I’m just stopping myself with every single breath.

“I hear that too,” Tiberias replies. Then his voice drops, deepening. It wavers in fear. “I remember darkness. Emptiness. Nothing.”

Reluctantly, I look over my shoulder to watch him stand, shedding the last of his armor. Avoiding my gaze. He’s still tall, still broad, but lesser without the weight of the battle-worn steel. Younger-looking too, just twenty years old. Tipping on the edge of manhood, parts of him still clinging to youth. Holding on to something as it disappears, just like the rest of us.

“I went into the water and I couldn’t get back up.” He kicks the pile of steel on the floor. “Couldn’t swim, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.”

I feel like I can’t breathe either.

Tiberias shudders as I watch, a tremor that starts in his fingers. His fear is terrifying. Then he forces himself to look back at me. With his feet planted and his hands firmly settled on his hips, he is rooted. The king won’t move unless I do. He’s going to make me surrender first. It’s what any good soldier would do. Or he is simply letting me choose. Letting me decide for both of us. He probably thinks it’s the honorable thing to do.

“I thought of you before the end,” he says. “I saw your face in the water.”

And I see his corpse again, suspended before me, dappled by the shifting light of a churning sea. Afloat, at the mercy of a foreign tide.

Neither of us moves.

“I can’t,” I bite out, looking anywhere but his face.

He responds quickly, with force. “Neither can I.”

“But I also can’t—”

Stay away. Keep doing this. Denying ourselves in the face of always-looming death.

Tiberias hisses out a breath.

“Neither can I.”

When we take the step forward together, from opposite directions, both of us laugh. It almost breaks the spell. But we keep walking, equal in motion and intention. Slow and methodic, measuring. He watches me, I watch him, as the space closes between us. I touch him first, putting my palm flat over his thudding heart. He inhales slowly, his chest rising beneath my fingers. A warm hand slips around my back, splaying wide over the base of my spine. I know he can feel my old scars through my shirt, the knobbled skin familiar to us both. I answer by curling my other hand at the nape of his neck, gently digging my nails into the lock of black hair.

“This doesn’t change anything,” I say against his collarbone, a firm line against my cheek.

I feel his answer in my rib cage. “No.”

“We aren’t making different decisions.”

His arms tighten around me. “No.”

“So what is this, Cal?”

The name has an effect on us both. He shivers, and I move closer, flattening against him. It feels like giving in, for both of us, though we have nothing left to surrender.

“We’re choosing not to choose.”

“That doesn’t sound real.”

“Maybe it isn’t.”

But he’s wrong. I can’t think of anything more real than the feel of him. The heat, the smell, the taste. It’s the only real thing in my world.

“This is the last time,” I whisper before I cover his mouth with mine.

Over the next few hours, I say that so many times I lose count.

TWENTY-ONE

Maven

I hate the waves. They offend me.

Every heave of blue against the hull of the boat makes my stomach toss, and it is entirely too difficult to remain still, silent, the image of reserved strength I need to be, Perhaps Iris or her mother is roiling the sea on purpose. In punishment for my risking Iris’s life in Harbor Bay. Even though she survived and escaped easily enough. Survived, escaped, and lost the city to my perfect brother. I wouldn’t put it past the Lakelander queen. She’s even more powerful than her daughter. Certainly she can control the rise and fall of the ocean around us. I spot her ships ahead, six of them. Small but formidable warships. Less of her armada than we expected.

I snarl to myself, lip curling. Can no one simply do as they’re told? Even with her daughter in the balance, leading the failed defense of the city, Queen Cenra hasn’t brought her full strength. A trickle of heat bursts through me, a tongue of angry fire down my spine. I restrain it quickly.

The constant motion makes it more difficult to keep my grip on the rail of the deck. It drains my focus. And when I lose focus, my head becomes less . . . quiet.

Harbor Bay is gone.

Another thing lost to Cal, the familiar voice whispers. Another failure, Maven.

Mother’s voice has grown fainter as time passes, but she never truly recedes. Sometimes I wonder if she planted a seed in me, leaving it to bloom only after her death. I don’t know if whispers can even do that. But it’s an easy explanation for the murmurs and the mutters that rattle around in my skull.

Sometimes I’m glad for her voice. Her guidance from beyond the grave. The advice is always small; sometimes it’s something she used to say before she died. Sometimes it could be just memories. But I wake up far too often from uneasy sleep, her words ringing in my ears, for her voice to simply be a product of my own mind. She’s here with me still, whether I want her to be or not. I call it a comfort, even when she is anything but.

All that matters is the throne, she whispers again, as she whispered over the years. Her voice is almost lost to the swell of the ocean. Part of me strains to hear, and part of me tries not to listen. And what you have given to get it.

That is today’s refrain. It repeats as my flagship sails toward the waiting armada, cutting through the waves as the sun sets low and red against the distant coast. Harbor Bay still trails smoke, teasing me on the horizon.

At least her voice is gentle today. When I falter, when I slow down, it turns sharp, a fraying, splintering shriek, steel on steel. Glass popping in the heat of flame. Sometimes it’s so awful I check to make sure my eyes and ears aren’t bleeding. They never do. Her words never exist beyond the cage of my head.

I stare at the waves ahead, each one a white crest of foam, and think of the path laid out. Not before, but behind. How I came to stand on the prow of a ship, a crown low across my forehead, with the spray of salt water drying on my skin. What I gave to be here. The people I left behind, willingly or not. Dead or abandoned or betrayed. The terrible things I’ve done and let be done in my name. How much will have been in vain if I fail. And now I race toward a Lakelander fleet. Enemies turned allies, through my own careful maneuvering.

Like the rest of my country, I was taught to hate the Lakelands, to curse their greed. Perhaps more than anyone else, I learned to despise them. After all, my own father and his father spent their lives locked in a stalemate war on the northern border. They saw thousands wasted against the blue uniforms, drowned in the lakes, obliterated by minefield and missile. Of course, they knew what the war was truly for. I don’t know if Cal, the poor, simple brute, ever connected such easily traced dots, but I certainly did.

Our war with the Lakelands served a purpose. Reds outnumber us. Reds can overthrow us. But not if they die in greater numbers than we do. And not if they fear something else more than they fear the Silvers standing over them. Be it dying in war, or just the Lakelanders. Anyone can be manipulated against their own interests, if given the right circumstance. My ancestors knew that well enough, in their deepest hearts. To maintain power, they lied, they manipulated, they spilled blood. Just not their own. They sacrificed life, but not the lives closest to them.