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His breath ghosts my ear, dry and marine and suddenly intimate.
I am drowning, and then a voice, clear as day whispers in my mind,“Breathe me.”
He says it like an order and like a promise.
The world narrows to his mouth finding mine beneath the cold water.
When his lips seal over mine, oxygen rushes in as if he has cupped the very air and pushed it down my throat.
It’s absurdand holy.
And I can feel the logic of it in my bones.
The panic loosens its grip.
My ribs unclench. I inhale, and the sting in my lungs eases.
The water swirls around us—fast, feral, hungry—but I’m fine, still holding on to this hulking creature.
I press my mouth firmly to his because it’s the only tether left that makes sense.
I do as he says.
I breathe him.
Salt and storm and something older than language.
While everything I know washes away, while the tank shrinks into a memory, I keep breathing until the terror and the wonder fold into each other and there’s no room left for smaller things like fear.
The water spins.
I close my eyes.
And I know when I open them again, everything will be different.
I won’t be in Jersey anymore.
Chapter 4
Kael
Earth to Casteltide
I am not lying when I say the sea does not answer me the way it once did.
When I slip back into the salt-scented night—through glass and plastic and the pale fluorescence of someone else’s ocean—the Tidal Lands feel like an open wound I can’t staunch.
My runes flare along my throat like fresh bruises.
Every breath tastes of iron and old storms.
The lines of power that used to hum under my feet stutter, skipping like a broken harp string.
Castletide looms ahead as I step from the portal of the glowing pool just beyond the gate.
Thoughts flitter through my brain unbidden.
The court’s pearls seemed dull lately. One by one they fade.
