Seaborn
Christopher Howard
Copyright © 2008 by Christopher J. Howard
www.SaltwaterWitch.com
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8095-7281-6
Publisher’s Note:
No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder except for brief passages quoted by reviewers or in connection with critical analysis.
Juno Books
Rockville, MD
www.juno-books.com
info@juno-books.com
For Alice
2 - Highway 17
3 - Fast
4 - Free Diving
5 - Visitors
6 - Captive Ocean
7 - One of the Seaborn
8 - The Wreath-wearer
9 - Recovery
10 - The Night Wanderers
11 - Displeased
12 - The New World
13 - Plans
14 - Iced Wine
15 - Lady Kallixene
16 - First Binding
17 - Ritual Drowning
18 - House Rexenor
19 - Tribunal at Sea
20 - At the Captain’s Table
21 - Dreaming
22 - McHutcheon’s Fire
23 - The Canal
24 - Futility
25 - The Crew of the Maria Draughn
26 - Gathering Forces
27 - The Living Fortress
28 - Nine-cities
29 - Phaidra
30 - The Army of the Bone-gatherer
31 - The Hollow Man
32 - An Audience
33 - No Diplomacy
34 - Sea Battle
35 - The Inner Ocean
36 - A Minor Rexenor Noble
37 - Battle’s End
38 - The New Army
Characters in Seaborn and Beyond
Chapter 1 - Kassandra
We are all Thalassogenêis—Seaborn.
All life began in the Ocean.
The tides, the salt, the rolling waves
are in our souls,
and the sea will always have
the power to call us home.
—Final page of the journal of
Michael Augustus Henderson
The water followed her home from the library, water in the air slipping over her skin as if afraid to touch her without permission. The sound of water played in her ears—a child's laughter splashing, a creek burbling a mile down Atlantic Avenue—and the soft rain skipped in her footprints.
Headlights broke over the hill behind her, and the wet air reacted. The water snapped flat and reflective on every surface until the car passed.
The hiss of automobile tires faded into the whisper of rain and, in the distance, she watched a spray of pinpoint lights, shiny and heavy like mercury on the leaves that folded over the road.
The car was gone and the water spoke to her, words that seeped and dribbled into her head. I will clothe you in mirror, my lady, shield you in ice, become the crown you already wear.
She glanced around and walked faster, huddling under her backpack.
"Leave me alone."
The rain spat and crackled like angry cellophane, but warned her of another car approaching—miles away, a shiny black sedan pulling out of the North Hampton Police Station. She turned and walked backward along the edge of the road, staring into the dark, her three long brown braids winding around her throat like a noose. She waited a moment for the car to appear, biting her lip uncertainly, and then turned away, sandals flipping mud behind her.
"The rain's watching me, Prax."
Praxinos, a voice inside her, answered with a deep thrum in her jaw. Of course it is, but its motives are rarely complicated. And you are the Wreath-wearer. It will obey, but you must learn to command.
"It's showing me things. I smell its life. The water's connected." It's in my veins. I am part of it, the water. She pointed to the asphalt's edge, broken by the woody knuckles of elms and pines. I can smell an underground river there. She looked away because she heard the sap coursing through the trees like blood, sticky snapping insect legs that wanted to crawl to her, capillary roots tugging at the earth as she passed.
Mud oozed between her toes and she stepped into the street, hopping to take off her sandals. The cold rumble of the Piscataqua River six miles away, a hundred brooks and streams in between, all of them coming into her body through her bare feet.
Puddles of rainwater were staring up at her, and she glared back at them.
"Get away from me."
She looked over her shoulder, moving to the roadside—still no sign of the car. When she turned back, the rain lit up the night for her, a hundred tunnels drawn in wiry mist, tubes of gauzy moiré. They opened in the air, opening for her, beckoning, and she knew they all led to the sea. She smelled the salt and mold, the bitter rotting seawrack, tasted sand and powdery broken shells in her mouth.
"Just let me go." She held in a sob, wringing her hair over one shoulder.
Follow the paths to the sea. You have so much to learn, my lady.
"I already know things—things I don't want to know."
But the rain showed her more: what she was and what she had been, sparks of memory in scrolling frames, fortress walls on the Atlantic's floor, a woman's teeth filed to points, a book with a voice, and the ice-filled bones of an army, two hundred and forty-thousand strong, wired together and sent to kill the dangerous girl, the Wreath-wearer—the girl with a soul of abyss-dark and noble ghosts, the girl made of inferno and restless gasoline.
"Don't do this to me." Her voice changed as it passed her lips. The water in her breath garbled her words, obeying another power inside her.
She tried a commanding tone: "I'll go when I want to!" The words twisted and softened, warm candy words in her mouth, floating sweet over her tongue.
She stomped through puddles. Her angry scream coiled into a song that summoned the tide—and the Atlantic Ocean roared in answer a mile away.
She tripped in a pothole and the water in the air caught her and kept her from falling—and the rain tipped the leaves and danced on the asphalt in her wake.
Cursing under her breath, she ran recklessly, her head down, past an old lichen-covered wall. The damp between the stones bled to the edges to be near her, condensing in huddling beads.
She looked up and blinked, slowing to a walk, and the rain showed her more. Another set of ghost caves unfolded, spiraling over each other, fading to dim intestinal coils if she looked hard at them, flaring electric bright every time she blinked.
"Let the rain hit me! I don't care." She looked away and the superimposed ghost world pivoted with her, paths shifting to accommodate her, the axis.
The clouds heard her call; bruised purple and water heavy, they gathered over coastal New Hampshire. She looked at them through the trees and tossed her sandals away.
"What the fuck do you want from me?" And she spat before the water could muddle her words.
Her shout broke the storm; falling sheets of water hit the earth, and no reply came from the clouds, the rivers, the underground streams, the endless hungry Atlantic Ocean, unable to answer a queen who begged her subjects for direction.
"Pôs eipas? Epitribeiês! Is this what you want?"
Barefoot, she stepped into the middle of the road and threw her arms wide; lifting her open mouth, she drank in the storm. Hot bars of lightning burned the air. Thunder swept through her bones, the thud of its crash to the earth under her toes.
Columns of rain broke through the canopy of pine and maple. Her fingers spread wide and then closed into fists, and the storm shattered at her feet like a car's windshield, beads of rain spiraling into razor-edged water stars that burst in rings of frost-lace and mist.
The crinkle of something alive slid up her body, coating her in armor: tight transparent sleeves, a skin of flexible arctic-blue scales, a collar of ice blades. Her fist tightened reflexively around the grip of a sword, and a crown of woven seaweed glowed cold green through her rain-wet brown hair.
She sang a storm of words, and lightning swaggered through the trees, blasting away bark. A sixty-foot pine split with a gush of sap, smoke, and vaporized needles—and splinters rained down with the water.
Headlights shot through the hazy night and she lowered her arms. The sword vanished. The armor disappeared, melting off her body. She stood alone in the street, soaking wet in a T-shirt and shorts, her backpack hanging loose off one shoulder.
She gave the approaching police car an angry squint and turned away, taking rapid steps along the road's edge, washed in a pulse of blue light. She kept her head down because she didn't want to see the pale outlines of caves in the air, holding her breath against their lure. Before she covered her ears, the rain urged her to run. Leave everything behind. Run, my lady, run where the police cannot follow. I will hide you.
"Don't talk to me." She snapped the words into the wet air.
Her steps slowed, her body shaking, weariness dragging at her. Her backpack slipped off her shoulder, fell to the ground with a splash. Her books and research papers raced for the pack's zipper-toothed mouth; a binder spread its wings, scattering its brood, white sheets of neat handwriting, wet-winged butterflies briefly alive, folding sullen and colorless in the rain.
She kept walking.
The black car rolled forward, the passenger side window sliding into the door.
"You need a ride, miss? This rain isn't letting up and it's a dark road to be walking alone."
"A dark road," she whispered, and something inside her made all the words but one drift away, forgotten. "Alone." She said it aloud, blinking purposefully, trying to climb out of her head and back into the world. She glanced at the blue stripes on the shiny black fender as if noticing the car for the first time.
"The police are here," she told the other voices in her head.
A woman inside her answered snobbishly, Tell the police to go. You do not need their help.
She blinked, trying to answer, but ended up repeating the rain's words: "I have so much to learn."
"How much have you had to drink tonight?" The officer again—it sounded like the police officer, the patrol car rolling to match her pace.
She bent to look through the open window. Her focus hit him hard, and he choked on his words; his heart stalled, his soul falling through dark water toward her, into the abyss of her eyes.
And the rain whispered, Alone, Lady Kassandra, you must be alone.
Still looking at the police officer, pinning him to his seat, she answered the rain. "Silence!"
Then she plucked the officer's name right out of his head.
"I have been drinking, Lieutenant Pannone. I've been drinking the rain."
She released him and walked away.
Pannone's forehead hit the hard plastic of the steering wheel. His heart thumped a wild rhythm and then evened into a steady rapid beat. He sucked air in desperate gulps and flexed his numbing fingers, staring out the windows as if he was lost.
Then he fell back in his seat, his uniform damp against his skin. Reality snapped into place for him. He closed his eyes tight, then opened them, trying to get the blue arcs and red backlit dials of the dashboard into focus.
A squeak of wiper blades. He looked up through the windshield and remembered the young woman with the backpack walking in his headlights in the middle of Atlantic Avenue.
Pannone wiped sweat from above his lips. He grabbed a tissue off the visor, wadding it damply in one fist. He tugged out three more to wipe his forehead and rolled the car forward to again come alongside her.
"Are you on medication, miss? You supposed to be? Can I call your parents?" She made no sign that she heard him, so he went on. "A shrink? Maybe your grandparents?"
She looked over but didn't meet his eyes. "My grandfather killed my mother. I'm going to kill him. He's expecting it, so I must plan well."
She noticed the officer hiding his reaction, and she scowled because it hadn't been alarm. It was sympathy.
He leaned closer. "What's your name?"
It was written all over his car, bleeding K's and S's, beads of rain lining up, a thousand Kassandras on the windows, weeping letters on black paint.
She turned away and covered her eyes, pressing the palms of her hands against her cheeks, her thumbs digging into the sides of her head.
"Do not tell me what to do!"
Thunder boomed far away and the voices in her head went quiet.
The officer let his seatbelt snap away, leaning over the passenger seat, holding the wheel with his knee, showing her his open hands. "I can take you to a hospital. Just let me help. You shouldn't be out here alone."
She didn't hear him, the rain shielding her from the sound of his voice.
She stopped as if she had run up against something solid in the air, her hands falling away from her face. Her world collapsed to the stretch of road the patrol car's headlights carved out of night, stiflingly small, and she tugged at her shirt, wet and binding around her throat.
Kassandra dropped into a runner's crouch, bending her knees deep, and launched her body down the edge of the asphalt, an off-the-blocks sprint for the lights' edge, her three brown braids streaming like wet rope in her wake. She was through the headlight horizon and into the dark, rain like needles against her skin, arms pumping, breathing hard through her teeth.
Pannone kicked the accelerator, topping forty miles an hour to keep up. He braked hard where Mill Road crossed Atlantic Avenue, turning into a slide that took him into the oncoming lane. The young woman collided with a pickup truck at the stop sign.
Pannone swung his door open, flipped on the side-spots and jumped into the street, not bothering with his hat or coat.
The pickup's driver stared through a rain-blurred sweep of wiper blades, his lips twitching, knuckles bone white on the wheel.
Officer Pannone crouched, examining the fender and the street along the driver's side, his dark uniform rain-pasted to his skin, water dribbling into his mouth, off his nose and chin. He kneeled to run his flashlight under the truck. He stepped back to take in the scene from a wider view, throwing the beam of light on the street, the wheels, windshield, letting it slide across the truck's hood.
Right in the center, the rain softened a muddy footprint. There was no other sign of her.
He turned the beam of the flashlight on dark empty Atlantic Avenue. She had vanished.
Pannone switched off the light and headed back to his car.
He slammed the door and dropped it in reverse, accelerating half a mile up Atlantic, looking for her backpack in the flashing blue. He pulled over and spent another hour walking, following depressions in the mud and blurry footprints where she had wandered into the middle of the road.
He gave up.
The rain coming through the trees annoyed him, running off the leaves, whispering his name in his ears, tapping a rhythm that promised to be catchy, but slowed or doubled unexpectedly, and would not allow itself to be caught.
Chapter 2 - Highway 17
I am an outsider, but I have been so thoroughly drawn inside another world—a most alien world—that I scarcely know where to begin.
—Opening line of the journal of
Michael Augustus Henderson
Corina Lairsey dived alone on Thursdays.
She lived thirty miles inland, in Coyote, south of San Jose, and spent an hour every morning battling traffic downtown to C-COM—California College of Music.
Every Thursday she cut her afternoon classes to make time for the Pacific, and so she also drove Highway 17 alone, navigating the dipping winding double lanes up over the summit and down the west side toward Monterey Bay.
All but one of her fingers curled tight around the wheel, the loose one tapped to a rhythm in her head, and a fine stream of tears ran down her cheeks.
She wiped them away, blinking over the steering wheel at a bar of red and white reflective tape, candy-caned across the back doors of a massive refrigerator truck, coming at her at close to ninety.
She braked hard and cut into the parade of fast-lane-hogging compact cars, glancing in the rearview at the guy flashing his headlights.
The freighter barreled down the slow lane with its cargo rocking and suspension creaking, its giant wheels circular blurs of droning gray a foot in the next lane. The slope steepened and the truck jake-braked with the rumble of an idling chainsaw that penetrated Corina's Toyota, mingling with the music in the other cars, harmonica-saturated gutter folk, boy band harmonies, and thumping technorhythmia.
