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“Kael—” Alaric begins, soft as wind through reed.
“No.” My voice is harder than I intend. “It must be this way.”
I know what he thinks—that I should be patient, that time could weave a safer path. I could earn her favor. Win her submission.
And if it were another of us, one of my brothers proposing this forced bond, I would have argued the same until my throat burned.
But I don’t have time.
The SoulTakers are pressing forth, and Nightfall aches for the loss our fallen Prime has left.
“The realm is coming apart at the seams, Alaric. What would you have me do?”
There’s a pause. It is heavy with magic, and emotions—regret, sympathy, and anxiety.
“You are right, brother. I would only wish you happiness,” he murmurs.
I appreciate the sentiment.I do.
But I can’t afford to dwell on it.
Tonight, I will attempt something older and meaner and truer than anything I have ever done with magic.
A Nightfast Oath.
The old words live in the margins of our histories, in the scripts my grandmother—no, my grandmother of the tide, who taught me the hush of currents—used to whisper when storms broke at the reefs.
It is forbidden in most courts now, practiced only by the elite when love must be bent into weaponry or when desire threatens ruin.
It is a ritual of binding and unbinding that the gods do not like to watch.
We move through the keep like men who are carrying a fragile thing.
The enormous room where the ceremony is to be held is ancient—stone rubbed by generations of feet, banners crackling in the breeze, crystallized by the salted air.
The long aisle that leads to the dais is laid with a white silk rug woven by Elven hands, filaments so fine they hold light differently.
They call it purity.
I call it necessary.
Everything must be perfect.
My people line the benches—faces I have known since boyhood, some bowed with worry, others set like flint.
Aloysious has done what he can to prepare.
Spellcasters are at the ready, ward-runes etched in secret, the high priest robed in the ash-gray linen of old law, and a special unit of the Tide Land’s finest naval officers stand sentry, guarding the perimeter of Castletide.
I wear the garb of my ancestors.
It is what my station demands—trousers of braided kelp-silk, a tunic cut to allow movement, decorated with pearls and bits of coral, and on my feet leather sandals laced with silver thread.
The crown circles round my head—a simple ring of storm-twisted coral and trident-tips folded into a fragile circlet with one enormous black pearl at the center.
But I do not feel like a king so much as a man desperate to earn the love of a woman I know I don’t deserve.
My nerves hum throughout my body, deeper still in the places where the ancient runes had been carved into my skin when I was born.
