Claimed by the Summer King

CHAPTER 3

Kael POV

He threw his own wings open and launched after her and dropped straight back into the shallows in a graceless heap, remRivening half a second too late that his wings were still soaked through.

"Damn it." He drove a fist into the water, sending mud and spray up into his own face, blinding him for one furious second.

"Well. That," came a voice from the rocks above, dripping with amusement, "was spectacularly mishandled, brother."

Kael didn't need to look up to know the voice, fire-bright hair, permanently smug expression but he looked anyway. Riven was perched on the boulders, wings bone dry, watching the whole disaster unfold like it was the evening's entertainment.

"How long were you sitting there?"

"Long enough to know her accusation didn't hold water. Unlike you, apparently." Riven dropped down to the pool's edge, arms crossed over his bare chest, studying his brother with an interest that was going to be insufferable in about four seconds. "So. What are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing." Kael hauled himself upright and scrubbed the mud from his hands, refusing to meet his brother's eyes.

"Nothing." Riven repeated it like it was the funniest word he'd ever heard. "You're just going to let her fly off and pretend the sky didn't turn blue? What would Mother and Father say, considering their own fated kiss is the entire reason you're one signature away from a kingdom of your own?"

Kael's hands curled into fists at his sides, and for one satisfying second he pictured exactly how good it would feel to shut his brother up permanently. But Riven would only dodge, laughing, and then repeat the whole story to every noble at breakfast with considerably more embellishment.

"I set sail for the Summer Isle tomorrow," he said instead, flatly.

"And your bride follows within the year. Yes. I recall the wedding plans, brother, I was there for the toast." Riven's charcoal eyes glittered with something sharper than amusement now. "You know the old stories as well as I do. Nobody outruns a fated bond. Not even a prince who's already promised to someone else."

That's the problem, Kael thought grimly. He knew the stories. Knew them well enough to feel the shape of his own future rearranging itself somewhere just out of reach, and knew worse that he could have stopped her. One word, one order, and the palace guard would have brought her straight back down out of the sky, fated bond or not.

He hadn't said the word. He wasn't sure yet what that meant about him.

"Don't strain yourself thinking too hard," Riven said, clearly delighted with his own cruelty. "I'd hate to see that handsome head of yours crack open."

Kael scooped a stone from the shallows and hurled it at his brother's smirking face and missed by a wide, humiliating margin as Riven stepped lazily out of the way.

"Terrible aim," Riven called over his shoulder, already climbing back toward the rocks.

"If I'd wanted to hit you, I would have." Kael turned back toward the water, toward the moonflowers still glowing faintly along the cliff wall, and noticed though he'd tell no one, not even himself, why it unsettled him so deeply that the flower nearest the spot where Liora had stood had curled shut again.

Just that one. Black at the edges, as if something had scorched it from the inside out.

"Get out of here before I actually manage to hit something," he muttered.

Riven went, still laughing under his breath, wings snapping open and carrying him lazily back over the rockfall toward the noise of the party, leaving Kael alone with the pool, the mud, and the single ruined flower.

He didn't move for a long while. The water had gone still again, smoothing itself back into a perfect black mirror, and above it the moon sat exactly where it always sat, indifferent to what had just happened beneath it. Somewhere beyond the boulders, the party carried on his brothers' laughter, the splash of bodies, Lady Seraphine's voice rising in some new performance for an audience that would never tire of watching her. None of it reached him. It all sounded very far away, like something happening to someone else's life.

He crouched at the water's edge and touched the blackened petal with two fingers, half expecting it to crumble at the contact. It didn't. It simply sat there, curled tight as a fist, refusing to open again no matter how long the moon hung over it. He thought of his grandmother's stories against flowers that turned traitor, blooming early to warn a prince, closing forever once the warning had gone unheeded and told himself, firmly, that he did not believe in omens.

He believed in the blue light behind his eyes even less, and yet there it still was, burned into the dark every time he blinked.

Kael sat back on his heels and looked up at the sky where Liora had vanished, wondering which direction she'd flown, wondering if she was already back at the palace pretending nothing had happened, wondering and this was the thought that finally drove him back onto his feet whether she was safe at all, flying alone and furious through royal airspace where any guard with an itchy trigger finger and an unfamiliar silhouette might mistake her for something she wasn't.

He should go after her. He should have gone after her the moment she left the ground.

Instead he stood in the shallows of his own private cove, wings still too wet to carry him anywhere, and watched the last ripples smooth themselves out of existence, and understood with the particular, sinking clarity that comes only once everything useful has already been said and done that tomorrow he was sailing for the Summer Isle regardless of what had just happened here, that a wedding six years in the planning did not simply unmake itself because of one reckless kiss in the moonlight, and that whatever this was, whatever the flowers and the light and the ache still humming low in his chest were trying to tell him, it was going to have to wait.

It would not, he suspected, wait quietly.