“I have to try to put it out,” he managed. As though it were listening and understood, his pendant gave an icy pulse against his skin, and the glow of it briefly cast green light across Adeline’s pallid face.
Her claws tightened. “And if you can’t?”
“I have to find Eda, she was sleeping—”
“Eda,” Ceri breathed, the name a single dry sob.
Adeline’s grip on him faltered—tightened again, painful and panicked.
Panic was rising in his own throat too, faster than the smoke in the sky; Adeline and Ceri were still aboard, Os and Alun too; an ominous creaking laced the crackling sound of the fire above their heads, and Eda—a quick glance over the surging crowd found her nowhere in sight. Kai snapped around again, took a step in, so swift it caught Adeline off guard, and he felt the catch in her chest at his rough, urgent kiss.
“I’ll find you,” he swore when he broke away. “I promise.”
She didn’t let him go, but he went all the same; he felt his shirt tug and tighten around his arm as he walked, and when it loosened with the break of her grasp, his stomach dropped like a rock. But he’d promised to find her, and not the spiral of the flames nor even the Mother herself could keep him from his word. Kai had to move fast against the panicked tide of partygoers surging for the ship’s edge. Even bearing down nearly head and shoulders above the crowd, fear and adrenaline had thickened their muscle and grit until pushing back through the melee had his joints screaming. Heat blurred his vision, and smoke hung like shadows over the deck wherever it wasn’t already burning.
Kai braced himself against the throng, scrabbled for his pendant, the icy coolness of it a welcome shock to his half-melted nerves as he called for the waters. He could feel them—There, rolling just behind his reach, simmering away in the heat at his fingertips. Above his head, the mast gave an ominous groan.
Kai’s heart leapt into his burning lungs.
He gripped the pendant hard, staring wildly at the flaming stars, reaching once more for the waters. A wave, a spray, a sprinkle, anything.
Nothing.
Somehow, in all the months he’d been without his power, the lack of it had not felt like this, had not dragged this weight into his stomach and turned his thoughts to crisp ash. The despair, the panic. The Mother answering his call from too far away, flames forging a burning wall between Kai and salvation. Helpless; he was helpless to act, helpless to save his people, just as he’d been trying to for months now—
And if you can’t? Adeline had said, her fear thicker than the heat in the air.
Move,he told himself, needing to parse the thoughts in his own head before the fire or the panic claimed them. Get Eda, get to Adeline. Get Eda, get to Adeline.
“Eda,” he tried to call, but the moment he spoke, searing, gritty heat flooded his mouth, and he choked on his own voice.
It took everything in him not to crumple as he stumbled past the last of the stragglers. Fire licked the sky, and its heat pressed between his gills like a soldering iron, gagging him.
“Eda,” he tried again, careful not to inhale this time.
“Your Majesty?”
Kai whipped around, heart lurching at the familiar voice.
A cluster of men scrabbled like rats out of the stairwell, scatterings of playing cards fluttering to the ground in their wake. Simon stood frozen at the top of the stairs, his own cardsstill tight in his fist and his face blank with sheer shock and the orange glow that slowly devoured theArabidae.
“Simon,” Kai yelled across the deck. “Simon, get in the water—”
“I can’t swim.”
The words were so flat, the shimmer in the air so disorienting, that for a moment, Kai was not sure he understood. When he did, his limbs surged with dread that quickly gave way to strength, adrenaline feeding him for a split second.
“I’ll help you,” he called back. “You’re going to be alright, Simon.”
Relief chased the boy’s blank look and left something new in its wake, a look he’d seen from Simon only once before. Bravery, Kai realised. He was trying to be brave. Kai strode for him with renewed determination, edging around a flaming barrel.
“Wait here,” he shouted as he weaved closer. “I need to run below deck for Eda and then we can—”
A low screech dragged over his words, and Kai watched Simon’s eyes flick to the sky, glowing in the split second before he howled, “Duck!”
Kai fell back at the staggering thunder of the warning, but not before a blinding light swooped into his vision, a blunt and burning force cuffing his shoulder. He dropped with a yell, but only when the pain didn’t ease, and the flare in his vision didn’t clear, did Kai realise his skin was screaming, nerves bubbling. He was on fire.
“Your Majesty,” Simon cried, immediately spluttering through a gulp of soot-smeared air.
