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I grew instantly sick. Any rational thought vanished from my mind as I tried not to picture it. What horror, indeed. No words I knew existed that could take away that pain for him. No words to mend the scar that sat under his chin or the ones I could not see but knew were there in his heart. If there were, I would have said them to him. Part of me thought it would be selfish to try.

“It’s alright,” he answered, dipping his face to my jaw and pressing a solid, unhurried kiss there. When he raised to look atme again, his shoulders gave a quick shrug. “If there were the right words for everything, we would never stop talking. About retribution, love, hate. So much so that we would forget to take those things for ourselves. It was long ago, now, and I prefer to hate her silently.”

I nodded, pulling him back to my side and laying my ear on his chest. Silence was a song I was accustomed to. I’d listened to it for seventy years, and apparently so had Kalen. I could listen for many years more if he asked that of me, but that noiseless thundering beneath his chest...I recognized its call. Love. Hate. Retribution. We would have all of it—and more, I would soon come to find.

But for now, silence.

WE TOOK UP Abed together from then on.

Every night, as we traveled through clusters of houses made from wood and stone, Kalen offered to request a suite with enough space for two smaller beds instead of one, similarly small bed. Every night, I recited the same list of logical reasons why that was unnecessary. He didn’t have enough power to heat such a room, I had said at a small inn a day’s travel from Ayona’s cottage. We needed to save what little coin we had, and besides, wouldn’t it be too conspicuous for us to travel so extravagantly? I’d thought up that one as we ventured along the border of Aegedonia.

Kalen would roll his eyes in wide exasperated circles, but I never failed to notice the quiver in his cheeks as they tugged against his grin. I’d watch him struggle to regain composure and wonder who I was trying to convince—him or me.

The answer was obvious. We had grown close in the past few weeks. Naturally, I told myself. As one might when spending nearly every second of every day with another. As one does when another holds them against their heart, kisses their neck, and touches them in a way one had only previously imagined, under the privacy of thick coverlets.

Kalen had shown me a few interesting ways to hasten the lull of time as we moved through strange town after strange town. As the moon draped night over a new city, some passing look would turn into a finger hooked underneath my chin, a tug of my lip between his teeth, and on and on until his hands were beneath my skirts, my back fitted snug against the Preserver or flat atop the bed.

Of course, it was something I had done for myself, before, on nights in my grove when loneliness fed into the basest need. Those nights had quelled the burning that swelled through my hip bones. The wet, swirling fire in my belly that made me want to jump out of my skin into the coldest parts of the Sea. Those nights had been well enough. But this was different. With Kalen, that sweet tightening and bursting relief only left me wanting more.

A frantic whisper, “Like that?”

More.

“Gwynore.”

More.

Until the world splintered off in every direction, his tongue against my skin a slick of heat coaxing me through throe after throe of pleasure as the earth and I pieced ourselves back together.

After, I’d always wanted to return his favor, but he never let it happen. When I asked why or grew insecure he assured me; the day he would be spent, by the touch of my hand or the smart of my tongue, was the day that I would know him, as he knew me.

Late one evening, I asked, “Know you? What, like how you are a bastard of the enemy faction or how your favorite color is clearly black?”

He laughed, but told me, “No, that is not quite what I mean.”

What did he mean, then? I couldn’t remember what it was to know someone.

My stomach grumbled through the quiet that followed. The most egregious, embarrassing noise that could have ever been heard on the face of the Continent. Kalen jerked his head, eyes filled with humorous wonder. I couldn’t help but giggle along, hiding my face in the crook of his arm. He cupped my chin with his hand so I would look at him.

“Let’s eat, hmm?” he asked.

I gave a nod, only slightly sorry to be leaving the bed.

We made our way to the tavern that was adjoined to our inn, a twenty-room villa of limestone and gypsum with a basement hostel for traveling seamen. Our stay was only a few miles outside of the gates of the High Mer, as Ione was lovingly addressed by her constituents. Every citizen that we passed wore a jolly expression on their salt-cured face. How could they not? This faction was thriving and there was every display possible of the benefits reaped. Hands may have been roughened from hard labor, legs and arms scarred from prying treasures out of shell and rock, but bellies were round and filled. Houses and shops were made of fine materials by even finer artisans. Gold coins hit the table tops like fish on their sun-bleached decks, scintillating and plentiful.

Dinnertime had long passed by the time we arrived, and the tavern was overrun with desperate sea folk searching for their nightcap. I shoved against jacketed shoulders on either side of me, trying my best to follow the small path Kalen had already pushed through.

Cigar smoke hung in the air like a thick fog rolling off the open kegs ofdrykkja, a putrid brew that Kalen told me was a favorite amongst Aegedonian sailors. The smell of brine and spiced malt tickled the sensitive shell of my nose in a wretched way. I forced air into my lungs and held it as we moved past a dozen drunk sailors. They smashed their mugs together in merriment, sloshing the brown liquid onto the bar.

“The Light, it’s coming back to us,” a drunken merrow bellowed. He mounted his stool clumsily and shouted even louder, “She’s coming to take it back!”

I froze, in shock, clenching my teeth as the legs of his chair wobbled.

“Right on Ollie,” an older mortal yelled back in jest. “And me mum’s gonna rise from her grave, shove me back up her hooch,and bald me head to youth!”

“Shut your mouth, you old bastard!” Ollie shanked his cup at the man, splattering some of his drink to the floor.

“I will when you stop spitting nonsense! Putting your faith in the power of dead Sages.”