Chapter 4
Kael
Earth to Casteltide
I am not lying when I say the sea does not answer me the way it once did.
When I slip back into the salt-scented night—through glass and plastic and the pale fluorescence of someone else’s ocean—the Tidal Lands feel like an open wound I can’t staunch.
My runes flare along my throat like fresh bruises.
Every breath tastes of iron and old storms.
The lines of power that used to hum under my feet stutter, skipping like a broken harp string.
Castletide looms ahead as I step from the portal of the glowing pool just beyond the gate.
Thoughts flitter through my brain unbidden.
The court’s pearls seemed dull lately. One by one they fade.
Like magic is slipping away from us.
The tide-gates that answered my thoughts in my youth seem to stick more easily.
Like rotted wood.
My people whisper about kelp rot, black blooms, fishermen returning with nets full of foam and nothing living.
Lord Alaric’s plan to trick the Fates and bring our power back to where it belongs seems rash and foolhardy at first—but look at him now.
I have followed the pull because I have no other option.
Crowns crumble when their magic runs dry.
A Sea Lord who can’t raise a tide can’t hold this place.
When the sea’s song falters, enemies smell weakness like gulls smell blood.
I smell it now.
I could have come with war—ships and banners and the kind of force that burns coasts clean—but war buries what it claims.
I need restoration, not conquest.
The old writs speak of a Sea Lord and his true viyella—a shore-born woman carved of salt and sun who can become a conduit, a living tide-line.
The prophecy isn’t poetry.
It is arithmetic.
A zareth bond plus human soul equals the difference between success and ruin. And possibly—a crown.
I searched for days, but then I found her.
Not in some temple or wild place of power—no.
In a cement tank beneath fluorescent lights.
The human is beautiful, but looks don’t matter. Not in this.
Not when the Tidal Lands will be next to fall under the shadow of the SoulTakers.
Still, she is soft and curved in all the right places with long sandy hair pulled back from a sweet face that glows when she laughs.
It’s that sound that struck me first. The way her laughter cut through the static of Earth’s ugly noises and landed like the only honest thing left in the world.
All the what ifs won’t change the fact I did take her.
I brought her back here, to Castletide.
And now, she is mine.
The runes decided it for me. The symbols etched into me at the beginning of my existence burn hot against my skin when I move closer and take her in my arms.
Now, with her lips sealed to mine, drinking oxygen through a kiss, I am hit with a desire so strong it nearly collapses me.
Yes, it’s a trick. An unnecessary one, for I could feed her breath beneath the water with a touch of my hand—but the truth?
I want this.
I want her taste, her startled heat, the way her body clings to mine as the sea rises to take us from her world to mine.
She tastes of citrus.
Bright and shiny.
Like promises made on a summer’s dawn.
The whirlpool swallows us whole.
We tumble through waves and magic, the sea between worlds obeying my command, carrying us away like a favor owed.
When we breach into Nightfall, Castletide greets us with silence.
For a moment I regret taking her to this ruin of my once thriving keep.
The palace reeks of absence.
My people can feel this change as I can.
They know the SoulTakers are pressing closer, and I can’t help but feel as if I’m failing.
As if they’re simply waiting for my throne to fail.
I won’t let that happen. As much as I never wanted this duty, it is nonetheless mine.
I can’t let the Tidal Lands fall.
I step forward with my precious burden in my arms—with the one person who just might save us all.
Guilt washes over me and I allow it for one second—but that is all.
Whatever the Fates had in store for Phoebe Sewell, it no longer matters. Because she is here now, and I will not go back on my vow.
I will claim this tiny slip of a human.
And I will save my people with the bond we forge.
“Lord Kael.”
My inner thoughts are interrupted by my steward’s voice.
It’s thin, brittle as a gull’s bone. He comes near but refuses to meet my gaze.
“There are—there has been,” he hesitates.
“Tell me.”
My voice fills the hall like a storm front. Runes blaze under my skin, thrumming with the need to break or burn.
But I do not stop my movements. I keep on walking, ignoring the question I can feel coming from him.
“The north sluice failed at dawn. The eastern reefs bloom black, like oil. More nets have come up with dead silverfish. The people of the low stones taste ash in their breath. The mer-wardens say the currents run backward. And—” His mouth shuts.
The words die in his throat.
“Tell me, Aloysious, what do they say?”
“That the world is forgetting how to listen and that our Lord, please forgive me, master, they say our Lord has forgotten us,” he forges on.
Pain slices at me, the truth tastes like grit.
“That is what the SoulTakers want. Forgetting is the first kind of death. Leave us now,” I reply grimly.
Aloysious bows low and backs away, closing the door of my throne room as he exits.
I know what he wants.
He wants counsel.
Well, I want salvation.
But salvation lies in the prophecy.
In the viyella.
