Page 70

A round her, the wind danced. Beneath her, Ora’s muscles contracted and released as feathered wings pulsed.

Beside her, the solar sail of one of Seidon’s small boats cut a line through the air that she could feel in some place she hadn’t known lived within her.

Just as she could feel those of the other vessels in this small fleet they’d brought out.

She held out a hand, letting the wind sluice over it, through her fingers.

Felt it in every cell of her being. In the five days since her Awakening, this extra sense had become…

real. A part of her. A part she still couldn’t wrap her mind around, but which her body responded to without the need for thought.

It should have been difficult. She should have needed years of training, like all the other Awakened. She should be sitting, bent over a workbench, beside the other islanders from her Ceremony, sweating over learning the basics.

Yet here she flew with Ora, knowing that when she moved her arm, the wind responded. When she leaned forward, it came underneath to buoy her up. She knew that she could leap from her mother’s back into the air, and it would hold her, carry her, dance with her—at least for a while.

She wasn’t a bird, wasn’t an angel. Not fully. She had no wings, she couldn’t fly. But she could glide. She could turn a dive into a loop that would make Seidon’s laugh ring out.

And when a gale traveled up the coast yesterday and her new husband had dragged her out to the islands to “play,” as he called it, she’d felt power unlike anything she’d ever dreamed.

Not hers—no, it was as Seidon had said. She could feel the power of the world around her, made by its Creator and linked, somehow, to her.

She couldn’t create the wind from nothing or banish it entirely. She couldn’t take the air away.

But when she’d raised her hands and let herself really feel that connection, she’d found it as he’d said.

It called—she answered. And her answer, her response, triggered another response from it.

When the wind gusted with force enough to send her staggering back a step, she had asked it, through that sense she’d never known how to sense before, to calm.

And it had. Its rage had dropped to a chuckle, and then a sigh.

She could still see in her mind the pride gleaming in Seidon’s eyes. Alongside the amusement as the next gust had taken her by surprise. “Reach farther,” he’d said. “Feel farther. Stretch out. Calming what’s right in front of you is the first step. From there, you reach toward what’s beyond it.”

She had no idea how to tell how far she was reaching now, how much wind was within her grasp. Probably not all that much. But more than yesterday. More than the day before. She was learning. Stretching. Growing.

It hadn’t brought her patience. She certainly saw the wisdom in Seidon’s insistence that they have a full plan in place before they cross the wall and rescue Jade. But had it been up to her alone, they would have made this trip the moment they returned from their abbreviated honeymoon.

Instead, like a man who’d had several centuries more to practice patience than she had, he’d taken a few days to learn how to wield this “reverse energy,” as he’d taken to calling it. Trying—and at last succeeding—to replicate the blue-sparked tridents the Black Tails had carried with them.

Once he could replicate it, he’d said, he could sort out how to turn it off.

And he had.

Which meant it was time well spent, yes.

She could grant that. It wasn’t as though she’d minded that at the end of each day, they’d gotten to pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist and focus on each other.

It was just that she knew it was within their grasp—tearing down the wall, rushing to Jade’s rescue—and she wanted to clutch hold of it already.

“Halt here,” Seidon called out from below her, eclipsing his solar sails so that his small boat slowed and stopped.

The others traveling with him maneuvered their own vessels to either side, the Awakened on board moving to the bows of each to put them as close as possible to the sizzling blue current of the Black Tails’ power.

They had no idea what would happen when they disrupted the current in one small area.

Would it create a cascade? Or could they experiment in one small section and get a gauge on how much effort it was for each of them to do their parts?

They’d decided to have the fleet on high alert, but to try small first.

Arden and Ora circled the area while Seidon and his two strongest captains took up position.

She and Seidon would be the ones trying to interrupt the current.

The other two were there to back him up as necessary but otherwise try to keep the water on either side of their small area calm and fluid and flowing exactly where it was now. To isolate the hoped-for failure.

Her nerves crackled as much as the electricity on the wall.

She and Ora flew in the tightest circle her mother could manage. Below them, Seidon shot up a grin. “Ready when you are, Your Majesty.”

That would take far more getting used to than wielding the wind. This strange power already felt like something she’d been made for. The fact that people now bowed in her presence and looked upon her with awe, though? Nope. That might take a century or two to feel normal.

She wanted to give Seidon a smile, to be as confident in herself as he was in her. But all she could manage was a slow, measured exhale. Then a nod.

