She wanted to swim for the surface and break free from this strange, burgeoning rage. But she was too weak. She couldn’t swim, much less rise.

And she was healing, even if the waters resented it and the Well wished it could withhold. Not you, it seemed to say. Anyone but you. It could not stop the healing, though, and as eternity drifted past, the flames inside Vivia receded. The blood stopped leaving her. Until soon enough, the only pain came from her lungs—desperate for air—and from her mind, still filled with the sense of disgust, disdain, disruption.

Once Vivia could swim again, she did. She frog-legged and spread her arms. She pushed and pushed, no help from the water, until the surface wavered in. She broke free. Air washed against her, spread through her lungs. She gulped and gasped and for several thudding heartbeats, she did nothing but tread water and breathe.

Then she sensed movement, heard splashing, and when she turned about, she found Vaness in the water too. “You are … healed?” the Empress asked.

Vivia nodded. Her throat and lungs still hurt too much for words.

“That is good.” Vaness offered a tight smile, her limbs splashing to hold her afloat. “I was about to dive under to find you.”

Still Vivia said nothing—now, though, it was not because she couldn’t. The Well healed constantly; it had already soothed away the sharpness of her lungs overstrained.

No, she held her silence because she didn’t know what to say. She had gone racing after Vaness—had killed and almost been killed—to protect an empress she would have gladly left to die two months ago.

Vaness seemed to follow the same thoughts as Vivia. Her cheeks pinkened. Her gaze darted toward the horizon and the sea, where night still reigned. “You saved my life. The assassin was Dalmotti, no?”

Vivia nodded. The waters were warming around her, the Well’s strange anger receding. As if it had forgotten her. As if perhaps she’d imagined the entire thing.

“Why?” Vaness’s hands reached up to rub water from her eyes, her legs paddling to keep her in place. “Why did the Doge refuse to help us then hunt us across the sea?”

“I don’t know.” Vivia’s voice croaked out, though not from exhaustion. She felt anything but tired now, with the Well’s healing touch to course through her.

And with Vaness so near.

Something ached low in Vivia’s belly. The Well, she told herself, even as she couldn’t take her eyes off Vaness’s face. Her hair was coiled and wet against her head, while her arms and shoulders, shapely and defined, were somehow far more appealing with white cotton clinging to them than they ever had been in her most revealing gowns.

Vivia wanted to swim closer. Her fingers wanted to wipe that stray hair from Vaness’s cheek.