Corina didn't have her music playing, except in her head.
Almost at the bottom of the Santa Cruz Mountains, she let her mind slip into replay mode—with accompanying music—watching her ex-boyfriend's mouth drop open when she told him goodbye, so long, adiós, don't call me, ever.
Corina wasn't weeping for the loss of Alan Yeater. She was glad to be free of him, free of another man who had started with flowers, caring, and constant attention, and ended with control over every detail of her life: where to eat, who to make friends with, who to drop, what to wear, what not to wear, how much to weigh, how much make-up, fingernail polish, toothpaste, breakfast, lunch, dinner... Give me some damn space!
She knew she had to end it when she saw "the look." He'd told her to change out of a flirty pink blouse, and she'd laughed and said, "What are you, my grandmother?" His face had gone rigid, his blue eyes molten, like opening a little iron door on a furnace, nothing but hot blurry anger inside.
She said goodbye, walked away, and kept walking with Alan Yeater screaming at her back, "No one walks away from me!"
The tears weren't for Alan. He'd never really seen who she was, what she was like inside and out. As if he had some unchanging picture of her in his head, and any deviation from it was a challenge to his authority.
The frenetic notes of a Beethoven string quartet coiled and jumped in the background of her imagination. Her breakup with Alan had taken no longer than it took two violins, a viola, and cello to get through the second movement of "Opus 130"—which she'd renamed "The Alan Yeater Breakup Presto."
She sniffed back more tears, savoring the same minute and forty-nine seconds of memory over and over.
In the final stretch of 17, Corina had to deal with a few predatory stockcar racers, darting in and out of the lanes, making their own narrow passages down the shoulders. They taunted her into slaloming to the interchange. She obliged and would have outraced one of them if there hadn't been a blur of black and white in her peripheral vision. She slowed down and slid into the right lane, letting the patrol car go by.
There were California Highway Patrol officers who made careers out of Highway 17.
Corina emerged from the death race with her vehicle and pinkslip intact, and went south on Route 1 toward Monterey. Half an hour later she pulled off at the first exit of the old army post, Fort Ord.
The road had, at one time, curved around to drop
drivers at the post's shooting range. Now it curved around into a small traffic circle with four roads shooting off in different directions.
Corina's phone chirped. Alan calling. She leaned into the wheel, grabbed her phone, and slid it against her ear. She sucked in a deep breath.
"Yup?"
There was a long pride-swallowing pause. "It's me." His voice was rough, hitching in his throat.
Her mind jumped right to: He isn't crying, is he? She killed the question, and her lips went tight with the effort to keep them shut. It's over. Make him do the talking. She pulled up to the curb, stopping in the darkness under the overpass. The shifter knob vibrated in her hand. She dropped the car out of gear, but left the engine running.
Alan drew in a long breath. "It's me, babe."
She sniffed and shook her head, annoyed. Already said that.
"Look... I'm... " Alan's voice smoothed out. "You going to say anything?"
"I was pretty clear the day before yesterday."
She felt a drop in the temperature over the phone.
And Alan's voice thinned to a knife's edge. "Are you seeing someone else?"
Else? That implies that I'm still seeing you. Corina stopped her grinding molars before they crumbled in her mouth. Seeing someone else... She ducked to her side mirror as a couple in a minivan passed her. "Two, actually."
He choked. "So, this is it?"
It ended two days ago. "What more do you need me to say?"
"Fuck you! I don't need you to—" He fumed and spit more words out. "You need me. You hear me? Crawl back to me, stupid whore, begging me! You need—"
"Save your saliva."
She powered off her phone, took a deep breath, and stared back at herself in the rearview mirror, her eyes fixed with purpose. No more tears. No asking how she got herself into these relationships. Nothing blurry, overemotional, nothing out of control.
"Proud of you," she whispered and her voice broke.
A couple cars passed her, entered the loop, and headed south toward the university. Old army posts never die—they're turned into parks and unique leasing opportunities like the Presidio of San Fran or, like Ord, schools.
Corina kicked in the clutch, put the car in gear, and took the northbound road. She passed ancient barracks and clapboard warehouses, all painted tan with big black numbers stenciled on the corners. Most were abandoned and had sat there peeling in the salt air and sun for decades. Cal State Monterey took up a large chunk of property at the other end of the post.
She turned onto a small road that swung back under the freeway toward the dunes and the bay beyond, pulling over at the end of a broken concrete pad, crunching mats of iceplant under her tires. She tucked her car up against a group of squat cypress trees.
She got out, stuffed her keys, rings and driver's license into a watertight pouch, and then unbuttoned, unzipped, and took off all her clothes.
Corina opened the door to the back and tossed her skirt, blouse, and bra across the cello case that shared the backseat with her dive gear. She squirmed into her wetsuit, black neoprene tubing that fit her body like another skin, tucking in her hair, snapping the black foamy material of the hood around her cheeks and chin.
Then she squatted and wriggled like a wet cat, getting used to the suit's squeeze on her neck and thighs. She fixed the seams along her arms and straightened her spine, reaching into the air, lifting her body on the balls of her feet, her calf muscles flexing until they burned.
She hauled her dive gear up the path that led to the endless Pacific, stopping at the crest to take it all in, the crash of surf, smooth blue folds at the horizon catching the sun in broken metal glimmers, a drawer full of wobbling teaspoons tossed over the bay's surface.
"I need you like I've never needed anyone."
She spoke the lie in a reassuring whisper even as the teeth in her mind, the hunger in her soul, fed on memories of shattered glass and steel wrung like a rag, a slick of oil and blood, brakelight fragments like wicked witch fingernails poking through the asphalt, through the oil, through the blood. And in her memories, she fell to the street and never got up, the rumble of cars coming into her skin through the warm tar surface, through her jaw, into her head; her tears pooled in the corner of her mouth, and time stopped there, a fluid that filled every yesterday, a moment long past that still rang in her ears.
She blinked at the California sun and saw her mother's hair squeezed between the seat and headrest in front of her, the tick tick tick of the left turn signal—and her sister's cold hospital voice interrogating her. "Why did you live when Mom and Dad died? What makes you so special?"
Corina had survived, dragged by firefighters from the backseat crush of metal and folded bones. Her mother and her father were dead in their seats.
Corina Lairsey cut off a whimper, but couldn't hold in her tears. They rolled from her eyes, falling down her wetsuit, soaked up by the sand—and she pushed the volume of the music in her head up to drown the endless-moment ringing. The music in her head—the only thing that softened the memory of her mother's sharp intake of breath just before impact.
The Pacific whispered loudly and Corina dragged her gear to the edge, another Thursday walking into the cold blue, and even when a part of her didn't want it to, it let her go every week.
She squinted at the sun. Smiling at a seagull, she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand, and slid the mask on, propping it on her forehead. The waves called to her and promised not to let her fall.
The Pacific was eternal. The ocean would always be there to hold her tight and make her whole, something the air just could not do.
Chapter 3 - Fast
Who are they, O pensive Graces,
—For I dream'd they wore your forms—
Who on shores and sea-wash'd places
Scoop the shelves and fret the storms?
Who, when ships are that way tending,
Troop across the flushing sands.
To all reefs and narrows wending,
With blown tresses, and with beckoning hands?
—"The New Sirens", Matthew Arnold
"Fast attack submarine." Kassandra whispered the three words as if they were her favorites, running her fingers along the slick acoustic cladding of the sail—the tall fin-shaped tower sticking out of the top of the sub.
"This is the most beautiful machine I have ever seen."
Her own words echoed in her head, and under her breath, she relayed a description of the marvelous submarine to the others inside her soul.
Kassandra had made her way several miles up the coast of New Hampshire to the mouth of the Piscataqua River, kicking against the current until she found the Naval Shipyard on the far bank. Not far. After all, her father and her bodyguard, Zypheria, told her to stay close to home.
There were two submarines in the water, one with a maintenance rack over the bell at the bow, and ropes and umbilicals running from the boat to the cleats or into the big gray utility sheds. She found two more subs in drydock, but settled on exploring one tied up at the pier.
The water from the Piscataqua dribbled from Kassandra's braids, down her back and off the rounded hull. She squatted and looked down the black sloping length of the boat, leaning against her sheathed sword, using it to keep her balance.
"Fast." She stood and took ten even steps toward the sub's stern, trying to measure its length. "Attack." She lifted her sword, tapping the steel cables running from the sail to the dock above her. "Submarine."
She heard the approaching footsteps of one of the Shore Patrol, but she didn't run, just glanced over her shoulder at the dark river to see that her path of retreat was clear. The Navy and Coast Guard ran patrol boats along the Piscataqua, and she didn't want one racing up behind her without knowing about it. She turned a little to face the patrolman on the edge of the dock above her.
"He's cute," she breathed the words to herself.
The patrolman looked to be in his twenties, with stubbly blond hair and vigilant eyes that shifted along the docks and submarine maintenance buildings. Kassandra's gaze followed the earpiece that stuck out a little over his cheek, then dropped along his shoulder with some stripes, insignia she didn't understand, down to his waist where a handgun was holstered. His focus had moved to the river, but well over her head. He didn't appear to notice her, invisible in a tight blue long sleeved shirt and shorts, standing motionless ten meters astern of the sail.
She cleared her throat politely.
The patrolman's gaze dropped, and he swung one hand up into a boxer's guard position. The other unsnapped the holster strap.
"Who are you?"
Kassandra pointed at her feet with her sword. "How many crewmen does it take to run one of these?"
He blinked at her as if he had trouble seeing her. There was a young woman standing on the submarine below.
He shook his head. "Uh... I mean... Over a hundred and forty officers and enlisted. What are you doing here? How did you get past the gate?"
She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder to the river behind her. "I came from the water. What kind of weaponry?" She used her sword to indicate the length of the boat. "I see vertical launch tubes. Those are for torpedoes? I've done research, but there's still a lot I don't know. What can a torpedo—one of the MKs—do in terms of damage against stone battlements, let's say twenty feet thick? How deep can they go? Deeper than the submarine? What about mines? Does this sub carry them?"
The patrolman looked increasingly concerned. Was she waving a sword around? "You can't... Does your dad work here?"
Kassandra huffed at his inability to answer her questions. Maybe he didn't know. She moved on. "How fast is fast? When you call this a fast attack submarine, are you talking thirty knots or a hundred and thirty?"
He spoke into his comm gear, his right hand slipping into the holster for his gun. "Patrol? I need back up at river five. Unauthorized—"
Kassandra sighed, and without another word, turned, tucked her sword against her side, and dove off the sub into the black green water of the Piscataqua, barely leaving a swirl in the surface to mark her passage.
By the time the harbor patrol boat roared up, she was out past 2KR, the red buoy at the Portsmouth Harbor entrance, marking the separation of the river and the Atlantic.
Chapter 4 - Free Diving
I know human lungs have never been capable of operating efficiently with so thick a medium as seawater. They have evolved over millennia for breathing air in a relatively narrow range of surface pressures. The human fetus does not breathe amniotic fluid, but receives all the necessary nutrients and oxygen through the placenta from the mother.
—From the journal of
Michael Augustus Henderson
The Pacific slipped up Corina's legs, cold and clinging, circling her waist, the water sensing the warm life under her wetsuit, nimbly prying at the seams, seeping through the material to chill her skin.
She pushed the mask against her face, fitting it over her cheeks and forehead. Without pause or fear, she walked into the monstrous waves of ocean thundering against the beach.
Violent water swallowed her; there was a roar in her ears, a rush of ice over her body, then silence. She was under, inside the storm, inside the other world that folded over the surface of the world that didn't want her.
Then she weighed nothing.
She drew a breath, wet and loud in her ears, a gush of salt in her mouth, metallic and bitter.
She kicked hard, following the smooth sandy slope until the rocks broke it up, edging away from the floor, into open sea.
Corina was a hundred meters from shore when something in the endless blue hit her in the back, almost playfully. She kicked and paddled, turning much too slowly, her movements clumsy and heavy like an astronaut on a spacewalk. She spun, looking for the cause, a shadow that moved just beyond her peripheral vision. She was alone, but something not made of seawater had bumped forcefully into her tanks, something alive, with the weight and mischievous power of a sea lion. She sucked in a shallow breath, biting into her mouthpiece. Her skin went colder under her suit. Sharks bumped potential prey before devouring them. She paddled one more time around.
There was nothing there.
Her eyes moved in small left-to-right shifts, trying to pick up anything solid out of the wide space of water, dropping to her fins to focus on anything beyond them. The sloping floor of sand and rock darkened as it angled away from the shoreline, velvety blue fading into black.
She thumbed on her dive lights, one dangling from her wrist, the other on a strap over her left shoulder.
The Pacific's surge lifted her gently, and she watched and waited. Enough. She threw her hands over her head and kicked, a reflex, a reaction to tiny changes in the ocean her body somehow picked up without having any exposed skin. There was something in the water with her. She just couldn't see it.
Then it touched her, poked her in the shoulder. She kicked away, spinning right, too slowly, and it anticipated her direction; it hooked her arms and jerked her back, tugging on the hoses, nearly ripping the regulator from her mouth. Her feet flipped out in front of her. The skin along her neck tightened, and she scooped the water, twirling to catch a glimpse of whatever it was.
Nothing there.
A chill ran through her, and she slid her hands over her wetsuit as if to wipe something off.
Her eyes stung trying to focus on anything out of the infinite gloom. She looked up and kicked. Her intuition—the combined prickling, wrenching, and screaming of several major organs at once—told her to get the fuck out of here! Surface. Get to the surface!
