16. Adelina
Adelina
Every hour I lie in this bed feels like I am handing my brother more time to find me. But my body needs rest.
Nara gives me potions that taste like bitter roots, salt, and smoke, then follows them with tea steeped so dark it stains the cup. She unwraps my foot, presses careful fingers over the swelling, and tells me I’m lucky I wasn’t injured worse.
Lucky.
The word almost makes me laugh.
By the second day, the swelling starts to retreat.
The bruising fades from dark purple to a sickly green before vanishing beneath another paste that smells of crushed leaves and warm stone.
My back mends faster once Nara stops treating only the surface pain and starts drawing the old whip-magic out with poultices heated over a silver bowl.
That pain fights her. I feel it when she lays the cloth against my skin, a crawling, burning resistance beneath the silver stripes that never broke open but somehow still feel carved into me.
Nara mutters curses under her breath the whole time. “Stubborn bastard magic,” she says the second time the poultice turns black along the edges.
I look at her over my shoulder. “Is it supposed to do that?”
“No.” She peels it away with more irritation than fear. “Which means whoever crafted the weapon wanted the pain to linger past reason.”
My mouth goes dry. She says weapon, not punishment. She says it like she knows exactly what kind of cruelty has been dressed up as discipline.
By the third day, the potions begin to work in earnest. I can feel the difference.
The pain stops living beneath my skin like something with claws.
My muscles loosen by degrees, my breathing deepens, and the weakness that had sunk into my bones after the moonlight begins to fade.
Nara’s brother, Corren, watches me cross the room twice without limping and grunts.
“You’ll do,” he says.
Nara rolls her eyes. “High praise, coming from him.”
Corren is a broad man with weather-bent shoulders, a scar along his jaw, and the conversational warmth of a locked door.
He has spent most of the last three days coming and going through paths I can’t see, carrying news from the coast, messages from the network, and once, a sack of apples he insists were not stolen even though Nara calls him a liar to his face.
Her cousins are quieter. Lysa is slender, sharp-eyed, and fast with a knife.
Tav moves like someone who knows every creaking board in the cottage and has no desire to make any of them speak.
They come and go with reports, supplies, and warnings, each one carrying pieces of a world I’ve never been allowed to know.
The network is bigger than I imagined. I begin to understand there are people in Dravaryn who have been waiting years for something to fracture.
It’s made of servants who hear too much, fishermen who know forgotten coves, old royalists who loved my parents, temple-trained healers, village women who can hide a person beneath bread sacks and lie to soldiers without blinking.
Freya’s people. My mother’s people, maybe. People who know my name and lower their voices when they say it.
That frightens me in a different way. I have spent my whole life being used as a symbol by people who wanted to own me. I don’t know what to do with people who might believe in me.
On the evening of the third day, Nara finds me standing by the warped round window, looking toward the thin strip of silver-blue sea visible between two hills. The light is fading, and the water catches what remains of it, turning bright enough to hurt.
“You’re steady,” she says.
I glance down at my bare foot, then shift my weight onto it carefully. No pain. Not even a lingering ache. “The potions worked.”
“They should. They cost more than Corren’s good sense.”
From the other room, Corren calls, “I heard that.”
“You were meant to.”
I almost smile. It still feels strange, the way humor exists here even with danger pressing against the shutters. They argue. They swear. They talk over each other. I don’t know how to be among people who aren’t measuring my every breath.
Nara comes to stand beside me. “We have a route.”
My heart stops. Then starts again too quickly. “To the temple?”
“To Maralis.” Her mouth tightens slightly. “The temple will take longer.”
I turn fully toward her. “How much longer?”
“You’ll cross the Celestial Sea tonight. Not from a port, and not on any official ferry. Oren found a cargo vessel willing to pass close enough to the western shore to put you off near the northern coves.”
“Oren found it?”
“He bullied it into usefulness.”
That sounds believable.
“And after that?”
“After that, you’ll travel by land.” Nara gestures toward the map spread over the table.
“The direct routes from the coves to the Sea Temple are crawling with people looking for you. Dravaryn men. Hired trackers. Elyrion watchers. Maralis officials pretending they’re simply keeping order.
So you’ll go inland first, then south through the salt marsh paths and old pilgrim roads. Slower, but safer.”
My stomach tightens. “How long?”
