Page 96 of Her Cruel Redemption

I groaned as I tried to move. Every muscle in my body was tight and wracked with sharp bolts of pain. There was a ringing in my ears. I couldn’t quite figure out where I was or what had happened. I grasped for magic, trying to reach around me, to read who was near and get a sense of any immediate danger, and felt… nothing. No humming answer in my blood. No surge of anticipation. The hissing voices in my head were silent.

‘Come on, you’ve got to get up. Most of the fleet is already on the move, and Oceatold’s troops aren’t far from the harbour now,’ Lester yelled over the gale as I pushed myself up, squinting at the scene around me. I was on the ground at the end of that spindly bridge, the stone platform dug into the cliff face. Below me, the stairs stretched down, and Lester was already trying to jostle me in their direction. I shook him off.

‘Wait.’ I pinched the bridge of my nose, hissing against the splitting pain, reaching again for magic. No response. I thought I could almost feel a ghost of what had once been, a whisper of that latent power, but it slipped away from me. I pieced together what had happened, remembering the lightning. Slowly, a realisation began to form.

‘Right, waiting is over. I know you’ve just been struck by lightning—your own bloody fault, by the way—but we’ve really got to go.’ Lester was already a couple of steps below me, paused mid stride as he waited for me to follow, hand half-extended like he was prepared to catch me if I collapsed again.

But I looked to the bridge.

Rhiandra was halfway along it, still trying to reach the lighthouse. Her steps were laboured, her hand gripping tightly to the railing. Beneath her, the ocean was thrashing and angry, a black mass of waves below a sheer drop. Lightning was striking the ocean all around the harbour, a cacophony of light so bright it sheared straight through the black night and turned it to a stark, white day. There was no way she was going to be able to keep going. Her body couldn’t take it. Her consciousness would give out before her determination to push forward did.

I predicted what would happen a moment before it did.

She swayed.

I fumbled with the buttons of my heavy coat as she staggered. I was already kicking off my boots before the coat hit the ground.

She slumped, losing her hold on the handrail.

My heart tripped as fear chased its beat, and I stumbled as I climbed the rock wall ringing the platform. The drop was steep, the black water below tossing restlessly in response to the storm above.

Lester’s voice bellowed after me. ‘Don’t you fucking dare!’

But she slipped over and began to fall. I’d already jumped.

We hit the water at the same time.

Chapter Forty-Five

Iswam out of the murky depths of unconsciousness, continually drifting back towards the dark. I caught a few snatches of sound, first. A soft, rhythmic rushing noise. A strained, ceaseless muttering, which I realised a second later was my own voice. Then I slipped down again. The next time, I caught a flicker of light through slitted eyelids, strange and shifting in patterns. But my eyes wouldn’t stay open and I was gone again. The last time, I surfaced in a panic, chased by a nightmare of a huge, white beast leaping out of the depths of the ocean, mouth open wide to swallow me whole. I thrashed violently, my legs tangling as I kicked them, crying out. I saw nothing, but felt fingers against my forehead, running through my hair. Water pressed to my mouth, accepted in greedy gulps. It settled me, slowing my heart rate, until I was sinking back into unawareness again, this time with no monster waiting. Just the embrace of a strangely warm sea.

I broke through unconsciousness fully to a body that felt like it had been beaten and buried. My limbs were heavy, and my head throbbed steadily. My eyes flickered open, squinting against the headache as I tried to make sense of what I saw. There were patterns of shifting light wavering over a ceiling of stone and dripping stalactites. Turning my head gingerly, caring for my stiff neck, I took in the cave, the river of gleaming water slowly rising and receding, the rolling rush of distant waves. The man sitting nearby, knife in hand, methodically working the bade between the lips of a shellfish, dark hair stiff with salt. I felt a brief, sharp spark of warmth, seeing him, right before I wondered what he was doing here. WhatIwas doing here.

I licked my dry lips. Even simply moving my head made me feel dizzy. My thoughts were sluggish, the world tilting when I shifted my gaze, so I kept it fixed to those hands as they carefully peeled back a shell to expose the meat within before picking up the next one.

‘Where are we?’ I asked in a voice so raspy the words might just have been fingernails scratching at the stone. The hands stopped, head lifting. Something like relief crossing grey eyes.

‘In the cave system that runs beneath Port Howl.’

‘But how did we get here?’

‘You fell.’ There was something haunted, tormented in his eyes as he watched me. ‘So I jumped.’

Flashes of memory. The slippery bridge beneath my feet. The storm thundering all around me. The electrifying, chaotic maelstrom of my mind right before I’d realised I was about to black out. The sensation of falling.He’d jumped.

‘Why would you do that?’ The words grated out of me, little more than a raspy whisper. He turned back to shucking shellfish and didn’t answer. It was a long time before I could speak again. Before I had the courage to speak again. The words I wanted to say swam around inside my head for a long while before I did, pushed and pulled in currents of my stodgy memories, of our shared history, of all we had done and would do to each other, quickening my pulse and catching at my breath. They were mad words, words dreamed up by someone still half-gripped with this unnatural sleep, still reeling from the cold grip of the ocean and the warmth of his hands pulling me free. I was terrified to trust in them, terrified to believe in them, and even more terrified of how they might completely dismantle me. But they were the only words that made any sense, that put the world back into alignment with this, with his jumping into the teeming, lightning-streaked ocean after me.

‘You’re in love with me.’

He stiffened, hands going still again, as though he’d heard footsteps in the stones. But then he went right back to what he was doing without looking up. ‘I think you’ve known that for a while.’

What could I say to that? How could I speak around this deep, aching sorrow in my chest? How could I be trusted to speak when I could feel my defenses disintegrating, exposing the raw, painful regret behind them? So I just watched him in the humid dark, the distant waves echoing through the chamber in a soft lull, his hands so quick and capable, long fingers manipulating the knife like he’d been shucking clams all his life, until the fuzz in my head rose again, becoming too thick to see through any longer and I drifted back to sleep.

When I next woke, it felt like I finally broke from that woozy, stodgy suck of unconsciousness, like freeing a boot from being stuck in the mud. It took me a few moments and a brief attack of panic to get my bearings, scanning my surroundings, pulling at hazy memories of lightning tearing through me, of falling, of waking to this cavern before. But I was alone now. Had Draven really been here, or had I just dreamed him? No, he must have been here. There was a fire burning nearby, the smoke curling up a natural flute in the cave. There was a tin or a pot of some sort on the coals.

A ravenous hunger roared to life in my stomach as I caught the scent of something edible, something that smelt vaguely of the sea. When I shifted to my side, my head spun and my vision darkened, but I was too hungry to close my eyes and let sleep claim me again. I waited for the spell to pass, taking stock of my makeshift bed. I was laid out on a sandy patch spread with what looked like part of a sail. There were a few different pieces of cloth—I’d hardly call them blankets—tucked around me. Most seemed like scraps pulled from gods knew where. One of them was garishly bright, decorated with pink and yellow flowers and when I touched it, it felt thick and soft.

Slowly, I sat up, the covers falling back, and with a flush of heat I realised I was naked.

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