could tell.
He passed the bottle to Alun, and his hands curled around thin air.
“Many stories begin once upon a time,” he said slowly—and a prickle of recognition rolled down Adeline’s spine. “This story begins at the beginning.”
“Is this really the time for a bedtime story, Koo?”
“This story,” he said firmly, glancing at Ceri from beneath flat brows, “begins at the beginning.”
Ceri fell silent, and Kai went on, sighing through his nose.
“In the beginning, there was only Adhlas, and her unending sorrow. She was lonely in a way that we mortals could never comprehend, but she had a world of love within her. She wanted, more than anything, to fill that empty space. And so she turned within herself. From her bones, she created land, and from her flesh, her children. She wept and bled to bring us into existence, all so she could share that endless love. Her blood and tears became the waters that bind and sustain all life, and the rhythmic flow of it came imbued with power, all from the very centre of her being. Her heart, as flawless and exquisite as—”
“A pearl,” Adeline breathed.
Kai paused, and the other Merrow turned to stare at her.
“You know it?” said Ceri.
“It’s an old fairytale, I used to read it to my sister. The Pearl of All the World?”
Kai dragged a hand down his face, then held the same hand out in a wordless request, not even glancing around to see who handed him back the bottle.
“I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me.” He took a deep, fortifying swig. “The Pearl is Merrow lore; our creation myth, as told by our Elders. You know how it ends?”
Kai leaned across the small circle to offer her the bottle; his thumb brushed deliberately over hers as she took it, a brief moment of connection that audibly loosened his breath.
Adeline’s heart contracted. She wanted to climb into his lap and hug him until she’d wrung the tension from the full width of his shoulders.
But she only took the wine and nodded.
“Adhlas had to harden her heart after her children turned against her,” she said, eyes flicking to the jewel-bright sky as she shifted through her own memory. “We ravaged her world with our wars and made her cry enough to fill the lakes and oceans. She hid her heart away beneath a storm of tears.”
“And if it was ever found?”