“If all goes well, two days.”
If all goes well. Nothing has gone well since my brother told me the crown prince was coming to dinner.
“And if it doesn’t?”
Nara studies me, then gives me the courtesy of honesty. “Then you keep moving until it does.”
I look back toward the sea. I’m so close. Close enough that the sound of it has slipped into every room of this cottage. Close enough that I wake with salt on my tongue and dream of water pulling me away from every hand that has ever tried to hold me down.
“What if I get to the temple and it isn’t enough?”
“Then you’ll be on sacred ground, beyond any crown’s reach, and we’ll figure out what comes next.”
“You sound certain.”
“I’m not certain of much. But your foot is healed, your fever is gone, your back has mended, and you can stand without looking like one wrong breath will knock you flat.” Her gaze moves over my face. “The rest is fear.”
Fear is not small. She says it like fear is something that can travel with me without taking the lead.
A shout rises from the front room.
“Tell her now,” a man growls. “Before I change my damn mind and let the soldiers have the boat.”
Nara closes her eyes. “And that is Oren.”
“He sounds charming.”
“He is a plague in boots.”
Oren proves her right within minutes. He is older than I expected, somewhere between Corren and Freya’s age, with sun-dark skin, a gray beard braided at the chin, and one eye gone cloudy beneath a scar that cuts through his brow.
He smells like sea wind, pipe smoke, and fish.
His coat is salt-stained, his boots are muddy, and his expression suggests the entire realm has been arranged specifically to irritate him.
He looks me up and down once. “So this is the princess.”
Nara sighs. “Try manners.”
“I did. Didn’t like them.” Oren points at me. “Can you stay quiet?”
“Yes.”
“Can you follow orders?”
I almost laugh, but the sound lodges somewhere behind my ribs. “I’ve had practice.”
His expression shifts, only slightly. Less annoyance. More awareness. “Not those kind of orders, girl.” He jerks his thumb toward the door. “Mine keep you breathing.”
I swallow. “Then yes.”
“Good. You’ll be stowed under illusion in the aft cargo hold.
Don’t move, don’t cough, don’t pray out loud, don’t sneeze, don’t panic and kick the boards if someone walks over you.
If soldiers search, you stay still. If they stab through crates, you stay still.
If they start dragging cargo aside, you still stay damn still until I tell you otherwise. ”
My mouth goes dry. “Will they search?”
Oren gives me a look.
Nara says, “Oren.”
“What? She asked.” Oren shrugs.
“Answer without sounding like a funeral bell.”
He scowls. “Fine. Yes, they might search. The ports are choked with men who think swords make them clever. The official crossings are being watched so hard even the gulls are flying around them. This route avoids the worst of it, but the king’s men have started stopping boats at random.
If they intercept us, we make them believe we’re carrying salt fish, lamp oil, and three barrels of spoiled onions. ”
“Spoiled onions?” I frown, thinking I must have heard him wrong.
“No one lingers over spoiled onions.”
Despite everything, I feel the corner of my mouth twitch.
Oren points at me again. “Do not laugh at my onions. They have saved better people than you.”
“I wasn’t laughing.”
“You were close.”
Nara touches my arm, drawing my attention back before fear can take the shape of Oren’s warnings and become too large to manage. “You’ll be hidden by illusion magic. Lysa is good at it.”
From the back of the room, Lysa smiles thinly. “Better than good.”
“Better than modest too,” Corren mutters.
She ignores him. “The compartment is real. The illusion will make the space above you look like solid planking and cargo shadow. But illusion can be disturbed by touch, blood magic, or someone who knows exactly what to look for. So Oren is right. You stay still.”
My fingers curl around the edge of my sleeve.
A secret compartment. Darkness. Boards above me. Soldiers searching overhead.
The room narrows, and I’m back under the floor of my chamber, climbing down into the passage while Freya shuts me inside. I smell damp stone. I feel the trapdoor closing. I hear my own breath too loud in the dark.
Nara sees it happen.
She steps between me and the others, narrowing the room to something I can manage. “Princess,” she says, quietly enough that only I hear the lack of title. “You can do this.”
My throat tightens. “I know.”
“No, you know you must. That is different.” Her hand hovers near mine, waiting. When I nod, she takes it. “You can do this. You already did the impossible part.”
I look at her.
She smiles faintly. “You left.”
