Page 110 of The Second Death of Locke
“How so?” she asked.
“It feels…” He considered this, gaze rolling back, staring at the misty white of the sky. His nose wrinkled, the effect only marginally ruined by the crookedness from the last time he broke it. “It feels like you,” he said finally. “All of it. I don’t know if I can explain it better than that.”
She leaned against the stone next to him, her hand still tightly laced in his. She tried not to think of the moldering piles of bones and fabric that were waiting for them in Osar’s hall—to think of that would be to think of what those bones had once been, and every time her thoughts edged along that, it did something very odd to her heart and throat and stomach and the relationship between the aforementioned organs.
They were here, waiting. They had always been here, waiting, every moment of the sixteen years she had spent away from this place; every single heartbeat in which she was alive and they were not.
She bit it all down in one clean slice, because once she started, she would not be able to stop.
“Can you try to explain?” she asked Kier, desperate for distraction.
He made a noise low in his throat, but he was breathing easier. She looked at him, double-checking his collarbone, then went to run her finger lightly near the collagen of his left ear, where the curving top had been cut off at a diagonal.
His gaze was fixed on her, utterly reverent. He was looking at her like she held all the magic in the universe. She knew Kier, and she knew in an abstract sense that Kier loved her, but until this moment, this look, she had not considered that he loved her more than he loved magic.
“I didn’t know what it was about your power,” he said, “until that time, before we were bound, when I didn’t have you. I’d always taken you for granted—I was spoiled, growing up with you beside me, with the knowing. But… with you—it has a scent. A feeling. It’s sharp, and honed. It smells like the sea, mineral and clean, tinged with salt. I can almost taste the force of it—I can feel it in the back of my teeth.” He took in Grey’s gaze and shook his head. “I’m not explaining it right. Anyone else’s magic is watered down. Tavern beer when the bills are catching up. But you’re a shot of liquor. And here it’s…” He took a deep breath, eyes sliding shut, drunk on magic. “It’s in the air. It’s in the land, the stones, the trees. And it’s coming from you. It all feels likeyou. Gods, Grey, I’ve never felt so safe in my life.”
It took her a moment to recover. “That’s something,” she said finally, haltingly, “considering there are warships from at least four separate nations bearing down on us.”
One of his eyes slipped open. “But Scaela is still our ally?” he asked quietly, thumb skimming over the back of her hand, rubbing circles into her skin.
“And Cleoc Strata,” Grey said. “As far as I know.”
He nodded, taking it in. She focused on the cold seeping through the stones, the wet shirt pressed to her skin under her battle padding, the breeze that slipped through the spell-slits in the walls.
“I’m so sorry,” Kier said finally.
“For?”
He chewed his lip. “I didn’t know… I thought you’d listen to me, for once. That you would just let me do this. I didn’t know I was forcing your hand, forcing you into reclaiming Locke.”
“You thought I would let you die?”
“I hoped you might,” he said, the faintest of smiles on his lips, and it made everything in her ache.
She shook her head, banishing Kitalma’s words as she searched for her own. “I would’ve come for you. I’d always come for you.”
“And I you,” Kier said.
“Then you should’ve known.”
“Maybe. But all I could think was… Grey, I never wanted you to feel like that girl again. Alone. Abandoned.”
Grey looked at him, his long eyelashes and hazel eyes and the persistent stubble cropping up already on his jaw, the cut glass of his cheekbones, the stubborn silver on his temples. “I need to tell you something,” she said.
She needed to tell him a great number of things, actually, but that was beside the point as she struggled to put the least of them into words.
He caught her hand. “You can tell me anything.”
She took a breath, tried to school her features. The sky was steely gray, slipping toward darkness at the edges, a sunset without the presence of sun and gold and amber. The steady sort, like someone dimming a magelight until no glimmer of it remained. But it had been that way since they had arrived; the darkening sky had not darkened nor lightened; instead, it had stayed in transition. Grey realized, in the back of her mind, why the silence was so odd: there were no birds.
She felt the constant pull of Kier, the thrum of taking as he transformed her power into magic. The most familiar thing in the world.
She opened her mouth to tell him about it. About his death. About her choice. The words did not come—they stayed lodged in her throat, and Kier looked at her expectantly, and she could not do it.
Instead, she said, “I didn’t know, when we bound. That it would be different for you and me. But Kier—it has made you a Locke. That’s why Scaelas and Cleoc came for you. Because if they risked you, if you figured out how to call Locke from the sea, it would’ve worked.”
That guarded look returned. “But you are…”
