“Yes,” she agreed, meeting his gaze again. “I actually thought about many things when I sat here alone.”
Her voice had shifted. She was no longer teasing him, and Jack felt the mood change. There was something on her mind, weighing her down.
“What else did you think of?” he asked gently.
“I thought about my fears,” she said. “How every day I woke up in the west I was afraid. I think because I often felt like a stranger. Like I was losing myself or forgetting who I was. And so I would come here to swim in the warm darkness, even though it terrified me, and tell myself, If I go deep enough, far enough, I will eventually find the edge of it. I will find the end.”
Adaira paused, rolling her lips together. Water beaded on her face, gleaming like small gemstones. “I would find the end of my fear or finally claim it and turn it into something else. But I discovered that I could swim to the edge of the mortal realm and still be afraid.”
“Give your fear a name,” Jack said, remembering that Adaira had once said this very thing to Torin. “Once it is named, it is understood, and it loses its power over you.”
She looked to the opening of the cavern, where the world beyond was quiet and shadowed. “I’m afraid to become the next Laird of the West.”
Jack exhaled. He had been wondering about that for days now, and especially after witnessing the events in the hall that evening, from Rab Pierce’s treachery to Adaira’s words to the nobility, abandoned swords gleaming at her feet.
Jack couldn’t help but envision her with a western crown.
“You don’t want to be their heiress?”
Her eyes returned to his, wide and dark. “No. After what transpired with the Tamerlaines, no. I don’t want to lead a clan. I don’t want to carry such a burden.”
“And I don’t fault you for it,” Jack said. “The Tamerlaines acted shamefully when you departed for the west. I’m sorry you had to experience it.”
“It’s not your fault, Jack,” she whispered. “But now I’m in the strange position of needing to tell my parents that I am not the one to lead after them. And I want to have a plan in place, I want to be doing something. I just don’t know what it is.”
Jack was quiet as he considered how to respond to her.
“Months ago,” he began, “when I was still teaching on the mainland, I had a moment not unlike your own when I was trying to set my course. I wanted to plan and know where I was heading. I wanted to know exactly how my life was going to unfold, and what my purpose would be. And yet even with the next five years planned before me, I panicked one night, lying in bed thinking about it.
“I remember staring up into the darkness and feeling the stone walls close around me. I remember trying to envision my life and what I wanted to become and being unable to picture it. But perhaps that feeling came from my subconscious sensing that my time on the mainland was nearly gone, that I would soon depart from that life and those plans, even if that felt impossible and overwhelming at the time.”
Adaira was listening, her eyes fixed on him.
“I don’t think you need to give your parents an answer,” he continued. “At least, not for a while. But neither should you rule yourself out. Perhaps you will find, years from now, that you’ve changed your mind.”
She nodded, but he could still see a spark of doubt in her expression.
“Do you want to come closer?” he asked, a bit gruffly.
Adaira held his gaze, and he struggled to keep his breaths steady and even. But her words from earlier were haunting him, stirring his blood. He wanted to sing them back to her—Come into the darkness, come into the deep with me. He wanted to find that edge with her, the edge she had spoken of, when one thing becomes another. When the superfluous at last fades away, leaving behind nothing but salt and bones and blood and breath, the only elements that matter. The edge where the very essence of each of them was found.
Adaira must have seen the desire in his gaze. She moved across the water and settled on his lap, sitting face-to-face, eye-to-eye, breath-to-breath with him. Jack had to swallow a groan. It always took him by surprise how he reveled in being this vulnerable with another soul.
He marveled at how his own heart could exist outside his body.
“You don’t know what you do to me,” he whispered. “By you alone I could be undone.”
Adaira raised her hand from the water to trace his collarbones, his golden half coin, flickering in the light.
“I know it well,” she replied. “But only because you have done the very same to me.”