Page 63 of Tides of Shadows

“An heir?” Aidenar laughed, though the sound was cold and hollow. “You can have all your plans but let me decide about my own life.”

“Ha! Deciding about your life, you?” Cassandra scoffed. “Were it not for me and your father, you would have achieved nothing. And don’t think I don’t know what you are doing with the islander girl. You think I don’t know she wields power. Her family means nothing anymore. Fuck her if you need to but at least get the vote.”

I wanted to hear no more. I withdrew into the corridors. I felt no anger though, only an emptiness. Cassandra had the gift of cutting deep with a single sentence. I stood in the old gallery and watched the rain upon the gardens. I loved those moments when the sky wept in my name.

So that’s what I was. A vote. Nothing more.

Aidenar entered nervously, but when he saw me, his expression softened slightly. My head was a mess. I couldn’t think but I didn’t want to show how distracted I was from what I’ve heard.

“I wished to try something different today,” I said. “You control the air, so you practically control energy everywhere. I want you to start creating small spheres of energy. Like I used to with water. Focus, control, enlarge, shrink. Let them become your weapon.”

He nodded, though he looked tired. I told him to gather the energy into a ball the size of an apple. But his irritation was preventing progress. Try after try, ending in failure and a burst of scattered air.

“Steady now. You nearly had it,” I said, urging him on.

The spheres swelled, at times to the girth of a pumpkin, then broke like soap-bubbles. With a sufficiently concentrated energy sphere, one could destroy walls and ravage ships.

“It won’t hold once it grows,” he snarled.

“Empty your mind. Think only of the sphere.”

Another sphere shattered with a crack.

“Try to concentrate. Focus,” I said, softer now.

Again. Another try. The sphere grew, began to tremble and hum, glimmering with a thin blue sheen, and again it failed.

“That is enough for today. You cannot settle your thoughts,” I said gently.

Sweat ran along his temple. I could see he was on the verge of collapse.

“I am never enough,” he rasped and the sphere he held struck the floor.

The last thing I felt was a great rush of air that hurled me against the wall.

Darkness swallowed everything.

I walked among the shadows.

Silence lay thick as smoke. Cold stone pressed beneath my bare feet. I wore a black, heavy gown that wrapped about me like a serpent. I heard that darkly smooth voice again.

“To them you shall never be of great worth,” he whispered. “They disdain you, they scorn you, yet you are a goddess. You command the water, the sea, the very flesh that carries their blood. They shall never appreciate you as I would.”

He stepped out of the gloom. The same man. Tall, black hair, his eyes dark as the night sea before a gale. His face was calm, but there was power in him that unsettled breath and bone.

“They are unworthy of you,” he murmured on. “He is unworthy of you.”

“I can set you free. I can show you what dwells within your reach.”

“An end to the Families and the Dominium. Only you and power without bound.”

He looked into my eyes, and I felt myself sinking into the night. But in my mind I heard another voice. My mother’s song. She had sung it when I was a child, a lullaby of the sea that never betrays those who belong to it.

Water began to seep into the chamber, a trickle at first, then quicker. In moments it swept across the marble, rising to our knees, to our waists. The man in black frowned.

“Do you think he would fight for you?” His voice turned wrathful, bitter as gall. “He wanted only your power. You are a toy to him, a diversion, a passing pleasure. Nothing more.”

The cold waves rose higher, until it reached my neck. The last I saw was his face, anger and disbelief upon it. Then he was gone. The water covered me entirely. I felt no fear. I drifted in the deep, light and unbound, as though I returned to the place that had always been mine.