She kicked hard, her breathing loud in her ears. She pushed her body toward the light, her mind racing with questions, twisting her thoughts into knots, strings of words circling around and repeating themselves, mostly variations on What the hell is that?
She didn't have any immediate answers, and the ones lurking at the edges scared her too much to state clearly.
Corina jerked her hands back as cold water washed over her gloves. She slowed for half a second, stunned, and then kicked again. Her body slammed into something solid but invisible in the water, jarring her teeth. She grunted over her reg. Her mask hammered into her face. Seawater squeezed in, pooling around her nose. She slid upside down, the saltwater blinding her. Her legs swung over her head, her heels hammered into the barrier, shaking her bone loose.
Finger-like cables grabbed her hands. She couldn't see them. She felt them, tightening, squeezing painfully around her wrists, snaking over her biceps, under her arms and back over her shoulders.
Her hands slapped together in front of her and the tentacles dragged her through the water, towing her deeper and to the south, toward Monterey and the cliffs of the southern edge of the underwater canyon.
Corina folded her knees to create some drag, and tugged as hard as she could, fighting the thing that held her. She bit into her regulator, screaming curses in big wobbly bubbles that ripped past her face.
Her breathing quickened into a saw-like roar in her ears, making her lightheaded.
The water went black, her dive lights dancing off the rocks as her invisible captor dragged her up against the canyon wall. She kicked wildly, and tried to hook her fins on a passing ridge. She flew over the crenellated row of rock, gray in the twilight like the broken wall of a haunted castle.
Watery fingers wriggled over her body, tightening their grip, working their way down her back, around her waist, spiraling her throat. She tucked her head down, trying to stop it from choking her.
The shadowy face of the cliff came at her fast, and she drew her legs toward a meter-wide slice of pure black, a cave in the tall face of rock.
The current freed her at the mouth, and tossed her inside. Corina bent her knees and had her hands halfway up to her face when a thicket of woody-branched gorgonians caught her. Stubby sharp stems of coral scraped her arms, clawing at her mask and hoses.
She kicked and clutched at the walls of the cave, tearing off a mat of sea-sponge in her scramble to right herself.
Get into open water.
She tugged her body around and climbed toward the mouth, her fins catching on the sea-growth on the floor, tiny flowers with mouths and questing tentacles, rigid patches of needlework sponge. Snags of rock cut through her gloves and her blood twisted in the water like smoke, clouding the dim light at the cave mouth. She pushed through it, and shoved her head forward.
The invisible current hit her, pushing her back. It tore her fingers from the rocks, and threw her deeper into the cave. She kicked madly, clawing her way to the entrance again. She ripped a big chunk of sponge off the wall, and shoved it behind her.
Corina froze.
She forgot to breathe, and the whole ocean went silent. She turned slowly, her eyes locked on the stretch of bare rock where she had torn off the sponge.
A human handprint stood out on the flat stone face. It was like a blood painting on the wall of some Paleolithic era cave.
Corina's mind raced, throwing thoughts in every direction. How? She choked on her first conclusions. Questions sparked and went cold. Forty meters down. Never. This cave's never been above the waterline. Ice age? Sea level dropped hundreds of feet. Okay, even if it ever had, the water would have washed away man's presence thousands of years ago. She started to shake her head, her muscles just coming into sync with her thoughts. It's paint or blood on bare rock.
And she wanted to touch it. Badly.
Paint or blood in saltwater. Under a hundred-year-old growth of sea-sponge. Who—whose hand?
She forgot where she was, or how she had been dragged there. She stared at the print. Long fingers, a wide palm, a man's hand. The pigment blurred like webbing between the fingers.
The thump of her heartbeat like an alarm, and her own hand reaching up, fingers spreading to match the one on the rock. A stringy haze of blood seeped from the glove, twirling in the water like strips of black gauze.
She placed her hand against the stone, over the wound-red print. Her fingers flexed but didn't reach the tips. She pressed her palm hard against the unyielding stone.
A bolt of heat rushed through her. Her arm and shoulder went numb. She sucked in air in tight little drags, rabbit breaths, in-and-out gusts seesawing in her ears.
She had... done something. The handprint was a lock of some kind. She was a key. She couldn't catch up to her thoughts to find out how she knew that. Her mind raced with a flood of... someone else's information.
She arched her back, kicking violently, struggling to get away from it. The stone cracked, and whatever was locked behind the handprint fired out of its prison and into her body.
Corina flew across the cave and slammed into the wall of sharp coral and rock.
Sobbing in terror, her mouth opened and she spit out her regulator. Something moved through her hair, against her neck... pain shot into her head like hot iron coming through bone.
The world buckled inside itself, narrowed down to the iridescent circle from her shoulder light. It danced along the cave wall and her soul nearly followed it out of her body; it remained anchored only by thin threads of sensation, the sound of her chattering teeth and the hot seep of urine down her thighs.
The motion of the world slowed to a crawl. Her legs glided up in front of her, and a sizzling sound tickled her ears.
I can't move.
Her eyes closed and she couldn't open them again. She couldn't lift her neck. She screamed... inside her head. Nothing came from her mouth.
Some primitive directive fired repeatedly, told her to close her mouth. Do not let the ocean inside your mouth. Too late.
Her regulator hovered over her, swaying up and back like an offended cobra. Even without her eyes, she knew it was always in reach. She couldn't lift her arms, or curl her fingers.
She sagged in the ocean's embrace, unable to stir the smallest of muscles. She tried to move her feet and wrinkle her nose. She tasted something sour, as if someone had shoved her face in a bucket of rancid cabbage—but it wasn't her doing the tasting.
Then she heard her own voice—someone else controlling it—using a thoroughly disgusted tone. It snapped off a bunch of words in a language she didn't understand.
She felt her lips move, her throat contracting, lungs struggling to make words, but it was someone else making her mouth and throat say them. She heard bits of words: "Lepto... " followed by "koost-ho... " She didn't catch the rest, but she heard the revulsion, a bottomless hatred in the tone.
Someone using her voice said the word "Thalassa" several times. A compound form then burst from her mouth, "Thalassogenêis."
She felt the words against the inside of her own throat, rumbling through her head, and the last of her breath escaped her lungs, passing her lips in fat shaky bubbles of air.
Her body shuddered and curled into a knot, her arms wrapping her knees. She felt her mouth move feverishly, more words she didn't know, and without any sound. Her lips opened expectantly and let the ocean inside. She tasted it, salty and ice cold against her teeth. It punched into the back of her mouth, down her throat and filled her empty lungs.
Her mind halted in terror. It was like experiencing someone else's drowning. A burning up her spine, sharp cramps gripped her stomach. Every thought in her head disintegrated. Her mind went blank, dead, a bitter black pool.
Chapter 5 - Visitors
They laughed when I used the word kissêrês, meaning "clad in ivy," to describe their hauberks of pointed pale green plates sewn to a thin, finely woven undergarment of a material like silk.
—Journal of Michael Augustus Henderson
Kassandra Alkimides froze, her eyes going unfocused halfway through the pages of Jane's Underwater Warfare Systems. She tilted her head to listen, glaring at the doorway to the kitchen.
"Something's in the house." She whispered the words with only the slightest movement of her lips.
She dropped the book and curled her hand into a fist, hiding the scar tissue lining the skin between each finger.
With her hearing focused on the quiet house, she put her weight down on her heels, leaned forward, and grabbed her chair by the seat, lifting and sliding it noiselessly away from the table at the same time.
Her shorts were riding up. She gave them a tug, and then slid one hand around her back to tug her T-shirt from the waistband, loosening it by rolling her shoulders. She didn't want her clothes to interfere in a fight.
She crept past the dining room table, then stopped moving and stopped breathing. Her gaze shot left, chasing a new noise in the house, a faint scraping sound, something metal dragged against gritty stone. A soft splattering sound followed.
She took a few steps, entering the short hall from the kitchen.
Kassandra listened at the bottom of the stairs leading to the second floor and the bedrooms. She looked up the stairwell, into the afternoon sun casting big white squares across the walls, and blew a short burst of air. It returned to her a moment later and she sniffed its contents.
Whatever it was, it wasn't upstairs.
She stepped into the kitchen, glancing past the refrigerator, the center island counter, to the sink. She released a normal breath this time, a cautious sense of relief building inside her as she approached. Her shoulders dropped.
Through the partly open window over the sink, she saw her father out in the side yard raking leaves off the drive. She looked down at the faucet. A drop of water fell from the tap and hit the drain.
Who left it running?
Kassandra pushed the lever down, furious at someone's stupid mistake.
She turned, sniffing the air. The house still didn't feel right; she stopped everything in her body except her heart and listened, matching the sounds her father made with the metal clicking and scraping sounds she'd heard a moment before.
They hadn't come from the rake against the gravel.
Her arms lifted away from her sides, fingers flexing as she turned from her father toward the shadowy stairs leading deep under the house to the grotto and continuing through caves to the Atlantic. She walked around the center counter, past the fridge to the top of the basement stairs, and blew a breath into the cool darkness.
What could get through the gate?
She grabbed the cold railings with both hands and sniffed, closing her eyes a moment to zero in on the smell. The ocean, a salty gauze that hung in the air, points of pungent seaweed... and something... someone. Wet footsteps approaching.
When she opened her eyes, four helmeted soldiers in green-scaled hauberks, all of them dripping seawater, stepped from the shadows of the basement landing, and pointed short heavy spears at her. The front pair had their weapons low, aimed at her knees, their cheek guards down, thick glassy green plates covering the skin of their faces. Kassandra let her eyes shift from one soldier's dark blues to the other's olive-browns. Blue-eyes coughed up a mouthful of water, spat and then blinked up at her. She stared back at them and they bared their teeth threateningly.
Like dogs.
A third soldier crouched behind them, holding his spear higher, the tip aimed at her face. The fourth she presumed to be in command, standing straighter, a less threatening posture—simply because he did not feel the need to threaten young women. His cheek guards were up like pointed ears on the sides of his helmet. His long black hair, tangled and heavy with seawater, curled in stringy lumps across his shoulders. His nose was broad, and he had tidepool-clear gray eyes that only left her face to read the word, Thalassogenês—Seaborn—on her bright yellow T-shirt. He gave her a moment to run or scream. When she did not, he narrowed his eyes in impatience.
"Where is the Rexenor lord who lives here?" The commanding soldier pushed a calloused broken-nailed finger at her.
She stared back at him with infuriating coolness.
Kassandra looked into his eyes, studying him. Something bubbled behind them, not fear, but uncertainty, as if he suddenly found himself unable to determine why he was there. She lifted his name and other details right out of his thoughts.
Stratolaos. These men are trusted House Dosianax soldiers. The king's House—and by blood, mine.
Kassandra let her gaze follow a glassy stream of the sea that ran down his cheek, off his chin. He swallowed the saliva collecting in his mouth, his lips curling in disgust.
Her focus dropped to the hand he extended toward her and the water that pooled in the gaps between his fingers where a thin web of skin connected each.
When she did not answer right away, he jabbed his finger again, shaking the water into the air. "Who are you? Can't you speak?"
She raised an eyebrow, mildly surprised. She tilted her head and in a well-mannered tone, said, "It is customary for visitors to introduce themselves first."
"How dare you use that tone—"
"Stratolaos." She said the man's name in a cold steady voice that cut through his words.
Stratolaos jumped, startled at hearing his name uttered by the young woman. His voice broke in panic, but he managed to gargle out the words: "In the name of the king, swim—move aside!"
Kassandra let her hands slide off the railings. She spread the fingers on her right hand, closed her eyes, let out a breath, and snapped her hand around a sword grip. Like crawling mats of vine, a knee-length hauberk of thousands of tiny silvery-blue scales bloomed and slid over her shoulders, tight around her waist and along her arms.
One moment she stood at the head of the stairs, a young surface woman in a yellow T-shirt and shorts, and the next, she was pointing a sword at them and in armor finer than any they'd ever seen.
Kassandra felt the influence of the warrior queen Andromache stir to life in her hands and shoulders, a burn of excitement that raced through her muscles, waking them up with smooth flexing tugs and squeezes, preparing for any spin of advantage a battle might throw, simple intimidation to cutting out the commander's heart and lifting it above her head, bleeding through her fingers.
Kassandra opened her eyes to find the wet hands of the three spearmen re-gripping hafts and the scuffle of their feet on damp stone, shifting them for balance.
They were uncomfortable out of the water.
She thumbed closed the throat buckles of her armor, brought her sword around, the lusterless blade whistling over their heads.
Nodding at Stratolaos, she took up a fighting stance at the head of the stairway. The old maxim, Kill the king and the army will fall, drifted through her thoughts, and her eyes automatically followed the seams in the commander's armor.
Stratolaos blinked away his alarm and swung a crossbow up at her.
Chapter 6 - Captive Ocean
There is a world deep in the Atlantic, a kingdom made up of nine great houses that have endured thousands of years without anyone on the surface, in the modern world, knowing it exists. The Seaborn have lived and perished, fought wars at a thousand fathoms, and banished noble houses to the Arctic. Many of them possess hereditary magical power, bleeds, that pass from parent to child or a grandchild. Some have ventured to the surface as exiles or as slaves to the Seaborn rulers—given the Porthmeus surname. Some have come to see True Helios—the sunlight—with their own eyes, reflected in the towers of surface cities. Others hide from cruel Seaborn rulers.
—Michael Henderson, notes
Corina woke with seawater heavy in her mouth, a cold wet tickle of it in the back of her throat, her body breathing it in, her lungs expanding. She was alive.
