Sera's POV
Something moved outside her door.
Sera was off the bed before she was fully awake, back pressed against the wall, heart slamming. She stood there in the dark, breathing through her teeth, listening.
Footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Moving past her room and continuing down the corridor.
Not a guard. Guards walked in pairs, and their boots were heavy. This was one person, moving quietly, like someone who didn't want to be heard.
She counted to five. Then grabbed her boots and followed.
The corridor was empty by the time she opened her door.
She followed the sound or maybe the feeling. Something about the air was different. Colder. Like a window had been left open somewhere it shouldn't be.
She took a staircase down. Then another. She passed a sleeping guard and stepped around him carefully. She pushed through a low door, and the cold hit her like a fist.
She was outside.
The fortress had a narrow yard on the ocean side, wedged between the outer wall and the cliff's edge. Just stone, snow, and wind.
And Kadrin.
He stood at the very edge of the cliff, still in the same clothes from the battle, looking out at the frozen black water below. He wasn't moving. He was just standing there, staring, like a statue that had forgotten how to stop being one.
Alive. He was awake and alive.
The relief hit her so hard her knees almost buckled.
She walked toward him. She made enough noise that he would hear her coming. She'd learned enough about him in the past day to know that surprising a three-hundred-year-old alpha king was a bad idea.
He didn't turn around.
"You should be in bed," she said.
"So should you."
His voice was flat. Not cold the way it used to be, cold like someone holding something very heavy and trying not to let it show.
Sera stopped beside him and looked out at the water. The ocean was dark and still. Too still. Like it was holding its breath.
"The healers said you'd be unconscious until morning," she said.
"The healers were wrong."
"Are you in pain?"
A pause. "Yes."
That surprised her. Not that he was in pain, but that he admitted it.
"Kadrin." She kept her voice careful. "What are you doing out here?"
For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, quietly, "Counting."
"Counting what?"
"The lights in the water." He nodded toward the ocean. "When I was a boy, before the curse, I used to sneak out and count the lights in the deep. My mother said they were fish with lanterns. My father said they were the souls of drowned sailors." He paused. "I haven't thought about that in three hundred years."
Sera looked. Far below, beneath the dark surface, tiny lights drifted in slow circles. She'd seen bioluminescent fish before and never thought twice about them.
Now she couldn't stop staring.
"Which did you decide they were?" she asked.
"Neither. I decided they were just lights." He finally turned and looked at her. The moonlight made the exhaustion on his face very clear. "But I remembered it tonight. I remembered standing exactly here as a child, looking down at them. And I couldn't stay in that room anymore."
Sera understood that. The feeling of a memory hitting you so hard it pushes you out of sleep, into cold air, because at least the cold is real.
"The voice," she said. "In my room. The one in the wall." She watched his face. "Have you ever heard it before?"
Something shifted in his expression. Fast. Gone before she could name it.
"What did it say?" he asked.
"It told me the second half of the prophecy." She kept her eyes on him. "It said the only way to stop the Leviathan is to break the bond. Put you back the way you were. Frozen."
Silence.
The wind moved between them, picking up snow and scattering it.
"And you believed it?" Kadrin said, finally.
"I don't know what I believe." Sera pulled her arms across her chest. "I know Valerius lied about things. I know Morgantha has been planning this for three hundred years. And I know a voice came through my wall tonight and told me I might have to destroy you to save everyone else."
Kadrin turned back to the water.
"The voice was right," he said quietly.
Sera's stomach dropped. "What?"
"I've known about the second half of the prophecy." His jaw was tight. "Morgantha left it in a letter when she cursed me. She wanted me to know that the moment someone broke my curse, they would also hold the key to ending me."
Sera stared at him. "You knew. This whole time?"
"Since the ceremony. When you touched me, and the golden light appeared, I remembered the letter." His voice didn't waver. "I knew what it meant."
"And you didn't tell me."
"No."
The word sat between them like a stone.
Sera felt something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite hurt. It was the feeling of realizing the ground you were standing on had been cracked the whole time.
"Why?" she said.
Kadrin looked at her then. Really looked at her. And for the first time since she'd met him, he looked uncertain. Like a man standing at the edge of something and not sure he wanted to jump.
"Because I was afraid," he said. "That you would do it immediately. That you would reach out and push me back into the dark before I had the chance to." He stopped.
"Before you had the chance to what?"
He turned away again. "It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me."
Another long silence. Below, the lights in the water drifted. The ocean breathed slowly, in and out, like something sleeping.
Then one of the lights stopped moving.
Sera watched it. It had been drifting north in lazy circles like all the others. But now it sat perfectly still, a pinprick of cold blue in the dark water, pointing straight up at them.
Like an eye.
"Kadrin," she said slowly.
"I see it."
"Is that"
"Yes." His voice had gone very quiet. "The lights used to drift. My whole childhood, my whole life before the curse, they always drifted." He paused. "This is the first time one has ever stopped."
The single light pulsed once. Twice.
Then, below it, the water shifted. A shape turned in the deep. Enormous. Slow. Barely visible in the darkness, but there was a shadow the size of a city block, rolling over, one massive eye rotating upward.
Toward them.
Sera couldn't breathe.
"It's not asleep anymore," she whispered.
"No," Kadrin said. His hand found hers in the dark. Not romantic. Not even gentle, really. Just a grip. Two people holding on. "It's watching us."
The eye in the deep didn't blink.
Sera's Tidecaller senses screamed at her a pressure she'd never felt before, ancient and patient and completely awake, pressing against the underside of the ocean like something testing a door.
Waiting to see if it would open.
"What do we do?" she breathed.
Kadrin didn't answer.
Because there was a sound behind them, the low door scraping open, and Magnus stood in the entrance with a face like a man who had already decided something awful.
"Your Majesty." His voice was steady. Too steady. "The council has called an emergency meeting." A pause. "About her."
He didn't look at Kadrin when he said it.
He looked at Sera.
And in his eyes was the answer to a question she hadn't known to ask.
The council already knew about the prophecy.
And they had already made their decision.