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Cepharius and I stayed, waiting, until the boat drove off with the siren swimming after it, and we were alone again.
“And now you are mine,” Ceph intoned, looking down at me.
“Like I always have been. Ever since I met you,” I told him, beaming.
“You did fight it some.”
“Only a little,” I said, pinching my fingers together between us. “I mean, you can’t blame me for being scared.”
“I am rather large,” he said, with no attempt at hiding his thoughts of a double entendre.
“Yes, you are,” I agreed.
“But now you are mine,” he repeated. “For life.” He sank lower in the water column, and I moved to follow him, but he shook his head. “Stay there.”
“Okay?” I said, laughing. “What, I cancel my one ticket out of the ocean, and now you’re abandoning me?” I teased. But then I saw him going through the pockets on his belt. “Ceph?”
“I have seen this enough in your stories that I feel sure I know its meaning. And I do not wish to court you anymore—I want to pump you every night, possibly every morning, and many of the times in between.” He folded up his tentacles beneath himself and proffered out the ring I’d flung into the ocean. “We are mated, Elle, mind and body, but I have found that I like the idea of this custom, of giving you something to wear from me. So, my beautiful pearl and mate for life, Elle formerly of the Air, and now of the Sea, will you take this ring from me?”
I put my left hand out for him so that he could slide it onto the right finger—and I was shaking.
If I’d still been fully human, looking down at the depths below us, I’d have been horrified at the thought of the ring dropping into the blue, to be lost forever.
But I knew now even if I dropped it on accident—Ceph would go down and find it for me.
And I could follow him.
“Yes!” I cried out. “Absolutely!” I shouted on the ’qa, and he slid the ring home on my finger.
epilogue
cepharius
“It is such a pity,” Sylinda thought at me, and not for the first time.
“Keep that thought to yourself,” I told her. I had just returned to Thalassamur after running an important errand for my brother, communicating with a group of selkies about the pollution where they lived. Afterward, I’d hunted for my mate, only to find Sylinda watching her outside the hatchling school where Elle was telling stories.
She spent a lot of time with kraken elders all over the ocean, learning history, and making sure their stories weren’t lost to the ’qa when they passed, plus helping Balesur with any matters that had to do with humanity.
But when she wasn’t working, she would always come to the school, to tell them stories from land and from sea, that they might not be forgotten. The children loved her, and she loved them.
Gerron had recently joined the ’qa, and Sylinda was pregnant again, about to give birth to her and Balesur’s next child in its egg sac, where it would live for a month, as its small body acclimated from swimming inside the safety of its mother to the harsher conditions outside.
“It’s a girl,” Sylinda said, sensing my thoughts upon her pregnancy.
“How do you know?”
“I just do,” she said, smiling at me. “I was right with Gerron, wasn’t I?”
I squinted my eyes at her. “Yes, but the odds of you being right were fifty-fifty.”
Sylinda laughed. “I look forward to you being around for her, regardless.”
Gerron had eventually decided to forgive me. We’d fixed the broken statue, gone on to carve others together, and now he wanted my advice about courting—there was a girl he had his eye on, a day’s worth of lengths away. I told him I had no real advice on the matter, that I had only been lucky twice over, but seeing as I’d somehow found two mates, he wasn’t convinced.
And then Elle spotted me as I felt her on the ’qa.
“Ceph!” she shouted, waving goodbye to the children who were rapt, swimming over them in her much slower two-legged fashion to come and see me.