She groped hazily for a sense of how much time had passed. She had the feeling she had been awake for some time, but everything had been so still there hadn't been enough of a difference between death and the low hum of some neutral state to make her notice.
There was motion now, her body stirring to life.
She heard clicking noises. It could have been things moving in the rocks in the cave, but it also sounded like her teeth clattering in icy seawater.
At this temperature—for any length of time—I should be dead.
Then her eyes opened.
Corina didn't open them. Someone else did, something inside her, something foreign, the prisoner she had released from the stone behind the bloody handprint. She felt it exploring her senses. She felt her lungs expand, her body living, her heart beating, everything working underwater.
Then the thing that controlled her moved her legs, her arms, her eyes, her tongue. It was a man.
Panic echoed through her mind. She'd had no trouble getting rid of Alan Yeater, but this guy—she had a feeling he would be worse than Alan Yeater—he would be more than a little difficult to walk away from.
Almost two hundred years . . .
Aleximor the Bone-gatherer blinked his new eyes. Almost two hundred years since he had last opened and closed them. These were his now. He scowled, squinted, and opened them wide. They felt strange and dry and could not see as well in the dark as his old ones.
He tried out his new voice.
"Finally, it is time for the king to die."
A shock ran through his new body at the high pitch. He foraged for a word... puppet? Something similar to that, but closer to the controls, as if the puppet and master were one, as if the master could fit inside the puppet's body and wear it like a costume.
But a thinling! Some woman from the surface had released him from his prison.
"What wonderful and awful fortune at once."
Aleximor looked down at his new host and spat, a curl of saliva tumbling through seawater. The woman had almost drowned before he realized her body would need immediate... alteration... in order to breathe under the sea. He had managed, but only just.
A female body—shorter than he was used to, with a higher voice. He doubted very much if her vocal range could come close to what he expected.
He touched the mask clinging to her face, and then his focus wandered up and down the arms of his host. He didn't understand the thick spongy skin she wore over her natural skin, dull black with violet stripes.
His new fingers glided over it to the wrists. Rough and grippy in some places, slick in others. It wasn't like any kind of clothing he recognized.
Some kind of armor? Protecting her from what?
He looked up at the jagged gap of blue coming from the cave entrance, a question starting to form. What is this surface woman doing by herself? How is it even possible for her to reach this depth?
He had dragged her part of the way, but his retrieval tools would not have selected her if she had not been below the ocean's ceiling for some time.
Aleximor paused and drew a long breath. He pulled in another one. Alive. Again. Real death had been so close.
He wasn't as quick with his voice and words as he had once been, his own soul sluggish after two centuries of imprisonment, his understanding too slow, this new host unfamiliar. He had tried to substitute his psyche for hers, but she had seeped back in with him like an octopus seeking shelter, squeezing into some impossibly narrow space.
He made an angry snorting noise. He had expected a Seaborn host, not someone from the damned surface.
Aleximor let his new fingers play over his neoprene outer covering. "I have your body for now. It is yours no longer." He spoke to the puppet on the off chance it was capable of listening.
Corina was a groggy spectator at some perverse show, watching someone else control her arms and legs. She felt the internal sensation that went along with the hair standing up on her neck, a wave of cold that spread and branched through her thoughts. A moment of paralysis caught her. Her thoughts slowly loosened and fell into place.
Think, girl.
Uh... Demons. Corina vaguely remembered some rule about demons from stories she'd read, something about wizards and demons. Your true name is power. There are things in the world that can enslave you with your name.
Somehow that made complete sense. Don't let him know your name.
She scowled on the inside, the tightening of her focus down to a pinpoint beam of thought. Don't think your name. He controls my muscles, the entire physical side of me but I can still sense everything. I can still hear. I can feel the Pacific against my skin—his sk—our skin.
But can he feel what I feel—emotionally feel? Does he even know I'm here? Does he know... I'm scared?
Aleximor, no sign that he heard her thoughts, pulled off her torn dive gloves and pushed them toward the back of the cave.
Corina grasped at every stray thought, but held them close like cards in a cheater's game. Don't think your name. Even as she thought it, she felt her mind's automated response, bringing up her name, Cor—
Her thoughts skidded to a stop.
She didn't like the way he stared at her hands. He stretched them out, fingers spread stiffly. She knew he wasn't admiring them. She felt his scorn. He tilted them up, studying them. There was a word, a concept rising in his thought before it reached his lips. She felt the idea, like a bubble of air in syrup.
He said something in his language that meant, "remarkable," but it was the "remarkable" someone would use to describe an insect that secreted acid as a defense mechanism.
He tugged off the rings, two of them, one with a small diamond that had been Corina's mother's. He let them go in the water, and looked back at his hands, long slender woman's hands with blue-painted nails—blue because it looked good against her cello's fret board.
Aleximor moved his lips, and a soft whisper came from his mouth, sweet and high, the sound almost like the sense of touch. She felt it as a smooth pressure against her skin, and deeper, in her bones. Corina shivered on the inside. He already knows how to control my voice. She tried to follow the words he sang.
"Dee-ah-zo-mah"—something. "Pah-rhee-steed... "
She got a sense of the meanings of the words from him, something about weaving—which was unexpected—the loom... connecting her... making her whole.
Fear derailed her attention from the words, but her musical sense followed the sounds a minute longer, then lost it. It was something with rhythmic rising and falling, a poem that he half chanted, half spoke. It had a pulse. His voice went lower—almost as low as her voice could go—and the words came faster. Corina wasn't quick enough to pick them out individually.
He curled his new fingers in a flash of short-trimmed blue nails, tapping his palm in time with the song. He pushed his hands through the water in a swimming gesture. Bringing them back in front of his eyes, he spread the fingers as wide as they would go.
Dance? A ritual dance? Corina waited for something to happen.
A slow, even warmth seeped through the skin of her hands as if she held them under a heat lamp.
Aleximor strained the muscles and tendons, trying to spread his fingers wider.
Corina's mind cycled over the same question: What's he doing?
He stared at his new hands. She stared at them through the eyes he now controlled. There was a faint glow around them, like some faraway spotlight trained on them. The warmth felt good. There was a gentle tickling between her fingers like someone running cotton along them.
The warmth turned to burning. The tickling became scratchy, a wire brush on her skin.
Aleximor's new body shook, and he lost his focus on his host's hands. The glow blinded him. Tears welled up and splattered the inside of the dive mask. He squinted against the pain, finally slamming his eyes shut.
Corina screamed in her thoughts. Her skin stretched, oozing and bubbling between her fingers, the pain made worse by blindness. The burning raced up her arms, running along her tendons like streaks of fire.
The heat faded. The burning between each finger died away.
Aleximor the Bone-gatherer opened the eyes of the body he now owned and blinked away the tears.
He studied his hands. They had been her hands. Now they really were his. Long fingers, her blue fingernail paint, and sheer webbing that stretched between each one.
What—
Corina stuttered every thought that attempted to get into focus. What have you done? I'm a monster!
"Nearly Seaborn," he whispered softly.
Corina's panic hit a wall on his words.
He looked down at his feet, snug in her black fins, and then back up to blink and stare out from the mouth of the cave into open water, trying to focus on something.
He tilted his head down, disappointed. "No more."
Mumbling something in his language, his thoughts seemed to spill over into some portion of mind he shared with Corina, and she understood what he meant, something like, "I will have to make her stronger." She also got the feeling it would not require lifting weights or swimming laps.
He bent down, dug around the floor of the cave among the branches of hydroids and solitary coral cups, and picked up Corina's rings.
Clutching the rings in one fist, he played with the big belt clip at his waist. He spent a few frustrated minutes pulling and squeezing the clip, but couldn't figure out how to open it. Then he noticed a picture of her, his new host, in a transparent plastic pouch stuck to the arm of the strange suit.
He yanked on the zippered pocket and it ripped away from the Velcro strip along her forearm, opening it into his palm. He fingered her rings, the keys, key-ring and remote—now full of seawater and useless.
Bastard! How am I going to get into my car?
He picked them up gingerly by the ring as if he was afraid of them.
"Charm?" He whispered in her voice. He ran his thumb along the serrated edges of the keys, fascinated and cautious at the same time.
He carefully slid everything back into the pouch, and then he picked out the rectangle of flexible material. He stared at her driver's license. His breathing quickened. He smiled with Corina's mouth, a tight twist at the corners of her lips, a smile she only used when something really pleased her.
He pronounced her full name slowly, rolling the Rs.
"Corina Lairsey."
Chapter 7 - One of the Seaborn
How is it possible that I am breathing in the sea while I write these words? (I write these words with an inky substance that holds to a pen, but at the touch of a sheet of pressed "paper" transfers from tip to page, adhering to it.) The answer must be tied to my other biophysics questions: I do not feel the immense pressure I ought to at this depth, and I do not feel the low temperature. I feel it, but not as discomfort. I sense the cold rather. What have they done to my ears? I swear to you—I can hear things moving in the sea a mile away!
—Journal of Michael Augustus Henderson
Corina screamed as loud as she could think about screaming. Nothing came from her mouth. Nothing. Not a damn noise in her throat, not a twitch in her lips. She was a prisoner in her own body, paralyzed, while the thing inside her had full access to the controls.
For a stunned second it occurred to her that thoughts weren't made of the things they represented. Loud wasn't loud in her head. Blue wasn't blue. She imagined blue, but blue—when it was stored somewhere—had no color. Then it occurred to her that she could imagine an angry yell, just as she could imagine a bright pink sea or rich field of purple grass. The thoughts themselves might not be the things they represent but she could envision the representations. The colors and loudness somehow came through in the imagining.
Say something, asshole!
She stilled her thoughts, waiting for some kind of response.
He was either really good at ignoring her or she wasn't getting through to him.
Okay. Size up the situation, girl. Someone is in my head, controlling me. I feel what he feels, but he doesn't seem to feel what I do. He can act. I can't. I can't move, speak, do anything but think and feel.
She smelled—or tasted—the ocean. But only when he uses my senses.
There was also a weird sourness she had sensed when he first got into her head, like something old and rotting, something that had once been alive. It was faint now, but still present.
She sensed other things about him. He's old, hundreds of years old... and he isn't quite alive.
What else? She had a web of skin between her fingers like some sea monster. It wasn't hideous. Not really. The skin was thin, nearly see-through, a gossamer sheet between each finger, but the idea of webbing itself was monstrous.
And my body is breathing. My lungs are working. I can breathe... underwater? She focused on his slow even respiration. The idea made her mind stumble and left her thoughts in questioning pieces. But the pressure? Temperature?
Diving was technical. She knew how it was supposed to work, and it wasn't like this—this was like a blind alley.
She couldn't read the dive meter on her wrist. He'd focused her eyes on the main buckle for her BC—buoyancy compensator, the vest like thing that held all her gear, the tanks, weights, and computer—trying to figure out how to un-do it.
She guessed that her depth was forty meters. She didn't feel the pressure. She might as well have been above the surface, out in the air.
She could hear clearly. Too clearly. She heard the shrimp clicking in the rocks all around her, things moving among the coral cups and sponge formations. She heard a soft susurration from the mouth of the cave, like the surf on a calm night.
Is that... the surface? I can hear it from this depth?
Aleximor touched her dive mask, tapping on the lenses, delicately at first, then thumping them until his head hurt. He made a few wondering noises but left her mask in place.
She followed his eyes and felt his movement. What's he doing now?
He wiggled around at the mouth of the cave, kicking and trying to look over his shoulder—my shoulder.
Then he finally unbuckled her BC and tanks and dropped them to the cave's floor. Her watch was next, tossed into the cave behind him. He stared at her fins for a minute, but he left them on.
I'm... not rising. I'm neutrally buoyant.
Corina's anger prickled. What else has he done to me? My hearing, my hands, my body. The human body is supposed to float!
Without warning, he tore off her mask. The muscles in his neck tensed hard for a few seconds, then went loose. The gush of cold against his face startled him. He blinked a few times slowly, getting used to the seawater around his eyelids.
She couldn't make out anything clearly coming through her dilated pupils, just big fuzzy black shapes, the lighter wedge of the cave's opening, and the ragged rows of coral and sea-sponge silhouetted against it.
Why me? It sounded pathetic and she hated herself for thinking it, but it flowed through her mind anyway. First Alan Yeater. Now, I get possessed by some total wacko merman in a deep sea cave?
She raced to head off any mind-derailing fits of weakness. Solve this, Corina.
She stopped her thoughts in a panic. Her name sounded strange. Was he doing something, taking her away, making her fade?
Then it occurred to her that this state of inner imprisonment could go on a long time, maybe forever. This asshole's hundreds of years old. He's not yet dead. She flipped the thought around, looking at it from all angles. What is he? He's not... human.
His name suddenly came to her. Aleximoros... Aleximor. He had named himself. It meant "warding off death." He had given himself other names, but two hundred years ago—maybe more than that—he had given himself this one.
"Rest assured, Corina Lairsey," Aleximor said in her voice, in her gloating tone, in English. Perfect English. "That I will not keep you in there for long."
Coincidence? Or can he hear me? Can he hear me clearly, or does he get the same hints of thoughts I'm getting from him?
Aleximor peeled off her hood. Her ponytail thwacked him in the shoulders. Startled, he jumped off the cave floor, bumping into the ceiling.
He ran his hands over her hair, fingering the arrangement, an elastic band at the back of her head. Then his hands went down her wetsuit, stopping at the waist and hips, rubbing the wetsuit material, pushing into it. He slid one hand over the material along his arm, feeling the difference between the violet striping and the black.
He had ditched her other gear. He might have been curious, but he was obviously looking for a way to take off the wetsuit.
Damn.
