Also, I sense desire—I can’t forget that.
It’s the one thing that makes it easier to go through with this.
“Speak your vow, Lord of Water,” the priest intones, voice creaking like a tide over old stone.
I realize with a lurch that I have been looking into her eyes as if they are the only windows to this world.
The hall narrows until it isn’t anything but the pale blue of her stare and the sound of my own blood in my ears.
When the priest calls, it’s like someone struck a bell inside my skull.
I take a breath, then I open my mouth.
“Phoebe Sewell of Earth, there is no light for what I feel. No law for what we are.”
My tongue tastes the words before I speak them, old salts on the lip of an ocean.
“I, Kael of Castletide, Lord of Water, claim you as my viyella. You are mine now and forevermore, bound in the unbreakable zareth, and I?—”
My voice narrows. The clause curls into the place where the runes sleep beneath my skin.
I take her hand because ritual requires touch and because my hands are traitors and know what my mouth will not.
Her fingers are warm, small and real and not at all like the abstract notion of aboon.
Her pulse hammers under my palm—fast, stubborn—so alive it aches.
“I am your undoing.”
The vow leaves me like a blade, and it isn’t bravado.
It isn’t a boast.
It is an arithmetic of consequence that tastes of iron and salt.
Saying it is a sacrament and a sin.
The same syllables that might draw tide back to the shore could drown what laughs at the edge of it.
The calculus of the prophecy is brutal—zareth plus human soul equals tide—but the numbers never speak of the cost measured in laughter lost or songs unsung.
Already, in the hush that follows, a tally unspools behind my eyes.
If my viyella steadies my realm, then the coastlines of Castletide will remember rain, and fishermen will pull nets with living silver fish.
If she does not, I have stolen a life for a promise that rots upon the lip of a ledger.
The thought is a stone that knocks against the chamber of my ribs and will not stop.
Duty hums in my bones like a low current.
I have a throne that will not wait.
I have children of the tide who sleep under roofs that leak ash.
I remember faces down at the low stones, gulps of smoke in their mouths, nets empty as palms.
I remember my steward’s thin voice, the mer-wardens’ urgent counts.
