Elara Meadows's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

The waves swallowed the dark king. Elara stood in the shack doorway and waited for the sea to give him back. It did not. But the water shifted again, and a second shape rose from the surf. She pulled Rath tight and readied the power in the pearl. The man who walked out of the water was not the king. He was tall, with black hair and olive skin and short green eyes. A scar marked his left arm. She knew him the moment he crossed the sand. This was Maris, the wounded stranger she had healed, the one whose pearl still pulsed in her pocket. He was the father of the child in her arms. "You're alive," she said. Her voice broke on it. Maris looked at the empty water, then at her, then at Rath. "He fled from a baby. My baby." He came up the steps. "I felt you both. The whole sea felt you." Elara had a hundred questions. She started with the hardest one. "You never told me what you were." "No." He did not soften it. "I am siren. Miredeep is my kingdom. Malachar stole it. He will come back with an army, and this shack will not hold him." He touched Rath's cheek. The child gripped his finger. "Our son threw a king across a room. He needs the swamp to grow into that. He needs walls of stone, not driftwood." "You want me to leave the shore." "I want you to live." He met her eyes. "Come to Miredeep. Rule it with me. The blood law that saved you here will hold there too, and it will hold forever if we stand behind it together." She looked at the man she had pulled dying from these same waves. She looked at the sea that would drown a land-born girl in a breath. "I can't breathe down there." "You can." He drew a pearl from his palm. It shimmered, round and bright, threaded with color like light through water. "Trust me one more time." He kissed her. She let the fear go and kissed him back. His hand slid to her jaw, and she felt the pearl pass between their lips, cool and smooth on her tongue. She swallowed before she could stop herself. It went down like a stone of pure light. Heat spread through her chest and neck. Her throat worked, then eased. When she gasped, the air tasted thin and wrong, and something new opened along her ribs, ready for water. "What did you do," she breathed. "Made you able to follow me home." He lifted Rath into the crook of his arm. "Your body will finish the rest under the sea." Elara pressed a hand to her side. She felt the change moving in her, slow and certain. The shore was no longer the only place she could live. She stepped down onto the sand, toward the water and the kingdom waiting under it.