This place—his gaze flew around the room, touching on the jumbled desks piled up against the walls—it was a school. The queen of Wintercraig had founded a school in Konumarr. She was very proud of it and had spoken of it often since his arrival. One of her sisters taught at the school—had, in fact, used it as her excuse to stay away from the palace since his arrival.
The Seasons were known by their giftnames, but they all had another. Ridiculously long Summerlander names. He knew, because he’d memorized them all before coming here. Including the name Gabriella Aretta Rosadora Liliana Elaine Coruscate.
Gabriella.
The Season known as Summer.
Dilys lunged forward, dropping to his knees on the blood-soaked floor.
Every Calbernan in the room snarled at him.
He didn’t snarl back. Heroared.He didn’t even have to use a Word this time. The mere force of his furious warning was enough to choke their threatening snarls into discontented rumbling. Still unhappy, but no longer verging on challenge.
Dilys reached for the fallen, unconscious woman. His hands were shaking. He stopped. Stared hard at them. Then concern for her managed what will alone could not: his battle claws retracted, disappearing into his fingertips so as not to risk the slightest nick to her precious skin. Only then did he let himself touch her, brush back the blood-matted hair from her face.
“Gabriella,” he called softly. “MyerialannaSummer...”
He heard Talin’s sharp intake of breath. The ballista operator hadn’t made the connection. Apparently none of them had, because the others in the room fell abruptly silent and the tension dropped by a significant, palpable measure. As well it should.
If the fallen woman was, indeed, Summer Coruscate, then both by dominance and by contract signed in blood and salt, the right of courtship belonged to Dilys.Without challenge.
He turned the woman’s face towards his and wiped away the scarlet spatters, revealing delicate, warm brown skin and serenely beautiful features. Her eyes were closed, but he didn’t need to see their deep, beautiful blue to know.
Dilys bent his head, drawing in a ragged breath of both relief and stunned wonder.
It was her.
Summer Coruscate. The Season who had haunted his dreams since his arrival. The shy, fearful, reputedly powerless princess of Summerlea who somehow—by some impossible, incredible miracle of fate—spoke with the legendary Voice of a Siren.
Chapter 9
“Myerielua...” Talin said, his voice oddly shaking. “Myerielua... yourulumi...”
Dilys glanced down at himself. Every tattoo on his body was lit up as if from some inner fire, shining a bright, phosphorescent blue.
At the sight of those shining lines, something snapped inside his brain and memories—clear, true, and irrefutably his—flooded into his mind. The woman standing on the dock in the moonlight—that had been her. The eyes—blue that turned to gleaming gold when she used her most shocking gifts—those were her eyes. The fingers tracing the shining, illuminated blue lines of hisulumi—hers, as well. Her voice saying his name with wonder and longing as she recognized the nascent bond between them. Her lips cementing that bond with a kiss.
There was no mistaking what was happening to him—what had begun that first night, on that dock in the moonlight, when he’d dived into the fjord to save her and emerged a man bound inliakapua.
He had begun the mating ritual of his species... with her, Gabriella Coruscate. The Summerlea princess who had used her magic to manipulate his mind.
TheSirenwho had used her Voice to make him forget that he belonged to her, body and soul.
Before he could begin to process that, her body convulsed in a wracking cough. Blood splattered across his face.Herblood.
“Where’s that healer?” he roared. “Get her herenow!”
He laid Summer gently on the floor and pressed his palms against her chest. “You will not die,moa kiri.I will not let you.” His mother had gifted him with her strength—almost all her strength—before he left Calberna. He carried it inside him now, a powerful, tremendous life force, raw magical energy, a vast ocean of it, from which he drew his own strength and powered his own gifts.
He had no power over flesh and bone, but blood... that was a different matter.
Blood was, primarily, water. Part of the ocean that had given life to all things. Part of Numahao that every living creature carried within itself.
And over water, Dilys ruled.
He closed his eyes, blocking out the press of anxious bodies, focusing on the blood—the water—that flowed through Summer’s veins. She was in a bad way. Her ribs had been broken, her lung punctured. One lung had collapsed. The other was rapidly filling with blood. There was also a rapidly growing pool of blood in her abdomen where her attacker’s booted foot had lacerated her kidney. She had other injuries as well, but those were the most severe. He focused on the lungs first. If she ceased to breathe, no other wounds would matter.
He found the punctures in the delicate lining of her lungs where tiny rivers of blood were pouring through. One by one, he blocked those flows, capturing the crimson currents with his magic and forcing them to turn, to follow a different path, using his magic to replace torn and ruptured cell walls with invisible barriers that routed her blood back into her veins.