They dress me in clothes that belong to no court and no memory.
Dark trousers. A tunic the color of wet sand.
A sea-cloak stiff with salt and old weather.
My hair is braided tightly, tucked beneath a scarf, then hidden under a hood that smells faintly of cedar and smoke.
Nara checks my necklace last, her fingers pausing above it without touching.
“Keep this covered.”
“I will.”
“No matter what happens.”
Freya’s words come back so sharply I almost answer in her voice.
No matter what happens.
?
Night falls thick and moonless, which Oren declares the only decent thing the sky has done all week.
We leave through a root cellar door beneath the cottage, follow a tunnel that smells of earth and old potatoes, then emerge into a narrow cut between hills where Tav waits with two horses and a cart stacked with covered crates.
I ride beneath coarse canvas for most of the way, curled between sacks that smell like grain and dried herbs.
Every jolt threatens to knock my teeth together.
Every distant voice makes my pulse leap.
Twice, the cart stops, and I hear low conversations I cannot understand through the boards.
Each time, Nara squeezes my ankle once through the canvas, a silent reminder not to move.
The sea grows louder, a distant roar becoming breath, then thunder, then a living thing beyond the dark.
By the time the cart stops for the last time, salt coats my lips.
Oren’s voice cuts through the night. “Move. Fast now.”
The canvas lifts. Cold sea air hits my face, wet and wild and so open it nearly steals what little courage I have left.
We are not at a port. There are no lantern-lined docks, no orderly ferry lines, no harbor bells.
Only a hidden cove carved between black rocks, water surging white against stone, and a large cargo boat rocking against a narrow wooden landing that looks like it has no business surviving the tide.
Something pale slips beneath the surface beyond the rocks, too smooth to be foam and too quick to be driftwood. For a breath, I think I see a face turned up through the black water, beautiful and wrong, before the tide folds over it.
Oren catches my stare. His expression hardens. “Eyes off the water,” he says.
“What was that?” I ask breathlessly.
“Nothing that needs your attention.”
He reaches into his coat, tosses a pinch of salt over the side of the landing, and mutters something too low for me to catch. No one laughs. No one asks him to repeat it.
The vessel is bigger than I expected, broad and heavy-bellied, built to haul cargo through ugly water, with none of the polished rails or snapping banners of a royal painting.
Its sides are dark, its deck cluttered, and its mast low and practical. A few shadowed figures move aboard without speaking.
Oren catches my expression. “She floats.”
“That was not my concern,” I reply.
“It should be. Floating matters.”
Nara pulls me into a quick embrace before I can prepare for it. I go stiff first, then fold into her because I don’t know when I will next be touched without force or claim.
“Stay alive,” she whispers.
“I’ll try.”
“No. You stay alive. Trying is what people say when they’re leaving room to fail.”
A laugh breaks out of me, small and wet. “You sound like Freya.”
“Good. She has sense.”
My throat tightens again. “If you hear anything about her...”
“I’ll send word if I can.”
If. Everything is if.
Oren mutters, “Now would be a lovely time to stop weeping in my cove.”
Nara releases me but keeps my hands a heartbeat longer. “The moon remembers.”
“What the crown forgot,” I whisper. Then I follow Oren onto the boat.
The deck shifts beneath my feet, and I nearly stumble on a coil of rope.
The sea is loud here, the wind colder than it was near the cottage, but my body holds.
I’m healed. My foot does not collapse beneath me.
My back does not flare with every breath.
I’m still tired, still afraid, still hollowed out by everything that brought me here, but my body is no longer breaking.
That feels like a miracle. A dangerous one.
Because now I have no excuse to stop.
Oren leads me below deck through a narrow hatch and into a cargo hold that smells exactly as promised: salt fish, oil, damp wood, and onions so foul my eyes water.
“Stars!” I choke, pinching my nose.
Oren looks pleased. “Good, isn’t it?”
“It is not.”
“Exactly.”
Lysa is waiting below with a hooded lantern and a mouth pressed tight against laughter. “Compartment is ready.”
The secret space lies beneath a false run of planks near the rear of the hold, wedged between barrels and crates. Oren lifts the boards, and darkness opens beneath them, shallow and narrow enough that my stomach turns.
I stare at it. The space is not a tunnel. It’s not a room.
It’s a box.