“After what you did, I doubt they’re very eager to try to enforce their justice on us again.”
“And if they tried, we would die. I can’t Summon again. I can’t. I can feel the god watching me, waiting to see how much more I’ll take. And it warned me. I fell overboard…” She met his eyes with her sky blue gaze. “Did you pull me from the water?”
“No,” Sebastian said. “Svoz.”
“But it was you who helped me to breathe again. Wasn’t it?”
“I suppose.”
“Thank you for saving my life.”
“You would have done the same.”
“And you warmed me,” she said. “You didn’t have to but—”
“I had to get you dry. It was the only way,” he said quickly.
“Thank you.”
She smiled at him, softly, warmly. She was sitting on his bunk wearing only a scrap of cloth…
Sebastian retreated behind his desk. “Stop saying that,” he snapped. He jammed his sketches into the portfolio and shoved it into the desk drawer.
“Saying what?” Selena asked, taken aback by his sudden anger.
“Thank you.” He slammed the drawer shut. “Stop thanking me all the bloody time. You saved my ship. I blew some air into your lungs. We’re bloody even.”
“Are we?” she said hoarsely, rising. The ship swayed beneath her but she found her balance quickly. “Are we even?”
No, now I owe Svoz a life too, Sebastian thought. “Aren’t we?”
She shook her head, flustered. “No, I mean…is that all there is? As though we… as if there were nothing but debts to be paid or repaid?”
“That’s all there is. That’s all life is.” He counted off on his fingers: “Take what you can get, always watch your back, and repay what’s owed so you don’t fear the knife in the night.” He made a cutting motion with his hand. “That’s it.”
“Very well. If that’s how you look at things. I’m surprised you had the presence of mind to help me at all today, given the way you sometimes look at me.”
Sebastian stared at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Sometimes I feel like you don’t care should I live or die, and other times I feel as though you hate me,” she said, meeting his gaze unwaveringly. “And sometimes, you are very kind. As on Nanokar…” She shook her head, looking away.
The silence that hung between them was thick and heavy. It seemed to Sebastian, the only sound was the thundering of his pulse in his head.
She could relieve that pain, he thought and the image of her standing close, close enough that he could smell the salt of her skin, feel the soft of her hands touching him, the warm sunrise glow of her healing engulfing him until there was no pain…
No pain.
There was always pain. The expression on Mina’s face—the last she would ever wear—was one of agony, emblazoned on his soul forever. The screams of his own victims echoed in the endless cavern of his memory.
I don’t deserve her healing.
He fought for the edge again, and watched Selena as if from a great distance.
“You hired me to sail you to Isle Saliz,” he said in a dead voice. “That is the only matter of concern between us. There is nothing else.”
Her face paled slightly and then she drew herself up and the small woman was gone. She was imperious and the immense power she wielded suddenly seemed very close to the surface. The warmth in her eyes when she looked at him vanished and her voice was as cold as the northern seas.
“Of course. You are correct. My clothes are in the galley?”
“Should be.”
“I’ll return your blanket after I’ve changed.”
“If you please.”
She went to the door. There she paused, and for a moment he thought she would speak, but then she was gone, closing the door—not gently—behind her.
Sebastian slumped in his chair, drained. The lantern above his desk swayed with the gentle rocking of his ship. He remained on the edge, not trusting himself otherwise, but his stomach interrupted his nothingness with a growl. The ship was quiet with exhausted crew. He thought it safe to find something to eat in the galley. He threw open the door and nearly tripped on his blanket, folded neatly outside. He retrieved it and retreated back into his cabin, thoughts of food forgotten.
Before he could stop himself, he pressed the linen to his nose. It smelled of seawater, faintly, and beneath that, Selena’s scent, warm and clean, and just as strong as when he’d been pressed to her, warming her with his own body.
Sebastian hurled the blanket onto the floor and returned to his desk, to the lantern. He watched its back and forth—light and shadow, light and shadow—until he stood up and blew it out.
The Paladin
Connor awoke in his bed in his little cell in the Moon Temple, at first unable to recall how he got there. Then he remembered the fish. So many fish. They’d swarmed around his boots in the shallows, and Connor had thought that if the episode hadn’t come on, something larger would have heeded his silent call. A dolphin perhaps. Or maybe even a whale. But another episode wracked him. That made two in as many weeks. They didn’t scare him. Not even the one weeks ago where lightning danced over him…
Taliah was a new addition to the duo of worried faces surrounding him as he woke. His father, Celestine, and now the crimson-skinned Juskaran woman hovered over him. She had always intimidated Connor; she was ferocious in her devotion to the Two-Faced God and intolerant of nearly everything else. But he liked her because her faith that the god would Hear him someday had been unflagging, and he had trusted that she was right. Behind them, Kyre stood like a sentry, reminding him that things were different now and the Taliah had been wrong. Very wrong.
Connor had hardly been awake more than a handful of moments, but he had come out of his sleep with a surety at the forefront of his mind. A destiny revealed to him in a dreamlike vision. He could hardly contain his excitement but knew he must if he were to fool his father and Celestine.
He blinked his eyes rapidly. “Another episode?”
They all nodded, each wearing that pitying smile he hated so much. But he kept his irritation concealed and instead smiled back.
“I called fish this time. Did you see it? I don’t know how I knew to do it, but I saw one swimming in the shallows and I just had this idea. Like with the birds a week ago…” He shook his head with remembered awe. “There must have been hundreds of them.”
Their faces, in unison, fell into furrowed consternation and unease. That irritated him too. Only Kyre stood expressionless, waiting.
“I think you should rest now,” Celestine said. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
That’s what she said after the birds. Connor feigned a pained expression. The headache that usually greeting him upon awaking from an episode was absent. “As you say, Your Reverence.”
Celestine and Taliah slipped out of the room, both watching him warily yet concerned, as though he were some kind of rare exotic animal that needed tending. His father stayed behind.
“Kyre, may I have a moment with my son, please? Alone?”
Connor nodded at the dragonman.