Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
When a kraken decides to keep you, escape is no longer an option.
–An Incomplete Guide to Kraken Survival
One hand remained locked around my coin necklace as I flew past the palace grounds, remembering the words Sebastian had spoken to me only a day ago. Mistakes can be fixed, if I’m willing to fix them.
“Fix the mistake, fix the mistake,” I chanted to myself. The palace grounds gave way to the city, and the city gave way to a forest. My wings screamed, but I couldn’t land yet. Not until I found what I needed.
I hunted a wall, a stone, a seam. Anything with a rune. But the dome no longer spoke to me. In fact, nothing did. But still I scanned, hunting light. Except the runes had gone dark as well. Hmm. Except, maybe, that one carved into a tree trunk, in the center of a clearing.
I dove fast, muscles protesting when I crash-landed on a carpet of crushed shells. But there, gouged into the bark, waited a message.
He gave me this before the ceremony and asked me to give it to you if anything went wrong.
Love,
Granny
Tears welled again. He’d taken measures to ensure my safety.
A faint pulse beat beneath the message. He’d given me a rune. Half-buried, no bigger than my palm, glowing faintly. Heart thundering, I traced my finger over the lines etched into the bark. Ja! Its power reached for me.
Blood-forged. Realm-bound. Survival entwined.
Sebastian’s contingency plan. “Hello, my friend,” I said, pressing my hand to it, and letting it pull.
And pull it did. I came through into a world of blue.
The cave. Our cave, where Sebastian had pressed my back to the wall and asked me to marry him and burned his handprint into my chest. The chamber stretched further than it should have, further than the mountain that held it, blue in every direction until the edges dissolved.
Above and around me the walls carried the whole of Krakenstrond.
The dome. The currents sliding over it. The kelp forests. Villages linked by winding shell roads.
I set my jaw. “Show him to me.”
Harpa believed I could win him back. So, I would watch and learn, and then I would plan.
I watched him for six days.
I ate rations either Harpa or Sebastian had left in a bag, and cat-napped only when my body shut down of its own accord. Every second of every day that I was awake, I stood before those walls watching my husband, learning him all over again.
Honestly, he was a magnificent commander.
He deployed his warriors across the outer reefs with perfect precision to battle the shifters.
No wasted men, no wasted hours, every position chosen for reasons that only became visible three days later when Jokull’s mers came at the exact angle Sebastian had already covered.
He remained in contact with this cave. Not appearing, but connecting with it, soaking in its intel from a distance. I felt him every time he did it, his icy essence dropping the temperature at least ten degrees.
Like me, he didn’t sleep. Never ate unless someone put food in front of him, and then he ate all of it, quickly, without seeming to taste it.
On the fourth day, a soldier failed to hold his position. Forty men died, and Harpa was captured and carried away. I saw her go down. She laughed as she put her back to a reef arm and slew at least ten shifters and mers before others got a net over her shoulders. But even then she was laughing.
They carted her off, and the wall showed me Sebastian, now forty men down, watching his grandmother disappear into the dark.
He didn’t go after her or order it done. He looked at the greenhorn fighter who’d broken formation for two full seconds. Reassigned him to the rear supply lines, where failure would cost less. And turned to the next battle. Because he felt nothing. He simply recalculated.
Saving Harpa was not the objective.
I didn’t worry for her. Much. She was brilliant and resourceful and Jokull didn’t want her dead. Plus, she would figure it out like she’d done with everything else. The real question was, would I figure out my own impossible task? How was I supposed to win over an emotionless robot?
He hunted Jokull without mercy. Village by village, reef by reef, always marching forward. He took the primordial’s forces apart. Mers, shifters, anything that came out of the trench to feed. He never lost a battle. But he did lose plenty of men. And still, he just kept going.
On the fifth day, Gunnar approached him wearing grief like a winter coat, begging him to find another way. “You need your wife. Let me bring her to you.”
Sebastian merely canted his head at the man he’d once called friend. “I’ll hear no more talk of her. Either you are with me, or you are against me. Those against me die.”
I shook my head. This wasn’t my Sebastian. I still had no idea how to reach him.
