“Then raise it with the Elders again. The boy was misled, and he has more than learned from his mistakes. He isstrong; he’s sensible. He can hold his own against your Sealgair.”
“Eda.” A rush of water told them that Daithí had loosed an airless sigh. “For you, and for my Uncle’s memory, I will suggest the Council reconsider. But know that it is not only the Sealgair that concerns us.Youwarned us of how this would all begin. You know how it ends. He cannot stay. You should understand this better than anyone.”
When they’d emerged, Kai had not asked. He had agreed to Daithí’s suggestion that they wait by the border while he brought Alun to speak with the Sealgair, but he had not spoken a word on the long swim back through Nua Laune. Now, he turned in the waters and met Eda’s crumpled, anxious gaze.
“What did Daithí mean,” he said finally, “when he said that youknow how it ends?”
Eda just stared back at him, and in the slow stretch of the silence that followed, she was a mournful spectre; rheumy eyes wide and round, suspended in the dark with her white hair floating eerily about her.
“You will not like my answer, sweet.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Kai,” said Os, tone low with reprimand.
But Eda held his eye.
“I delivered a prophecy to the Elders when I told them of your journey to the depths. Time has somewhat smoothed the details for me, but it seems they recorded it, or at least some iteration of it. Daithí and his kin have interpreted the prophecy in their own way, and they’re reluctant to interfere with what they believe to be the natural outcome.”
Another damned prophecy.
Kai fought for control of his face, but he could not help the fleeting sideways glance that told him Oswalt was struggling too. His cousin’s lips were a tense line, his brow flat. This was one thing that had always bonded them; their agreement that the Elder’s thousands of vague and lyrical prophecies were, and had always been, glorified fairytales.
“I did tell you you would not like it,” said Eda, to his silence.
Kai was spared from mustering a response when a flicker of movement in the dark caught their eyes. Two figures wove forth through the shadows, Alun kicking and pulsing, Daithí sinuous at his side.
Alun paused, unsmiling, between two lengths of chain and said without preamble, “No fishermen. They’ll allow marked trade vessels to pass undisturbed.” Then kicked past them all and began the upward swim toward theArabidae.
Gills tight with unease, Kai turned in the water to follow him, but was drawn up short when a long set of spindly fingers shackled his wrist.
“Kai Cumhaill.” Daithí’s brittle voice skittered down his spine as he turned. “I know this was not the outcome you had hoped for.”
“It’s not over yet,” Eda piped up once more.
Daithí inclined his head gently in her direction; a placating nod. But then he drew something from the folds of his thin clothing; something that pulsed with a weak but all too familiar glow.
“I should not do this, but I admit, I feel badly. Eda speaks highly of you, so I feel I can trust you—and I will. I will trust you to return this when—if,” he amended, with a swift glance at Eda, “we eventually part ways. For now, I would offer you this small piece of home, so you might call upon the waters once more.”
Daithí raised his hand slowly, and the pendant’s glow beat like a dying heart in his palm, lighting up the dark pathways of veins and arteries beneath his thin skin. It was made from a circular vial of rough-cut seaglass, soft green with a vein of white shot through like a lightning bolt. It was not the blue glow of the pendant that had nearly drowned him, but Kai felt his gills catch and seal all the same, suffocating him just as those fathomless depths had so long ago. His hand twitched at his side, thumb curling in to touch the smoothed gash across his palm. And then, forcing a burst of water through his gills, Kai reached out that same hand and let Daithí lay the Adhlian pendant over his scar.
It was cold as a shard of ice.
He stared at it for a moment, then forced his gaze up, forced it outward and away from paralysing visions of the Laune’s darkest depths, the violent rush of its deepest waters. Forced his eyes to focus on the present; on Eda’s worried gaze, and Oswalt’s frown; on the Merrow Chief’s inscrutable face.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Use it wisely,” said Daithí.
*
As theArabidaesoared for the shore, silence settled over their party once more. It was not the anxious, thrumming silence of their inbound journey. This silence had a weight; a texture.
There was too much to process for all of them, as they sat huddled on the floor of the forecastle, stiff in their damp, salt-caked clothes and sheltering beneath the rush of the warm sunset winds. Eda dozed on Alun’s shoulder as he stared, unseeing, up at the shifting pink-and-orange sky above them. Alun had not spoken a single word nor looked in Kai’s direction since they left Daithí’s home, and Kai could think of all too many reasons why not. Oswalt, on the other hand, sat across from Kai and stared openly at the Adhlian pendant, brow knitted in thought. He would be considering, Kai knew, all the ways they could leverage this small shard of magic to build their own Nua Laune if it came to that.
Which it would not.
Because just as the Elder Council had made a decision, so too had Kai. If they would not allow him to settle in Nua Laune, he would respect their decision—and urge them to accept the rest of his people, without him. The Sealgair had no quarrel with them, after all; they were innocents. Bystanders and babes. He had sworn he would see them settled, and he would do so even if it meant he never felt the waters on his skin for the rest of his life.
