Chapter Thirty-Seven #2
Relief broke open in Nam’s face. “Sable.” Her voice softened around the name. “She’s alive.”
I nodded as tears pooled.
Nam closed her eyes for just a moment. When she opened them, tears streamed down her face. “I loved you like my own daughter from the very first day I gave birth to you. Though you may not recall, I’m honored that you had chosen me to bring you into this life.”
My legs locked and I sucked in a breath. The words I gave birth to you caught somewhere in my chest, and for a second, I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t recall choosing her in my previous life. Perhaps the god of the afterlife had given me that choice.
My throat tightened. “I love you, Nam. You have been so good to me. You are my strength. My home.” I swallowed. “My mother. My family.”
Nam smiled, peace and love crossing her features.
“Forget me,” she said. “Save your sisters.”
She was asking me to let her go. She was willing to sacrifice her life for the others. I would not sacrifice hers or any of my sisters’ lives if I could help it.
“Enough.” The queen’s voice cut between us like the blade in her hand. Her violet cold, assessing eyes set on me. “Kneel. And give me the pure stones.”
“I don’t have them.”
I had pressed them into Fraya’s hands before we left the Seelie queen’s castle, the last person the queen would suspect to carry them. The woman who had no divine blood, no name recognized, no reason to be watched.
The queen studied me, assessing if I told the truth. Then her expression shifted dangerously.
“Face your consequence, Yeri.”
At those words, I ran with a speed I didn’t know I carried, faster than any mortal. She drew the blade across Nam’s throat and stepped closer to the onyx boulders.
The sound that left me poured from grief and rage. As Nam’s knees buckled, I caught her, my hands pressing against her throat, her blood—red and warm—poured through my fingers no matter how hard I pressed.
Her eyes found mine as I brought her lower.
“Nam.” The word came out broken. “Stay with me. Please.”
She wheezed, struggling for air, but her words came clear. “You—a goddess.” A breath. “Jina—lost princess.” Another breath. “Release—barrier.” Her hand found mine, barely more than a whisper of touch. “Go home… Love… you.”
“Not without you,” I sobbed. “Not without you.”
Her lips moved once more without sound as she closed her eyes. Then her hand went slack in mine. No breath lifted her chest.
I had survived the cavern. The auction block. Russo’s ship. The arena. The land of the dead. I had watched people suffer and held myself together through all of it because falling apart was a privilege I couldn’t afford. I had never known sorrow like this. Not once in any life I could recall.
This was what it felt like to lose the person who raised me and held me up until I could bloom into the best of me.
The ear-piercing scream of grief and rage that tore out of me rippled through every inch of my body, burning through me, remaking me, releasing power that had no end. No longer waiting to be set free.
The onyx barrier behind the queen cracked down the center.
The queen staggered, hands flying to her ears. “No. Impossible.”
Though impossible, the three boulders trembled, then shattered at once as if hit by a cannon, collapsing to the ground in dark powder, the energy they had stolen dissolving into the air like smoke finding no place left to gather.
The barrier was simply gone.
“Soldiers, get them.” The queen pointed to my friends rushing forward.
Calroy hit the air, wings beating hard, crossing the distance to me.
The soldiers around her stumbled, hands pressed to their ears. Not from sound, but from pressure. My grief made physical. My power made real. The continuous wave of it rolling outward across the shore, and no one standing in its path could hold their footing.
“Hello, love.” Rowhan stepped in front of the queen. “Miss me?”
“How—” The queen staggered back, eyes wide, poised to run. “Impossible.”
“You say that word far too often.” Rowhan raised a hand, his eyes flaring gold and blinding.
The thick roots came from the tree line in a rush, coiling around her ankles, her waist, her arms, climbing until they covered every inch of her except her eyes and mouth. She fought them, twisting, her power surging and finding nothing to grip.
“I want to see your face when the earth takes you back,” Rowhan said.
“Wait.” Her voice cracked. “Rowhan. I didn’t kill you. Everything they told you was a lie.” Her desperate eyes found his. “I love you. I have always loved you. Please. Hear me out.”
Old pain moved across Rowhan’s face, then quickly buried.
“I’m done being manipulated by you. Enjoy your new life, alone.”
“Rowhan!” Her scream split the air as the ground opened beneath her, the earth parting like a mouth and swallowing her whole.
The roots followed her down. The ground sealed over her, like she had never been there at all.
Rowhan looked down at the unmarked surface. No satisfaction on his face. No relief. Just a long, quiet exhale of someone who had carried something for a very long time and had finally set it free. He pressed his foot once against the sealed ground, then walked away without looking back to Palto.
My body lifted from the ground of my own will, high enough that the soldiers on the sand and the sailors on the ships could see me. Heat bloomed behind my eyes, gold flooding the edges of my sight, the same as it had for Calroy, Palto, and Rowhan.
In front of me, the sea answered my call.
The water read my mind and rose in a towering wall, higher than the masts, higher than the cliffs at my back, curling at its crest like it was waiting for permission.
It held there, trembling, a held breath given shape.
Then it split—one half curving, shielding the shore and everyone still fighting on it, the other rising, arcing until it hung above the enemy fleet.
“I am Yeri.” My voice carried across the water, across the shore, across every ship. “Goddess of the sea. The Seelie queen is dead. The war ends now. Surrender and you will live freely. Deny me and face what stands behind you. Your choice.”
A long moment of silence.
Then the first sword hit the sand.
Then another.
Then dozens.
Soldiers dropped to their knees, heads bowed, one after the next rippling outward from the center like a tide going out. On the ships, cannons tilted down. Flags lowered.
I descended, and the body of water lowered with me, settling back into the sea without so much as a splash, as if it had never risen at all.
On the shore, the winged people, the Seaborn, and the human soldiers who had fought beside us found each other in the chaos—embracing, some laughing, some kneeling beside the fallen, hands pressed to wounds, voices calling names.
Some wept over people who wouldn’t answer.
Some simply held each other and didn’t let go.
Calroy’s arms closed around me the moment my feet touched the ground, pulling me against him, wings folding around us both.
“There’s my goddess.” His voice came rough against my hair. “I’m so proud of you.”
“We did it.” I held on for a moment, then pulled back. “We did it together.”
He kissed my lips, and we both turned to our friends.
Nam lay where I had left her. Jina knelt beside her, one hand pressed over her mouth, shoulders shaking. Minha crouched on her other side, jaw tight, her eyes pooling with tears.
Sohee and the others from the cavern gathered around Nam, weeping. We were the only family any of us had ever known, drawn together by grief this time.
I ran to them. And I was back in the cavern. My sisters around me, our arms around each other, holding on to each other in the dark the way we always had. Only this time Nam wasn’t there to tell us it would be all right. It was my turn.
I looked at their faces—Jina, Minha, Sohee, all of them—I would be their anchor as Nam had done for us.
We cried in each other’s arms until there was nothing left and then held on a little longer.
There was much to do. Kingdoms to rebuild. People to tend to. A world that needed to remember peace. But this… my sisters… for now, they came first.
They always had. They always would.