“Wonderful. Adeline, a word?”
He rose gracefully to his full height and tugged her so gently after him that it lent her a moment of relative grace, too. Hand in hand, they stepped into the shadow of the mast and pressed themselves into the tapered railing of the forecastle.
Kai didn’t speak at first, so Adeline gave him some time, turning to look out over the dark shimmer of the water as it rippled beneath the starlight. The same breeze that stirred the surface gusted over her shoulders, and when she shivered, Kai was at her back at once, the warmth of his arms encircling her. She clung to his forearms and tilted her head instinctively just as he turned his face to the curve of her neck.
“I don’t want you to feel as though you have to make your peace with this. With us exploring the possibility of a way home.”
Pain lanced through Adeline’s chest.A way home.Goddess, what she’d give to find her own way home now, and she’ddeniedhim that, let him give up on it because of how it might hurt the people she cared for. But he was the person she cared for the most. She could admit that now, even if it was only to herself.And the people Kai cared for—they needed a way home, now more than ever.
“Ihavemade my peace with it,” she said.
“Eisalaan will thaw,” he said gently.
“And the world will keep turning.”
It wasn’t quite so simple, she knew that. There would be pain, difficulty. But she was the Heir of the Silver Fucking Kingdom, and she would see Eisalaan through the Thaw if it killed her. She was going to make it right.Theywere going to make it right.
Together.
She wanted that.
“Adeline,” Kai breathed, like her name in itself was the answer. He pressed a kiss to the side of her throat, then hesitated. “Would you like to know something awful?”
When she nodded, his warm hands splayed over her waist, and she let him turn her gently to face him. He pressed her into the crook of the railing, his arms a taut, protective bracket around her.
“I’d do it again,” said Kai. He took her face in one hand, palm warm beneath her jaw, and his eyes gleaming with utter reverence. “I’d do it all over again. If it meant meeting you, loving you, I’d help her commit a blasphemous crime that doomed the world for centuries to come. I would do that. I’d sentence myself to millennia beneath the ice for five minutes of you tormenting me over my manners.”
He pored over her face. Not awaiting an answer, she understood, but looking, taking his fill of her. Committing everydetail to memory, gaze stroking over the curve of her lip and the slope of her cheekbone.
And Adeline’s eyes stung.
She wanted to blink away the heat behind them, but she could not miss a moment of this; of the look on Kai’s beautiful face and the play of refracted water spilling starlight over his skin as he stared at her, so tenderly.
“Kai,” she heard herself say. Her throat hurt, her heart thundered, but the words were coming and—Daughters give her strength, she had no will to stop them. “Kai, I lov—”
This time, she knew, she would have told him.
Would have, had a roar of flame not ripped her voice away into the black night.
Chapter Twenty
Kai
For the hours and days to come, Kai would find himself haunted by those few precious seconds he’d lost to sheer shock.
In the moment, he thought of nothing but caging Adeline beneath him, his body a shield between her and the wall of heat clawing at his back. It was Ceriwyn’s scream that roused him from that instinctual freeze. He spun, tucking Adeline behind him and cringing back at the flare of light, ragged orange flames ripping through a soft night sky.
“Kai,” Ceri shrieked again, and he sought the sound amid a cacophony of screams, the deafening whip of flames in the breeze. Light spots burst behind his eyes as he dragged them away from the tower of fire that licked up the main mast.
“There,” Adeline gasped, hand flying out past him to point to where his sister stood at the top of the forecastle steps, clinging to the bannister and straining against Alun’s grip on her arm as he tried to drag her away.
“Ceri, you need to jump!” Alun was shouting, angrier than Kai had seen him in all their years of friendship, or perhaps just more frightened. It was a visceral echo of Kai’s own dread, resounding in the hollow of his stomach as he took Adeline’s hand and rushed toward his court, herding them all to the ship’s edge where Oswalt was already guiding frantic passengers over the rope ladder. All along the railing, Merrow clambered up and dove into the burning night, but the waters were deep and the distance far enough to break human bones.
“Ceri, Adeline, go with Alun. Now. Al, get them off the ship; get Adeline down the ladder.”
But Adeline held tight to his arm, her nails catching like the claws of some frightened animal. That same primal fear hollowed her eyes, the flicker of the fire dancing in their depths.
“Where are you going?” she choked; her voice was thick with soot, throat likely burning just as his was. A jolt sang painfully through him. He needed her off this ship; needed it so badly it gutted him, held his voice just out of reach.