He had trouble with the zippers. He pulled down the one that ran from her throat to her waist on the right side. He frowned, watching her right breast squeeze past the zipper.
Corina's thoughts went tight and sarcastic. Right. Let's swim around the goddamn Pacific with my tits hanging out.
Maybe he understood. He tugged the zipper closed.
Aleximor made a disappointed noise, and Corina picked up his reaction to her body. Repugnance. He didn't care for it. He did appear to like her suit. He definitely liked her fins, because he kept lifting them up, tilting them side to side and staring at them.
He also liked her knife, strapped around her right leg. He fiddled with the safety snaps, and drew the blade out. He examined it closely, twisting it an inch from her nose. Finished with the inspection, he slid it back inside its sheath.
He sucked in a deep breath.
Corina tasted the salt in the inhale, like breathing in the clean ocean scent off the water after a storm. A hint of the sour taste remained.
Aleximor planted his feet in their fins right at the edge of the cave, and did a weird swaying dance.
Corina saw her hands twist up in front of her, curl into hooks and draw back. It was as if he was dragging in an invisible net. Every time he pulled, the invisible bundle of stuff grew in his hands, an accumulating glob of nearly transparent jelly. She felt it oozing against her fingers, pressing into her palms.
She made the connection with the invisible tentacles that had dragged her to the cave. He had sent them out to capture her... or anyone diving in the bay.
The bundle was about a foot around when he squeezed it, compressing it until it fit inside his cupped hands. He turned it, and gave it one last push, using all the strength in his arms. Then he opened his hands like a magician who'd played some vanishing-coin trick on a group of kids.
Then without a word, he shot into open water, rocketing through it like a dolphin, ponytail whipping his shoulders, water streaming by him, roaring in his ears.
He angled steeply, following the descending line of cliffs for an hour.
Long after the last reaching rays of sunlight faded to pure black, he slowed and back-kicked, getting his bearings. He spun in slow circles, staring into what Corina perceived to be nothing but uniform dark watery space.
Still no sense of pressure, she thought. This must be well over a hundred meters.
Aleximor whispered something in his language. She heard it in her ears. She could just make out the meaning of some of the words and phrases, like an incompetent translator on a three-second delay.
He stepped through a dance, went through rhythmic tapping of his fingers against his palm and said something about glowing inside... where the darkness abounds, encircling the earth. He mentioned a name, then another. Gods? Demons?
She didn't hear the rest. Her eyes burned—just like her hands when he had modified them. It felt as if he was sticking hot needles through her pupils. Her flesh tore and cooked, boiling in her head. He felt it, too, and couldn't bear the pain. He passed out and took her with him.
Corina woke, no sense of how much time had passed. The pain had fused her thoughts into a solid hunk of useless material.
When Aleximor finally opened his eyes, Corina could see, and small pieces of her mind seemed to work.
There still wasn't much hitting the retinas. The ocean was pure black, but he could see... the violet stripe that ran along the arm of his suit. He saw color. A pale glow lit the water around him.
He floated in black space for a long time, maybe hours, and she made some guesses about what he was doing.
Meditating? Resting? Hello?
She felt his control over her body reach some tipping point, and then fade.
He had fallen asleep.
And Corina felt stronger—her own strength, as if her thoughts were spreading out and taking some power back. She felt... her feet, and they hurt as if she was walking barefoot on cobblestones. Strange because she was certain he hadn't yet reached the floor of the Monterey Canyon.
If I'm in open water, then the stones under my feet must be in here with me.
She couldn't move her body, couldn't open her eyes to see if she was anywhere near the canyon's floor, but she tried anyway.
Light flashed in front of her eyes, a burst of blue. He had closed his eyes, but she saw motion and light in them, like a movie projected against the inside of his eyelids. A row of lights, wavering like fluid fire. A narrow cave, a rough black diamond shape, cut in the face of a cliff.
Corina hauled up every thought in her mind, and pinned them to the scene in front of her. That's the cave where they imprisoned him. Who imprisoned him?
The scene became slippery, and more imaginary, unfocused. The world shifted to a different place, but still deep in the ocean somewhere.
This is a dream. He's dreaming, she thought. Then she changed her mind. It's a nightmare.
It was as if the situation was reversed, and she was now looking out through his eyes, in his body, two hundred years ago.
She peered out through his almost closed lashes, and sensed something wrong. He was concentrating to keep still, trying to deceive his captors, pretending to be unconscious while watching them.
His guards towed him through the water, through large doors and into the judging chamber.
Two men held his arms behind his back, and he floated in the water between them. One of them said, "He thinks he can fool a Rexenor. He's awake, lord. Wouldn't tell us where his stronghold lies."
The judge—lord?—grabbed the Bone-gatherer's long black hair, and yanked his head back to see his face. Since he no longer needed to pretend to be unconscious, Aleximor opened his eyes. A few strands of his hair drifted in front of him.
Corina was him, Aleximor, centuries ago. He was dreaming this, and she was living it.
The name of the man in front of him rose in her thoughts, but it hurt to remember it. The man wore a helmet with a tiny gold embossed seabird stamped above his brows. Strands of thick brown hair stuck out and brushed the plates that curled over his shoulders. He wore armor, scaly like a fish, sharp little shield shapes of what looked like pale lime-green plastic. He was young, maybe twenty, but he looked serious, as if his life had never been easy.
And he had a long curved black dagger in his right fist, his eyes fixed on Aleximor, cold and pitiless rings of bright bluish-green.
He drifted forward about a foot off the ground, dagger held low.
"You killed my brother, Aleximoros. Dead raiser. I'm told I cannot take your life. Strates Unwinder tells me that I can, however, prevent you from taking another's."
The knife moved against the Bone-gatherer's throat.
Aleximor's neck snapped back, and he cried the man's name in agony and hatred. "Kassander! I will make you—and your king—pay for this."
Kassander shouting back, "He is not my king."
Aleximor woke, the heart in his new body thudding over the noise from the scene, smears of color in a pool of syrupy black ink. He blinked and breathed deeply, folding his arms in front of him protectively.
Half an hour passed while he held his new host body tight and took in slow breaths to calm down. Then he moved on and made no comment on the nightmare—nothing out loud.
Corina had the feeling that he had experienced this many times over the last two hundred years—and there hadn't been anything to hold on to. Nothing physical.
Aleximor stretched out his arms and legs, and kicked up a good pace, singing low to himself of blood drawing out the psyche and of locking it in the earth—and of someone he hated almost as much as the king, one of the names from his nightmare, Strates Unwinder.
Corina spent some thought on their depth, but she couldn't produce anything but a wide range, from one hundred to five hundred meters.
She spent some time thinking about the man with the knife in the dream, Kassander—and even the name, Strates Unwinder, wondering what he had unwound. They all belonged to some group called Rexenor... House Rexenor. The guards who brought Aleximor in to be judged called Kassander a lord, and Kassander had called Aleximor, "dead raiser."
Any way she looked at it, it didn't sound like a good thing to be associated with.
Aleximor stopped every fifteen minutes and stared around at black empty ocean.
Swimming to the floor of the Monterey Canyon? Then what?
He followed the descending walls of rock another hour as they flattened into a field of slate colored sand, swimming faster than any human.
He kicked along the smooth floor for what felt like miles to Corina. Silt swirled in his wake, his focus shifting to little reddish crabs, an occasional spidery tube anemone.
Aleximor stopped, startled by something, twirling his arms to keep himself upright. A cloud of dust caught up to him and enveloped him, settling while he floated a few feet off the ocean floor.
He pushed out his hands, straightened his legs, and planted his feet—in Corina's fins—in the sand, a cloud of silt blossoming up his legs. Then he tilted his neck back, sniffing the current, and he smiled with Corina's lips.
"I taste death," he said with her high whispering voice.
Is that what it is? Corina willed her nose to scrunch up, but nothing happened. All I can sense is that weird sour overcooked cabbage smell. And I thought it was you.
Chapter 8 - The Wreath-Wearer
The number three has special meaning for the Seaborn. Three is the minimum number of strands required to braid, three is the shape of their world. The surface is two-dimensional. The sea is three. It is a common belief among the Seaborn that the ocean's currents are three-part, and with the right power and knowledge, a current can be unbraided, broken into its three separate tracks, even controlled.
—Journal of Michael Augustus Henderson
Gregor Lord Rexenor, son of Lady Kallixene and the late Lord Nausikrates, wiped his forehead on his forearm, brought the rake up straight, and leaned on it. He tilted his head to the side to listen, scowling at the sound of someone hammering.
A female scream of frustrated rage and pain came from the house.
He dropped the rake and spun away from the driveway, his eyes stopping on the kitchen window, catching a dull flash of reflected light off moving metal.
Gregor ran for the nearest door.
Nicole and Jill were in Rye at the harbor aboard Stormwind. Zypheria was at North Hampton Beach. Kassandra was alone in the house.
Then he heard a high-pitched angry sea of words ending in, "Kill the old kings!" and it sucked his store of courage dry. It was his daughter screaming the Alkimides battle cry, not in English, but in the old Hellene dialect of the Seaborn.
He jumped a low stone wall, waving madly as if he could move his body faster by pushing the air behind him. Damn thin world. He could move so much quicker in water.
"Kassandra!" He cried her name before he reached the house, hoping she could hear him and take it as a sign that help was on the way.
He cleared the stairs, wrestling with the screen door. He shoved the side door in, dashed through the mudroom, and slammed clumsily into the paneled wall leading past his study. He fell into a narrow table, knocking everything off it. A lamp crashed against the wall. A stack of books skidded along the hall's polished wood floor in his wake.
The tiled kitchen floor came into view and he let out a grunt of horror, breathing in the coppery smell of blood. The floor was syrupy, a dance of bare footprints decorating it, a folded broken strip of armor scales, and long blotchy streaks where someone had slipped.
Gregor skidded at the top of the stairs that led to the grotto, his eyes following the bloody footprints on the stones.
"Kassandra?" He stuttered her name, grabbed the railings, and jumped three stairs at a time into the dark under the house.
"Dad?" Kassandra shut the refrigerator door and took another long drink of orange juice. She hadn't been able to hear him over the roar of her heart beating and the chattering of the crowd inside her head.
He spun with a jump, thumping his head on the thick beam across the basement entrance. He came up the stairs slowly, his face pale. Then he noticed her sword on the kitchen island counter, in easy reach. She had already cleaned the blade, but she was a mess. Blood oozed between the scales, down the front of her armor and down her legs. One of her braids had come untwined. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a war.
His jaw started working before he could get sound from his throat. "What... what happened?"
She nodded, acknowledging his question. She was breathing hard, and spent a minute getting her racing heart under control. She took another sip and jutted her chin toward the blood-covered stairs. "Soldiers from my grandfather, looking for you. Four of them. I wounded two, one badly, and let the other two carry them away." She tipped more orange juice into her mouth, swallowed it. "It was obvious they'd never fought above the waves. They knew little of the sweep and swing of a sword. The terrain was mine. One managed to get out of the stairwell and he paid for it."
She noticed the expression on his face—neither pride nor fear, but a deep mix of them that looked like agony.
Kassandra tilted her head to the side and gave him a reproachful you-worry-too-much look. In a sweeter voice, Gregor's daughter surfaced, and without a hint of sarcasm, said, "I was just making friends, Dad."
He closed his mouth and thought about it. With an exasperated breath, he said, "How does friendship play a role?" He gestured down the bloody stairs. "You hurt them." He bent down and picked up the torn strip of green scaled armor, turning it over to examine it. "Badly."
"I let them go." She said it coldly and simply, as if it was the obvious conclusion to draw, as if the only other possible path she could have taken was to kill them all. "They are at this moment cursing my grandfather for sending them unprepared against me."
"The Wreath-wearer," he whispered automatically, his eyes roaming thoughtfully, stopping on the half-buried crossbow bolt in the ceiling above her head.
She placed her glass in the sink, a ring of orange juice at the bottom, darkening with blood from a cut on her knuckles. She kept her right hand and arm pressed to her side, body turned toward her sword.
She gave him half a shrug. "Rumor is a capricious friend."
Gregor's eyes crinkled in suspicion.
"But it can be a powerful ally. I let them go so that they may talk. Their story will get around the City in a matter of days."
Gregor sighed. His daughter was in there somewhere, but that was the Wreath-wearer talking.
Gregor's thoughts drifted to Kassandra's mother, Ampharete, the prior wearer, who had been just like this, voices of past wearers in her head, always plotting, a princess of the royal house. She had been in exile, hiding from her father, coming north with Zypheria and her personal guards to the Rexenor fortress deep in the North Atlantic.
Gregor pointed at her with the rolled-up piece of scale armor. "The king knows you exist and his opinion sways everyone else."
"I'm counting on it."
"Why reveal yourself to all the Seaborn now? Tharsaleos controls the ears of every listener. He will make you the enemy."
She smiled happily. "I'm counting on precisely that."
Gregor waited for an elaboration, but Kassandra's eyes went unfocused, wandering off somewhere in her head. He watched her pull a memory, a painful thought inside. The expression disappeared from her face.
"Kassandra." He called her back, and then held a hand up in appeal, the strip of armor rattling in the other. "You scare me when you're like this."
Pretend not to know what he's talking about. She lifted her brows and gave him a questioning stare. "Like what?"
"You are like... As if you're already... "
Kassandra frowned. It wasn't like him to stammer. The Dosianax soldiers getting through the gate had really shaken him.
Gregor gestured with a half-folded hand, trying to hold on to an idea that was delicate and at the same time caustic. "You're cold. You fight alone. It's as if you believe you're indestructible. You're like... " His voice trailed off. Gregor dropped his hands, got a better grip on one of the rails, and gave his daughter a deeply-concerned-father look, adding one twitching eyebrow to show his uncertainty about something.
