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“You should sleep,” he said.

“I was going to after you left.” She walked him to the door. “The shoes are reorganized. I’ve run out of productive anxiety tasks.”

“All of them.”

“The ones I’m willing to admit to.”

He left. She stood in the doorway in her wool socks and watched him go, and he was aware of every bit of it — she had a way of making sure he was.

FIFTEEN

ALTHEA

The storm came the way Spelltide Cove storms always did: sudden, certain, and without apology.

Althea had been on the beach for twenty minutes before the rain started. She was here because she did what she always did when the apartment got too small, the ceiling too close, and reorganizing ran out of things to reorganize: she walked toward water. The ocean didn’t have opinions about her. It moved, sounded like itself, and made it hard to hear her own thoughts, which was the entire point.

She’d spent the day with Drayce’s photographs.

Forty-seven of them. The cave walls. The layered inscriptions. The deepest chamber, the carving in the unknown script, the transliteration beneath it. He’d walked her through each one that morning, patient and thorough. She’d asked questions, heard answers, and by the end, understood what she was looking at. What she was. What the ward system had been built around before anyone used the word ward.

She was what kept the door closed.

The rain started on the thought, which seemed pointed, but the weather in Spelltide Cove had never been subtle about its opinions.

She didn’t move. The pebble shelf at the high-tide mark was damp and cold, and she was already wet from the spray, so the rain was just rain. The ocean had grown louder, that building-offshore loudness — not crashing, not dramatic, only the low, continuous roar of an enormous thing doing what it did.

She was afraid.

Not of the Drowned King. Not of the Rift, the creatures, or even Elder Colleen’s family name, which had appeared in three centuries of secondary annotations. Those were real dangers, and she would deal with them because she was apparently the one who did. That was the problem.

She was afraid of herself.

Not the fire magic. Not the surges. She’d made peace with most of it. She was afraid of the woman she used to be — the one who managed, suppressed, and made herself convenient, who had filed her feelings away so efficiently that the whole structure depended on the filing continuing. That was exactly what someone with knowledge of the ward system would have designed if they’d wanted a vulnerability.

She pulled her knees up, looked at the ocean, and let the rain do what it wanted.

He found her the way he always did.

She heard him on the path before she saw him — a steady, unmistakably his footfall. He came down the path from the headland, stopped at the edge of the pebble shelf, and looked at her, sitting in the rain with her arms around her knees.

“You know,” she said, “most people wait to be invited before they show up on dark beaches in the middle of a storm.”

“Most people don’t sit in the rain on dark beaches.”

“I’m processing.”

“I can see that.”

He sat beside her without asking, the way he did most things — already there and intending to stay. His shoulder was close to hers.

She watched him lower himself onto the pebble shelf. He was careful with his right side. Not visibly careful — Drayce was never visibly anything he could help — but she’d been paying attention for weeks, and she caught it.

“Your ribs.”

“Are fine.”

“That’s not what fine looks like when you sit down.”