“You will hear me,Lady Phoebe,” she says it mockingly. “My daughter was Maureen of Old Ridge—courted by the faithless Lord Kael! That wretch stole my daughter from me!”
“He didn’t. I’m sorry she dies?—”
“No! You don’t know sorrow, you greedy thing,” she says, and it’s like poison to my ears. “Master Idris promised me revenge. Now I see he delivers on his promises. Kael’s precious sea will steal you from him now,Lady Phoebe. By and by, beneath the sea, you will be lost forever!”
Her eyes are glittering with something like triumph.
Then, she shoves the stick out.
It catches me across the chest with more force than I’d have given her credit for.
I stumble back, and my arms flail.
The wood under my boots is slick with spray and age.
For a second everything tilts—the moon, the pearlescent lights of Castletide, the gleeful face of my murderer—and I think I hear Kael’s voice, or the ghost of it in my chest, booms into me.
I’ll keep you safe, Telya. No one touches you. No one.
It is thunder, and it is mercy, and it is killing me with regret that I can’t reach him.
“I—” I try to step forward, to answer her, to tell her she’s wrong, but her hand is on my shoulder, iron-sudden.
She shoves again with the long stick.
My foot finds nothing.
The dock groans—rotten at the edges, hollowed by water and time—and I misjudge.
I slip.
I go down.
There’s no dramatic slow-motion, only a series of small brutal facts.
The sting of cold air when it fills my lungs, the scrape of splintered wood against my palms when I try for purchase, and the cruel, bright taste of salt.
The edge of the dock is a hard crescent at my periphery.
I know the water waits beneath, black and hungry and not like the water that hummed around Kael.
This water feels like the gap between what I hoped for and what is happening.
A hundred sentences sprint through me—I should’ve said I love you.
I should have told him.
I should have asked more questions, held him tighter, asked him not to go.
The bond thrums.
I feel him somewhere there in the storm, and I push everything I have into one small, useless gift.
A wave of regret, hot and bright and true, radiates outward from me.
It isn’t a magic spell.
It’s a confession sent thin and raw through the only tether I have.
