Chapter Twenty
Kai
For the hours and days to come, Kai would find himself haunted by those few precious seconds he’d lost to sheer shock.
In the moment, he thought of nothing but caging Adeline beneath him, his body a shield between her and the wall of heat clawing at his back.
It was Ceriwyn’s scream that roused him from that instinctual freeze.
He spun, tucking Adeline behind him and cringing back at the flare of light, ragged orange flames ripping through a soft night sky.
“Kai,” Ceri shrieked again, and he sought the sound amid a cacophony of screams, the deafening whip of flames in the breeze. Light spots burst behind his eyes as he dragged them away from the tower of fire that licked up the main mast.
“There,” Adeline gasped, hand flying out past him to point to where his sister stood at the top of the forecastle steps, clinging to the bannister and straining against Alun’s grip on her arm as he tried to drag her away.
“Ceri, you need to jump!” Alun was shouting, angrier than Kai had seen him in all their years of friendship, or perhaps just more frightened.
It was a visceral echo of Kai’s own dread, resounding in the hollow of his stomach as he took Adeline’s hand and rushed toward his court, herding them all to the ship’s edge where Oswalt was already guiding frantic passengers over the rope ladder.
All along the railing, Merrow clambered up and dove into the burning night, but the waters were deep and the distance far enough to break human bones.
“Ceri, Adeline, go with Alun. Now. Al, get them off the ship; get Adeline down the ladder.”
But Adeline held tight to his arm, her nails catching like the claws of some frightened animal. That same primal fear hollowed her eyes, the flicker of the fire dancing in their depths.
“Where are you going?” she choked; her voice was thick with soot, throat likely burning just as his was. A jolt sang painfully through him. He needed her off this ship; needed it so badly it gutted him, held his voice just out of reach.
“I have to try to put it out,” he managed. As though it were listening and understood, his pendant gave an icy pulse against his skin, and the glow of it briefly cast green light across Adeline’s pallid face.
Her claws tightened. “And if you can’t?”
“I have to find Eda, she was sleeping—”
“Eda,” Ceri breathed, the name a single dry sob.
Adeline’s grip on him faltered—tightened again, painful and panicked.
Panic was rising in his own throat too, faster than the smoke in the sky; Adeline and Ceri were still aboard, Os and Alun too; an ominous creaking laced the crackling sound of the fire above their heads, and Eda—a quick glance over the surging crowd found her nowhere in sight.
Kai snapped around again, took a step in, so swift it caught Adeline off guard, and he felt the catch in her chest at his rough, urgent kiss.
“I’ll find you,” he swore when he broke away. “I promise.”
She didn’t let him go, but he went all the same; he felt his shirt tug and tighten around his arm as he walked, and when it loosened with the break of her grasp, his stomach dropped like a rock.
But he’d promised to find her, and not the spiral of the flames nor even the Mother herself could keep him from his word.
Kai had to move fast against the panicked tide of partygoers surging for the ship’s edge.
Even bearing down nearly head and shoulders above the crowd, fear and adrenaline had thickened their muscle and grit until pushing back through the melee had his joints screaming.
Heat blurred his vision, and smoke hung like shadows over the deck wherever it wasn’t already burning.
Kai braced himself against the throng, scrabbled for his pendant, the icy coolness of it a welcome shock to his half-melted nerves as he called for the waters.
He could feel them—There, rolling just behind his reach, simmering away in the heat at his fingertips.
Above his head, the mast gave an ominous groan.
Kai’s heart leapt into his burning lungs.
He gripped the pendant hard, staring wildly at the flaming stars, reaching once more for the waters. A wave, a spray, a sprinkle, anything.
Nothing.
Somehow, in all the months he’d been without his power, the lack of it had not felt like this, had not dragged this weight into his stomach and turned his thoughts to crisp ash.
The despair, the panic. The Mother answering his call from too far away, flames forging a burning wall between Kai and salvation.
Helpless; he was helpless to act, helpless to save his people, just as he’d been trying to for months now—
And if you can’t? Adeline had said, her fear thicker than the heat in the air.
Move, he told himself, needing to parse the thoughts in his own head before the fire or the panic claimed them. Get Eda, get to Adeline. Get Eda, get to Adeline.
“Eda,” he tried to call, but the moment he spoke, searing, gritty heat flooded his mouth, and he choked on his own voice.
It took everything in him not to crumple as he stumbled past the last of the stragglers. Fire licked the sky, and its heat pressed between his gills like a soldering iron, gagging him.
“Eda,” he tried again, careful not to inhale this time.
“Your Majesty?”
Kai whipped around, heart lurching at the familiar voice.
A cluster of men scrabbled like rats out of the stairwell, scatterings of playing cards fluttering to the ground in their wake.
