The road opens up over the course of the day, gradually melting from grassland to coastline. The smell of salt wafts stronger, the grasses fading yellower and rooted in much drier, sandier soil. The birds turn from crows and sunbirds to gulls and seafalcons nesting in the rocky cliffs that’ve started to poke through the horizon. Fione consults a map briefly at a crossroads, pointing us to the southwest, to where the port town Dolyer—and hopefully our passage to the island of the Black Archives—awaits.

“Do we even have money?” Malachite asks during a water break.

“We can pawn something if we must,” Fione insists, then looks to Lucien. “I could’ve sworn the Breych sage gave you a pouch of coin.”

“Graciously,” the prince agrees. “The majority of it went to the villagers we rescued, but we have enough for a charitable boat.”

“A shitter, you mean,” Malachite sighs.

“A local charmer,” Lucien corrects.

Camp that night is quiet, all of us exhausted after three days walking on the road. It’s a bone-deep exhaustion, plagued with cold and wet all because Malachite saw a few very large and very fresh valkerax tracks in the silty mud and deemed a fire unsafe. Lucien offers to warm us with magic internally, but Fione and I won’t have it, insisting he keep up his energy.

“‘Warming internally?’” Malachite scoffs. “Please, heartbreaker. Save the innuendo for your girl.”

Lucien and I go rigid in our seats, neither of us looking at each other.

“Malachite-whatever-your-family-name-is!” I half shriek, half hiss. “Shut. Up!”

“Save it for the giant squids, rather,” Fione chimes in and saves the day. “It’s spawning season, and they oft mistake the underside of boats for other squid.”

And that settles that, raunchy rib forgotten as we all chew our jerky in disgusted-expression tandem and imagine a squid trying to mate with the underside of a boat.

Thanks and no thanks to Malachite’s comment, Lucien’s and my shared covering-slash-bedroll tonight is more awkward than usual. Every part of him burns like a brand, too close, too radiating. At some point in the night he sits up, both of us still wide awake.

“I can sleep somewhere else.”

“Don’t—” I reach for his shirt and tug him back down. “Don’t be silly.”

“I can’t help it around you.” I can’t see his smirk in the dark, but I hear it. It’s strange. Neither of us smells very good—mud and acidic valkerax blood and the layered sweat of travel—but my body doesn’t care about any of that. It wants to touch him, forever, always, no matter what. Now most of all.

“You know now,” I say.

“Know what?” he murmurs against the shell of my ear.

“My choice. What I’ll choose, always.”

“To help me?” he asks.

“To be with you,” I say. “In death or undeath.”