Chapter 17
Kael
First Shore—The Tidal Lands, Nightfall
After the whales, after the way she’d knelt like a child and fed the great beasts with the same fierce curiosity she’d fed everything since she arrived, Phoebe and I drift back into the center of the feast like two planets pulling the same small moon along behind them.
I don’t let myself linger on the way she moves, but the truth is a tide that will not be held back.
She shouldn’t have this effect on me—not a human woman with a soft body and a laugh that breaks open like spring—and yet there’s a space in the long, wide part of me that answers to her like a beast obeying its master.
Familiarity, connection, something older than politics or duty. More powerful than magic or greed.
The thought rises unbidden and humiliatingly bright.
Maybe she is the thing the old songs call a true viyella.
Maybe the zareth has braided itself into us.
The idea both terrifies and steadies me.
I need to speak to Alaric first. I need his counsel. And if there is any truth to what I suspect, then I’ll tell Phoebe all of it. She deserves no less from me.
“Kael?”
Her voice pulls me back like the gentle tug of a current.
She’s half turned to the booths, eyes still alight from the whale-feeding, and for a breath I forget caution and simply drink her in.
“How long are we docked here?”
“One night here,” I say, letting my voice be the map she needs. “Seven nights. Each night we anchor at a different shore to make our announcement. Song and food and offerings in every harbor. It is customary in the Tidal lands for the people to celebrate the union of their Lord.”
I watch for the small glow that usually steals across her face when she thinks about something she likes.
It is a map I love reading.
But then the light in her eyes stutters. The joy flickers.
She looks away, small and suddenly distant, and I feel the pull of it in my chest like a snag on a line.
Before I can do the rational thing and give her space, my hand moves. Two fingers under her chin, lift, make her meet my face again.
It’s like I need her to look at me. I can’t bear the distance when she doesn’t.
“Kael, is this—” she starts, words tumbling like the nervous things people say when they want plainness. “Is this really what you want to celebrate across your lands?”
“It’s tradition—”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then, what are you asking me, Telya?”
She steels herself like she’s readying to face something difficult, unpleasant, and all I want is to shield her from it.
But then, I see it. And my heart? It squeezes.
That something difficult is me—and the realization stings.
“What am I doing here? Why bring me from—God, from Earth—to be your wife, your mate—what do you even call it? But more important, why?”
So many cages live in her questions.
The word zareth feels too heavy to drop in front of her before I’ve weighed it with Alaric.
So I hide it. I keep the truth inside me instead of spilling it.
“Are you not happy, Phoebe? Have I done something to hurt or scare you?”
“What? No—”
“Don’t you want to be with me? To be mine? You can’t hide the way you react when we are alone,” I murmur, low enough for our ears only.
“Kael, I-I want you. I never felt like this about anyone, but you’re this powerful, important Demon Lord, one of the rulers of Nightfall—this magical place I never even imagined existed, and I-I’m just a girl from New Jersey. How long can I possibly expect to hold your attention?”
“You have no idea, Telya,” I murmur, and draw close enough so I can breathe in her scent.
Fuck, but I want to keep it inside of me, carry it in my lungs for always.
“Look tonight, we will rest here and feast. All I ask is for you to just be here with me. Talk to the people. Eat the food. Ask questions. I promise you and I will talk about all the rest when there is less noise, less audience.”
I let the promise stand like a small anchor between us.
She looks as if she wants to argue—wants to press for a clearer confession—but something in the back of her jaw gives way and she nods.
“Okay, I mean, this world is fascinating, and I do want to learn,” she says. “And I’m grateful.”
My heart squeezes. She shouldn’t be grateful to me.
I’m the thief who took her. The liar who keeps her in the dark.
But before I can dwell on that, bright as a startled bird, Phoebe says, “Oh my God—is that a dragon?”
The sky answers her before I can.
A shadow detaches from the cloud-line and falls toward the inlet like a living storm.
Wings chop the air with a sound that makes the salt in my mouth taste of iron.
Heat washes us in a breath that smells of smoke and old thunder.
Bloody fucking show off.
Still, I grin as Alaric rides low, his Dragon form a mountain of shadow and ember, scales flashing like struck ore in the last of the sun.
He lands with that easy, dangerous grace he’s always had—an impossible beast—and the whole world hushes.
His Dragon’s breath is a slow exhalation that sends a ripple through the banners. The music stutters and then finds a new rhythm.
“Fashionably late,” I muse, grinning as he raises his snout and breathes a stream of gold and black smoke into the air.
He eyes me, then Phoebe, and she grips my arm tight.
“Easy, Telya. He’s a friend,” I whisper before Phoebe could combust from nerves and novelty.
“Your friend with a mother-humping dragon!” Phoebe hissed, half scandalized, half deliriously thrilled.
