Page 58 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

Curious, we made our way to him, leaving the humans to shift their weight along the sand. My sea was cold against my bare feet, but it drew me in, welcomed me home. I slid into the tide, ducking below to watch a horse streak past in deeper water. Half of a horse, head and shoulders and front legs—the other half gleamed under a muscular tail, almost as long as my entire body, deep blue and endless. Wide flukes rippled at the end, so thin it was almost transparent.

“I knew it,” Aegir said when I lifted back to the surface in shock. “She’s a Marequus. A horse of the sea.”

We each claimed a human to tow through the river’s foamy current. Diara had stiffened when I’d explained the need for it: we could travel further, faster, if the humans simply floated behind us, taking our air every few miles, though I understood her aversion to handing control of her body to someone she barely knew.

Hadrian had simply shrugged, surprising me. I suppose his life had been threatened so many times, the idea of placing it in a stranger’s hands seemed commonplace. When Aegir drew close to blow Naiad oxygen into his lungs, he didn’t bat an eye.

Still blindfolded, Kye waited as my sirens tugged him under before they could take a breath of air. He floated in the shallow water beside me, the cold already pressing its fingers into my bones. When we were the final two remaining, he turned toward me, a hand curled around the back of my neck as he drew me close.

His lips were warm, smooth, though his stubble scraped against my chin. He took me with slow, skillful strokes, tilting his head through the lashes of his mouth and tongue as if savoring something he’d craved for days. I let my fingers root in his soft hair, boneless as I melted into him, until he pulled back just enough, his thumb skimming the underside of my jaw, that I gently sealed my mouth over his and exhaled.

I didn’t regret carrying him through the torrent, but I wished he could stay with me. Really stay.

Two days into our swim, we cut from ocean to river, and according to Aegir, we weren’t yet halfway, though Kolibri seemed to drag us twice as fast as we’d have traveled without her. Daylight was spent swimming, but at night Nori sat between Olinne’s legs as they curled under a cloak in the cold, Olinne’s chin tucked over Nori’s shoulder. The river’s tide was low, the air thick with drizzling rain, the embankment damp enough to hiss against the floating embers sloughing from our fire.

I shivered as well, even under thick furs, pressed against the warmth of Kye’s chest. Aegir and I had called the water out of our clothes and hair as soon as we’d set foot onto land, channeling anything moist back to the river, though the soft rain was slowly nullifying our efforts. Midnight air nipped at our skin, misted around our mouths, cold enough to steam over our heads.

Diara’s cheeks pinched with winter blight as she stared into the flames, the sharp corner of her bow just visible over her shoulder.

“Do you feel the current in the air?” Aegir asked. Unlike us female Naiads, he wasn’t shivering, though gooseflesh had erupted down his neck and across his arms, his eyelids a shade cooler than they’d been in Calder.

I stretched my hand, feeling against the water. It was everywhere around me, a low cloud that buzzed and burned against my call. And within it, tiny shreds of static.

“It’s plasma,” Aegir continued. “If you look up, you will see burning clusters of it, billions of years away from us.”

At my back, I felt Kye glance at the night sky in the same moment I did. The solitary crackling of the fire in the seconds that followed told me everyone else had as well. Somewhere in the back of my memory, titanic spheres roared, flames scorching me as I ran a trail of glittering dust.

“We can’t control the stars,” Aegir said. “Just as we can’t control the plasma here.”

“How can I call lightning, then?” I asked.

“You can’t. You are a water-caller. Electricity is not water. You do not wield the stars by calling to plasma in the atmosphere. You wield them by finding points of electricity already around you and connecting them with water. One mote of plasma alone won’t give you a charge. You need to bridge it with a mate. And this”—he indicated to the foamy rain around him—“is the perfect time to practice. When you aren’t angry.”

Aegir leaned forward then, rolling his weight onto his knees, reaching out a hand and waiting for me to take it. Kye grew very still, and I was reluctant to leave his heat under the fur pelt we’d shared. But I steeled myself against the cold, twisting my hair away from my shoulders and taking Aegir’s hand, letting him hoist me upright.

“Can you feel it?” Aegir asked.

I pursed my mouth, trying to search for what he claimed surrounded me. Water pressed back, billowing and blowing like smoke over a wet fire, unwilling to stay still unless I summoned it.

The Venusian gazed patiently at me. “Sometimes it helps if you close your eyes.”

I licked a bead of rain from my lip and shut the world away, trapping the moon and river and all my friends behind the curtain of my eyelids. Darkness landed over the top of me, and I shook the cold away from my arms.

I let it fade away. The snap and pop of campfire, the ash inside my nose, the rhythm of Kye’s heartbeat behind my back. One slow breath at a time, I shrank it down, put it away, folded it into nothing, and tucked it into my pocket, so that the world was as simple and deep and quiet as the house of shadow.

And there, stitched into the shroud of air, were the tiny shreds of water I’d seen only twice before, when Naiad oxygen spilled into my lungs.

They sparkled and shifted, twisting and dancing and floating around me. I traced them with my finger, collecting them one at a time, until I reached a liquid drop of metal, though I knew that wasn’t right. This was not steel or iron or silver. It was volatile, hot-tempered and fickle, a volcano in the shape of a tear, shaking to break loose of its own skin.

I searched for a second one; everything seemed miles apart. But I finally found it, a tiny mote of liquid silver begging to explode. My focus igniting, I dragged water between the two, a long string of liquid from one end to the other—

SNAP.

It startled me more than anything else, a sharp shock in my palm like a bright crack, there and gone, pulling me back to myself. I worked my tongue, the taste in my mouth like metallic salt. Ahead, green eyes smiled. “I knew you’d find it if you tried.”

We followed the rivers east, bracing against cold under the sun and warming ourselves by flame at night while Kolibri flounced and frolicked in the water below until she wore herself out, climbing to the riverbank to drop and snore like a hound. The following evenings were clear of rain, drizzling or otherwise, but I took to learning the music of the stars.

Lightning was slippery. Once the connection was made between two charges, my control vanished. White fire surged, angled and hungry, and I learned to train at a distance from my team. Or more accurately, they learned to move away the minute I grew warm enough to let my furs drop to Kye’s knees and stood, a lesson after one of my bolts of light had singed the rock between Aren’s feet.