Chapter 7
Kael
Casteltide
After I use my magic to clean us both up, I leave Phoebe with Amber, her new lady’s maid.
The older Demon is stern but not unkind, with the kind of no-nonsense air that makes her well suited to guiding a stranger through the keep.
She has her orders. Show Phoebe the halls, the kitchens, the heart of Castletide itself—yet do not let her step beyond the sea-stone walls.
“Why can’t I go outside?” Phoebe asks, chin tilted in defiance, though her voice carries more weariness than rebellion.
Amber bows her head slightly before glancing at me, awaiting permission to answer. I sigh.
“Because nothing is as it seems in Nightfall, Telya. I will show you more when my meeting is over. I am sorry—I can’t escape it.”
“Whatever,” she mutters, folding her arms.
The word grates, unfamiliar in my ears, dismissive in a way I can’t quite parse.
I frown, unsettled, not fully understanding her tone yet knowing I lack the time to untangle it now.
Reluctance weighs on me as I turn from her. I do not like leaving her here alone, in this alien place, bound to a fate she does not yet grasp.
But duty presses. The other Lords wait for me.
I step into the corridor and call the current. Magic carries me through the deep-carved veins of the keep until I stand before the tall double doors of the council chamber.
With a thought, they open.
The air within is sharp with brine and the tang of old iron. A place where sound is swallowed, coiled, and never escapes. Private. Protected.
Light filters through the great sea-windows, casting the flagstones in wavering sheets of green.
Relics line the walls—silent witnesses of power once wielded without hesitation.
My father’s helm, crowned in coral. The jagged harpoon that split a leviathan’s heart. And there, in pride of place, rests the trident.
Three prongs rise like a crown of lightning and storm, each point glimmering with the memory of tempests.
Beside it, the chest plate, heavy with scaled inlay, and the woven mer-mail, a net of impossible metal pulled from the trenches where no mortal diver breathes.
They gleam with cold promise, vengeance, and wrath.
I have never worn them. They wait, patient and implacable, for the moment the Lord of Water must shed his mortal guise.
A Titan, some call it. Merman, others whisper. The words do not matter. What matters is the truth—that when the sea claims me, there is no man left. Only the tide.
I have never needed to take that form—until now, perhaps.
The very thought makes the runes along my skin flare hot and anxious.
Alaric sits cross-legged on the raised dais, long limbs folded like a man built to ride the wind. His Dragon bristles beneath his calm.
Dagan’s bulk fills the carved bench opposite, wings wrapped about him like a second shadow.
Thorne lounges on the far side, smoke-scent clinging to his cloak. He always looks like a man who can’t be bothered to be noble and enjoys the irritation it causes.
Their presences are like weather I have learned to read.
“A trident on the wall is a lovely decoration,” Thorne drawls, “but why can’t you go all Ariel then, Kael? Why the half measures?”
His tone is thin as ash and twice as poisonous.
I feel the old reflex to clap him across the mouth for the insult—the Lord of Fire, always clever, always cruel.
My hand tightens at my side, the temptation of a violent answer bleeding heat into my runes.
“Fuck you, Smoky.”
The words are blunt. They land and ring as the Fire Lord’s growl echoes off the sea stone walls.
Dagan’s chuckle is like a rock shifting.
Alaric’s face is neutral, an unhelpful mask.
“Enough,” Alaric says, louder than necessary, and the chamber echoes with his voice. “My viyella waits for me, and I have no time to fuck around with you lot. Now—is the crown safe?”
We look at each other.
Small motions.
Politics in miniature.
The air tastes like expectation and old soot.
“It is,” I reply, but my tone has the texture of a warning. “For now.”
My worry shows in the way my fingers flex, a line of tension that runs like a tide under my skin.
The realm will accept for now as a thing to hold, but I know the weight of that pause.
The SoulTakers do not keep polite hours.
“We are all under attack, Kael,” Dagan reminds me unnecessarily.
“Yes, but the crown is here. Safe, but for now—”
“Tell us what news you have of breaches,” Alaric says.
I nod. He’s right to start there.
“Aloysious,” I order.
My steward is a thin man with skin like dragged parchment and eyes bright as my trident’s point.
He moves with the efficient sorrow of someone who keeps record of all the places grief can be counted.
He produces the ledgers and scrolls I asked for without hesitation.
He speaks, and his voice is the careful meter of a man who has read bad news too often to be dramatic about it.
“North sluice failure at dawn. Blockage suspected, but the mechanisms showed signs of deliberate corrosion.”
He lays a damp scroll across the stone.
