Lain woke to the crying of gulls. The sound usually scraped at her sensitive ears, but this morning the sharp edge of the world seemed wrapped in wool. Behind her, Morgan remained a steady, radiating heat. His arm was draped across her waist. It possessed a heavy, anchoring weight, a contrast to the frantic crushing pressure of earlier nights.
She shifted, her hoof clicking against the wood of the bedframe. Morgan exhaled, a long, ragged sound, then opened his eyes.
Lain sat up. The linen sheet slid down her back, the cool air of the room a sudden and bracing hand. The nausea that had shadowed her since the fall of the Spire felt like a distant tide, retreated far down the shore. She looked at Morgan. Without the heavy cloak and the shadows of the road, he looked stripped – pale, the lines around his eyes deepened by exhaustion.
He tracked the movement of her ears, his gaze fixed and quiet.
“The tide is high,” she said.
Morgan propped himself up on an elbow. He reached out, fingers hovering just above the scales of her forearm. He didn’t close the distance. Lain leaned until her scales brushed his knuckles. The contact was warm, uncomplicated.
“Didn’t Eamon say he’d be at the docks?” she said. “He said the dolphins run early.”
“Would you like to see them?”
“Yes.”
“Then we should go,” Morgan said.
They rose together. The room filled with their separate natures, the heavy, muffled thud of his feet and the sharp clack of her hooves on the floorboards. But as they dressed, a strange synchronization took hold, as if the bond were music they danced to.
When they stepped onto the balcony, the sea air arrived to catch them, smelling of salt and kelp. Below, the village was waking. The masts of the fishing boats swayed like a drowned forest, and the sun caught the spray of the waves breaking against the sea-wall.
Lain stood a moment longer than she meant to, letting the wind tug at the ends of her hair, letting the horizon remind her that the world was not only stone corridors and collapsing spires. Morgan waited at her back, and she felt his impatience as a contained thing rather than a command. He wanted motion. He also wanted to eat.
“You’re staring,” she said, without turning.
“I’m listening,” he replied.
“To what?”
“To you,” he said. She could have hated him for how simple he made it sound. She could’ve hated him for meaning it.
They went down into the common room while the inn still smelled of last night’s fire. A few fishermen sat with bowls of porridge and the blank, faraway eyes of men that give their bodies to the sea before most people wake. The innkeeper nodded to Morgan as they passed. Humans seemed to love a Lord so quickly when he paid in coin and spoke with certainty.
Morgan asked for pastries. He returned to her with a small bundle wrapped in cloth, warm through the layers.
“For the walk,” he said.
Lain took it and, after the first bite, understood why he’d insisted. Butter and pears and something faintly spiced melted against her tongue. Her stomach, usually so ready to turn on her, embraced it like a gift.
“You look shocked,” Morgan observed.
“I forgot that food could be good,” she admitted, then immediately wished she’d chosen different words. As if it were only her fault she had lived so long on what he’d given her.
The bond shifted with something she couldn’t name at first, and when she did, it made her throat tighten. It was regret.
They walked toward the docks along a lane that curved with the coastline. The sea made the air damp, and the gulls followed them with bright, greedy arrogance. Lain ate as they went, the pastry disappearing in small careful bites, and for a while she let herself pretend she was simply a traveler. She wasn’t Bellborn, or hunted, or bonded to a man who had turned her body into a tool.
At the edge of the docks, the world changed. Rope and tar and fish-brine thickened the air. Nets lay piled like sleeping serpents. Men hauled crates on shoulders that already bent into shapes that would never straighten. A boy ran past with a bucket, splashing seawater onto his own boots.
Eamon stood near the end of the outer pier, hands full of rope, his sleeves rolled, his hair blown back by the wind as if the sea had taken a liking to him and refused to let him be tidy. He looked up and saw them, and his face broke into the same expression it had the first time he’d addressed Morgan: half amusement, half exasperation, like greeting a guest that always arrived late.
“You’ve come,” Eamon called.
Morgan lifted a hand. “You said you’d be here.”
“And you listen,” Eamon replied, then his gaze moved to Lain, measuring her the way a sailor measured the sky, with assessment. “You’re on your feet.”
