Chapter Nineteen #4
But he had to. Of course, he had to. Adeline lifted Kai’s hand to her lips and brushed a soft kiss to the backs of his fingers.
“How do we set them free?”
“Adeline—” His voice was a low and urgent murmur in her ear, but she turned away with a gentle squeeze of his hand.
“A heart of pretty stone,” she said, speaking now to Ceri. “Is that the Pearl?”
Ceri’s gasp was so loud it sent a ripple through their little circle, each of them jerking back in minor shock.
“Oh, Adeline, you beautiful genius.”
She scrambled to her knees, leaning over so she could snatch the scrap page from Oswalt’s hands, the paper slicing through the air and, judging by his wince, through her cousin’s fingers too.
“Mother— Ceri, I’m bleeding.”
Ceri went on as if he hadn’t spoken, eyes moving in a blur as they pored over the inked verses.
“I thought it meant Avette, but the pearl—that has to be it. Mother’s tears already known, now hide a heart of pretty stone, and pretty hearts revive the drown’d clan.”
Her voice rose as she read until the last few words thinned out in a high, excited squeal that had them all wincing. She bounced on the spot, and Al’s slow roll of laughter tumbled beneath her own.
“That’s us! We’re the clan! We’re going home.”
“Ceri, that’s not—” Kai cut himself off at the abrupt fall of his sister’s face.
His eyes closed for a moment, and he inhaled through his nose.
“I’m sorry. I know. But we have a lot to process.
Let’s just—we’ll revisit it in the morning.
Let Eda get some sleep, and we’ll ask her more about it when she wakes.
Go enjoy the music. Drink some of Pike’s stolen wine. ”
Ceri sank back to her cross-legged seat and snatched up the discarded bottle, watching her brother pointedly over the heavy glass bottom as she drank. Kai raked a hand through his hair.
“Wonderful. Adeline, a word?”
He rose gracefully to his full height and tugged her so gently after him that it lent her a moment of relative grace, too. Hand in hand, they stepped into the shadow of the mast and pressed themselves into the tapered railing of the forecastle.
Kai didn’t speak at first, so Adeline gave him some time, turning to look out over the dark shimmer of the water as it rippled beneath the starlight.
The same breeze that stirred the surface gusted over her shoulders, and when she shivered, Kai was at her back at once, the warmth of his arms encircling her.
She clung to his forearms and tilted her head instinctively just as he turned his face to the curve of her neck.
“I don’t want you to feel as though you have to make your peace with this. With us exploring the possibility of a way home.”
Pain lanced through Adeline’s chest. A way home.
Goddess, what she’d give to find her own way home now, and she’d denied him that, let him give up on it because of how it might hurt the people she cared for.
But he was the person she cared for the most. She could admit that now, even if it was only to herself.
And the people Kai cared for—they needed a way home, now more than ever.
“I have made my peace with it,” she said.
“Eisalaan will thaw,” he said gently.
“And the world will keep turning.”
It wasn’t quite so simple, she knew that. There would be pain, difficulty. But she was the Heir of the Silver Fucking Kingdom, and she would see Eisalaan through the Thaw if it killed her. She was going to make it right. They were going to make it right.
Together.
She wanted that.
“Adeline,” Kai breathed, like her name in itself was the answer. He pressed a kiss to the side of her throat, then hesitated. “Would you like to know something awful?”
When she nodded, his warm hands splayed over her waist, and she let him turn her gently to face him. He pressed her into the crook of the railing, his arms a taut, protective bracket around her.
“I’d do it again,” said Kai. He took her face in one hand, palm warm beneath her jaw, and his eyes gleaming with utter reverence.
“I’d do it all over again. If it meant meeting you, loving you, I’d help her commit a blasphemous crime that doomed the world for centuries to come.
I would do that. I’d sentence myself to millennia beneath the ice for five minutes of you tormenting me over my manners. ”
He pored over her face. Not awaiting an answer, she understood, but looking, taking his fill of her. Committing every detail to memory, gaze stroking over the curve of her lip and the slope of her cheekbone.
And Adeline’s eyes stung.
She wanted to blink away the heat behind them, but she could not miss a moment of this; of the look on Kai’s beautiful face and the play of refracted water spilling starlight over his skin as he stared at her, so tenderly.
“Kai,” she heard herself say. Her throat hurt, her heart thundered, but the words were coming and—Daughters give her strength, she had no will to stop them. “Kai, I lov—”
This time, she knew, she would have told him.
Would have, had a roar of flame not ripped her voice away into the black night.