Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
If a kraken spots you, you’ve already lost.
–An Incomplete Guide to Kraken Survival
Two Days Until Convergence
Iwoke certain of one thing. There must be another way to save my firebrand.
My romance with Sebastian could not close with us apart. My beloved books didn’t end with happily never afters, and we wouldn’t either.
I leaped out of bed far too early and rushed through a shower, donned a lovely ice-blue dress, and plaited my hair. Barefoot, I opened the door between our rooms, breaking protocol and not caring, and soared into his section of the suite.
He stood at the window, already dressed and armored in terrible calm, watching the dark water press against the dome. I’d bet he hadn’t slept a minute.
Not even my entrance drew him around. The tension that rolled through his shoulders told me he’d clocked me before I ever crossed the threshold.
“Tell me everything again and again and again,” I demanded. “Every little detail about the rune, the convergence ceremony, your mother. Leave nothing out.”
Still, he didn’t turn. “Good shimmer to you, too, Brona.” He said it lightly, but that lightness didn’t reach the rest of him.
“Stalling won’t help.” I slid myself between Sebastian and the dome, forcing my way into his line of sight. “Last night you told me the rune moves into you. Unpack that first. I want the whole of it, right now.”
For a long moment, he said nothing. The colors in his eyes went flat and still, and I braced for a fight. Stillness never came before good news.
He searched my gaze, and for a heartbeat, grief flashed, old and bottomless and worn smooth, like the gold in his gallery. “You will not like it.”
“I already don’t like any of this. Tell me anyway.”
“You hope to find another way, and I would love more than anything to give you hope. But I won’t because that would be cruel.”
“Tell me anyway,” I repeated. I might find a nugget of gold he had missed.
“The convergence rune doesn’t want me to die.”
Okay. That sounded good so far.
“It wants my heart. I don’t mean the physical organ. We don’t have to cut that out and give it as an offering.”
That was good, too, but I struggled to put the pieces together. “If not the physical organ, what kind of heart?” There was only one I could think of, and it inspired nothing but dread. “The essence of you?”
“Já. The stone doesn’t take, Brona. It… becomes.”
Cold prickled my skin. “Becomes what? You?”
“Exactly. I will become it, and it will become me, and we will be one. A powerful weapon that will use my emotions as fuel. But it cannot do it without permission.”
That… nein. Absolutely not. “You’re telling me you will have a heart of stone and no emotions. Is that it?”
He nodded. “That is it.”
“And the rune needs your permission to do this.”
His gaze did not waver from mine. “As well as yours. Because what’s mine belongs to my consort. My firebrand. You have a claim upon me the rune recognizes.”
My breath snagged.
He squared his shoulders. “So. We will both allow it. The rune will embed itself in me. Spirit, soul, body. I’ll become a weapon, and I will carry it for the rest of my days.”
Ice slid down my spine. I pressed my palm to his chest. His heart beat beneath it. Warm. Strong. His. Mine. For now.
“I will live to execute whatever I deem a threat. Jokull cannot overcome the one who carries the rune. Not when that one is at full strength.” His jaw flexed.
“But how will this power—you—kill the unkillable?”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “That, I will learn when I am the weapon.”
“So you don’t know, can’t be sure, and are relying on rumors or legends?”
“I may not know the semantics, but I’ve seen the rune in action, and I know it will work.
” His focus returned to the dome. “My mother loved my father. He was her firebrand. Her everything.” His words came slower now, as if reliving those moments rather than simply retelling them.
“But he’d just died, and her heart was as broken as her body. Perhaps more so.”
My throat tightened.
His shoulders lifted with a heavy breath. “As the convergence began, Jokull taunted us with the rune. He’d taken it from its former host upon their death, and he was so confident of his power, he even unlocked her cage. Put the rune in her hand. Dared her to use it. She did.”
The overconfident monster who’d eaten my pinky would absolutely allow a broken woman to activate a power rumored to kill him. Just for the fun of it.
“And my mother… she wasn’t the same woman after she gave her heart to the rune. She drove Jokull out of the kingdom, all that she had the capacity to do at the time, and used the last of her strength before she died to close the dome behind him and keep him out.”
The room expanded and contracted in a blink as facts crystallized.
“Oh, Sebastian.” I could imagine what happened next.
He was forced to cut the rune from her chest. The rune, and the dome, became all that remained of her.
Perhaps the very reason he’d been willing to bond himself to the dome.
And then Jon had dared to steal the rune. My heart broke for young Sebastian.
And really, this explained so much about today’s Sebastian.
Why he had tried to keep me at a distance; he hadn’t wanted me to feel what he’d felt when his mother died.
Why he’d been so certain of the cost; he’d seen it firsthand.
Why he’d do whatever it took to succeed. Victory would be his final gift to her.
He fortified and marched on. “During her crusade against Jokull, my mother thought only about his death. She did not care about me. I was nothing to her. And the same will be true of me, with you.” A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“Immediately after convergence, you’ll be escorted home to Ashmorra. It’s all arranged.”
