Chapter Twenty One
PEDR
The mostly-demolished Seat of the Father King breathed rubble and age and despair. Receding water revealed wet rock and hidden hints of life. Shattered clay pots. Thrashed thrones. Barren quiet.
But not silence.
Pedr stood in the middle of the destroyed throne room. He didn’t dare move. Less than a moment before, he heard fast breaths before he smelled rosewater. Rosenvatten.
Was it true?
Could it be?
Fifteen years of sailing the Westlands, studying the slopes, discovering arcane artifacts to help him liberate her, seeking his Mila.
Fifteen years breathing, dreaming, desiring.
Fifteen years wondering whether she’d been a dream after all.
Fifteen years remembering the smell of rosewater in his nostrils, and her sweet kiss on his lips.
Fifteen years waiting for this moment, and it had finally arrived. His skin shivered into bumps, and he let the surreality carry him for a moment. He leaned into it, terrified, delighted, frozen in place.
Mila’s strangled, familiar voice sent a shiver through his skin.
“Pedr?”
He breathed her name.
“Mila.”
His knees quaked as he slowly pivoted, looking over his left shoulder. He paused halfway, unable to believe it.
She stood there.
Mud caked her clothes, streaked her face. She reeked of desperation and terror. Dirt clumped her thick, black tresses. Loose strands waved around her cheeks and dusted her tawny skin. She stared, wide-eyed, held fast by something like disbelief. Her sleeve was ripped from shoulder to elbow.
A choked cry surged from her mouth.
“Is it . . . are you . . .?”
He waited for the dream to dissipate, as it had for fifteen years. Waited for her to fade, as he returned to the Rosenvatten, somewhere in the sea and lost in buried dreams. In the ten seconds that passed, Mila hadn’t left. Neither had he. Maybe this wasn’t a torturous dream.
Carefully, he reached out a hand. By the sea, he wanted to touch her. Bury his face in her neck and breath in, in, in. His tentative whisper sounded loud in the settling cavern.
“It’s me, Mila.”
Her white-rimmed eyes carried shock and tears. They regarded each other hungrily, but carefully. The air in the room stretched to a brittle thinness. If he breathed, the delicate hope would shatter.
Hands pressed to her face, she whispered, “I’m afraid to touch you.”
“Why?”
“I might wake up.” A tear dribbled down her cheek. “I might wake up again and it’ll all be a dream.”
“Then let me touch you.”
He staggered toward her. She threw herself forward and met him halfway; a sob wrenched from her throat. In two strides he caught her, his long arms wrapping her waist, clasping.
Oh, shite.
Mila.
She was real. Tangible. In his arms. Pedr held fast, feeling as if he were unable to hold her and this overwhelming incredulity at the same time. Beneath the stink of caves and rocks and mountains, he smelled rosewater. He tightened his disbelieving hold.
It couldn’t be.
Mila sobbed his name. “Pedr!”
He buried his face in her hair. A relief this deep and a joy this permeating couldn’t be real. He felt it too deeply. Mila had ingrained herself into his soul from the moment he saw her in that market. The lashing bitterness of fifteen years cooled, and he held close his sweet success.
Fingers fisting her dress, he reverently whispered her name.
“Mila.”
She wrenched back, hand pressed to his chest. Pedr scoured her face with his eyes. He touched her cheek with his fingertips, startled by the warmth. Her every movement was tender.
“You’re real?” he croaked.
Laughing—oh, that beautiful sound—she cried, “Yes!” Her joy turned into another trembling sob. His thoughts fragmented at her pain. He observed no bruises, no overt wounds.
“Did they hurt you? Did they?—”
“I’m fine.”
“I didn’t give up.” He almost broke, whispering, “I never gave up.”
She pressed her forehead to his, their warm breath mingling. “Neither did I.”
Pedr closed his eyes, breathed. They stood there for minutes, maybe hours. He’d never draw in enough. He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and asked, “What happened? How are you here? You found me . . . but how? Is Britt with you?”
Saucily, and with hidden exhaustion, she retorted, “I can smell as powerfully as you, Arcanist of the Sea. Seawater is quite pungent, especially when set against the rocks. It was a matter of deduction.”
She made light of what must have been a harrowing journey.
Presuming Britt set Mila free somehow, Mila would have had to make her way across the mountain bowl, up the ridge, over the top, and down to the cave.
Unless she found a way through the waterlogged passages, but he could sense they hadn’t drained yet.
He held her closer at the thought. Her body flowed along his like a ribbon.
“Where’s my sister?”
Mila’s expression fell. Her gaze lowered. “I . . . I don’t know. I believe she’s probably fine. Britt is very savvy. You see, I . . .” Mila swallowed, glancing to the side. “I abandoned her to find you.”
He set that aside to deal with later. Indeed, Britt and Denerfen were a savvy pair. She would have figured something out. Stories and massive possibilities lay in the immediate past, and he’d hear all of it, but right now was reserved for Mila.
Pedr ran the tip of his nose along hers, luxuriating in the silky caress of her fingertips across the base of his neck, just like fifteen years ago. He drank her in, a starved man.
“Pedr,” she whispered, teary. “I want to know everything.”
“You will.”
Hesitation stalled his hand. The Siren Queens had made allusions to a final band of his curse.
The last layer, guaranteed to ensure his demise.
They were terrible enough to go to great lengths, ensuring even if he bested them, he wouldn’t win forever.
Amalia, Stinna, and Vassi would wield their ruthless power of hatred to curb any love.
Particularly a love they couldn’t control.
Many details after his cursing remained blurry.
He’d known what the individual layers restricted at first, but the details were lost in the wash and haze after.
He suspected that the moment he allowed his love a physical manifestation—a kiss, something the sirens couldn’t hate more—the final curse layer might activate.
He felt almost certain of it, because the moment he pulled Mila into his arms, a new gravity sank through his chest and into his stomach like a dropping weight.
He’d felt the power before, when the first and second layers activated to stall his speech and freedom.
Yet, if he put it off, he and Mila would never truly be free.
What to do? The sweet agony of her body tempted him for more. The torture of rosewater in his nostrils. The design of fate that brought them together, only to threaten them again.
“Pedr?”
“Mmm?”
His hesitance withered to determination when her voice became a small inquiry. “Do you still love?—”
He cut her off mid-question with a heated kiss that deepened every moment. At his fiery touch, she silenced. Her fingers threaded through his hair. His arm tightened across her back. She became liquid in his arms. A whimper escaped her throat as she returned all that he gave.
As the kiss slowed, finalizing, the gathering darkness inside of Pedr intensified.
It looped around his chest in a spiraling, ebony circle that twirled around his heart.
Squeezing and wrenching, the curse twisted into an onyx ball concentrating in the dead center.
The orb peeled apart, blooming like a wafting flower in the sky.
He gasped, breaking the seal on Mila’s lips.
Darkness shrouded his eyes, robbing Mila from his sight. It crawled outward from the middle of his chest, through his mind, and beyond. Widening, the cursed mist overtook every facet of his body until he barely heard Mila’s terrified cry.
“Pedr?”
You fool, Amalia hissed, a mimicry from history, unlocked as the final curse layer activated.
You wretched fool, breaking our command.
The arcane will unbraid from your soul. The curse shall wither your arcane bond, and you shall spend your last seven days enduring the torture of lost arcane and Mila’s lessening presence, all while knowing you shall not have her.
At the end, your anchor will shatter.
Your soul will obliterate.
You will never exist again.
He felt the finality like a thud to the chest, knocking him into a darkness that knew no life, no hope, and no soul.