Alaric makes a face like he’d been complimented and insulted with equal skill.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I reply.
I caught her eye, felt the little shock of her amusement ripple through me, and before I thought I let the word slip.
“Alaric, shift already and ease my viyella’s mind.”
The moment the title leaves my lips it settles into the air—soft and dangerous—and only I seem to notice the way it sounds.
The ocean inside me didn’t riot.
If anything, it hummed approval.
And that terrifies me more than anything.
Dagan’s dry voice cut in from the crowd like a skewer through a roast.
“You two started the party without me?”
Alaric’s draconian grin flashes and smoke curls from his nostrils.
“He is fashionably late as always. And you, Lord of Earth? Where did you run off to this morning? And why are you still wearing winter in the middle of summer?” I frown at his apparel.
The Tidal Lands are usually warm and tepid, but he’s still in fur lined pants and a thick wool tunic.
“Always,” Dagan replied, deadpan, boots leaving large prints in the hard sand.
He peers at me then, a farmer’s curiosity in his gaze.
“So—viyella? Really, Kael? You’ve gone soft, then?”
“Not soft,” I said, because the word soft would be weaponized into a thousand court rumors if I let it linger. “Different. More accurate.”
“Why isn’t he surprised by the Dragon?” Phoebe murmured at my elbow.
Before I could answer, Jules—already untying the harness with the casual confidence of someone who plants seeds and raises storms—calls out, “Kael! Dagan! A little help!”
Her voice had a maternal twang now, the rounded inflection of a woman who commands attention simply by speaking.
Alaric snaps to attention like a hound at a whistle. He stands and, with one fluid motion, shifts into his human grace in full Lordly regalia—no hesitation—and his arms catch Jules as though he’d always done so.
She gasps. He grins. And the way he settles into this possession of her is like a practiced thing.
It looks attractive all of a sudden—secure, warm, unavoidable.
“They will catch you over my dead body,” Alaric mutters as Dagan continues to walk as if to prod our brother. His words are a joke and a promise all at once.
“Alaric! They were being friendly,” Jules harrumphs and makes a show of peering down at her viyen as if he might be moved.
They kiss, and I feel like a voyeur, even though it lasts but a moment.
Then she squeals, shimmying in his hold, and I catch the soft curve of her swollen belly beneath her blouse—proof that whatever fierce storms they’ve fought, they’ve built something together.
And I realize I want that too. With my Telya.
Jules wriggles free eventually, laughing, and comes bounding toward us like a spring uncoiled.
I lean in close to Phoebe before she can be devoured by Jules’s orbit and say, low enough that only she feels the heat of my words, “This is Lady Jules. She’s Alaric’s viyella.”
“So, his wife?” she asks, earnest and literal in a way that made me grin.
I dip my chin, because formality steadies things.
“Alaric, Lord of Air, and Lady Jules of the Eyrie—may I present Lady Phoebe of Castletide.”
Phoebe’s answer was immediate and charmingly deflating.
“Oh, um, I’m just Phoebe from South Jersey.”
Jules hears the whisper—of course she does—and the sparkle in her eyes doubled. She lunges at Phoebe with the kind of warmth that makes strangers family.
“Oh my God! I am so happy to meet you! Another Jersey girl? Isn’t that awesome?” she squeals, squeezing Phoebe like she was reclaiming kin across worlds.
Phoebe goes wide-eyed, surprised into smiling, but I see the tremble at the edges.
I watch her being pulled into a second hug, and I see it.
It’s a flicker, but it’s real. Something other than joy passes over her face—an instant of confusion, maybe a ghost of hurt, or the sudden calculative pause of someone measuring a new place and finding its rules.
The line between her brow tightens for a breath.
My chest drops.
It’s nothing—probably nothing—but it clangs in me like an ill-fitted bell.
The festival noise swells around us.
Alaric’s indulgent laugh cuts through it.
And in the background, the whales leap through the air, shaking seawater like confetti at the people watching in awe.
“Everything all right?” I ask aloud, because I must. It’s a bone deep need now to see to her comfort.
Phoebe forces a smile and nods at where Jules is grinning and speaking to Alaric animatedly.
“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s just a lot.”
I don’t buy the word.
Not fully.
My worry folds into something fiercer, a protective current that answers Dagan’s old warning about claws in soft things.
Maybe he is right. Maybe softness has teeth.
Either way, the night is young and loud and full of promises I haven’t earned yet.
I wrap my hand over Phoebe’s—light, possessive—and let my thumb rest on the pulse at her wrist.
If there are snares ahead, I’ll tear through them.
If there are storms, I’ll weather them.
Tonight, though, I let the banter and food and music, Jules’s squeals, Alaric’s growls, and Dagan’s rumbles, mask the worry that hums under my skin.
For now, we belong to the Tidal Lands, to the sea—and to each other, whether the world counts it true or not.