Page 27

“Someday, I will die.” The goddess said this to me as casually as one might remark upon the weather. As if the notion did not bother her at all.

I vehemently denied the words, of course, but she would not be swayed. “Do not be troubled,” she told me. “For every ending is a new beginning of sorts.”

from the unpublished papers of Rahvekyan High Priestess Omira

The Kraken was riding the waves hard, rising and falling with stomach-churning regularity. Aleksi felt his guts tighten with nausea. Einar’s ship usually cut smoothly through the water, even when sweet little Naia wasn’t helping it along by sweet-talking the sea.

But was this the Kraken? There were no jovial shouts, no laughter drifting through the air. No lilting shanties ringing out to set the rhythms of work on a ship.

He opened his eyes. Definitely not the Kraken. Aleksi had been tied to the base of one of the masts, and his feet were bound, as well. Sailors milled about, but none that he recognized.

And Naia and Einar were tied up beside him.

“Well, fuck,” Aleksi mumbled. “What have we gotten ourselves into now?”

Neither one answered, though they were not gagged. Aleksi looked closer, and he realized that they weren’t moving, not even to blink. Their chests barely rose and fell with the force of their breathing, and their eyes were wide and full of fear.

Panic shot through him, and he began to struggle against his bonds.

“Stop that.” The command came from a robed figure, a woman Aleksi recalled seeing a few times around Gwynira’s palace. The early-afternoon sunlight glinted off her hair. She was pretty but cold, and he remembered thinking that her demeanor suited the frozen island. “Immobilizing you might kill you in your weakened state. I’d rather avoid that, but I will do what I must if you force my hand.”

His head spun. Looking deeper revealed dark colors swirling around her, black and red and a sickly green. Not a single shade that he associated with anything pleasant. “You’re a cruel one, aren’t you?”

“You have no idea.” The woman’s cloak floated out around her as she knelt in front of Aleksi and studied him closely. “Funny. You don’t look like a god.”

“What do I look like?”

“A human,” she answered flatly. “A fragile, breakable human. Just like I used to be, before the sky split open and the Empire imploded.”

This must be one of Sorin’s newly freed Dreamers. That explained the unhealthy colors that emanated from her, but Aleksi knew the core of what she was must have already existed before her awakening—pure evil, with no conscience.

Aleksi licked his dry lips and looked past the waves of color to focus on the woman’s face. “Where are you taking us?”

“Us? No, no.” She clucked her tongue and reached out. Her fingers felt like ice against Aleksi’s feverish cheek. “Just you, Lover. You did something naughty, and now you’re to be punished.”

Naia and Einar had not moved a muscle. Now, as he glanced at them, he could see the same discolored light that oozed from this woman shrouding them like fog. She must have possessed some sort of ability that granted her physical hold over them.

A hold that Aleksi had to figure out how to break.

He turned his attention back to the blonde with her hand on his face. “I have done many things in my time that might offend someone like you. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Hmm. No, actually, I won’t.” She rose with a sigh of absolute boredom. “It’s time to get on with things and eliminate the others.”

One of the sailors piped up proudly. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, no land for miles. Might as well throw the pirate and the girl overboard.”

The woman sighed again. “They’re creatures of the sea . Do you honestly consider that a prudent course of action?”

He deflated a bit. “They are tied up.”

A chorus of derisive laughter met his words.

“This is what I have to deal with,” she said to Aleksi, the exasperation in her tone overlaid with violent anticipation. “Silly suggestions like that. As if there are not easier ways.”

She thrust out one hand and slowly closed her fingers into a fist. For a moment, it seemed like nothing more than ridiculous theatricality.

Then Naia started turning blue, and veins bulged in Einar’s neck.

“Stop,” Aleksi demanded. “Stop it!”

But the woman simply smiled. Naia and Einar had both stopped breathing, and blood was beginning to leak from vessels in the whites of their eyes. It was as eerie as it was horrifying—they were so perfectly still, and Aleksi had never seen anyone not thrashing and struggling when—

When they were dying like this.

He didn’t lose control this time. He flung it away and willed one of the wild surges of magic he’d previously experienced to overtake him. His hands started to shake, and he welcomed the tremors. He was the god of the fields, of children and art and all things that grew. Of love ...

Not of peace.

And he had power , unimaginable and dreadful. Power enough to see into souls, to judge intentions. To bring a god back from the realms of the dead.

Sending one there would be far, far easier.

“ Stop. ” The word reverberated through him to shake the deck beneath them. “Now.”

The sailors gasped and scattered, but the woman whirled on Aleksi. “What are you going to do?” she mocked lightly. “ Seduce me into sparing their lives?” Her ugly laughter echoed off the rigging.

Then she stopped. Just stopped.

Aleksi did not look away. He stared into her eyes—beautiful eyes, save for their flinty hardness—and let her feel his pain. Naia’s pain. Einar’s.

Then he reached deeper, sifting through the woman’s memories. Dredging up the sharpest ones, the ones that still vibrated with the force of the violence she’d inflicted.

And he let her feel those, too.

She clutched at her face, her chest heaving. Then she started to scream, and the clutching turned to clawing. When she broke, it was with a whimper and a snap that Aleksi felt in his soul.

Still, he did not relent.

So she turned and ran from him, as fast as she could, heedless of the tragic fact that there was nowhere to go. When she reached the railing, she tipped over it without hesitation. A series of thuds broke the sudden, shocked stillness, but the final, terrible sound of a distant splash thrust the stunned crew back into action.

They shouted and reached for weapons, but all of Aleksi’s attention was on Naia and Einar. They were gasping in relief now, drawing in great lungfuls of air.

The relief was short-lived. It had to be, because they weren’t out of danger yet. Einar caught Naia’s gaze, and she nodded. The ship rumbled and rocked as a huge wave swept up the side of the hull and over the deck. The crew screamed, but the water carried only one person overboard.

Einar.

Malevolent amusement replaced the pirate crew’s collective fear, and they continued to advance. Naia, who had freed herself from her bonds, rose to stand in front of Aleksi. A second wave, higher and more violent than the last, crashed over the deck, tearing several of the men off their feet. Instead of washing over the other side of the boat, the wall of water whipped around and struck again.

Aleksi watched in awe as Naia unleashed the true fury of the sea upon their kidnappers. The water swirled around them, lifting them from their feet, tightening around them like a giant fist. It covered their mouths, their noses ... and squeezed .

The hull creaked ominously, and the ship did not merely rock. It lurched , and the tower of water dropped twitching and jerking bodies unceremoniously to the deck as Naia pulled Aleksi to his feet. “Quickly,” she urged. “We have to hurry.”

The words made no sense ... until a huge purple tentacle reached up around the side of the ship. Screams drowned out the sound of splintering wood, but nothing could obscure the vessel’s desperate, dying shudders.

Naia tore at Aleksi’s bonds as the top half of the mast he’d been tied to snapped off, and she jerked him off his feet and dove into the water.

For a moment, it felt exactly like staring into Einar’s heart—cold water rushing around them, the air bubbling out of Aleksi, his lungs burning—

Naia pressed her lips to his. Light flashed behind Aleksi’s closed eyelids, the same light that had illuminated his visions of Einar’s desires.

It was a curious choice, her kissing him at just this moment, but Aleksi wasn’t about to argue. If he was going to die, no immediately preferable way came to mind than to drown in Naia’s arms.

Then he realized he wasn’t drowning.

She was breathing for him.

They drifted free of the chaos, down and away from the wrecked ship, into the deep.