“So you’re acting onourpart? Or protecting Adeline?”
Kai felt his jaw lock, tight enough that he had no choice but to grind his response through his teeth.
“My objective remains the same; what does it matter?”
“It matters,” said Os, slow and cool, “because you’re talking about dragging her along with you. It matters because with Adeline at your side, your priorities change. It’s not a criticism, it’s a fact, and one we need to consider.”
A scoff ripped through him unbidden, chased by a pulse of ice from beneath his pendant.
“It certainly sounds like a criticism.”
For the first time, something flickered across Oswalt’s face. Something beyond the narrow catalogue of all his cousin’s expressions, one he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before. His shoulders curled in, then pulled back with a heaving sigh. He looked up at Kai from beneath a soft swoop of sandy hair, his eyes hard and flinty in contrast.
“Alright, Kai. Yes. It’s a criticism.”
In Kai’s periphery, a pulse of green flashed in time with the angry jolt in his chest. Oswalt’s eyes flicked to the pendant. He huffed a derisive breath.
“You’re casting aside Mael’s legacy,” he said. “For agirl. Again.”
The words were barely above a breath, but they speared like glass knives through the air between them. Where they landed and shattered, the shards buried themselves in his skin.
“That’s what this is about?” Kai’s fingers found the table’s edge and curled, hard enough to shift the dressing on his shoulder and make him clench his molars so his every word came tighter than the last. “You think I’m letting my father down?”
But Os shook his head.
“I’m worriedweare letting him down.” He let that hang a moment. Nodded slightly at the flicker of confusion that twitched Kai’s brows together. “You were different before he went to Caldbon, Kai. Reckless, impulsive—”
“I was barely more than achild.”
“And he was going towar.He was concerned. I made him a promise to help you, to stand by your side for as long as you led the Merrow. So yes, I am worried that we are letting him down. You’re not the only one with Mael’s legacy on your shoulders.”
Kai froze, and in his stillness, time paused too, the years peeling back. He saw Mael, in his mind, drifting high above the lakebed. An apparition beneath the Laune’s surface with the sun’s thinned rays playing over his furrowed brow as he took one final look at all he left behind.
It was the last time he’d ever seen his father.
Kai’s hands cramped with the pressure he’d pressed into the table, and he spread his fingers wide, exasperation tensing through his muscles and creeping into his voice.
“This wasn’t his bloodylegacy,Os, it was anobligation. We did just fine with the Elder Council, and he had a family to raise. It was bureaucratic nonsense handed down by the Beiras. He wanted it even less than I—”
His pendant pulsed, a cold bleat against his heart. Kai swallowed. His hands fisted once more. But Oswalt’s eyes flashed with understanding; the wrong kind of understanding. It was nothing close to that warm brown look that made him feel seen. It was a cool, stone gaze that told him he’d been seenthrough.
“That’s the thing, though, Kai. He did it anyway. Itishis legacy, and now it’s ours too. You’re his son, and I am—”
Oswalt’s voice thinned, but Kai had barely a moment to blink before his cousin pushed away from the table and shot upright. The reaction was jarring, more erratic and emotive than he’d ever been before. As though he had to physically separate himself from the uncomfortable sensation, step out of it. Osglanced around, brow furrowed. And Kai felt the cold pressure in his chest lift, ever so slightly. Thawed, he thought, by a dawning understanding. A missing part of the puzzle that was his ever stoic cousin.
He had been raised with Os; that was how he’d always seen it. But for Os, that meanthe’dbeen raised by Mael. That Kai and Ceri were not the only ones who had lost him in that long-forgotten battle.
“You meant a lot to him, too,” he said carefully. Quietly, as one approaching a temperamental cat. “You know you did.”
Not carefully enough.
“Don’t patronise me,” said Os at once.
Kai stood to meet him at eye level, hands coming up to bare his palms.
“I wasn’t. But he wouldn’t want you to feel like this, Os. To feel like you owed him anything other than to live the happy life he’d wish for you—and for Ceri. And for me.”
Os just looked at him. Looked at him, unmoving and unreadable even as a storm rolled in across his stony features. For a moment, Kai wondered if they were about to crumple. But they set, even harder than before, his lips pressed in a thin line so taut it dimpled his chin.
