Chapter Fourteen
PEDR
Two Weeks Later
Pedr stood with his toes in the surf, arms locked over his chest, beneath an unbroken starry sky. The glassy sea hardly moved, the waves like whispers. He comprehended the glimmering stars with profound awe.
This world.
Elegant and brutal in the same hand.
Mila slept on her side up the beach, tucked in the safety of wide tree roots, curled in a ball.
Her hair splayed across a wrinkled blanket he’d tossed down so she didn’t itch once she finally fell asleep.
Usually, she fought sleep until three in the morning, and snoozed until six or sometimes seven.
Not enough hours for a human, but she definitely wasn’t an Arcanist.
So what was she?
They carefully avoided questions that personal. Somehow, it would break their unspoken trust around details and history. The tenuous enjoyment of each other, without ties.
Pedr wriggled his toes when the sea nibbled at their tips. The moment it touched him, the mental map formed. His relative position in the sea, structures around them—not many, but a few. Narpurra was a quick one day sail away, if he pressed new currents to form.
“Is it wrong?” he asked in a whisper. “The currents, I mean. Can I just form any current to take me anywhere?”
Nothing answered his question, and the sea slid away from him, and the mental map vanished.
With a returning foamy kiss, the mental map returned.
Still no answer to his question, however.
Physically touching the sea brought the arcane power, which made sense.
The temptation to swim grew stronger with every tidal surge. He’d been avoiding it.
Well . . . he’d had enough avoidance.
He waited a few more breaths for the arcane to respond to his question about creating currents, but it didn’t.
Never had. Best he could tell from his one-sided night conversations while Mila slept, the arcane wasn’t sentient.
Every attempt to speak from the mast, standing in the sea, out of the ship, in the rowboat continued to confirm his supposition. The arcane never replied.
He could ask Himmel, but she hadn’t spoken to him since promising to help stave their problems off two weeks earlier, and he wouldn’t waylay her focus toward Mila’s safety. Presumably, Arcanists had something else to do?
He hoped so.
Pedr licked his lips and glanced over his shoulder. Mila snoozed lightly. The cawcaw monkeys bedded down hours ago and wouldn’t wake before daybreak. No humans lived here, and few visited. Mila would be safe.
Returning his attention to the ocean, he decided with a glimmer of anticipation to go in.
He could leave behind this complicated tapestry.
He didn’t have to be an Arcanist, a brother, a Captain, or Pedr. Only a swimmer enjoying his favorite spot.
There wouldn’t be overwhelming arcane lessons that arose and occupied most of his day, or unusual and sometimes instinctual realizations that caught him by surprise.
He grabbed the back of his shirt, hauled it higher, and shucked it off. Tossing it close to Mila so she could smell him, Pedr advanced into the water, blocked out the swelling arcane in his chest, and dove.
Once beneath the waves, Pedr came to a dead stop. He waited for a chest-bucking fear to swamp him. The urgency to breathe; the fear he couldn’t. Neither occurred. He didn’t fight instinct, nor calm a swell of panic.
He simply was.
Using gentle motions with his arms, he headed farther out to sea. His hair waved. At his feet, inky darkness ballooned, lightening by minimal degrees as it proceeded higher. Blackest black became an intense navy.
Pedr waited and listened. Arcane awareness came in low and steady flows, like a tide.
Ten seconds between each. An intense rush, culmination, and gradual release.
He sank with a thought. When darkness surrounded him, his toes hit sand.
The colder valley didn’t tighten his fingers, nor strike him as unpleasant.
Like him, it simply was.
Drifting to the sea bed, he understood his surroundings despite the lacking light. Like the mental map in the air, he observed the sea and what marvels she contained. Creatures, but only a few. This close to the island, most fish kept their distance.
This was serenity. Nothing but him, the arcane, and the sea.
Did Himmel travel to the tops of the sky and experience the same?
Jordaire to the sinister earth depths? For the first time in weeks, he wondered if he could make this soul-swap worth it.
If nothing else, he always had this. Within the sea, Pedr could do anything.
Testing the arcane had been his single-minded focus—outside of Mila—for the past two weeks.
He returned to that habit here, thinking his way to the top.
Before the idea to rise had fully formed, the arcane brought him higher.
Water skimmed by. The rippling surface approached in tones of sapphire as he burst out of the watery swirls.
The stars remained.
So did Mila.
Pedr returned to the beach and sat in the sea.
He closed his eyes, extending his awareness.
The mental map expanded four, five, six times beyond what he had previously experienced, suspecting he was barely touching his burgeoning ability.
Today’s lesson was that being in the sea amplified every facet of his power.
An unexpected understanding that he could only explain as instinct filled his mind with a thought: the sea arcane was self-restrictive, unlike the others.
Himmel should have been the most powerful Arcanist, as the sky touched all.
The land, too, in some ways. Earth lay beneath these watery depths. But the sea didn’t touch everything.
He was, from the outset, a lesser Arcanist.
He didn’t care.
Pedr mapped west, east, south and understood depths, underwater mountains, predators, shipwrecks. The entire ocean lay at his beck and call, including swirling currents, their direction and haste.
Everything.
I can protect her, he thought, leaning into the same desire that haunted him nightly. I can protect her. I will protect her. With you, we will protect her.
He stayed in the water, and he practiced.