A boon to any Lord who finds her, a mortal soul bound in zareth to balance his own.
It isn’t romance, not psalm or song.
It is the line between power and ruin.
I lower her onto a cushioned settee.
Saltwater runs off her wetsuit, dripping onto the cracked marble floor. The tight clothing is clinging to her lush curves, but it can’t be comfortable.
She’s pale. I frown. She’s not breathing.
I turn her on her side, and more water drips in rivulets, tracking across her soft skin to the marble beneath the settee.
She coughs, shivers, lashes beaded with seawater, lips parted as if to protest—and the tide rises in me, not with command, but with reverence.
“Phoebe.” I test her name, relishing the feel of each consonant and vowel on my tongue.
She is my viyella—she has to be.
I must admit that deep inside me something recognizes this human woman as something special—as something mine.
My runes burn, glowing in answer to my unspoken question—not just with power but with a hunger I have never allowed myself to feel before.
It thrums through my veins like an undertow—ancient, patient, hungry—and when I look at her, it translates into something else entirely.
But hope is dangerous. This soft human is a means to an end, not a tether I can bind myself to lightly.
Stop being a fool, Kael. Do your duty.
But it’s not as easy as you’d think.
She is foreign to me. Alien. Something stranger, something that draws deeper than any calculus of crown and coast.
Alaric was right in his idea. It is sound.
Trick the Fates. Get the boon.
But Jules is no fluke, no lucky pull of fate wrapped in pretty deception—she is his truth.
Watching them taught me a dangerous thing.
That a zareth can remake a man without undoing him. And now, with this woman folded at the edge of my hall, I begin to suspect Alaric wasn’t simply fortunate.
Perhaps he was proving a different lesson all along.
Perhaps the truth the old prophecies hide is more blunt and merciless.
The women the Fates choose are not only conduits of power.
They are ends—the prize Fate set out when it wanted us to learn humility.
I do not say this aloud.
I do not let it soften the steel I need for the work to come.
But the thought circles my mind while I stand, hands heavy with the certainty of what I have done, the risk, and the woman I have taken.
I weave a small, intimate spell—something gentle, almost embarrassed in its tenderness.
It lifts the salt and brine from her skin like a hand brushing hair from a child’s forehead.
The wetsuit dissolves into steam and reknits into cloth that will not chill her.
The seam of the keep hums.
The magic smells of crushed shells and warm hearthstone.
She stirs beneath my fingers, her lashes fluttering like caught gulls.
She is still unconscious, but her breathing evens out now that shivers no longer rack her limbs.
I call my magic again, drawing a corridor of currents that thread through the keep and carry us to my bedchamber as if the house itself wishes to shelter her.
The servants avert their eyes.
Even the shadows seem to lean away, giving space to what I have done.
I look at her and, fuck, my body tenses.
She is undeniably beautiful.
Closer, the details of her unwind like a map.
Skin pale as pearls with a scatter of freckles at the bridge of her nose, lips soft and full, lashes long enough to cast tiny storms across her cheeks.
When I lay her on the sheets—silk gleaming with a faint ocean sheen—my hands tremble as I brush them over the softness of her shoulder.
My runes burn in sympathy, a constellation of need and caution.
I will not let myself become the thing the histories warn of.
I will not let want collapse my reason into ruin.
Desire is but a current.
Destiny is a channel you must carve with care.
I tell myself this like a prayer and like an order.
First, I must woo her.
Not with coercion, not with the blunt force that broke kingdoms in older times, but with patience and truth—if truth will ever be possible after what I have done.
I must make her see me as more than the stranger who stole her with a whirlpool and a command. I must make her believe there is a choice.
Only when she stands willingly beside me—if such a thing is possible—will I claim the boon the prophecy promises.
Only then will I hope for the old writs to be generous and grant me the tide-line—the zareth—that will anchor Castletide.
The power to save my homeland.
The ancient favor that any Lord would kill for.
It is a plan.
Half-formed, brittle at the edges.
Reckless, because every choice I make tightens a noose of consequence.
I know this. I feel it like pressure against my chest.
And yet every time I look at her—at the soft rise of her breast with each small, fragile breath, the way the light catches the curve of her mouth—the plan shifts.
What was once a ledger entry becomes a ledger that rewrites itself, line by line.
Duty blurs.
The arithmetic of power becomes personal.
The inevitability I counted on for strategy begins to feel, horribly and wonderfully, like fate.
I close my hand over the small, warm place at the hollow of her throat, more to keep myself steady than to possess her.
The keep is silent as a held breath.
Outside, somewhere along the ruined reefs, a current answers me more true than it has in months.
I take the sound as both promise and indictment.
And when I see her shift in sleep—watch intently as slumber turns to wakefulness—I brace myself.
Because whatever this is, there is no going back.
It all starts now.