He sat on the little platform rigged to the bow of the boat, so that his bare feet and calves were in the water, his Awakened mirroring him on their own.

Arden dragged her gaze off his movements and closed her eyes, focusing instead on this.

The wind. The air. The way it flowed around them, teased the top of the water.

She felt it whisper through the blue electricity of the wall, felt the way the wall excited the particles.

Recalled the words Father Enoch had read over them this morning in the daily missa before he blessed them and sent them on their way. And the Triada drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided .

The Great Prophet had stretched out his hand over the sea to accomplish it.

Arden did the same, raising both her arms, trusting Ora to remain steady beneath her.

She focused all her attention, all her energy on that line of crackling power heating the air—and she sent the wind tearing down along it.

Gust after gust, so many as to become one steady, pushing force, focused entirely on the line.

She first got it moving, steady and sure at the surface along the distance they’d set as their experiment, and then she asked the air to release.

A million small asks, coalescing into one big one.

Then she bade them go lower. Lower. To dig into the water, to nudge it away on both sides.

On Daryatla’s side, Seidon and his captains soon helped, holding the gathered waters back.

Only the wind held the water back on the other side, but still they eased the pressure on the air.

Arden kept the speed consistent but sent the wind deeper still, and then more, curving it down so that in her mind, it began to resemble a turning wheel.

Air pushing down and southward until it scraped the sea floor, then gradually coming up again, arcing above where she and Ora circled, and then down again on the other side.

Not until she heard the first snap did she open her eyes, and even then, she was careful not to lower her hands, not to release the wind.

The sizzling blue in the center of their line fizzled. Sparked. Died. They’d focused their attention on a span between two ruins, both of which tried now to sag toward the emptiness, but Seidon held them up from his side.

But it worked! The electricity vanished where no water flowed over the wires, and she could feel the heat in the air shift, recoil, want to fail elsewhere.

Seidon must have felt the same in the water. Victorious grin on his face, he shouted up to her, “Perfect—let it return to normal now before it cascades.”

She flipped her palms over, to signal the change to herself.

Silently, she asked the wind to rise higher again, and the water began to refill the half-circle trench she’d blown dry.

This time, she didn’t close her eyes. This time, she watched to see if the blue light would reignite when water flowed again.

Breathe, precious one , Ora reminded her with a warble.

Arden drew in a long breath, let it slowly out. No sparks of light met her gaze. Her stomach went tight, her gaze seeking Seidon’s.

He studied the water rather than her, concentration etched onto his face, deepening into concern with each inch the water rose without reigniting the current.

When it was half filled again, he glanced up at her, resigned worry in his eyes.

They’d known this could happen—that the breach wouldn’t repair itself.

In which case…what? Would there be a gate here?

That wouldn’t be such a bad thing. They could guard it, keep any mer spies who had been trapped on shore for the last five weeks from returning to their masters.

But if it caused other failures, they had to be ready to move. Fast. And even this gap could signal some message to the Black Tails.

The water returned to its normal level, Seidon keeping it steady and calm, and Arden released the wind with a whispered, “Thank you.” Then another “Thank you” emerged on a gasp when the electricity sparked, sputtered, and reignited along the wires.

She hugged Ora and then leapt from her back, calling up the wind to slow her so that she touched down softly on the deck of Seidon’s skiff.

He chuckled. “Nice trick.”

She’d been practicing it whenever his back was turned. No point in saying that slowing her descent wasn’t that hard—though her attempts at leaping from the ground and gaining any altitude were a great deal more difficult. She moved to his side. “Do you think it will hold?”

“I imagine.” He flexed his hand, though if it was to do something in the water, it must be below the surface, because she couldn’t detect it.

“And the pain? Still retreating?”

“Back to a blister. I think you were right, that I’d been pulling the magic into myself, and it had gotten to be too much for me, even if I couldn’t see it lessening any at the wall.”

It had been the only theory that made any sense, when he’d awoken the morning after their brief honeymoon without the deafening pain, even when she wasn’t touching him.

She reached out now anyway and wove their fingers together. “We have our in. I think when we try a bigger section, the whole thing will fail.”

Seidon nodded, gaze back on the wall. “It’s going to work, Arden. We’ll have Jade back with us within the week.”

Her fingers went tight around his.

She could only pray her husband had a bit of the prophet in him.