“Sofie,” Safira said in warning, “I don’t think I should be here.”
“These are my rooms,” I replied. “I say who can or can’t be in them.”
“If the captain sets sail without me—”
“He won’t,” I said resolutely, only to find I actually believed that. He was unfailingly loyal to his crew…as long as he didn’t believe they’d betrayed him.
I rifled through the middle drawer of my desk, not caring that I was ruining my system of organization. Where was that fool thing?
Then I remembered: This drawer always stuck. I yanked the handle with both hands, nearly dropping the entire thing on my foot. I caught it just in time. Minor magical objects clanked and collided, and still I didn’t care.
There, against the back. It didn’t look like much more than a bauble, just a small two-inch amethyst sphere with a few citrine inclusions. Known as ametrine, the mix of two translucent crystals made a strong medium for enchantments.
I wrapped a few threads of my chaos magic around the stone, gently coaxing them inside the sphere. It glowed briefly as the enchantment set.
I held it out to Safira. When she met me halfway with an outstretched hand, I dropped it into her palm. “Keep it on you at all times,” I said. “It’ll allow me to find you. I’ll send paper messenger birds with regular updates on Omar’s condition.”
Safira’s hand closed around the sphere, her eyes still on it. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry I can’t do more.”
She didn’t even manage a weak smile as she turned to leave.
“Safira?”
The siren paused.
“I should’ve been your friend,” I said. “I know it doesn’t help, but I wish I’d done a lot of things differently. That’s one of them. I should’ve tried harder to get to know you all—even if you wanted to keep me at arm’s length.”
“I offered,” she said, then stopped. One shoulder hitched up, as if she considered rebuking me further. My words felt so silly and empty, even to me.
I just didn’t know what else to say but the truth.
Temeritywas about to sail away, leaving me ashore. And I was filled with nothing but regrets.
“If things were different, if you weren’t a captive bride I helped capture, and if you’d made different choices along the way, maybe we could’ve been friends,” Safira continued. “That’s enough maybes to fill a small sea, and yet it adds up to nothing. There are plenty of regrets to go around, Sofie. Plenty of them. And the captain has more of them than all of us combined.”
Even now, she was taking his side. Advocating for him.
“He’s made his choices,” I said stiffly. “And I’ve made mine.”
What more could be said after that?
Chapter twenty-four
Sofie
Itwasstrange,beingback at Dewspell. As if everything was smaller or larger than I remembered, as if the proportions of everything had changed while I was away.
My rooms felt like a palace after so long stuck aboard ships. The laboratories and stores seemed small and quaint, but ever efficient. The dining hall was cavernous and lonely, even as sorcerers and students from my past started to notice I was back and came to greet me.
The library, of course, was still too large to fathom.
None of it felt right.
After a day of hiding in my rooms, I looked up my old suitemate from my last year as a student. Fig—who was technically still a princess—was gladder to see me than I had a right to hope for. She, too, was the recipient of a fairy godmother’s gifts.
I guess she was lucky there were no balancers like me when she was young.
