Kadrin's POV
The council meeting ended with someone throwing a chair.
Not at Kadrin. No one was that foolish. But Lord Fenwick had shoved it when he stood up, and it crashed into the wall, and that was close enough to make every guard reach for their sword.
"She is a liability!" Fenwick's face was red. "The girl shows up, the fortress gets half destroyed, the Leviathan wakes, and you want us to simply."
"I want you to sit down," Kadrin said.
His voice was quiet. He had learned centuries ago that the quieter he spoke, the more carefully people listened.
Fenwick sat.
"Sera Blackwater stays," Kadrin said. "The Law of Sanctuary holds. If any member of this council attempts to remove her from this fortress without my direct command, they will answer to me personally." He looked around the table. "Are we understood?"
Silence. Then, one by one, heads nodded.
Kadrin left before anyone could speak again.
He made it to the end of the corridor before he had to stop.
His hand pressed flat against the wall. His chest was doing it again, that strange pulling sensation, like something inside his ribs was trying to rearrange itself. It had started the moment Fenwick said *the girl* with that dismissive curl of his lip.
Something hot and sharp had moved in Kadrin's chest.
He had not been in control of it.
That terrified him more than the Leviathan.
He straightened, checked that the corridor was empty, and went to find Aldric.
Aldric was Kadrin's oldest advisor and the only person alive who had known him before the curse. He was around three hundred and forty years old, which meant he walked slowly, forgot names, and had no patience for pretense.
Kadrin found him in his study, as always, surrounded by books and a cat that hated everyone except Aldric.
"Sit," Aldric said, without looking up.
Kadrin sat. The cat glared at him and moved to the other side of the desk.
"The council meeting went poorly," Aldric said.
"Fenwick threw a chair."
"Only one? He must be losing his nerve." Aldric finally looked up. He studied Kadrin the way a healer studies a patient carefully, without embarrassment. "Something happened. What?"
Kadrin was quiet for a moment. He had ruled for three centuries without once admitting he was confused. He gave orders. He solved problems.
But the thing in his chest moved again at the thought of Sera's face when he'd told her he'd known about the prophecy. The way something in her expression had closed, like a door being quietly shut.
"When Fenwick said her name," Kadrin said carefully, "and spoke about her the way he did, dismissively, like she was a problem to be removed, something happened in my chest. Something hot. I wanted to stop him from speaking."
Aldric's eyebrows rose. "You wanted to."
"Not in the way I want to stop someone because it is strategically correct to do so. Something else. Something I did not choose. It simply moved."
Aldric was quiet for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands.
"That," he said, "is protectiveness."
Kadrin looked at him. "That is an emotion."
"Yes."
"I have not had emotions in three hundred years."
"Also, yes."
Kadrin stood up, then sat back down, because standing had not solved anything. "It happened last night, too. When she asked me why I hadn't told her about the prophecy. Her face changed. And something in me responded."
"What did it feel like?"
He thought about it carefully. "Like I had broken something that could not be fixed."
"Guilt," Aldric said simply.
"And at the ceremony. When she first touched me. That was different. That was" He stopped.
"Describe it."
Kadrin looked at the ceiling. He had spent three hundred years being precise about everything: shipbuilding, law, and strategy. He could describe the tensile strength of a rope or the weight-bearing limit of a wall down to the last detail.
He could not describe this.
"It was warm," he said finally. "And it moved fast. Too fast to stop. Like the moment a fire catches one second nothing, the next, light everywhere."
Aldric was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, "Kadrin. You understand what that sounds like."
"Don't."
"I'm not saying it to cause you distress. I'm saying it because you came here to understand what you're feeling, and I think part of you already knows."
Kadrin stood again. This time, he walked to the window. Below, he could just barely see the ocean, grey and flat in the morning light. The spot where the Leviathan's eye had watched them was still.
"She doesn't trust me," he said. "She told me I was wrong not to tell her about the prophecy. She was right."
"Yes."
"She has every reason to be afraid of this place. Of me." He paused. "She came here running from a man who used feelings as a weapon against her."
"Kadrin." Aldric's voice was gentle. "I have known you since before the curse. I watched you become something that functioned beautifully and felt nothing." He paused. "I also remember who you were before. Kind. Stubborn. Enormously bad at accepting help." A pause. "Some things have not changed."
Kadrin turned from the window.
"Tell me what I am supposed to do with this," he said. It came out more raw than he intended.
Aldric looked at him steadily. "The same thing everyone does. Feel it. Don't run from it. Try not to make every decision from the middle of it." A small smile. "And perhaps start by telling the girl the truth. All of it."
Kadrin straightened. Nodded once. Moved toward the door.
"One more thing," Aldric said.
Kadrin paused.
"The letter Morgantha left you. The one with the second half of the prophecy." Aldric's voice had shifted. No longer gentle. Careful now, in the way of a man walking very close to something dangerous. "You said you read it after the ceremony."
"Yes."
"Did you read all of it?"
Kadrin frowned. "There were three pages. I read" He stopped.
He had read the first two pages. He had stopped at the passage about the Leviathan. He had not read the third.
"Where is the letter?" Aldric asked quietly.
"My study."
"Go read the third page." Aldric's eyes were serious in a way Kadrin had not seen in decades. "Before you speak to the girl. Before you do anything else."
"What's on the third page?"
Aldric shook his head. "I don't know. I have never seen the letter. But Morgantha was not a woman who wasted paper, and she was not a woman who saved her least important information for last."
The cat jumped off the desk and walked out of the room, as if it wanted no part of whatever came next.
Kadrin left at a near run.
He had not run in three hundred years either.
His study was exactly as he'd left it. He found the letter in the bottom drawer, three yellowed pages, the handwriting cramped and precise.
He turned to the third page.
He read it.
And then he sat down on the floor, which was something King Kadrin the Undying had never done in his life.
Because the third page did not describe a second way to stop the Leviathan.
It described what Morgantha had actually cursed him to do, the real reason she had taken his emotions away. Not as punishment. As a delay.
She hadn't cursed him to suffer.
She had cursed him to wait.
Wait until the right Tidecaller arrives. And when she did, he would have no choice but to
He crumpled the page in his fist.
He had to find Sera. Right now. Before the curse decided for him.
Before it was too late to choose anything at all.