Simon stood frozen at the top of the stairs, his own cards still tight in his fist and his face blank with sheer shock and the orange glow that slowly devoured the Arabidae.
“Simon,” Kai yelled across the deck. “Simon, get in the water—”
“I can’t swim.”
The words were so flat, the shimmer in the air so disorienting, that for a moment, Kai was not sure he understood. When he did, his limbs surged with dread that quickly gave way to strength, adrenaline feeding him for a split second.
“I’ll help you,” he called back. “You’re going to be alright, Simon.”
Relief chased the boy’s blank look and left something new in its wake, a look he’d seen from Simon only once before. Bravery, Kai realised. He was trying to be brave. Kai strode for him with renewed determination, edging around a flaming barrel.
“Wait here,” he shouted as he weaved closer. “I need to run below deck for Eda and then we can—”
A low screech dragged over his words, and Kai watched Simon’s eyes flick to the sky, glowing in the split second before he howled, “Duck!”
Kai fell back at the staggering thunder of the warning, but not before a blinding light swooped into his vision, a blunt and burning force cuffing his shoulder.
He dropped with a yell, but only when the pain didn’t ease, and the flare in his vision didn’t clear, did Kai realise his skin was screaming, nerves bubbling. He was on fire.
“Your Majesty,” Simon cried, immediately spluttering through a gulp of soot-smeared air.
Kai rolled onto his arm, smothering the flame beneath him even as fresh pain seared his side.
He caught sight of Simon through the shimmering air, above the wall of flame that had parted them; the Arabidae’s green-and-gold flag, now black and blinding orange on the deck.
Simon clung to the bannister, a stricken expression tilting his brows.
Kai struggled upright, a hand on his own knee; then faltered at the stretch of the skin on his arm, gritting out a yell through his teeth as his raw shoulder smacked the ground.
“I’ll get her,” Simon blurted, over-loud even with the roar and groan and crackle of the crumbling ship.
Kai’s head snapped up at another mournful groan from the mast; what was left of it.
He rolled again, biting down hard on his own pain and trembling as he got one knee beneath him, struggled halfway up.
But Simon was already a shadow in the stairwell, the gleam of his eyes catching the unforgiving light as he gave the mast a final wary glance.
“No,” Kai yelled. He skirted the crackling flag, arm raised like a visor against the scorch of it, eyes melting in his skull.
“I’ll find her, wait for us,” Simon yelled back, voice wavering like the heat on the air.
“Simon, stop!” Kai roared.
The boy was gone, not even his footsteps audible beneath the hiss and snap of the fire, and Kai did not wait for him to turn back.
He darted around seeking a patch of untouched deck, a way forward, but the fire was everywhere.
A growl slipped from him in awful harmony to the dying bellow of the mast, but it renewed something in him, made it easy to grit his teeth and brace himself, shove aside the crawling pain in his shoulder as he faced the flames and—
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
A thick arm seized him around the middle, and Kai was momentarily stunned, too caught off guard to fight back as he was dragged away from the flame. Rage soared in his belly, and he wrenched the arm back, spinning to shove its owner away.
“They’re down there, they’re still down there—”
Pike did not waste time arguing, but immediately seized two handfuls of his shirt and tried, again, to haul Kai back toward the ship’s edge.
He grappled for Pike’s arm, but the remnants of his sleeve went taut under the sailor’s grasp, and Kai stumbled under the sudden burst of pain, swallowing a scream and a lungful of hot air.
“Whoever’s down there is not coming up again,” Pike grunted, words barely audible beneath his struggle with Kai’s weight. “We’ll be lucky if we get off this ship.”
“Get off,” he roared, but Pike only hooked an arm around his middle and pulled.
And without his bidding, Kai felt his body react to the sloughing of his blistered flesh. React, too, to the tightening of his swollen lungs with every passing moment that he didn’t find Simon and Eda. Kai did not decide to hit him; it just happened.
The impulse snapped through his spine, exploded through his unharmed shoulder, his whole arm cocking back, full weight thrown into the blow that sent his knuckles ploughing into Pike’s face. The sailor stumbled, dropped, and the whole deck shuddered. The mast gave one last crackling wail—
—and collapsed in a graceful sweep of raging, orange light.
Kai had no knowledge of having fallen, and yet here he was on the deck, blinking up at the dulled stars through a soot-peppered smog. Angry light pulsed in his periphery. The distant roar in his ears might have been the fiery tides of the Underking himself.
This time, when Pike’s thick-fingered hands hauled him upright, he did not fight. He let the sailor drag him away. But not without one last glance at the burning mast, where it now lay, thick with impenetrable, ravenous flame—
Smothering the mouth of the lower stairway.