Page 77 of Tides of Shadows

“Oh, hush,” I said, broken with despair. “Don’t you dare die in my arms, do you hear me?”

“You’re even lovelier when you’re angry,” he breathed, a faint smile ghosting across his lips.

I kept talking, as if words alone could bind him to life.

“What would we eat?” I asked softly. “At that dinner of yours.”

“Whatever you wished,” he whispered. “The servants would have prepared it. I am, you know after all, the Regent’s son…”

“Hold on just a little longer, please.” My fingers brushed his cheek. His beautiful, perfect face, the one I had seen every night before sleep.

His silver eyes grew dim.

“Healers!” I shouted my lungs out when I saw them rushing closer. “Healers!”

They came armed with their Elementars, cutting his shirt open, pressing glowing stones against the wound. Their hands trembled with focus. I held his head in my lap, barely breathing. And then his body went still.

“No, no, no…” I whispered. “Please, no.”

But the healers were already working. The blood stopped flowing. One of them nodded. There was hope.

“We must move him!” said the eldest.

They lifted him onto a stretcher, surrounded by guards. I stood there, drenched in blood once more, my empty hands still remembering the weight of his life. Peter, his personal guard, approached me with care. Gentle-eyed, ever silent, always near Aidenar.

“Lady Veymaris,” he said softly. “Please, let them do their work.”

I looked at him wordlessly. He was right. I knew nothing of healing flesh. There was nothing more I could do. I only stood there, watching as they disappeared down the corridor. Whispers rose among the gathered crowd. I felt their stares, the iron scent of blood on my skin. I turned and walked away to my chambers.

I washed mechanically until the water turned red. Then I simply fell onto the bed. I do not remember when I closed my eyes. Only that his touch still lingered on my hands.

That night, nightmares came. I saw the attack again, but this time there was no one beneath the arcades, only me. The marble glistened with blood, yet silence reigned. A dark crimson pool spread across the floor, gleaming in the moonlight. My hands were clean, my gown black as midnight.

A man stepped from behind a column. The same dark-haired stranger I had seen in my dreams before. He smiled, that calm, chilling kind of smile that makes the air grow heavy.

“So close,” he said, tilting his head. “Ah well, perhaps next time. I dislike the way he looks at you. Though Rava wants him for herself…” He paused, glancing aside. “I’m not certain that’s wise.”

His voice carried strange echoes, as if more than one soul spoke through him. Then I heard it. Bubbling sound, thick and wet, like something boiling beneath the earth.

I looked toward the Inner Court. In its center stood a bowl upon a stone pillar, the same as those in the catacombs of the elemental temples. This one brimmed with black, glistening ooze. Slowly, it began to overflow, as though something within it breathed.

The sludge crept across the marble, spreading wider, slithering toward me like a living thing. I wanted to summon water from the fountains but they were dry.

The man took a step forward.

“I learn from my mistakes, Nerissa,” he said softly. “Never to leave you water to play with.”

Panic constricted my chest. The black liquid touched my feet, cold and viscous as tar. I forced myself to move, one step, then another, then I ran. The palace corridors twisted before me like a labyrinth, walls bending and shifting. His voice echoed behind me.

“You cannot run from me.”

I ran until my lungs burned then woke, drenched in sweat, my heart racing.

At dawn, I went to the infirmary. They wouldn’t let me in, but they said Aidenar lived. He had lost much blood, but the bleeding was stopped and the wound sealed. He breathed. That was enough. I stood there in silence, not knowing what to do with myself. Worry would change nothing, so I turned toward my father’s “temporary office”, since he and Roderick had been working with the royal cartographers for two days, poring over maps of the Dominium.

I entered without knocking. My father stood bent over the table, parchment and maps spread before him, marked with dense symbols. The air smelled of wax and old paper. When he looked up, weariness shadowed his gaze, yet alertness lingered there too. The same sharpness he bore at sea before a storm.

“Any news of the Young Regent?” he asked without straightening.