Page 24 of Tide of Waves and Secrets

Even if I trusted her. Even if I wished to tell her, the code of the Keepers strictly forbade it. Especially now.

“Do your duties align with how you wish to spend your time?”

We made our way out of the palace and toward the same entrance where I first met Nerys. She greeted people as we walked by, though none appeared familiar to me.

“What do you mean?”

“Your ideal life,” I asked, the same question my grandfather had when my father began to train me. There were two types of Keepers: shadow and lore. Lore Keepers were also noblemen and women, laypeople, blacksmiths… members of the Estmere kingdom but also descendants of the Harrow family who kept its secrets. Shadow Keepers were the trained warriors, the most skilled also serving as spies, who not only kept the family’s secrets but actively pursued a better life for all Harrows, and humans, in whatever capacity was necessary. My father assumed I would be the latter, but it was my grandfather who asked what I wished for my life.

I was uncertain at the time and told him as much.

“My grandfather asked me once,” I told her as we moved through the palace gates, “when I closed my eyes and watched myself living my ideal life, what it looked like. I told him and began my training that day as a knight.”

It was not a lie. I’d been knighted by an earl who had no knowledge of my family’s history. But attaining knighthood was not truly the goal of my training. Gaining information, aiding whatever human’s cause was most needed—in my lifetime reopening the Gate—was my true life’s purpose.

“My ideal life,” Nerys murmured.

“Or lives. You live many, which I suppose changes the equation.”

“In that respect, you’re right,” she said as we apparently reached our destination.

A stream that ran through the palace walls had opened up, wide enough for narrow boats the Thalassarians called scapha. We walked down a set of stairs toward a holding area where many of them were stored.

“Yet my mother often told me to live as if I might die. I’d always thought it was a morbid sentiment, but I understand now she meant it to be the opposite.”

We walked onto a wooden dock, Nerys untying and preparing a bright-coral scapha as if she’d done so thousands of times.

“Come,” she said, “we will take this into Serenium Square. The markets are today.”

I stepped into the boat and sat behind her. With a flick of her wrist, our scapha began to move forward just as another passed on our right to dock where we’d pushed off.

“I’ve seen the scapha before and wondered how they move simultaneously in different directions.”

“We guide the currents, not unlike a rider directing their horse. The water beneath us is alive, responsive to intention and touch. But it does take some skill, which is why young ones do not travel by scapha.”

As the palace walls shrunk behind us, Nerys and I glided away from the elegance of Maristhera through intricate canals toward the center of the city.

“My ideal life,” Nerys said. “I’ve thought only of goals I wished to achieve. Making my parents proud, and later, honoring their memory. Showing Aneri she was not foolish to take me under her wing, that I could become something, as my parents had before me. Performing the Stormcaller’s Rite.”

“All very worthy goals.”

“But my ideal life?” she continued. Nerys somehow turned halfway toward me but managed to steer our boat with nothing more than a few flicks of her wrist. “I suppose it would be with a partner, someone to wake up to each day and love. Together, we would see Thalassarians thrive in a united Elydor, where our own happiness was not wrought at the expense of those less fortunate.”

What surprised me most about her response was how similar it was to my own, even at a young age. I saw my own happiness as very much tied to the world in which I lived.

“Have you been partnered before?” I asked, using her word for our human concept of marriage.

“I have not. There have been lovers, but none with whom I wished to spend an eternity.”

Of course she had taken lovers. Immortals saw their relationships much differently than us humans. They partnered less readily, with good reason. As in Estmere, separating from a marriage was not taken lightly, but their “forever” lasted much, much longer than ours.

She turned more fully toward me.

“Do you have a partner, Rowan?”

Her words were nearly drowned out by the waterfall we passed. Nerys’s hands were so quick, I’d have missed the movement if I had not caught the unnatural redirection of the water away from our boat. She did it so that we did not get wet. Or more accurately, so I did not get wet. Everything a Thalassarian wore, from their tunic to their boots, resisted water.

“Or a wife, as you call it?” she clarified.

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