She'd seen the look before. Reading it as clear as if he'd brought the accusation to his tongue, Kassandra's right hand went reflexively into a fist. She tugged in a breath, deep enough to hurt, and prepared to shout. She held back, furious words burning in her throat. She coughed to cover the process of stuffing her anger inside.
"I am not... " She spoke evenly, in a hard, controlled voice. "I am not like my grandfather."
Gregor said nothing, but it was a nothing so thick it hung in the air with the words: If you're like this at your age, you have the potential to be worse than the king.
That was grounds for letting the urge to yell off its leash. "How dare you! He killed my mother, your wife."
"He sent the dead army to destroy House Rexenor." His voice trembled. "Not to kill Ampharete."
Her face scrunched into an indignant snarl. "That's Lady Ampharete. And she died because of it." Kassandra waved away his response. "Tharsaleos killed your friends, your family, your father, my grandmother Queen Pythias—his own wife." She screamed at him. "I am not Tharsaleos!"
In her head, Kassandra heard her mother's angry questions, followed by another woman's snobbish voice: Is your sword handy, dear? If that Rexenor doesn't know his place... why not cut off his—
"Shut the hell up, Andromache!" Kassandra's fists went white and a stab of agony shot through her ribs on the right side. "Or I'll come in there and put you to sleep myself."
She blinked, held her eyes closed a few seconds, and then grabbed the counter to keep her balance. Something in her head woke, a cold bullying motion, dizziness with fingers that touched her thoughts, smooth prodding fingers, smooth like saliva.
She shook it off.
Gregor's eyes widened and his mouth came close to a grim smile. "Queen Andromache agrees with me?"
Kassandra's eyes swiveled to her father, focusing. She shook her head. "No. She just thinks you ought to be polite to your daughter."
Gregor dropped his shoulders and wheeled toward the dark stairs, coiling the scrap of armor tighter in his fist. "Can you do something to protect the grotto entrance? We obviously need more than the gate if they can get through the lock."
She nodded, her eyes going to squints of pain. "After I rest I'll go down and summon Ochleros."
Gregor let a minute pass, studying the green scaly armor, the expression on his face souring even more. He recognized their shape and color, the kind worn by the old Rexenor enemies, House Dosianax—the king's house warriors. Dosianax was the Sparta of the Seaborn, rarely defeated, and only then by death. His neck went prickly at the thought of his daughter doing something to make them flee.
Gregor gave her a pleading look. "You don't realize how much you scare me when you act like this."
She stared back at him, silent for ten long seconds, no expression on her face. Suddenly she was too weary to pretend, and she ignored the directives in her head.
"How do you think I feel?" She was annoyed that he thought he had any idea what her life was like. "I have Andromache teaching me to kill when she's not bickering with Praxinos about turning me into a witch. I talk with sea demons two or three times a week; without a lot of trouble I can control half an ocean." Her voice went bitter. "I can kill a man with a teaspoon of water."
As if to demonstrate this, Kassandra swung her left hand over her shoulder, curled two fingers, tapped a rhythm into her palm, and sang a command. The kitchen faucet flipped up and water jetted from the tap into the drain. In one sliding motion, she brought her hand forward, pointing at her father. A disk of water shot at Gregor from the stream, flattening with stiff, jagged teeth like a saw blade of ice.
Kassandra was halfway through the command to stop its motion when Gregor—much quicker than she'd anticipated—did something with one hand, deflecting the blade to the side. It flipped vertical and went four inches into the wall above the basement stairs, a hand's width from the edge of a framed Little Mermaid movie poster.
Kassandra fixed her eyes on her father admiringly. Even with his power waning, he still had it, although he rarely let it surface. He had grown up in the fortress of House Rexenor and had been taught by a student of that famous old Rexenor mage, Strates Unwinder.
Gregor straightened out of his defensive stance, and Kassandra went on as if nothing had happened, casually stopping the flow of water into the kitchen sink with another gesture.
She brought her hand up and touched her forehead.
"You don't know what it's like in here." Her voice was thin and angry, clipping the ends off the words.
She caught herself tightening up all her muscles, breathing hard through her teeth, but didn't do anything to slow her anger.
"You have no idea. It's every second of every day of my life." She tapped her temple, glaring. "Never being able to hide. Someone always looking over my fucking shoulder. They were all in here the first time I kissed a boy—telling me I was doing it wrong. They were all in here advising me when I had my first period, a committee wondering what surface women did, with running commentary as I sat in the bathroom and read them the damn Tampax directions."
She gripped her forehead in one hand and the pain made her voice go rough. "I have this thing in here that I cannot stop. I have three full time—"
Four, said a man's eely smooth voice in her head.
Kassandra jumped, grabbing the kitchen counter to keep her feet. "Who the hell are you?"
Not quite the reception I had anticipated. The man was slightly put out. I am King Eupheron.
"Eupheron." She had been warned about this one already. "Pleasure. Now, if you'll shut up for a moment, I'm in the middle of a conversation."
She ignored the follow-up grumbling from all four Wreath-wearers, waving at her father to continue the discussion, anything to hold off the voices in her head.
Gregor swallowed dryly and let his gaze roam over the blood-covered floor. "Do you know what King Tharsaleos will do to those men when they return without me... or you?"
"There was no other way."
"There might have been."
"They came to take you, probably kill you, and they'll get what they deserve."
He looked at her pityingly. "Don't you understand? The king will not stop with them. Can't you fight it? Look what it's done to you, Kassandra. You are... " She watched his expression change, fascinated as he struggled for a word to describe her. "Ruthless."
She jutted her chin at him, retort ready. "And what did twelve years in the King's prisons do to you?" Kassandra bit down hard, holding her mouth steady, opening it only enough to say, "You are soft."
She had to suppress something inside that told her to use the word, "Weak."
He mimicked her, clamped his mouth shut, grinding his teeth, holding in whatever he was about to shout back at her. He swallowed it, took in a breath, and went on in a forced calm. "It's a pity you couldn't have persuaded them to—"
"With crossbow bolts coming at me and the points of their spears in my face, I didn't have time for pity."
"Time for cruelty, time for calculating their destruction?"
She glanced down at her feet and moved one to cover blood pooling on the floor, and then her eyes hit his eyes. They hit him hard and forced him to back up a step.
She pointed an accusing finger at him. "I am an Alkimides. The throne does not belong to that murderer." She held in the next line of thought, which told her that she was also of House Dosianax, her grandfather's family.
"You are Rexenor, also."
Kassandra winced, took in a slow shuddery breath, and let it out. Her own voice in her head commanded her. Respond harshly. Follow with an apology to soften his mood. You do not have time for this.
"It is in my name. How am I allowed to forget your great-great-grandfather?" That had the right amount of sourness and she made a face to show that she regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth. "I didn't mean to say it like that. I'm sorry. Lord Kassander is one of my favorite ancestors. He was a great man."
Gregor lifted his head and his eyes held hers, black as the abyss with a thin roiling ring of blue that flowed through the irises. She blinked and focused on him, and he clenched his jaw with the effort it took to keep them there.
He dropped his shoulders and gave up his offensive. "You are fearless—whether that is always good, I do not know. But I am wrong. I didn't mean to imply that you act like King Tharsaleos."
She gave him a curt bow. Gregor rubbed away a tear and looked at her. "Promise me you will be careful. It's just... I don't understand you. I think I understand Jill. I understand Nicole to some degree. Your whole life is secret. You act as if you are in this alone, as if you are invincible."
"I'm never alone, father. I'm not allowed to be. Invincible?" Kassandra smiled thinly. "I was unaware that that was how you perceived my actions. I assure you that I do not think that."
She grabbed her sword off the kitchen island, slamming it into the scabbard that stuck out from her back over her left hip. "Now, please call Zypheria. She's probably down at the beach. Tell her to meet me in my room."
Kassandra waited for her father to leave before she let the armor dissolve off her body. Her sword vanished with it.
She gasped as if she had been holding her breath for the last ten minutes. The right side of her shirt was sliced open from her armpit to her hip and blood soaked the thin cotton in dark streaks across her back.
She turned, clutching at the kitchen counter for support. She reached into the narrow side sink where they usually washed vegetables, and picked up a long thin bolt—as long as her forearm—with a deadly black tip. Her own blood coated the shaft. It was slick on her fingers and clotting in the spines of the fletching.
Chapter 9 - Recovery
King Eupheron was the only Wreath-wearer with two bleeds, the product of an early attempt to mend the relationship between the two mightiest Seaborn houses, Alkimides and Telkhines. The result could not have gone more wrong. Eupheron's mother, the Alkimides Queen Kleonike (and Wreath-wearer) married a lord of the Telkhines, Timasitheos. Queen Kleonike was reviled as "The Whore" by all Alkimides for producing offspring with the enemy. The Telkhines could not trust Timasitheos for marrying a usurper, and Eupheron was caught between the hatred of two powerful houses. With two bleeds, one each from his father and mother, he was the most powerful of the Wreath-wearers, and marked from the beginning as unbalanced.
—Michael Henderson, Seaborn History
Zypheria's scowl deepened as she pressed one of the good white bath towels against Kassandra's side, soaking up blood. A lump of bone and muscle along the ribs stuck up where the bolt had pierced her. Kassandra's torn and bloody shirt lay on the floor with her bra. She yelped when Zypheria's fingers tugged at the lip of skin, pulling it and the meaty tissue underneath smooth.
The wound edge lifted with a fresh surge of blood, and Zypheria's eyes narrowed and grew more intense, one hand working the towel over the wound to keep it closed.
"You have so much strength, milady. Only so much blood to lose. I will work the bone and sew this up." She frowned. "It is a shame that lying whore's son of a king isn't awake. Greatest rhapsôides. He could do things with wounds and scars that none of the other wearers could."
Kassandra tilted her head up, gulping for air. She had her face buried in her pillow to muffle the screaming. Her voice was dry. "King Eupheron?"
Yes, Lady Kassandra?
Zypheria looked warmly down at her. "He could fix the webbing on your hands."
She gave Zypheria a weak mischievous smile. "The lying whore's son is awake. He woke a little while ago."
Lovely. That can only mean that there is an Alkimides here with us, Kassandra—aside from you.
"Zypheria is here."
Charming Zypheria! Please give her a paidariôn from me.
Kassandra tried to prop herself up on one elbow and failed, her eyelids fluttering with the pain. She touched Zypheria on the shoulder and whispered, "Lean closer."
She kissed her mother's ex-bodyguard and friend on the cheek, and felt the woman jump under her lips. Zypheria's hair smelled faintly of mint. Her skin was cool and smooth, browned by the sun, and when she drew back, Kassandra saw the hairline scar along her cheek that ran to her ear, the faded badge from a childhood fight with one of her brothers, which she undoubtedly won.
Zypheria bowed her head, her eyes filling with tears. "Milady, please."
Kassandra looked up at the toughest woman she knew and, seeing her uncomfortable, grinned as wide as the sea. "Charming Zypheria—that wasn't from me, it was King Eupheron."
Zypheria tried to hold her mouth steady, but the ends tilted into a smirk, and then she gave up, shaking her head. She looked down at Kassandra and more tears poured from her eyes. "Charming, indeed."
Charming and... Eupheron's voice went high in shock. Old!
Eupheron! said Praxinos archly, his sensibilities offended. By my calculation, Zypheria can be no more than thirty-eight years.
Kassandra snapped her head back into her pillow, blinking. "How are you doing that?"
I am the only Wreath-wearer who can see through your eyes—and not much clearer than a tottering old man—but I've never been able to do it without some discomfort to the current wearer. You will get used to it. Toughen up. No one likes a weakling.
Enough! Andromache shouted and for ten seconds, there was silence in Kassandra's head. Kassandra is... It was unusual to hear diffidence in Andromache's voice. She is only... She needs your help, Eupheron. She is injured. A bolt went through her armor on the right side and broke at least one rib. She is bleeding. Andromache suddenly found her resolve. Do something, you shit-eating malignity!
Ah, there you are, great Queen Andromache. Your stuttering and indecision puzzled me. Is it not interesting how much of a person is made up entirely of words, and completed by them, and that without their words they become nearly invisible? I swear I did not recognize you without your bitter tongue and your unsocial, frigid, and base disposition. I thought for a moment that some gentle and feeble princess like Ampharete had stirred from sleep to torment me. Kassandra felt him grinning inside her head.
Longevity, Praxinos reminded. Kassandra's bleeding.
Eupheron choked. That hurt! Androm—Why it's Ampharete! I count you among my favorites of the wearers, but I did not expect to see you again for a century.
Liar. Help my daughter.
Your daughter? Oh, fine! Did somebody say something about a crossbow bolt injury?
Andromache's voice was low and cold. Call me "somebody" again, and I'll put out your eyes. Now, make yourself useful.
Eupheron seemed to have no capacity for pausing or pondering, only acting. He began by reciting an epaiodê to stanch the flow of blood. Ah, here we are. Right side, broken bones.
Kassandra, too weak to protest, sank into her pillow and waited for Eupheron's ministrations. He was inside her body in seconds, not filling her arms and legs, but like a car mechanic sticking his head under the hood. Eupheron evaluated the integrity of her rib cage from the inside, fingering the bones until he found two that were cracked and one with a splintery break.
I can mend bone and arrange the torn skin to heal without scarring. You have lost too much blood to think about performing any daring acts of war in the near future. We must feed you.
