Page 41 of Taken
My magic reports back in small, impatient pulses: warm, cool, anxious.
Amber wetness, a child laughing, the slow work of hands that feed and stitch and prepare.
I drag news from the sea the way other men drag nets.
Unwilling things that smell of salt and risk.
Aloysious brings me the morning letters, but the real report comes under my skin—little pricks of answer where the runes sit.
She is being bathed.
She laughs when the soap catches the corner of her mouth.
She resists the fitting with the stubbornness of dogs and of fishermen.
She smells of orange peel and something gentler I can’t name.
The current that attaches to her name vibrates like a string tuned too tight.
Alaric is here.
Dagan, too.
Thorne rides the Broken Plains after scouts who saw SoulTakers glimpsing the horizon near his forges.
He will be missed at the ceremony. And I like to think he would feel the same about missing it, and then he’d probably curse the mud for not letting him find his prey faster.
Thorne is a storm of a different kind of weather, but we all expect him to return with fire in his hair and the dust of his enemies beneath his boots.
“Why rush this, my brother?” Alaric asks as if the question is only air.
He does not hide his thoughts.
He never has.
He sits with that same easy balance, wings folded behind him like a cloak. Watching him with Jules is still harder than I thought it would be.
He has a way of making this whole thing—claiming a mate—look easy.
Simple as a promise kept.
Because my lands are fading faster than his, I want to say.
Because the salt that used to cradle my people now tastes like ash in their mouths.
Because I am not sure I can win Phoebe when all she sees is the monster I am without artifice.
I answer honestly.
“Because the Tidal Lands thin by the moon. Because I can’t afford time. Because I have no power of illusion, and even if Idid, it could only hide what I am for so long. I-I can’t afford to let this opportunity slip.”
The words are simple. They are a truth I do not dress in silk.
But there is more I don’t say.
More I keep to myself.
Hiding it like a crab beneath the coiled shell.
