Vi gave him a small smile. Their lives—their love, however unspoken it was—seemed so insignificant in the face of the needs of the whole world. No wonder neither of them could bring themselves to say it aloud.
“Now, I’m going to get some rest…” Taavin looked over her shoulder. Vi thought he was looking to the cabin, until she turned, realizing he’d locked eyes with her father. “You finally have your father. You should spend some time with him.”
Vi squeezed his hand once before letting go.
Taavin crossed to the cabin and disappeared behind the curtain. Arwin was at the helm, focused and silent. Her father slowly stood and walked over to her. Vi’s throat was thick with emotion, and tears prickled her eyes but didn’t fall. Aldrik’s eyes seemed just as glassy.
But the deeply ingrained stoicism of royalty won for them both.
They had shared words. They had been reunited. This moment felt different. This moment felt like the first time they were actually seeing each other, free from panic, fear, and worry.
Vi took a deep breath.
“It’s been a while. I’ve much to tell you.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“It started with a watch…”Vi began as they sat at the bow of the boat. The seas were blessedly smooth, the salt spray from the hull cutting through the ocean misting her legs as she hung them over the side between the railings. “This watch—or what’s left of it, to be specific.”
“I recognize it.”
“You do?”
Her father hummed softly. “Even charred and broken, I’d know it anywhere. After all, it was this watch that gave your mother her magic back.”
“Magic… back?” Vi repeated.
“Have we never told you that story?”
“I suppose not.” Vi had heard of rare cases where sorcerers lost their power through a process callederadication—diminishing magic to the point that it created a block in the channel. But she’d never heard of her mother going through it.
“When the Mad King rose up, he gravely injured your mother and, in the process, robbed her of her magic. There was a brief time when her command of the wind was gone.” Aldrik’s eyes drifted closed and he sighed, for a moment living in a time well before Vi’s birth. “We didn’t think she would ever regain her power. But it seemed she had made an unintentional vessel—that watch. It housed enough of her magic to reopen her channel.”
“Fritz said that Mother was reunited with her power when the world was darkest, thanks to this. But I didn’t know…” Vi turned the watch over and over in her hands.Magic has an odd way of finding us when we need it most. He couldn’t have known when he’d sent the watch how right he’d been. “It gave mother a connection to her power; it gave me a connection with mine,” she whispered, mostly to herself.
“Your magic, Vi…” Her father left the sentence hanging, clearly expecting her to fill in the blank.
“It’s not like yours, after all.” She looked back over the deck, toward the cabin. Her mind was an ocean of memory and Vi was sinking into its depths. “It’s like his.”
“His?” Her father turned, following her attention. “Ah… Taavin, you called him?”
“He’s a Lightspinner. Like me.” Her voice nearly quivered at the end. “I-I’m not a Firebearer.”
Aldrik was quiet, looking back out over the sea for a breath. Eventually he turned to her, tilted his head, and asked, “So?”
“My magic isn’t like yours, like grandmother’s, like anyone in the Ci’Dan line or anyone on the Dark Isle for that matter.”
“Just as Sehra predicted.”
Her parents had known, thanks to the traveler, that she would have unique magic. At first, Vi had hated the traveler and what she’d done to her life. But now, sitting next to her father—a father she had rescued thanks to that magic—Vi found her rage had quelled. Had it not been for the traveler, Aldrik would be dead.
“Speaking of family, does your mother know where you are?”
“I’m not sure.” Vi glanced at him, feeling as if she was about to be scolded. “I told Romulin. He may have mentioned something by now.”
Aldrik shook his head, letting out a chuckle. Had her father always looked so old? Sounded so tired? It seemed he’d aged ten years in the five it had been since she’d last seen him.
“My foolish daughter… You could’ve been killed, you know.” His face fell from the controlled mask of the Emperor into the raw emotion of a father.