"Very good." Kassandra breathed the words, just loud enough to hear. "I do not plan to land myself in another combat situation for another five, perhaps six days." Zypheria gave her a reproachful scowl. "Plenty of time to regain my strength. Zypheria, can you bring up some orange juice and a PB-and-J? Extra peanut butter."
"Milady," said Zypheria with her lips turned down in disgust and left the room.
Kassandra closed her eyes and pulled her knees up. She lay on her left side, her arms folded up around her face, her fingers clawing at her pillow as Eupheron kneaded her skin from the inside. He packed something that felt like oozing hot clay against her bone, stitching the fragments back into a whole.
Her face tightened but she didn't make a noise as Eupheron's fingers worked the wound closed then sealed it. He did something with fire that felt as if he was touching her skin with a red-hot wire, and she sucked in a breath every time it seared her. He used smaller and smaller points of burning until it felt as he was using hot needles.
Rest now, and I will watch the progress of your healing. Eupheron let a beat slip by. May I ask you a question or two, nothing distressing?
"Okay... " She dragged out the last syllable, already suspicious.
Oh-kay? There are eccentricities in your speech I have heard before. You must tell me how have you come to acquire such a deep command of the surfacer argot, and why you insist on using it with me.
Kassandra turned the question over in a quieter part of her head. "I am one."
A surfacer? Ridiculous. You are the Wreath-wearer, the Alkimides princess, you belong in the oceans.
"I grew up in Nebraska, about as far from the ocean as my grandfather could send me."
Eupheron's voice went sour. I have to see this with my own—your own eyes. Swim to the nearest mirror. What is Neb-raskah?
"I don't need to swim. I'm in my room." Kassandra grabbed her desk to steady her legs, staggered to the far wall, and shut her bedroom door. A full-length mirror hung on the back and she stepped in front of it.
Eupheron was silent a moment, but it was a disappointed silence. How old are you? How did you end up on the surface, and why did you not return to the sea? Who butchered your hands?
Kassandra folded her arms over her chest and curled her hands into fists, hiding the scarring, brown seams that lined the skin between her fingers. She hadn't felt embarrassed about them for a couple years, but the disgust in his voice brought the shame to the surface. "My grandfather had the webbing cut away when I was a year old, just before he sent me to St. Clement's—some place in Nebraska. I didn't even know I had a connection to the sea. I grew up getting the shit kicked out of me by my governess. I'm almost twenty."
You're too pale. Your hair—holy Thaumos! It is beyond repair. Where are we?
"In my room, in my house, in North Hampton, New Hampshire."
Above the waves?
"Above the waves."
And the light? Why is this room so bright?
"That is Helios. True Helios. The evening sun coming through the windows."
Eupheron's voice was hard and angry. Why have you tolerated this?
Kassandra held her reply because she didn't know if he was asking her or the other wearers. Then she answered before they could. "I wear the gift of the sea's lord. It is my decision to remain here. I go in the ocean every day. The Atlantic is across the boulevard from my father's house, but this is my home."
For now.
She nodded. "For now. I will return to the Nine-cities when I have the means to take the throne from my grandfather."
That appeared to satisfy Eupheron, because he returned to criticizing her hair and the rest of her. Your eyes are very dark. Did you get those from your Rexenor side—no those are from Kallixene, are they not?
Kassandra's mother shifted angrily inside her head. Speak ill of my daughter again, and I will—
What a uniformly delightful girl! His voice was bright and cheery, without a hint of mockery.
The door swung in. It was Zypheria with a plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a glass of orange juice; when she saw Kassandra out of bed, she added a pained expression to her serious face.
Kassandra stepped out of the way, leaning heavily against the wall, laughing, "Eupheron the Liar. Say it. I am a freak fish out of water. I'm the freakish granddaughter of a murdering king."
Any other faults?
Kassandra took Zypheria's arm, and sat down gently on her bed, trying not to disturb the freshly healed skin and bone on her side. She slid up against her desk, and took a big bite of one of the sandwiches, avoiding Zypheria's incredulous stare.
She is headstrong.
"Headstrong is good, Andromache," said Kassandra through a jaw-locking, roof-of-the-mouth-clinging wad of peanut butter. Zypheria groaned, loudly this time, wondering how Kassandra could stomach the nasty thick brown paste.
Kassandra nodded at her. "This is perfect, Zypheria. Thanks."
And she's often foolish.
"When am I foolish?"
How foolish, Ampharete? Tell me.
Kassandra persuaded four Naiads and what remains of House Rexenor—a handful of warriors led by Lady Kallixene—to make a stand against the Olethren at that school in Nebraska.
Eupheron made a choking sound. Kassandra coughed, swallowing some of the orange juice wrong. It burned in her throat—and kept on burning. She coughed again.
Two hundred and forty thousand of the drowned dead in the King's army.
That many?
Lady Kassandra went to their fortress before they marched and she counted them.
Beyond foolish!
Kassandra swallowed. The orange juice was trying to strangle her, and her throat tightened around her words. "The freezing storm worked. Their bones were full of water that turned to slush." She took a bite of her sandwich, thinking that something less acidic in her throat might help.
How did you escape the Olethren? They do not cease until everything is dead.
She destroyed them, Eupheron.
Tell him, said Ampharete.
Kassandra chewed through peanut butter, jam and bread, nearly gagging on it. "When water freezes, it expands. This is science—physics of water. Parresia, Limnoria, Helodes and Olivia—they're Naiads—made an ice storm for me, and when me and Ephor—"
Her voice stopped. She dropped her sandwich, took in a breath and released it in a choppy wheeze that headed right into sobbing, all of the muscle contractions and sniffling nose, but without tears.
Me and who?
Ephoros, said Andromache sadly.
She is bold, summoning the king of the sea daimones. I do not understand the purpose of the freezing storm, but Ephoros, the wonderful old demon, made it all work, did he?
"Eph—Ephoros is dead," whispered Kassandra. "He died in order to save his brother—to save me. He fought the king and took back the book my father created."
He is immortal. Do not make light of such a thing.
"I misunderstood that part as well. Immortal does not mean you cannot die."
Or do not want to, said Ampharete in a painfully sad whisper.
"Ephoros helped me with the last of his life. My grandfather's mistake was to command the army to fight above the waves. The dead could not stop the water when it froze. It expanded inside their bones and shattered them. All of them."
The entire army of the dead, gone? No more?
Kassandra laughed weakly and a wave of dizziness roared through her head. "I am not The Liar."
All four of the wearers in her head went still. Kassandra heard her heart beat a hundred times, and the silence hurt.
Eupheron broke it. Oh-kay. Is that how it is said?
Praxinos and Ampharete spoke excitedly. Tell us if it worked.
Give me a moment, said Eupheron. Most likely. Someone so young plotting the destruction of an army which the lords of the Telkhines could not defeat? Freak, did you say? Twenty years? Off of whom are you bleeding, Lady Kassandra?
Kassandra frowned. She knew a little about the bleeds of power from parent to child, but it sounded as if he was talking about something else.
You are gathering the power from your Rexenor father. I can see that. You gain what he loses.
"Are you insulting me?" Kassandra winced as something sharp poked around deep in her skull.
Never! Eupheron said in a distracted voice. Would not dream of it. You described yourself as a freak and oh, Kassandra, you truly are a freak of the most extreme kind.
Eupheron! It was her mother's angry voice.
I am not speaking of her hideously disfigured hands, madam, but of the bleeding.
Praxinos' voice was cautious. Did it work?
"Speak to me! Do not discuss this as if I'm not in the room—or in my own head. Did what work?"
Eupheron didn't miss a stroke. Kassandra, you are also bleeding off your grandmother of House Megalesios.
"Lady Kallixene? Ouch!"
Eupheron jabbed into corners of her brain she didn't know she had, tracing lines of power.
"Stop it now!"
That is what we had hoped for, said Ampharete quietly. Are you sure she is taking from both of them?
"Mother, what does that mean? Taking from both?"
Not just two, Ampharete! He was shouting now, his voice a muffled echo in her mind, as if he'd crawled into the ventilation system and had to raise his voice to be heard. Kassandra, you are also bleeding off an Alkimides source, probably that traitorous would-be Queen Isothemis.
"What are you talking about? No one can have more than two bleeds."
Kassandra. It was Ampharete's serious listen-to-your-mother voice. Do not, under any circumstances, speak of this to your father—or anyone.
"Of what?" She had a vague notion of the subject, something that the Seaborn rarely spoke of, even among relatives or close friends. "Bleeds of power?"
You must not tell anyone, said Praxinos gravely.
She was getting dizzy. "Answer me!"
Hysterical laughter burst from Eupheron, but all she felt from Praxinos, Andromache, and Ampharete was stunned silence.
Oh, this is exquisite! I am the only Wreath-wearer with two bleeds and that is because my father was pure Telkhines. No other has had two, and I know of no other among the Seaborn with more than two. Did not know this was even possible.
Kassandra clawed at her desk, the blood loss catching up to her. Her face was bone white. Her fingers loosened, and the plate with half a sandwich crashed to the floor. Zypheria jumped to her side, grabbing her by the arm to stop her from falling off the bed.
Kassandra's eyes went unfocused. Her lips, nearly the same color as the skin around them, drew back, baring her teeth. "Eupheron! Proktos! Tell me now!"
Kassandra, you dear girl, you are also bleeding off your Dosianax grandfather, King Tharsaleos. Oh, I wish I could see his face. What would I not give to see that? He knows it's slipping from him, and there's nothing he can do about it.
He can kill you, muttered Andromache.
Oh, Kassandra, you have made me the happiest man in the sea! Eupheron's cheering voice swam numbingly through Kassandra's head, and she gave Zypheria one pleading look. "Make it stop." Her voice was barely audible.
She fell into a tight curl on her bed, her body shaking feverishly. She squeezed her eyes shut and shoved her hands against her ears.
Zypheria hesitated over the decision to tell Lord Gregor that his daughter needed a doctor, and then threw her arms around her, shuddering with her own inner pain, tears streaming down her face onto Kassandra's bare back. Her lips trembled with soft words, the salt of her tears on her tongue.
"Sleep, Kassandra. Everything will be fine, my baby girl. I am here." She forced her eyes open, blinking through the tears, struggling to focus on something in the outside world, because when she closed them, the same memory haunted her, the stifled cry of a little girl with big dark eyes staring up at her, begging her governess to stop hurting her.
Chapter 10 - The Night Wanderers
Slash the gullet of the neck, and let the blood of this sacrificial victim flow into the murky depths of the reeds as a drink for the lifeless. Call upon primeval Earth and chthonic Hermes, escort of the dead, and ask chthonic Zeus to send up the swarm of night-wanderers from the mouths of the river, from which this melancholy off-flow water, unfit for washing hands, is sent up by Stygian springs.
—Aeschylus, Psychagogoi, F273a
Aleximor floated a foot above the ocean's floor, staring down at a flat stretch of dark gray sand. The gloomy water closed in around him, but he didn't notice. He whispered something to himself. Corina didn't catch all of it, but it sounded like he had said the words, "broken bones."
He raised his left hand, palm up, and spread his fingers until the webbing went tight between them. Without turning his eyes away, he reached down and pulled out the dive knife.
He gripped the handle with his thumb against the back of the blade, and cut into Corina's hand, carving deep from the meaty bulge below the thumb, diagonally across his palm to the first knuckle of the little finger.
Blood gushed in the wake of the knife blade, dark thick and red. Corina felt the pain, but the brightness of her blood startled her. When she'd cut her right hand on the cave's rocky walls, her eyes weren't capable of seeing color at that depth. It had looked like strips of black ribbon in the water.
Aleximor let his eyes stray to the horizon of sand. There was something reddish brown crawling across the floor close to him, but it was blurry, and he didn't appear to notice it. Corina urged his neck to swivel. Nothing happened. He appeared to know exactly what he was doing, and so Corina followed him in ignoring it. It's probably a crab.
Aleximor spun in the opposite direction, away from the reddish shape, and his eyes dropped to a soft swirling movement at his feet. He kicked and circled a small depression that had formed. The gray fluid sand eroded under clawing fingers.
Something was digging out.
"Gather to me," he said in a clear commanding voice. "To each of you, apneumeones, I say I bind your psyche, your tongue, your thumos, your hands, your nous in obedience to me. I call any who have not tasted Lethe."
He curled into something close to a sitting position while he floated a few meters off the sandy floor.
Aleximor drew a series of deep breaths to calm himself, and closed his eyes, singing softly, "a door into the pit of Erebos where dark fears darkness" and how he "possessed the secret that keeps defiled Persephone under the world."
Corina couldn't imagine that these words contained anything but some ritual meaning for him, maybe they calmed him down in preparation for some further step. He had already cut open her hand, spilling her blood into the currents.
His meditative state caused a flood of strange thoughts and knowledge to wash over Corina's mind, words in his language, nekuomanteion meant a place for necromancy, a doorway to death, a place for raising or communicating with the dead. Another word, katabasion, was the path a goês—a sorcerer—followed down into death. Corina imagined a long dimly lit stone stairway and the steps crumbled to sand behind her feet. The dead were brought toward life, pulling the living sorcerer closer to death. Only the goês who achieved something like living-death could hope to draw the dead entirely into the living world without losing his footing and falling into death.
Then he called on the Erratic One, Akastê—she who owned the souls of the drowned.
Aleximor did something with her knife, brought it above her head, but with her eyes closed, she couldn't tell what it was. He went still for a moment and then sang, "I break the wall of the Moiriai, and make my offer to the hater of life, lady without mercy, Akastê. Bitter blood untasted. Let not this nor my challenge go unheeded. The wall thins, pass to me the psychai of the five whose flesh and bone are buried in the ocean floor, clinging to the worm-eaten ribs of the ship that bore them courageously from Iberia."
