Morwenna’s throat bobbed. She didn’t deny it. That he knew how much she needed her skin and he still kept it from her was all I needed to know about his character.
Edmonds stepped closer, rain dripping from his hood. “You wanted your seal-skin.”
The air went colder.
Bash’s hand brushed mine—silent warning.
Morwenna’s eyes shimmered, but she didn’t cry. Not yet. She held herself like a woman who had survived by refusing softness.
Edmonds looked at her for a long moment, then reached into his cloak.
His hand emerged holding something slick and pale—a bundle of hide that made my stomach twist. The seal-skin looked almostsilver in the rain, mottled and smooth, the kind of thing that should have been alive.
Morwenna’s breath broke. It was the first sound of her grief.
Edmonds watched it with detached interest, then lifted the skin and tossed it toward her like a coat.
“You don’t need leverage anymore,” he said. “Not now. Not when I’m about to collect what I came for.”
Morwenna caught it with shaking hands.
And then she cried.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just tears sliding down her face as she stared at the skin like it was both salvation and a corpse. Her fingers clutched it with desperation that made her knuckles pale. She pressed it to her chest, and the sound that came out of her was so raw it didn’t feel human.
I found my anger… faltering.
Because in that moment, she wasn’t a witch or a bargain-maker or a woman who had delivered us to monsters.
She was a woman holding the last piece of herself.
Morwenna swallowed hard and looked up at Edmonds.
“I tried,” she whispered. “I tried to keep you from becoming him.”
Edmonds’s jaw clenched.
“You couldn’t,” he said flatly. “And you didn’t truly want to. You stayed. You watched. You let him teach me how to hunger.”
Morwenna flinched as he struck her.
“You finally have what you’ve ever wanted,” Edmonds said, voice sharpening with impatience again. “So take it. Leave. Go north. Go to whatever shore will tolerate you. I don’t care.”
Morwenna’s shoulders shook. She clutched the skin tighter, then turned.
For a moment, I expected her to say something—a curse, a plea, a prophecy.
She didn’t.
She walked away down the dock into the rain, the seal-skin held to her chest like a child. Her dark hair hung like seaweed. Her back was straight, but her grief followed her in visible waves.
Edmonds didn’t watch her go.
He turned to me instead.
“Rose,” he said, and my name sounded like he’d dissected it and found it useful. “Hand it over.”
My hand tightened around the conch beneath my cloak.