“I am,” Lain said.
Eamon gave a short nod. He glanced at Morgan and then looked away again, the way the men did when they cared and refused to be seen caring.
“We’ll see if they’re close,” Eamon said. “Sometimes they run the channel like they own it. Sometimes they don’t show until you’ve given up and turned your back.”
“Then we won’t turn our backs,” Lain said, surprised by how much she meant it.
Eamon grinned. “That’s the spirit.”
They walked out to where the pier narrowed. The water below was dark in the deeper places, green where the sunlight struck it, and Lain leaned on the railing to watch the water. Morgan stood at her side, the bond offering her little pulses of him.
Eamon kept talking while his hands worked, looping rope through itself, knotting without looking. “You headed inland again?” he asked Morgan.
“Soon,” Morgan said.
Eamon’s eyes flicked to Lain. “Soon can mean today, or it can mean when a man gets bored of sitting still.”
Morgan didn’t answer immediately. Lain felt the truth of it in him, the impatience coiled under his skin, and she also felt the other truth, the way he’d learned, through pain and consequence, that impatience was a luxury he no longer had.
“When she says,” Morgan began, then stopped himself, not liking the words. He tried again. “When Lain is ready.”
Lain stared at him. His face was still, but his eyes were on her.
A strange thing happened in her chest then, small and dazzling in the truest way. She wanted to take that tiny shift of language, the way he’d put her name at the center of a sentence, and build a future out of it. The desire scared her more than his anger ever had, because it was hers, and she could not blame him for it.
Below them, the water broke.
At first, it looked like a flash of silver. Then something smooth and gray rose, a curve of back and fin, then another. A pair of dolphins cut through the surface in an effortless line, as if the sea had opened its palm to show them. They moved with boundless happiness.
Lain’s breath caught. She gripped the railing and leaned forward, ears angled hard, every part of her attention pouring into the sight.
They surfaced again, closer, and one rolled as if to look back at the pier. Its eye was dark and bright. It vanished beneath the water with a flick that sent spray glittering.
A sound came out of Lain that she didn’t recognize as her own until it had already escaped. It was a laugh, sharp with disbelief, a bell rung for no reason at all.
Eamon glanced at her and smiled. “There,” he said, rife with an unexpected tenderness. “There she is.”
Morgan had gone very still beside her. Lain felt his emotion through the bond. Wonder, and longing. Longing for the shape of her face when she forgot fear for a moment. For the sound she’d made without flinching afterward.
She turned toward him with the laugh still trembling in her throat, and found him watching her as if he’d been starving in a different way than the body required.
Then his hunger rose.
It arrived slow at first, then inevitably pressed in. The bond carried it to her, a shift in focus, need plain and old as blood.
Her smile faltered. She didn’t step away. She couldn’t decide if that meant she was brave or simply too tired to keep being frightened every moment of her life.
Morgan’s jaw flexed. His gaze went to Eamon, then back to her, as if he could not bear to announce it in front of another man and also could not bear to hide it from her.
“I need to take care of something,” he said.
Lain nodded. “How long?”
“Not long,” he replied, and the bond carried the careful honesty of it, the promise of return. He reached into his coat and pressed coins into her palm. He did it quickly, almost brusquely, as if any tenderness in the gesture would become a chain. Then his fingers closed around her hand for the briefest second, grounding and asking at once.
“If you get hungry,” he said, “you eat. If you want to go back, you go back. If you want to stay –”
“I know,” Lain cut in. “Go.”
Morgan turned and walked along the pair. He didn’t move in a hurry, but Lain knew better.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
When he was gone, the bond thinned. It didn’t sever, but space opened inside Lain’s mind, a quiet she hadn’t realized she’d been missing.
Eamon watched Morgan’s retreat with a look of worry. “Has he been caring for you properly?”
Lain’s fingers tightened around the coins, then loosened. “He promised he would.”
Eamon gave a grim nod. “Promises are easy until they cost you something."
The dolphins surfaced again farther out, chasing a line of fish. Lain watched with a softer attention now, the joy still present but threaded with the awareness of her own smallness in the world.