On the sixth day, he found Jon. They met on a black ridge above the trench, at the ragged edge of everything, where Sebastian’s own dome thinned to a membrane and the abyss opened its mouth below.
Jon was fully shifted, a towering, plated, serrated nightmare of endless hooked limbs. His remaining shifters, still a staggering number, spread out behind him in a wall.
I pressed my hands to my churning stomach as Sebastian walked into the midst of them with Gunnar on his heels. Battle erupted.
I’d witnessed a great deal of violence since coming to this realm, but I had never seen anything like my husband on that ridge.
His shadow tentacles came out of him, glowing white—rune-white—and they sliced through shifters like a blade through smoke.
He didn’t hurry, didn’t stop, didn’t miss, and in a matter of minutes, he took a hundred shifters apart.
Gunnar fought at his back the way he’d fought at mine. Until he didn’t.
I saw it coming three seconds before it happened. Three whole seconds—enough time to scream, but it did him no good because I was a hundred miles away watching from a glowing wall.
Jon came at Sebastian’s blind side while he was mid-strike.
Gunnar was closer, and he didn’t hesitate to stop it.
Of course he didn’t. He was the mountain man, and he put himself in front of his king.
The shifter’s shadow engulfed him, and Gunnar vanished.
Just for a second, but when Jon released him, Gunnar, who had carried me through a burning forest, who had bowed to me in a hallway and called me my queen, was nothing but bone shards.
Agony tore at me.
One day. That was all the time between “let me bring her to you” and this. He had asked for me, and been told that those against his king died, and he had stayed anyway. He had stood at Sebastian’s back until there was no more back to stand at.
Anyone who harms you will die screaming. Gunnar had said it the day we met, so matter-of-factly he might have been remarking on the weather. I had laughed and told him I’d rather he didn’t do any dying.
That’s on you now, isn’t it?
On the ridge, Sebastian stepped over him. The same stride he’d used on the soldier at the reefs, as if it cost him nothing, because Gunnar wasn’t the objective either. Forty years of my king, my king, my king, and my husband did not look down.
I toppled to my knees and pressed my forehead to the cave floor, releasing a broken sound I’d never made before. Fresh tears rained over my cheeks.
I only looked up when battle sounds came again, Sebastian taking Jon head-on.
He let the shifter king grab him. He didn’t move as a shadow tentacle came out of the wreckage, wrapped around his throat and yanked him to his knees. Impact cracked the ridge beneath him.
“Remember when we used to share everything?” Jon said, his monstrous mouth splitting into a grin. “It’s time to revive that old tradition. Jokull says I can have your firebrand when you’re dead.”
Sebastian didn’t speak or struggle. I saw the wheels turning in his eyes. He was measuring the angle of Jon’s stance, the distribution of his weight, the position of his own hands.
Jon was too drunk on his supposed victory to realize he was about to lose everything. “I want you to know. Jokull will take your grandmother.” Jon reared back. “Today, I’ll take your throne, and I’ll take your queen—”
Sebastian’s eyes changed.
My back straightened. I saw that… right? On a wall, in a cave, I saw the emotionless creature my husband had become waver. The flat, dead gray broke, and for a quarter of a heartbeat the sea stormed back into his irises.
Hope sparked. The firebrand bond might be a force even the rune hadn’t accounted for.
I watched as Sebastian ended Jon in a not so efficient manner.
The ground beneath the shifter king erupted.
White tentacles coiled up around his ankles and sliced both his feet off in one brutal arc.
Jon crashed backward, screaming, and Sebastian rose.
Then he took the shifter apart. Slowly. Methodically.
Thoroughly. Long past any point where Jon could have posed a threat.
And when there was nothing left on the black rock but red, my husband stood over it, breathing hard, staring down at his own hands as if he could not entirely account for them.
He popped his neck, turned, already icing over. Moving forward, he issued new orders. Jokull wasn’t far now.
But hope stirred within me. Sebastian was still in there. He’d heard another man threaten to take me, and he’d slipped through the rune stone for one second like a leviathan breaking water.
I got to my feet. “I know what to do,” I said, out loud, to the cave, to the realm.
