By the time I reached the center of the market, it was empty, aside from a few merchants trading their remaining goods with each other. The kite seller and Sami were nowhere to be found. I had missed him. I dropped down onto a pile of broken crates, burying my head in my hands. I had come so far, and I had missed Sami, and all I wanted was for someone to take care of me for once, to take me home.

“Nor?”

I would have known that voice anywhere. It was the sweetest sound in the world, and now I was hallucinating it in my desperation. I kept my head down, until a small hand landed hesitantly on my back.

“Nor, is that you?”

Slowly, slowly, I looked up. And there, clad in a rough tunic and trousers, her beauty no less radiant because of it, stood my sister.

“Zadie?” I gasped.

We came together like we were falling into our reflections in the water, two mirror images colliding. How foolish I’d been, I realized, to spend so many years worrying over the ways we were different, instead of cherishing all the ways we were the same.

I had forgotten how small she was, how delicate, how familiar her smell was, the smell of home. “What are you doing here?” I asked her finally, smiling through my tears as I touched her cheeks, her lips, her hair. “Where is Sami?”

She cried harder at my question, and for a horrible moment, I was sure he was dead. “He tried to stand up to his father after he talked to you. He even had most of the elders on his side. But a group of villagers revolted, demanding he be banished for conspiring with an attempted murderer.”

“Me?” I asked. “They still think I tried to kill you?”

“It was Alys’s mother. She wouldn’t stop until she’d turned everyone in Varenia against our family.”

And I thought our mother was ruthless. “And Kristos did it? He banished Sami? His own son?”

“No, of course not,” Zadie said. “A group of men from the village did it in the night. They kidnapped him and took him out to sea. They abandoned him out there, Nor.” She sobbed into my shoulder, and I pulled her tighter against me, the fierce need to protect her that had driven me for most of my life burning as bright as flame.

“And you still came?” I asked her, amazed at her strength, the bravery it must have taken for her to come here alone.

“I had to,” she said, her voice breaking. “I couldn’t let you risk your life coming back here over and over when there was no point.”

“Don’t worry,” I said as I stroked her head. “Sami is resourceful. He’ll have found a way to survive. And when we get back to Varenia, I’ll explain everything to the governor.”

She blinked back her tears. “Explain what?”

“Prince Ceren is dead, Zadie. Our struggles are over.”

She stared at me for a moment, her face blank as she tried to make sense of my words. And then I noticed it for the first time: the flower she had dropped as she embraced me.

“Is that...?”

“It’s a rose,” she said, stooping to pick it up. The flower was as red as a blood coral, its head bowed under the weight of so many petals. She pressed it into my hands. “The kite seller gave it to me.”

I held it up to my nose, inhaling the delicate scent. It wasn’t just a flower. It was a symbol of everything I had dreamed about for so long, and everything I’d been willing to give up for that dream.

I looked into Zadie’s warm brown eyes. “You know, it’s not half as beautiful as a seaflower.”

And then, at the exact same moment, we burst into laughter, howling until our tears became tears of joy, and the world made sense once again.

* * *

I told Zadie everything as we headed back to our family’s boat, which she’d hidden in a small cove near the market. We stood on the shore together, looking out over the Alathian Sea, stained gray and orange by the setting sun. Staring out at the horizon, I realized that my world had never been small. It had been as boundless as my love for Zadie, stretching out before me as far as the eye could see and beyond.

Perhaps I had needed to leave to learn how precious it really was.

Talin would come for me, and we would all find Sami together. I would finally get to see the rest of the world like I’d always dreamed, but I wouldn’t take Varenia for granted ever again.

The waves crashed on the sand at my feet, and below the roar, I heard something else, like the murmur of a mother’s voice to her child, and I remembered the verse I had left out when I sang that lullaby for the king—the secret verse sung only by the young and hopeful, by those who believed that Thalos did not choose our destiny any more than a spoiled prince in a faraway kingdom.

I raised my voice and shouted it to the wind, singing the blessing that would carry me home:

Can you hear the ocean humming?

See the blood go sweeping past?

The child of the waves is coming.

To set our people free at last.

* * *