Page 60 of Seaborn and the Seven Seas

I forced my eyes open. The light came in too bright, as did the new revelation. I could be wrong, but the evidence was stronger.

Not the dungeon.

Not the arena.

A room. White walls. A shelf filled with bottles of herbs, roots, flowers. The smell of herbs. The heat that had burned through my body was gone. Whatever Nira had injected had saved me.

I managed to turn my head.

Nira stood beside the bed, her hands cupping Theron’s face, her eyes wet. He didn’t pull away.

“Please.” Her voice was barely above a breath. “Find the others and take your rightful place. You’re our only chance.”

“I don’t know where to look for our people.” He sounded defeated in a way I had never heard from him before.

“In the sky, son. Where else?” Her hands lowered to his shoulder.

Son?

My husband passed away, and my daughter… Prince Pierre took her and I never saw her again.

The pieces fell into place. Theron, the true crown prince. His father, poisoned by the queen. His debt: delivering Seaborn, keeping his mother safe while she lived as a servant in her own castle. I understood his pain, grief, and the anger at the world. He’d already lost his sister to Pierre. He couldn’t lose his mother too. My heart went out to him.

“I have yet to come across them. Besides, I’m no leader. The only thing I’m good at is killing.”

Whatever hope gleamed in Nira’s eyes vanished.

I closed my eyes before either of them could see I was awake.

Chapter Nineteen

I groaned from the sharp bite of urine in the air, and hard ground beneath my back. I knew where I was. The dungeon.

Perhaps everything I’d heard—Nira’s voice, Theron pacing, the bottles clinking, Theron nearly choking Pierre—had been a dream.

Minha’s voice found me, low and soft, my head on her lap, her hand moving through my hair in long slow strokes. A familiar melody drifted in and out of my ears, sweet and haunting. Then a song came clear, the one Nam used to sing in the cave.

Where the water runs deep and our home holds our name,

We lived in the blue and the oceans were ours to claim.

Seven gods watched the tides and the world stayed the same,

Till the kingdoms grew hungry and conquered without shame.

They called it unification, but they bound us in chains,

Of the people whose blood in the deep have stained.

But the ocean remembers the torment and the pain,

And the blue blood still runs where the cold currents remain.

Come back to the water, come back to the deep,

Where the whales sing your name and the oclego sleeps.

We were born of the sea and our people will rise,