The floor dropped out from under me. “You won’t even let me stay and help you?”
“It will be better for us both if you leave.” His voice cracked.
“Nein, you’re wrong,” I burst out. Forever nein. “I will stay. I will help you. And you will not sacrifice your heart.”
Up went his chin. “It must be this way. Jokull will not stop. My people won’t survive him. And I refuse—” his hands closed into fists at his sides “—I refuse to let the kingdom fall when I have a heart to spend.”
I fisted his shirt, clinging to him. “So you’ll sacrifice our future?”
“Not yours.” He said it gently, as if gentleness could make it bearable. “You will have your sisters. Your dance. You’ll enjoy a long, bright future. That is the kindest ending I can give you, and I have thought of nothing else since the moment I understood what you were to me.”
“That isn’t kindness.” I was shaking now, fury and heartbreak stirring together.
“That is you deciding my ending for me. Again. You bought the manticore’s absence.
You engineered the vote. You arranged my passage and my rooms and my dresses and my whole life here, and now you’ve arranged my broken heart too. ”
“Do you think I haven’t searched for another way to save my people?” For the first time, he raised his voice to me.
I gentled my tone. If he brought the fire, it was my turn to bring the water. “I’m sure you exhausted every avenue. But you didn’t have me yet. Of course you didn’t find an answer.” I lifted my chin, too, like I did before every performance, when I became the character I portrayed.
Today I wasn’t a fictional queen but a princess standing at the edge of a cliff, desperate to hold on to her anchor. “By your own admission, your heart is not yours to give. It’s mine, and I won’t release it.” I could not. “I’m your firebrand. A partner. We must find a different path.”
He closed his eyes. “You were not supposed to be this stubborn,” he said, as if, for the first time, he wasn’t sure of his next move.
“What was the plan in the beginning?” I asked, softening my hold on him. “Outline it for me.”
A wry grin, there and gone. “I was supposed to resist your appeal, and you were supposed to realize a dragon and a kraken cannot mix long term. You would have been eager to return home and gladly given my heart to the rune. But you walked into my throne room, and what was supposed to be stopped being possible. I wanted only to give us the life we couldn’t have, if only for a little while. So I arranged our arrangement.”
“Sebastian the schemer,” I said and tsked.
Stepping into him, I once again flattened my palm over the thundering runes on his chest. Over the heart he was so ready to give away to that rune.
“I’m done letting your certainty write my ending.
We have two days, Sebastian. Give me both.
Not to enjoy what time is left, but to find another path.
And if I fail—” my voice wavered, but I steadied it “—if I fail, I will stand on that stone beside you and make sure the rune gets the heart it wants.” Even if I had to offer my own.
His eyes narrowed. “My heart, Brona. Mine.”
Oh, this man knew me too well.
Ja, but what was his was mine, and what was mine, well, that was his.
He owned my heart now, and not even an ancient rune could argue with that logic.
I could exchange one heart for the other.
So, without a shred of shame, I offered him the truth without giving him the truth.
Exactly as he’d done to me in the beginning.
“Ja, Sebastian. I’ll give the rune your heart. ”
He studied me for a long, terrible moment, and I gave nothing away. I would replace him without hesitation if necessary. But it was my fervent hope we would not come to that.
I expected him to retreat behind that flat, still calm and shut the door on this the same way I’d shut it on him last night. Instead, he lifted his hand and settled it over mine, where my palm rested against his heart. “Two days?” he echoed roughly.
“Ja. Two days for me to find a path while you run the primordial ragged.” Not too much to ask.
His mouth curved, cold and pleased. “Speaking of, my raiders hit a supply cache before shimmer, and three more before this one. He’s spending strength, chasing shadows that cost him everything and me nothing.” The satisfaction bled into his voice.
“Good.” Weaker was killable. Weaker meant maybe, if I found my path, we wouldn’t need Sebastian’s heart or mine to end the monster. “So will you do it? Give me my days?”
He breathed in. “I will. I want to give you everything. Want to believe we can have forever. And maybe we can. By the deep, Brona. You have amazed me at every turn. If anyone can change what’s coming, it’s you.”
My heart leaped. I managed a watery smile, twirled from his hold and performed my famous pirouette. “Haven’t you heard? Turns are my specialty.”
He chuckled and pressed a soft kiss into my lips. I lifted on tiptoe to reciprocate.
Dome lights flickered.
A boom sounded from the distance.
The whole world shook as if it had been hit with a cannonball.
Muscles seized. “Jokull?” I asked.
Sebastian smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Nei, not the primordial, only the intensifying of the coming convergence.”
Ah. Good. And yet, I didn’t relax.
“Eat. I wish to prepare something special just for you. Dress for hiking in caves. Gunnar will collect you in an hour.” He gave me a lingering peck, then strode from the room.