She could run. She could take the coins and vanish into the village. She could make a clean break while the day was bright and the sea wide and no one’s hands were on her.
Instead she sat on a coil of rope near Eamon’s work, and ate the last of the pastry, letting the sweetness settle her stomach.
Eamon worked in silence for a while, as if giving her the dignity of choosing whether to speak.
Finally, Lain said, “What was he like?”
Eamon’s hands paused. “When?”
“Before,” she said.
Eamon exhaled through his nose. “He was younger,” Eamon said. “That’s the first lie people tell themselves, that youth explains a man. It doesn’t. It just gives him more room to pretend he’s a different creature than he is.”
Lain kept her gaze on the sea.
“He was disciplined,” Eamon continued. “He could stand on a deck in a storm that had other men praying and vomiting, but he’d be calm as stone. Refused to let fear make decisions for him. Absolutely no sense of humor. Like trying to tell a joke to a mule.”
Lain smiled a little at that. “He’d probably be surprised to hear that.”
Eamon laughed. “Men like that always are. But when’s the last time that man laughed? I mean in earnest. Full belly.”
Lain laughed again, because the idea was so impossible.
“Ah, yes. He had a way of making you feel like the center of everything. Truly. One instant you’re the only thing that matters to him, and then what matters to him is the only thing that matters to you. My word, that man could lead. Special power, that.”
“That hasn’t changed,” Lain said softly. She felt, to her own disgust, the familiar tug of being seen. Even by a predator,being seen was still a kind of warmth when you’d spent your life preparing to be fed to one.
Eamon watched her for a moment. “He frightened people, too,” he said, and it seemed like he wanted to apologize for needing to say it. “He had a way of measuring you up, deciding whether you were worth your weight. He didn’t waste men, he paid his crew, he kept his word about supplies. But.” He put a hand to his face then, scratching at his beard, gazing at the sea. “But if he wanted something, he found a way to get it. That was always the truth.”
Lain’s head turned sharply toward him before she could stop it.
Eamon met her gaze at last with tired eyes.
“I’m not telling you this so you’ll trust him,” Eamon said. “You asked what he was like. I can see you trying to build a story in your head where he becomes safe if you just understand him correctly.”
Lain’s ears flicked back, the words ringing too close to the truth.
Eamon went on, quieter. “Men like him don’t become safe because you love them hard enough. They become safe because they choose it, girl. Every day. In small ways that no one applauds.”
Lain’s hand drifted unconsciously to her belly. The gesture was protective and instinctive, and shame came hot through her chest when she realized she’d done it. The child was still a secret in so many ways. Not from Eamon. But from so much of the world. Eamon didn’t ask, and he didn’t pry, but he’d probably shared more of his true feelings in this moment than he would have, if she hadn’t asked him. She had to be grateful.
She sat for a long while as Eamon worked beside her. She watched the dolphins disappear into the distance until the sea looked empty again, as if it had imagined them for her.
Eamon wiped his hands on his trousers and stood. “I’ve got more work,” he said, giving Lain a look that asked nothing but offered a great deal all the same. “Come back for supper tonight. Gráinne will kill me if you don’t.”
She smiled. “Okay.”
She stood, left the docks, and walked down the beach, her hooves sinking into the soft sand. A small baker’s cart rolled past, obviously bringing lunch to the fishermen. She could smell the pies before they emerged from under their basket lids, potatoes and peas and heavy cream baked into a crisp crust. She used one of her coins and the man wrapped it in brown paper and warm cooking oil leeched through to coat her fingers. She walked further down the beach, and sat in the warm sand, and ate, and she’d never seen dolphins before in her life, or the sea, and she’d never walked a sandy beach. She took bite after bite. When the gulls landed about her hoping for a taste of her lunch, she shooed them away. Even that made her laugh as they complained.
When the pie was finished, and she’d licked the last few crumbs from the paper, she walked down to the water and put her hooves in the cold salty brine for the first time, and yelped with glee as a wave rushed the shore and she had to run back, her slacks soaked through to her knees. She gasped with the cold and the pleasure of it. She cleaned her hands in the water, then licked them, the salt biting gleeful across her tongue. She sat further up the beach again, and drew little designs in the sand, and then she did something she’d seen girls do, growing up: she drew a little heart, and then drew an arrow through it, and wrote the initials M+L, and it was only in that instant that she realized Mallow and Morgan shared their first letters.