“Reef bloom reported off the eastern shoals—black, mucilaginous—a bloom we have never catalogued. Nests of fish have been found dead in nets. Two near-drownings reported by low-station fishermen. Both saved at the last breath. Mer-wardens note currents oscillating where they should run straight.”
The words fall like pebbles into a dark pool.
Each one ripples outward.
The room tightens as if in unison.
Thorne whistles, a sharp, sour sound.
“SoulTaker signatures?”
Aloysious nods.
“Yes, my Lord. Marks consistent with the scavenger-blight reported near the border. The watchers saw shapes at the edge—thin as huntsmen and with the same bone-cold pallor as earlier advisories.”
Alaric’s jaw sets. He leans forward, fingers steepled, the look of a man who measures danger against his own.
“They push, and we pull. They probe, we fortify. We can’t waste time in—” he glances at Thorne—“—puerile sparring.”
I let it pass for the present because the point isn’t Thorne’s mouth but the nature of the attack.
The SoulTakers do not simply take.
They unteach.
They make the world forget how to answer.
“If the tide forgets, the Tidal Lands unmake themselves one fisherman at a time,” I remind the room at large.
“What do you recommend?” Alaric says.
His voice is low but steady.
I respect him. Hell, we all do. But this war is doing harm the likes of which we have never seen.
The runes under my skin are a background ache.
“I need to claim my viyella,” I murmur.
“My Lord?” Aloysious says.
Fuck. I should not have revealed all that.
“You’ve found a mate?” Thorne sounds shocked.
I tell myself again why I am doing this before I answer aloud.
Prophecy is arithmetic, yes, but prophecy also makes demands.
I should not risk her where the SoulTakers press.
Yet I must.
The facts are there. Ugly and small and stubbornly necessary.
Aloysious waits for my command, and I breathe through a long, weary exhale before speaking.
“Strengthen the sluices, reroute the currents where we can, post sentries with the mer-wardens and the tide-wardens. But more—” I hesitate.
My eyes flick to the other Lords, then to Aloysious. The small man’s practical face is thin with the knowledge that there are things ledgers do not fix.
“I need a boon. I need a turn.”
Alaric’s gaze slides to me, and for a moment the room narrows to the space between us.
I feel exposed—not to ridicule but to expectation.
He reaches for something like counsel and perhaps something like comfort.
I see it in the slight set of his shoulders.
“Your viyella,” Dagan says, guessing rightly. “If the Fates' answer is her, then let them answer, brother. But know this, it is a double-edged thing. Claiming your magic by using her is taking a boon that binds.”
“You speak like a man who prefers stone and dirt to flesh and blood,” Thorne quips.
He isn’t entirely unkind.
It irritates him that the Fates demand tenderness of those who would otherwise do only ruin.
I watch their faces. Brothers in different shapes of rule, each with their prejudices, their leanings toward the element that makes them.
Alaric’s calm. Dagan’s stubbornness. Thorne’s fire-forged impatience.
All of them are unavoidable weather.
I am not naive about the bargain I make in taking her.
A zareth isn’t a simple contract.
It is a threading of souls. To claim it cleanly, I must win her trust, not merely her consent on paper.
I will avoid lies and crooked clauses. I will not let any carve my oath to her into empty promises.
That is the vow I give myself in the circle of this ancient room, with my father’s helm looking down like a judge.
“Do what you must, brother. We are with you,” Alaric says.
I nod.
“Prepare the keep for a wedding,” I tell Aloysious.
“My Lord?”
“I am taking a wife. Call my subjects. Bring in the high and low born all. I want everyone. And have magicians, and any who know the old protections on hand. We do this properly or not at all.”
Aloysious bows, skin creasing at the eyes.
“At once, Your Highness.”
Thorne snorts softly from his bench, but even he looks less certain now. Alaric’s hand finds my shoulder briefly in a gesture that is both admonition and solidarity.
“Be careful, brother,” he says, the wind in his voice softening.
I feel the weight of that small touch like a tide underfoot.
My hands are not steady with certainty—no man’s are in a chamber that remembers war and calls it counsel.
But my future wife waits, and the tide answers when she breathes.
I have a chance to bend that answer to salvage a kingdom.
If I fail, the Tidal Lands will drown.
If I succeed, the price will be counted in bindings and the soft ruin of a human life tied to my fate.
I close my eyes for a breath and let the old names and the old fears settle.
The trident on the wall gleams in the green light. My fingers itch to lift it. Later.
For now, there is a woman walking my halls I have need to claim and an ocean that must remember how to obey.