Chapter 24
Phoebe
Back at Castletide
I feel it first—like a drumbeat under my ribs, a thunder that isn’t the festival or the surf.
Kael’s fury rolls through the bond, raw and hot and utterly, painfully certain.
It fills me with something fierce and scared all at once.
I can’t stay inside.
I don’t want to be sheltered while he bleeds for us. I shove past the stewardesses and race toward the dock, skirts ballooning, breath sharp with salt and prayer.
The moon slices the harbor in silver.
The pearlescent towers of Castletide loom like quiet, watchful things.
My feet slap the planks.
I’m straining for a glimmer of him—one shape on the horizon, one flash of trident—anything.
It’s been days of no word—only these harsh feelings, fleeting glimpses of emotion from our bond.
I can see it inside myself now. When I close my eyes. It’s beautiful and new, pulsing inside me like waves curling against a sandy shore.
I’m lost in thought, trying to feel our bond—the zareth, Amber calls it—so, I don’t see her at first.
Then, something in me recognizes it—the moment I’m no longer alone.
Someone steps out of the shadows. She looks harmless. Like so many of the people we’ve been tending with supplies, shelter, food, water, medical care.
The SoulTakers don’t just attack the borderlands, they attack our water supplies, casting disease and setting fires on the farms, destroying crops.
An old woman, bent with a crooked walking stick, hair like spent seaweed, face folded into a map of a life that’s meant to be harmless.
I see her, and my first thought is pity.
Help, I think.
Old women get cold here.
Old women are afraid.
But she doesn’t look afraid.
Her mouth splits, and a sound that is almost a laugh peels out of her throat.
Then she cackles, and the noise makes whatever kind thoughts I’d been having cease on the spot. Now, I feel wary. Uncertain and uncomfortable.
“Do you know who I am?” she shrieks, voice thin and sharp as scraped shell.
“N-no—”
“Do you know your precious Lord’s past?”
“I’m sorry, I have to go—” I try to skirt around her, but she holds her walking stick across the way and I freeze, not wanting to touch it or her.
“You will hear me, Lady Phoebe,” she says it mockingly. “My daughter was Maureen of Old Ridge—courted by the faithless Lord Kael! That wretch stole my daughter from me!”
“He didn’t. I’m sorry she dies—”
“No! You don’t know sorrow, you greedy thing,” she says, and it’s like poison to my ears. “Master Idris promised me revenge. Now I see he delivers on his promises. Kael’s precious sea will steal you from him now, Lady Phoebe. By and by, beneath the sea, you will be lost forever!”
Her eyes are glittering with something like triumph.
Then, she shoves the stick out.
It catches me across the chest with more force than I’d have given her credit for.
I stumble back, and my arms flail.
The wood under my boots is slick with spray and age.
For a second everything tilts—the moon, the pearlescent lights of Castletide, the gleeful face of my murderer—and I think I hear Kael’s voice, or the ghost of it in my chest, booms into me.
I’ll keep you safe, Telya. No one touches you. No one.
It is thunder, and it is mercy, and it is killing me with regret that I can’t reach him.
“I—” I try to step forward, to answer her, to tell her she’s wrong, but her hand is on my shoulder, iron-sudden.
She shoves again with the long stick.
My foot finds nothing.
The dock groans—rotten at the edges, hollowed by water and time—and I misjudge.
I slip.
I go down.
There’s no dramatic slow-motion, only a series of small brutal facts.
The sting of cold air when it fills my lungs, the scrape of splintered wood against my palms when I try for purchase, and the cruel, bright taste of salt.
The edge of the dock is a hard crescent at my periphery.
I know the water waits beneath, black and hungry and not like the water that hummed around Kael.
This water feels like the gap between what I hoped for and what is happening.
A hundred sentences sprint through me—I should’ve said I love you.
I should have told him.
I should have asked more questions, held him tighter, asked him not to go.
The bond thrums.
I feel him somewhere there in the storm, and I push everything I have into one small, useless gift.
A wave of regret, hot and bright and true, radiates outward from me.
It isn’t a magic spell.
It’s a confession sent thin and raw through the only tether I have.
I love you. I will be waiting for you on the other side.
It lashes through me and then, impossibly, toward whatever is left of Kael’s attention.
The dock gives under my hand.
Cold takes my limbs.
The woman’s voice is distant, like an echo churned through surf.
Her cackle becomes a smear of sound.
I think maybe someone screams my name. Amber? Aloysious?
My ears ring with it and with the drum of Kael’s vow, the promise that had warmed me for days.
I want to lean into that promise, to hold it like a rope and climb back up.
I reach for something, anything. My fingers slide through the frigid waters.
Darkness is not theatrical.
It’s simply the world going soft around the edges, colors bleeding into one another until there is only pulse and the taste of salt and the one sharp, bright regret that I ran out of time to say everything I felt.
Somewhere above, on the storm-split horizon, I feel the sea send for Kael.
With it, I send one last, ragged echo into the bond—hope, not surrender.
Then something takes hold of me.
It pulls me under, and everything goes muffled.
It’s no longer blue here. It’s black and slow.
Cold. Alone.
Oh, Kael. I’m sorry.