She ran her hand over the sand, clearing the slate.
Mallow was from a fishing village, on a coast far from here, on the other side of the Cloudspine. But she imagined him walking through this village, stopping to speak with his favorite bakerwoman. She saw him leaning against a stall, haggling for apples as he made his way to the docks in the morning, preparing for another day’s hard labor on a fishing boat. She heard his laugh.
Morgan found her by following the thread of the bond like a starving man following the smell of bread. He came down the beach with his coat open in the wind, hair blown back, boots leaving deep prints in the sand. Lain saw him only when his shadow fell across the place she’d been sitting, knees drawn up, hands still gritty from the shore. She had meant to stop crying before he’d returned, to swallow it down, wipe her face, and make herself presentable. The sea had taken her plans and worried them apart like paper.
His gaze went first to the wet tracks on her cheeks, then to the way her ears had flattened back against her hair. He recoiled for a moment as if he’d stepped into cold water. Then came a rush of helplessness he tried to master.
He dropped beside her, sand giving under his weight. The moment he sat, his arm came around her with gentle inevitability, heavy and solid, drawing her against his side as if he could anchor her to the world by holding her there.
Lain let herself lean and broke in the same instant. She pressed her face into his shoulder and tasted salt and wool and the metallic ghost of him, and then her body betrayed her in a shuddering breath that turned into another. Morgan’s forehead dipped. He stared out at the water for a moment as if he could force the horizon to teach him what to do.
“I left you for an hour,” he said quietly.
“You left me for an hour,” she echoed, and the words were wrong, but they were all she had.
He didn’t tell her he had to. The bond carried it anyway, and she could feel that he hated himself for needing anything at all in this moment.
“What is it, Lain?” he asked softly, and oh she hated him, hated his gentleness. She wished he would be cruel.
“I was thinking of Mallow,” she said.
The bond flared with a rush of conflict – jealousy more cutting than a razor, grief leashed and starving, and beneath both a weary understanding that she was telling the truth because she had no strength left for anything else.
And then her sorrow seared through all of it, a blinding fire. He collapsed beneath it. His shoulders began to shake. His grip on her tightened, and then he was crying with her, feeling, too, her hate for him.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“No,” she shook her head. “No –”
“I’m so sorry I took him from you. I am.”
“It’s not enough,” she said. “It will never be enough –”
“I know. I know.”
“And if he –” Serpents’ sake, she couldn’t say it, but then it came anyway, all the truth spilling out at once. “If he survived somehow –” she choked on the cruelness of the hope. “If he lived. I don’t know if he thinks I chose you. I don’t know if he thinks –” Her voice broke and she hated it. She tried again, harsher. “I don’t know anything. I’m so tired of not knowing anything.”
Morgan’s arm tightened again, and she felt him fight the urge to say something that would make it about him. She felt him swallow it down. He had been capable of swallowing down entire wars when it served his purpose. The only difference now was that he was doing it for her.
“He would not think you chose me,” Morgan said after a moment. “Not if he knew you at all.”
Lain’s eyes stung anew. She stared at the water, the foamy line where the tide drew back and returned, drew back and returned, as if the sea were practicing leaving and failing at it.
“And the child,” she said, because it was there like a weight on her tongue. “Morgan, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know if it’s yours. I don’t know if it –” she couldn’t finish. She had the sudden, nauseating memory of a human hand on her belly. The image of the doctor saying We can straighten this out. The image of the world deciding, again, that her body was a place other people could conduct their arguments.
Morgan’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “Stop,” he said gently. “Stop building a tower out of future misery and climbing it until you can’t breathe.”
Lain’s breath caught. Anger rose, immediately defensive. “You don’t get to –”
“I do,” he said, the old authority in his voice surfacing by instinct. It was gone again a moment later, replaced by something softer. “I do, because I’m here with you. You’re shaking. You’re making yourself sick.”
She stared at him, furious, but he didn’t flinch.
“Do you want this child, Lain?”