If I put myself in front of him, in danger, where he had to choose, he might break through again. Longer. Permanently. And I might be able to reach him. Or he might not break at all. But either way, I could make sure my presence advanced his mission to kill Jokull.
The wall shifted before I asked it to, revealing the manor half-swallowed by the trench, where the sea kissed the abyss, past the last membrane of the dome, past Sebastian’s territory.
And inside, at the head of a dining table I’d sat at a week ago, was Jokull.
Platters were laid out along the length of the tabletop.
Thankfully, nothing looked human, kraken or mer.
Nearby sat Harpa, hair wild, clothing bloodstained from battle, confined in a cage that hung from the ceiling.
I pressed a hand to my throat. The walls around them glowed a dull, patient red. The rune Harpa and I had used to escape dinner was already scrubbed away, making his dome as un-enterable as Sebastian’s. I’d bet un-leavable too.
So how was I seeing this?
“How do you think?” Harpa, through the dome, met my gaze—and winked.
Air sucked between my teeth. She knew I watched them. Was she the reason I could do it? Had she allowed herself to be captured like a Trojan horse I could use to my advantage?
“How do I think what?” Jokull asked her.
“When I’m talking to you, primmy, you’ll know it,” the Raving Pearl snapped.
He pursed his lips and drummed his fingers against the arms of his chair. “I expected your grandson to reach us sooner. Does he not love you?”
“Right now, he doesn’t love anyone but the thought of your demise. But why are you complaining? You’ve been run ragged. You need time to recover.”
“I am fine,” he snapped.
He looked fine. But maybe he protested too much. Just like he’d oh, so adamantly claimed he wished only to win Sebastian’s friendship. But had he spoken true? Like called to like, ja, but I’d bet this man had other plans. When Sebastian entered, would he become trapped? A kraken to slaughter?
Something in me went very quiet and very cold.
Here’s what I knew: I couldn’t kill Jokull without the rune.
I had watched Harpa take his head off over dessert and watched him grow a new one and keep eating.
Fire would not do the job; I’d proven that too on the island.
Steel wouldn’t work. Nothing in me, and nothing in Ashmorra, and nothing in the sea would do it. Except Sebastian.
I’d felt the rune’s power. Jokull had felt the rune’s power. And yet, the primordial still believed he could circumvent a permanent death. But I—Bronwyn Drachenveil, Queen of Krakenstrond, Pirouette Princess—would not let Sebastian walk into battle alone.
Jokull expected a king with a stone heart, and that’s what he’d get. But he would also get a ballerina with fire in hers.
My dragon rose in my chest, uncoiling slowly, the way she had the night Jokull ate my finger, and she looked through my eyes at the thing at the table and said, very quietly: His end has come.
“Ja,” I whispered. And once he was taken care of, my real mission would begin: drilling through that stone to get to the husband trapped inside it.
Ready, I set both palms against the cave wall. Every rune in every stone in that ancient sea turned toward me, relieved. Even those on the dome. I knew I couldn’t travel straight to Jokull. If I could, Sebastian could, and if he could, he would have.
“I’d like to speak with Jokull,” I said. To the dome. To Harpa. “Can you arrange it?”
Blue flashed over the walls, reflecting from the waters above and below, and suddenly I felt as if I were standing in that dining room with Jokull, even though I still stood inside the cave. “Hello, Jokull.”
He frowned at me. “This is… interesting.”
Harpa yawned. “Life with me always is.”
“Invite me in,” I said and gave the primordial my best smile. He’d claimed he was lonely. “Let’s have a dinner do-over. Just know, I intend to help Sebastian defeat you. So. Be prepared for that.”
He brightened, as if I’d suggested we play a fun new game. On his feet, he crossed to the wall and carved a rune into the stone with a claw. Slow. Unhurried. Letting me watch every line of it, because a creature who cannot die can afford to be generous.
“Come alone,” he instructed. “Come unarmed. Come as a guest and leave when I’m finished with you. If you can.”
Every condition revolved around me. Not one about his house or Sebastian. Exactly as I’d hoped.
“Ja,” I agreed. “All of that.”
When the rune found me and pulled, I let it…