Chapter 24
Phoebe
Back at Castletide
I feel it first—like a drumbeat under my ribs, a thunder that isn’t the festival or the surf.
Kael’s fury rolls through the bond, raw and hot and utterly, painfully certain.
It fills me with something fierce and scared all at once.
I can’t stay inside.
I don’t want to be sheltered while he bleeds for us. I shove past the stewardesses and race toward the dock, skirts ballooning, breath sharp with salt and prayer.
The moon slices the harbor in silver.
The pearlescent towers of Castletide loom like quiet, watchful things.
My feet slap the planks.
I’m straining for a glimmer of him—one shape on the horizon, one flash of trident—anything.
It’s been days of no word—only these harsh feelings, fleeting glimpses of emotion from our bond.
I can see it inside myself now. When I close my eyes. It’s beautiful and new, pulsing inside me like waves curling against a sandy shore.
I’m lost in thought, trying to feel our bond—the zareth, Amber calls it—so, I don’t see her at first.
Then, something in me recognizes it—the moment I’m no longer alone.
Someone steps out of the shadows. She looks harmless. Like so many of the people we’ve been tending with supplies, shelter, food, water, medical care.
The SoulTakers don’t just attack the borderlands, they attack our water supplies, casting disease and setting fires on the farms, destroying crops.
An old woman, bent with a crooked walking stick, hair like spent seaweed, face folded into a map of a life that’s meant to be harmless.
I see her, and my first thought is pity.
Help, I think.
Old women get cold here.
Old women are afraid.
But she doesn’t look afraid.
Her mouth splits, and a sound that is almost a laugh peels out of her throat.
Then she cackles, and the noise makes whatever kind thoughts I’d been having cease on the spot. Now, I feel wary. Uncertain and uncomfortable.
“Do you know who I am?” she shrieks, voice thin and sharp as scraped shell.
“N-no?—”
“Do you know your precious Lord’s past?”
“I’m sorry, I have to go—” I try to skirt around her, but she holds her walking stick across the way and I freeze, not wanting to touch it or her.