Lain swallowed. Her throat hurt.
“I want… I want them to live,” she said, and the honesty of it cracked some hardness in her and the tears came anew, as if she’d struck an altogether different well. “I want them to have something I never had.”
Morgan. Took a deep breath, and held her fast, and the moment glimmered in his emotions, and she knew with almost premonitory clarity that he would carry this moment forever.
“Then think of that,” he said. “Think of walking here with your child.”
Lain looked down the sand.
Morgan kept going, steady and patient. “Picture it. This exact stretch. The tide’s going out. Your child ahead of you, running up to the waves. You call their name and they don’t listen, because they’re laughing and the sea is loud and you’ve made them fearless.”
Lain blinked hard. The image arrived vivid as a dream. Small hooves, small hands, hair blown by wind. A little figure darting away from her reach.
“They would fall,” she whispered. “They would fall right into it.”
“Of course they would,” Morgan said, with faint but familiar humor. “They would fall, and then they’d get up, and they’d fall again, and you’d spend the rest of your life pretending you weren’t delighted they inherited your stubbornness.”
Lain’s mouth twitched despite herself.
She looked out at the water again. “They’d dig a hole in the sand.”
Morgan’s hand moved to the top of her shoulder, gave a small squeeze. “They’d build a fortress,” he corrected. “With a moat. They’ll demand a moat. And they’ll fill it with shells and act offended when the tide takes it back.”
Lain let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
Morgan watched her face closely, as if reading the moment a storm began to pass. “My youngest,” he said, and the words surprised her so much she turned to him fully, “once tried to fight the water.”
Lain stared. “Fight it?”
“With a stick,” he said, as though this were a perfectly reasonable approach to the sea. “He stood at the edge and struck at the waves like they had insulted him personally. I told him he shouldn’t anger the sea. He told me the water needed to learn manners.”
The image of Morgan Balthir on a shore, a small boy bristling beside him, both of them offended by the world’s refusal to obey, hit Lain so cleanly she laughed in earnest.
Morgan let himself be warmed by her laughter.
“And what did you do?” Lain asked, still laughing, wiping at her face again.
“I told him,” Morgan said, and the bond carried a reluctant fondness that made her chest hurt, “that if he was going to challenge the sea, he ought to at least remove his boots first.”
Lain laughed harder, the sound torn loose and bright, and for a moment the grief didn’t vanish, but it took its claws away from her throat. She could still feel Mallow like a phantom limb. She could feel the fear, waiting in her lungs. She could also feel this: Morgan’s arm around her, his steadiness, his fierce, stubborn commitment to pulling her back from the ledge of her own mind.
When she finally quieted, the laughter leaving her in soft shudders, she leaned back into him again. Because she was tired, and he was there.
Morgan bowed his head slightly, his cheek against her head. His voice went low. “We will come back here,” he said. “You and I. And your child will try to drown themselves for joy, and you will shout, and I will pretend to be stern, and the sea will do whatever it likes anyway.”
Lain closed her eyes.
“And Mallow?” she whispered, because she couldn’t leave him unspoken.
Morgan’s arm tightened around her, his feelings hurt, but steady.
“It’s a lovely name, Mallow,” he said gently. “It produces such pretty violet flowers. Like your eyes.”
He examined his jealousy, and breathed, and when he exhaled the jealousy went with it.
“You are allowed to miss him. You are allowed to grieve. You can laugh, too. None of it cancels the others.”
Lain’s throat tightened again, but the tears that came now were quieter. They didn’t feel like drowning. They felt like rain after a long drought, the kind that softened the ground enough for something to grow.
Lain closed her eyes, letting the salt spray dampen her face. Usually, she kept herself shuttered when she could, a fortress built to keep Morgan from her private thoughts.
But now, she turned to him, and reached into the center of the connection they shared.
She gave him the morning. She sent him the sting of salt on her tongue. She sent him the way the light felt like a golden weight on her eyelids. She sent him the vastness of the horizon, where the blue of the water met the blue of the sky in a line that promised nothing but distance.
Morgan gasped. He leaned again, closer to her, and turned his mouth softly to her temple, and pressed his gratitude there with all the love this sharing made him feel.
