He knows I can’t breathe underwater, right? I can’t even speak to tell him that. But there’s a mountain of force behind the gentle tug and the float Roiven made me comes down with me, sinking beneath the ocean’s surface.
Down, down, down, until the world darkens around me, the light thinning. The float escapes my grip as the kraken’s tentacle shifts around me. I watch it soar up toward the surface, through the dark.
Maybe I should be scared. But it feels like coming home.
At last I come to a stop. The kraken holds me up in front of one massive eye. I swear stars are swirling in the inky surface.
I can’t breathe. How am I supposed…
Breathe, the kraken’s voice says, a dry crackle in my head. My chest hurts and I take a gulp even knowing it will be the death of me. But it’s air that fills my mouth, not water, and if my eyes still sting from the salt they aren’t underwater anymore.
There’s a bubble of air around my head. I gasp, frantic to fill my lungs with more air. What do I do if the air bubble vanishes?
Why are you so quick to assume I would hurt you?
“I don’t know how to breathe underwater.”
You are mine, little knight. I will not let harm come to you.
“Then why did you let me get taken in the first place?” I say, before I can think. I regret the words immediately, certain he’s going to shut me out entirely. But the kraken only pulls me closer, until his giant eye is the only thing I can see, like he’s studying every detail of me.
I was not fast enough to stop it.
“What do you mean?”
He pulls his other tentacles in toward himself, and I can practically feel the ocean shudder with displaced water. A group of small fish dart past my head, just outside the bubble of air.
Your mother was my last bonded.
“My…” my mouth goes dry. Roiven said it wasn’t about bloodlines. But if the kraken was my mother’s familiar, too… “My mother was…?”
I want to know everything. Who she was, what she was like. But all I do is stare as the kraken continues.
The queen of witches. We managed to push back the death ships, together. The witches were reclaiming their lands. So when a group of witches sailed between isles to re-wild the lands, I let her join them instead of taking her myself. I needed to hunt.
The idea of a kraken this large needing to eat makes me wonder how the seas aren’t empty—and just how deep the water goes.
An assassin struck,he continues.
“Someone betrayed her?”
Your mother used to let deserters from the Empire join, until the Empire felt the tides turn against them, and realized they could use her kindness to send traitors into your midst. This was faster than slowly draining your lands… which they had resorted to, since I made travel by ocean an impossibility for them.He sounds smug.
“So someone attacked my mother.” Someone she’d welcomed, from the Empire. The thought makes me sick.
I felt her death, down in the abyss. I could not rise fast enough. With her dying breath she begged me to save you as your father putyou in the water. The moment you touched the sea I claimed you as mine, but I could not reach you, before…
“The War-Father took me,” I breathe. This part of the story, I know, at least a little, through the dim haze of memories. Even without the enchantment on me I can’t remember everything. Some details are perfectly preserved, the blood and the screams, the terror, the nets they used to drag me from the ocean and the War-Father’s metal hands as he dug me from the netting.
By the time I reached sunlight, the death-god’s people were sailing toward their barriers with a knife to your throat. This, I think, was their aim—not just to kill my last bonded, but to remove me from the war. I did not dare strike and cause your death. And then you vanished to the other side of the enchantment and I did not know if you lived until Savasaeirn tried to kill you. Dragons.
The way he thinks the last word feels scornful and affectionate all at once.
“They made me afraid of the ocean,” I tell him.
There is no end to their cruelty. The ocean has always been your birthright, even before I claimed you as my own.
“Roiven didn’t know you were still alive,” I tell him. “Why didn’t you keep fighting? Why…?”
