Page 33 of The Crown's Awakening
The man gives a quiet scoff. “Over a princess they’ve never seen? I doubt?—”
He doesn’t finish.
Teorin doesn’t move toward him. He doesn’t raise his voice or step forward. The force leaves him in a single, controlled release, crossing the space between them before anyone else has time to react. The man’s body snaps backward and hits the deck hard enough to carry through the boards beneath our feet, the sound sharp and final.
No one speaks after that.
Teorin’s attention doesn’t linger on what he’s done. He turns to me as though nothing has shifted at all. “Go below.”
I look at him, searching for something that might give me reason to refuse him now when I didn’t before. But there’s nothing there I can use, only that same unyielding resolve.
I nod once. This time, the reaction in him is clearer, though brief. He didn’t expect that answer. I don’t give him time to question it.
I turn and move toward the stairs, the air growing heavier with each step as the ship continues forward. The sound of the water has changed, the hull answering it with deeper strain,and beneath it there’s something else threading through the structure, something that doesn’t belong to wind or current.
Behind me, the deck shifts into motion again, voices rising, movement tightening, the space between people closing as they prepare for something that has already begun.
The weight in the air presses more heavily against me with each step down the stairs. The deck behind me holds too tightly together, voices low but beginning to strain, as if something beneath them is pushing upward and waiting for the moment it gives.
The ship continues forward, but the movement beneath my feet no longer feels like open water. It drags, resists, the hull answering something outside it with a deeper, uneven pull. I descend the first set of stairs, my hand brushing the rail as the air shifts the further I move from the deck. It thickens below, warmer in a way that feels wrong against the cold pressing through the structure around us.
The second set of stairs narrows, the light dimming as the ship strains again beneath me. The first impact rolls through it a moment later, heavy and uneven, the wood vibrating under my hand as something outside presses against it with more force than it should. Another follows. closer this time, and the sound that answers it is not just movement.
It breaks.
The corridor below shifts as panic rises where control had been. People surge toward the stairs, pushing past one another without direction, hands catching walls and doorframes as they try to move faster than the space allows.
I reach the bottom as the first scream cuts through it. Bodies press toward me, someone colliding with my shoulder hard enough to force me back a step, another gripping the rail beside me to keep from falling as the space fills too quickly to hold them.
“They’re inside?—”
The rest is lost. The sound reaches me a moment later, deeper now, closer, something forcing its way through the hull with a wet, dragging pressure that leaves no room for doubt.
I move toward it. The breach runs jagged along the wall, the wood bowing inward under the force pressing against it. Fingers push through first, dragging along the edges as the opening widens, followed by more of it, pulling itself forward with a persistence that doesn’t slow no matter how little space it has to work with.
Another body presses behind it. Then another. The wall gives further. The light answers before I think, cutting forward and forcing the first of them back hard enough that the wood fractures outward with it. The opening doesn’t close. It widens under the pressure, the force behind it building as more of them push through.
Something catches my arm.
I turn into it and find Nyara there, her grip firm enough to stop me without dragging me backward. “Stop fucking around,” she says. “Get them off the ship.” There is no uncertainty in hervoice, only impatience sharpened by the chaos around us. “I am not going back to Veynar today.”
The wall splits wider as she says it, the structure giving in uneven sections as more of them force their way through. She releases me and steps forward.
The air shifts. The cold presses deeper through the floor and into the walls as something outside answers her. I feel it gather beneath us, along the seams of the ship, the water pulling closer in a way that feels directed.
The next body that forces through the breach halts mid-motion. Then it jerks backward, hard enough to tear the wood wider.
What the fuck?
I stare at her, at the way she stands there as if the sea itself has turned toward her. Her eyes have now changed from their usual warm brown to an ice blue not dissimilar to Colsar's eye.
“What are you?—”
“I’m a Watermaker,” she says, her tone irritated like the question is unnecessary. “One of the many reasons Veynar has always shunned me.”
Teorin had been wrong about her. Or he had lied. It was hard to tell which these days.
Another surge presses forward. The shards hold for an instant, then begin to fracture under the weight of what’s pushing through. A short sword lies on the floor, abandoned in the rush. I grab it and step in beside her as the first of them breaks free of the ice.
