“And now,” said the High Priestess. “I invite you all to bear witness to the seven divine vows.”
Kai’s gills tensed, a reflexive bid for the oxygen his tight lungs could not draw. In his periphery, Imogen was visibly steeling her spine against the unyielding call of that all-consuming power, fighting to remain alert and ready.
“In the name of the Goddess,” said the Priestess, “you solemnly vow to nurture your bond from now until death parts you.”
Kai’s every fibre locked in place as Avette stepped in, the cruel curve of her lips flashing like a blade’s edge before they pressed to his own. His gills ached with his withheld breath, stomach roiling in protest. She drew back, and he could not help but rake in that missing breath with an audible gasp.
One vow.
“In the name of Daughter Lasra, you solemnly vow to kindle one another’s passions for many years to come.”
He held his breath through the next kiss, cringing when it lingered.
Avette pulled back with a smile like a scythe. Beyond her, Gerard stood stock still, his hand no longer playing at his hilt but curled readily around it.
Two vows.
“In the name of Daughter Tala, you solemnly vow to ground one another through life’s many trials.”
She kissed him again.
Three vows.
Adeline had set her jaw and drawn her shoulders back, a hardy gleam in her eyes he knew from their tussles in the training room, so long ago now. Focus, determination, and something he hadn’t recognised until now. Something she had finally named for him as she begged him to remain hers, and only hers.
He looked at her, openly, over his bride’s shoulder. Brazen enough to stir a rustling from the pews. To set a flash of blue in Avette’s black eyes and stir the air around her hair. Stillnot enough, it seemed, for Imogen to act. But he was closer. She would not stand for public humiliation when this,allof this, had been orchestrated to polish her all-important image. The Saviour of Eisalaan, risen and triumphant. The Sorceress, returned from a cursed eternity to claim her fairytale ending with her one true love.
Kai met her eye and willed her, for just a moment, to see him. Toreallysee him. The man she had tricked, humiliated, and imprisoned, handled like a careless child with too many toys. But Kai was not her toy; not hers to break. He let her see that in the shift of his expression when he looked at her. Her lip curled, nostrils flaring with the weight of her own breath.
“In the name of Daughter Isa, you solemnly vow to let your past wash away with the tide.”
Avette moved toward him, and Kai knew with a bone-deep certainty that this was it. Only the fourth vow of seven, still time to think and gather himself—but he would not. Becausethiswas the one vow for which he would not pretend. History may have forgotten the truth of their past, but that truth had kept him company through centuries in the dark. He would not vow, beforeanydeity, to forget it all now.
Avette laid a hand on his shoulder, craning up to meet him. He flattened a hand beneath her elbow to guide her, let her reach for him until her frosty breath prickled his lips—and turned his head at the last moment to speak in her ear.
“There is no forgetting for you and I, Avette.” She stiffened. Her skin buzzed beneath his palm, magic stirring within her like the hum of a thousand angry wasps. “There is no washing it away.”
He pulled back to meet her eye, and found a glowing blue glare in place of the dead, black eyes he’d once known so well.
“There is notide,” he said, no longer bothering to lower his voice. “Because you froze it.”
Kai had once known Avette’s expressions rather well. There’d been joy, desire, genuine warmth when she looked at him. There’d been something sharp that he’d never had the words for, a possessiveness he now understood for calculation. And then there had been only impenetrable cold, and the flare of anger that preceded her wrath. It was that cold that beheld him now. In the weeks that had passed, he had learned that that look preceded a stirring of the Mother’s warped and muted call. A crackling of cruel ice racing to do Avette’s bidding.
He didn’t hear that crackling as she reached for her pendant.
He heard only the flooding roar of the missing tides as he reached for her throat.
Chapter Forty
Adeline
Nothing could have prepared her for the sheer force of the flood. It was ravenous and demanding, a thing made not for bodies of soft tissue and delicate nerves but for the earth itself. It ripped through her like one natural force moves through another, a river through a rockbed, and she simply was not made for it. Shebowedto it through no will of her own, knees hitting a bed of moss she hadn’t meant to call forth.
“Adeline,” Mareda cried.
Through the deafening groan and rustle of her forest storm, Adeline could feel Imogen pulling back, fighting to spool her influence in.
“No,” Adeline gritted.
