Kaelan fought desperately, like a cornered animal. He tried to break free, pushing with his shoulders, kicking, clinging with his fingers to the hair and skin wherever he could reach. Water splashed around them, filling their ears and mouths. They were both drowning, but only one was trying to go under.

"Enough," Serak hissed through clenched teeth, grabbing his arms.

He grabbed Kaelan by the wrists, spun him around sharply, pressed his arms against his chest and leaned his whole body on him. It seemed to him that if he loosened his grip for even a second, the thin body would simply slip away.

The water lapped at his chest, the waves clinging to his clothes, pulling him down, but he didn't allow himself to think about how deep they were. Serak took a step back, then another, digging his heels into the sandy bottom and pulling Kaelan out of the water. His arms ached, his muscles burned, but he didn't stop.

When the water reached their knees, he jerked the thin body higher, almost lifting it off the surface of the sea, and, turning around, dragged it to the shore. The sand began to sink under his feet again, his legs buckled, his breathing became ragged.

He didn't understand at what point he simply lost control and turned his last step into a throw. Kaelan flew forward, fell onto the sand, rolled over his shoulder and remained lying there, curled up in a ball, trying painfully to draw air into his lungs.

Serak collapsed beside him. He fell heavily onto his shoulder in the damp sand, either onto his knees or straight onto his side, and felt it stick to his wet skin and clothes. For a few seconds, all he could hear was his own painful breathing. Every attempt to breathe tore his chest apart from the inside. Gently touching one of the wounds on his neck, he felt a sharp burning sensation and quickly withdrew his hand.

He wanted to raise himself up on his elbows to check if Kaelan was moving. Was he even breathing? But instead, he forced himself to just freeze and listen.

And he heard it.

First, a quiet, almost childish sob. Then another. Then a sound he remembered all too well. A broken cry and despair turning inside out.

Serak closed his eyes, allowing the sound to squeeze through the roar of blood in his temples, and felt something inside him relax strangely.

"Yes," flashed somewhere deep inside, "I remember him exactly like that."

He turned his head and looked at Kaelan. He was lying on his side, his knees pulled up to his chest, sand stuck to his wet hair, his eyelashes, the skin on his temples. His shoulders trembled slightly, his fingers clenching a handful of sand seemed fragile.

"Your tears no longer evoke pity in me. They never did," he thought unexpectedly calmly, feeling only a strange, heavy satisfaction that this crying meant one thing: he was alive. He was here. He hadn't gone under. He hadn't disappeared.

How wonderful.

Time stretched out. The tears didn't stop, as if everything Kaelan hadn't been able to shout out over the past few years was now trying to burst out at once. Serak didn't touch him. Although he really wanted to shake him good and hard. But the man just lay there, feeling the cooling wind dry the blood on his face, tightening the skin where his fingernails had left deep grooves.

When the crying subsided and turned into rare, convulsive sighs, he finally spoke. His voice was hoarse but steady.

"Why did you go underwater, Kaelan?"

He flinched, as if only now remembering that someone was nearby. He was silent for a few seconds, still fiddling with the sand, rubbing it between his fingers as if checking whether it was real. Inhale, exhale, one more time.

Ignoring the familiarity of the seemingly unfamiliar man, Kaelan spoke.

"They wouldn't do that," he finally whispered, without raising his head. "My family... they wouldn't do that."

The words came with difficulty, but he continued.

"They wouldn't have given me away so easily. They wouldn't have let me go alone. Without nannies... without guards..." He faltered and exhaled heavily. "They were always there. Always."

He was still speaking too quietly, and Seraku had to move a little closer to hear him.

"I thought..." Kaelan's voice almost broke into a whisper. "I thought they would come. That right now the carriage would stop, and I would hear them... kill you, as they were ordered to let me go. I thought that if I closed my eyes and lay still, then... everything would come back."

He bit his lip for a second, clenched his fingers into a fist, sand spilling out between his knuckles.

"But no one is chasing us," he continued, faster now, as if afraid that if he stopped, he would never speak again. "No nanny, no guards, no father, no mother. No one. Do you understand? No one. They wouldn't have done that."

He sniffed, took a breath, and, without looking up, added almost inaudibly, but each word fell between them like a heavy stone:

"I think... I think you killed them."

There was silence. It was no longer the ringing emptiness that had struck his ears when he saw the empty cart, but something else... thick, filled with the sound of waves, the distant cry of some birds, and the beating of his own heart, which suddenly became too loud.

Serak looked down at his own palm lying on the sand. Grains of sand slipped through his fingers, flowing from one fold of skin to another, as if showing how easily everything in this world crumbles if you squeeze too hard or, conversely, let go.

"Should you be surprised that he thinks that way?" a thought passed through his mind, devoid of emotion.

He continued to sift through the sand, feeling his heart beating faster than the water crashing against the rocks. To delay his answer, he began to draw curved lines in the sand.

"Perhaps," he finally said, without looking up, "you simply idealised your family too much."

The words came out evenly, without any attempt to soften the blow.

Kaelan flinched as if he had been struck in the face. Slowly, with a strange caution, he raised his head and turned around. His gaze ranged from despair to rage.

"What?" he breathed.

His eyes filled with tears again.

"They..." He choked on a sob. "They are my family."

His voice broke. His body shook again, and the crying, which seemed to have dried up, returned with renewed force. Only now there was no longer the empty resignation that had sounded a minute ago. There was a pitiful belief in the past, to which he desperately clung.

Serak watched him silently, feeling a thin strip of blood from his cheek mix with the salt of the sea and slowly run down to his chin. He did not wipe his face.

Let it be. Let it burn. Sometimes pain was the only thing that connected him to the present.

And amid the smell of salt, wet sand and sea breeze, he caught himself thinking that this was only the beginning of their conversation. The beginning of a journey in which they would have to break not only the chains on their hands, but also those that wrapped around Kaelan's memory and throat, preventing him from breathing.

But they were together.