Kai could see it too; they’d sailed far enough to bypass the handful of ships moored on the coast, and the dock was now in full view.
As was the heaving throng of people standing atop it, their cheers just audible over the rush of the waves. At the sight of the crowd, Kai could feel Adeline tense at his side; he couldn’t say why, and when he risked a sideways glance, she only smiled tightly up at him.
“Looks like we have a welcoming committee,” she said.
“It looks that way,” he agreed.
Mother above. Two weeks among the sailors and he was slowly morphing into a parrot, capable only of squawking Adeline’s observations back at her. On his other side, Ceri loosed a low, awkward whistle, and he resisted the regressive urge to muss her hair.
With the dock ahead of them, the waters parted like butter beneath a blade, theArabidaegliding eagerly home. The crowd came into focus bit by bit; Alun was at the fore, his familiargrin as broad as ever, the ebony apples of his cheeks gleaming under the high Dhaliaan sun. Many of the faces surrounding Al were familiar—there was Eda clinging to his arm, and Os’s sandy blonde head skulking somewhere behind him. The merrow had come out in full force to greet them, but they were not alone.
The Empress Eleni Vanjir stood a little ways apart from Alun with her hands folded demurely over her vibrant red skirts. Surrounding her in shining bronze armour was a personal guard of at least a dozen men, and beyond them, even more spectators.
TheArabidaeanchored with a soundless thud that sang beneath their feet, and within minutes, the crew had hauled up a wooden gangway handed overhead by their peers on the dock.
Ceri was the first to scramble down from the ship, and she’d already thrown her arms around Al and Eda before Kai had even turned away from the bow. He went to follow her, but something nagged at his attention; Adeline was still rooted to the spot, her hands curled over the bow’s railing with painfully bleached knuckles.
“Adeline?”
He called her name as gently as he could over the now deafening roar of the small crowd below, but even so, she jumped as though he’d screamed it.
“Coming,” she said vaguely. She looked nearly nauseated; as ashen and jittery as she’d been on their very first day aboard.
Kai felt his brow knot and his feet move beneath him, an absent step toward her before he forced himself to still.
Space,he reminded himself.Distance. It’s what she wants.
But even forcing himself not to close that distance, Kai couldn’t tame his expression, nor force his gaze away from hers. Adeline’s tight smile gave way to a true one, soft and warm and reassuring.
“I’m fine, Kai. Lead the way.”
So he did.
Pausing at the gangway to offer his hand was second nature. He knew her acceptance was too, but that didn’t stop the jolt of warmth that bolted down his arm at her touch. It took a concerted effort to let her go as she stepped over the ship’s edge, and even then, her warmth remained. He closed his palm around it, as though he could hold onto the feeling. As though he could keep it as a reminder of all they’d been to each other.
“Koo,” Ceri hollered from somewhere beneath him. “D’you fancy yourself a sailor now? Get off the bloody boat!”
Sighing inwardly, Kai followed Adeline down the gangway. Alun had stepped up to greet her, though he hadn’t quite let go of Ceriwyn either, and the three of them laughed as they folded into one messy embrace. Os moved around their giddy huddle and stopped short just a few steps before Kai to offer a stilted, hesitant nod.
Kai wanted to pull his cousin into a hug, to say something reassuring, and sweep the awkwardness between them aside. But he was, quite plainly, exhausted—and, if he were honest with himself, some petty, rotten thing within him was not quite ready to forgive Os for all that he’d implied.
For being right.
You walk chest-first through life, without a scrap of armour.
He wondered, as he returned his cousin’s greeting with a stilted nod of his own, whetherOs felt vindicated, or just annoyed thatKai hadn’t listened to him in the first place. It was hard to tell; it always was with Os, and not least in the moment that his cousin’s blank stare was drawn away by a chorus of clinking metal. Kai followed his gaze as he stepped off the gangway; Eleni Vanjir was crossing the dock to greet them, ringed by her armoured guard—and with her eyes trained on Adeline as the princess untangled herself from Al and Ceri.
Kai moved without deciding to, but the Empress was undeterred by his swift step in front of Adeline. She nodded at him as he broke into her line of sight and smiled her glittering, enigmatic smile. So familiar, yet so hard to read, even now that she’d opened her home to them.
“King Cumhaill,” she said, a cursory greeting. Her eyes drifted away, back to Adeline—and that smile broadened.
“And my darling Adeline, home at last.”
Kai frowned, struggling to decipher his own thoughts through the sudden swell of whoops and cheers from the Dhaliaan onlookers across the dock.
Her darling Adeline?
Before he could even attempt to decipher the context, Adeline stepped past him with a coaxing brush of her hand on his arm. Her smile was more strained than he’d seen it throughout the entire crossing; not sad and unsure, but tense. Unmistakably so.