A bright light flared in front of him, orange and red like roaring flames. It radiated through his eyelids, dying after a moment to an ember's glow. He opened his eyes and slid Corina's knife into its sheath.
A rippling line of fire burned in the dark water, running from the sand to forty feet above Aleximor, as if someone had cut a long thin line in this reality and into another at a volcano's heart.
A voice as cold as the depths of the sea rumbled through the opening, a woman's low voice. "No introduction, young demander? What do you call yourself? Come closer."
Aleximor stiffened in fear. He kicked, an uncontrollable spasm. He released a breath, drew another one, and answered in a commanding tone, "Give me the names of the five, and I will close this door. Erratic One, I know you and your tricks," he added as if that added weight to his demands. "That is enough."
Corina's thought tumbled down a treacherous slope carved out by fear. They stopped on this last point. He knew the thing behind the line of fire, but he didn't want the speaker to know his name.
Aleximor! Corina screamed it without another thought. If the thing behind the door could hear her, maybe it could take him and leave her behind.
Please, help me. His name's Aleximor.
Corina felt Aleximor tighten his jaw, as if he feared that her shouting thoughts would reach his lips.
So, he can hear me clearly.
His eyes unfocused. He concentrated inward on her, and she felt him searching. Corina didn't know how to flee inside her own head, but the fear of him catching her was tempered by the feeling of rocks digging into her bare feet. There was something familiar about the pain of hard sea-rounded boulders, firm ground under her, even though Aleximor had not set her feet down on the floor. She felt him looking at her, but across some gulf that he could not cross. Then his eyes shot to the glowing line in the water.
Corina's focus snapped back to her surroundings. She heard the same deep woman's voice. "Swept from the deck of their ship by a storm, which soon broke against the waves and these five clung to its pieces all the way to the bottom. They are Porfirio, Cordareo, Damas and Alois. The fifth, Macario, is beyond. He has sworn his oath, and will never rise to your command. You may have their life's power as you have complied with the forms laid down by the Lord of the Sea."
"Surnames," Aleximor demanded.
"I offer you enough. You must... " Her voice broke off.
Corina felt Aleximor go cold under the wetsuit.
Akastê said, "Another's blood I taste. I have no memory of it. Your voice has changed, but I know it, though I have not heard it recently. Come inside, I would speak with you."
Aleximor's hands went to claws, some kind of defensive position. He screamed a long string of words, something about sealing and darkness.
Corina's sense of translation failed her when he spoke rapidly, and it was distracting to hear her own shrieking voice.
The line of fire, the doorway, burned bright then went black with a hiss, like water thrown on a campfire.
The voice of the one beyond it crackled angrily through the closing seam. "You are the nekuomantis, Alexim—"
The doorway closed, and Aleximor drifted in the dark, stunned into silence. He slumped forward, breathing like an enraged ox—which was also strange since he managed to do it with Corina's body. He was moving facial muscles she didn't know she had.
He flipped both his hands in front of him. The deep gouge in the left was already closing up, a bloodless pale lip of skin running from the lower edge of the palm to the top right corner. He focused on the shreds of roughly torn skin in his right hand. His fingers trembled, and Corina sensed both fear and anger.
He had given himself the name, Aleximor, but it wasn't the first time he had taken a name.
While Aleximor drifted in weariness, staring at his hands, Corina's feeling of despair returned stronger. She knew his real name. What could she do with it? It gained her nothing. What would that thing beyond the line of fire have done with him?
Corina played with one of the new words she had learned, nekuomantis, which meant something like "prophet of the dead."
The feelings, the knowledge, the new words affected her in a strange way. A whole world opened up inside her soul. Her first attempt at identifying the feeling began with the assertion: There are mountains in my mind. This didn't sound right, but that's what she felt, a force wrenching her thoughts, as if they all rode along in a car and could lean back against gravity and inertia when rolling down a steep slope. There is terrain in my soul. Thoughts have momentum. There was something right about this, but she couldn't pin it down or confirm it.
Aleximor tilted his head back, let out a long breath and blinked forcefully as if he had trouble staying awake. He looked over at the four dead men who had dug their way out of their tombs beneath the ocean's floor.
They were nothing but rot-streaked bones and a few threads of tendon. Some kind of life force, given to each by the thing behind the door, burned in them and kept them together. One wore armor, a corroded shell of blackened metal that hung from his shoulder bones on broken strips of rust. It looked like something the Spanish had worn in the 1500s. He was a conquistador. He'd lost his helmet, but he still had what was left of a long skinny sword.
The four of them stood shoulder to shoulder, facing outward, on bones that shouldn't have been able to hold them up. Aleximor circled them in the water.
They didn't move, but the one in armor tilted his skull to follow Aleximor. The pale glow of yellow fire beamed from empty sockets of bone.
"Release me," he begged with a thin ragged voice. "And I will serve you on death's bor—" His voice cracked and faded. "—der."
A weary smile stretched along Aleximor's lips. His right hand slid down Corina's leg to the knife. He fumbled with the snaps and tugged the blade free.
The faces of the skulls turned to him, no means of expressing feelings remained in the threads of tissue and tendon. Aleximor kicked to position himself above the four. He started with the one named Porfirio, grabbing the Spaniard by the forehead, working the tip of the knife into the back of the skull. The blade punched through old bone. Aleximor twisted the blade and in one smooth motion, brought out a thumbnail-sized chunk of sea-rotted skull. He slid the blade back in its sheath and jammed the piece of Porfirio into Corina's water-tight pouch.
Without a word he performed the same bone-taking ritual on the others. Finished, he circled them like a predator. The hollows of their eyes followed him.
"You four, bound to me through the grudge-holding one's consent. I command you to find and guard my old stronghold. You will wait for me there."
The dead did not answer. Each one shuffled in the sand so that they faced each other, expecting further instruction.
Aleximor sang softly about the dark oceans. His new voice sounded less like her old one. Corina could hold a note, and sing well, but Aleximor created things with his voice. The sound swirled around him, a current of light spiraling in the heavy dark fluid. His voice went higher, and more currents joined the first. They came together between the four dead Spaniards. A dark glistening globe expanded in the middle of the group with the currents feeding it like umbilical cords.
A mountainous scene formed in the globe, dark and jagged against a black night. There were no stars, and Corina realized she must be looking at the bottom of the ocean somewhere else.
The view inside the globe moved closer to the underwater mountain range, like a camera mounted on a submarine. The speed increased. The mountains drew nearer. The moving scene tilted left a little and passed between a spine of crumbling black hills and sheer cliffs.
Aleximor's voice rose above the currents, directing the path they followed in the globe. He spoke of returning along the route taken by Magellan around the cape at the southern tip of South America.
Corina watched without thinking, wondering where this was leading. They moved into the Atlantic Ocean and headed directly north. She passed massifs and deepwater vents that belched boiling clouds of chemical blackness; she skirted sheer drops into the abyss, and crossed endless flats of miles-deep desert.
Aleximor's whispering told them to pass the Great City of the Seaborn, the Nine-cities. A pale blue glow on the seafloor's horizon was an entire city... of others like him?
Corina's thoughts begged for a better look, but the scene passed by.
The path led further north then turned west into a range of serrated rock that rose thousands of feet above the plain. These were just the foothills to distant mountains that cut through the dark in steep zigzags.
She felt Aleximor tense up. They were nearly there. The scene stopped high in the mountains, along a ledge that jutted from a cliff's vertical face. Aleximor whispered a long string of noise. She couldn't understand it. It could have been one long word, or a bunch of them run together.
A key.
The rock wall before them dissolved into a cave mouth wide enough to drive a truck through. The glow of fire or molten rock flickered against the cut and polished walls.
The movie ended, and jarred Corina's thoughts back to the Pacific and inside the body she now shared with a four-hundred year old sorcerer.
Aleximor turned his eyes to the four dead he had raised, pointed south with his arm stretched out. She could just see her metallic blue fingernail polish on the index finger.
"Go."
He had spent every ounce of energy opening the door, summoning the powers behind it, animating four of the dead, and feeding them their directions.
This body was so foreign and he was so tired, he could barely focus his eyes, but he managed to push the lids up and keep them on the four dead Spaniards as they passed out of sight.
"Which one is your favorite, Corina Lairsey? You choose, and that will be the one in which I bind your soul."
Chapter 11 - Displeased
Without approaching the nature of the power (magic) possessed by the Seaborn, let me discuss my meager understanding of the process by which the power "bleeds" from parent to child or grandchild. I will also put aside the apparent differences in the bleeds of power possessed by the nearly extinct House Telkhines, which contained the old royal line, some of whom could multiply their bleeds, passing it to all their children at once.
—Michael Henderson, notes
King Tharsaleos, Lord Dosianax, ruler of all the Seaborn, kicked to the arched ceiling of the city's pan-assembly arena, making Stratolaos, his favorite cousin, swim the tall space to him.
The hall was wide enough for an army of a thousand to stand shoulder to shoulder in a single row. Tall men could stand, sole to shoulder, in a vertical line of two hundred, without reaching the arched ceiling. The kings and queens of the Seaborn had been crowned in the hall for thousands of years.
When Stratolaos reached the king, he back-kicked and curled into a bow. "Lord."
Tharsaleos tilted his head back, glaring at the old soldier through narrowed lids. The glow from a hundred lights, set in an even row halfway up the walls, lit them from below and cast monstrous shadows over the painted ceiling. The lights glinted off the king's crown, a gold circlet with a single tine in the middle and two segmented horns that spiraled back through his white hair on each side.
The glow of the lights slanted off the king's armor of gold plates so thin and flexible they appeared to dissolve into one smooth sheet.
"I am saddened, Stratolaos." He said the words with the appropriate amount of sympathy in his expression, then went back to glaring. One corner of his mouth twisted into a sly smile that disarmed those who'd never met him. Those who had, understood the king had never been sly in his life. Cruelly deceptive and secretive, yes, but sly was for amateurs and children. Tharsaleos appeared to have never been either.
On the rare occasion when smiling was required, he assented. He smiled, for instance, when he married his first wife—Queen Pythias of Alkimides, the Wreath-wearer—and again, years later, after commanding a trusted assassin to return with her pretty head.
Stratolaos bowed his head. "I am sorry, my—"
"I am displeased with you." The king spoke right over the old soldier's attempt at an apology, but without raising his voice. He paused and gave every indication he was waiting for Stratolaos to say something.
"She is the—"
"I am not, however, displeased with you or your men for failing against Kassandra Alkimides, the Wreath-wearer."
A blurry layer of water haloed Stratolaos. He was sweating. King Tharsaleos waited patiently for the soldier to continue.
"Lord, she—"
"I am displeased you allowed your story to be told outside of my confidence. I depended on your secrecy, cousin."
Stratolaos kept his eyes on the rows of stone benches over a thousand feet below him, determined to wait out the king if every statement he made was destined to be interrupted. He felt the effort to keep his arms at his sides, and not fold them obstinately.
Tharsaleos' eyes widened at the old soldier's childishness. "Do you waste my time? Report."
Stratolaos looked up into the king's very light eyes, almost gray with a yellow tinge. He was close enough to see flecks of gold in the irises, close enough to see that the king's glare was as cold as the abyss.
"My lord, this woman—"
"All of the Nine-cities will soon know of my granddaughter's existence and they will speak of the fact that she wears the gift of the Earth-encircler, that it has not been lost as we had all thought."
"I will punish—"
"Of course you will, my dear cousin." Tharsaleos waved dismissively and let his eyes stray to the painting above him on the ceiling, one of the Nereids killing something, another blowing a horn. "It will only be a matter of time before the inquisitive citizens of our great city connect the existence of the Wreath-wearer to the loss of the Olethren."
The blurry layer around Stratolaos blossomed. "Loss?" He stumbled over the word. The king's ancient army of the dead was over two hundred thousand strong. She was skilled with a sword and she had someone's powerful bleed, but what could one girl do against an army that most immortals couldn't stop?
"Do not bother your thoughts with it, Stratolaos."
The old soldier bowed, flinching when the king said his name. Anger reeled raw inside Stratolaos, but he kept it there, showing nothing but a tightening around his mouth on the outside. The Wreath-wearer woman had done something to his mind. He feared hearing his own name.
"I have two more tasks for you." The king waited for their eyes to meet. "Stratolaos." He watched the man recoil with satisfaction and then continued. "The first involves the punishment you spoke of. I have nearly reached a decision on what is to be done. Return to your post and await my command. Speak to no one. Not even your wife."
The king waved him away, and Stratolaos bowed again before kicking off, thinking—with a release of tension—that more than one task was a good sign.
The double thump of someone's fist on the door reached King Tharsaleos' ears and he looked up from a topographic and bathymetric map of New Hampshire, a wedge-shaped plot of land in the Americas with a very short coastline. One of the king's fingers was in the middle of tracing a path through the soundings a few hundred meters off the coast.
"Come."
Two of his guardsmen—two of the trusted Eight, Oktoloi—pushed the doors wide and swam to him. One bowed his head, and the other extended a pale box of intricately carved whalebone a little larger than the size of a man's head.
The king folded the map over so his guards wouldn't see what he had been studying, and made his way to them with one powerful kick.
"Well done, Sameramis, Lazoros."
The king studied Sameramis for a moment, a handsome man with a young son. Sameramis had the common Alkimides sandy brown hair, long and unruly corkscrews to his shoulders, some of it bound in braids like most of the Oktoloi. Sameramis had pale green eyes, and a bleed off one parent gave him extraordinary archery skills. He could pin a man's heart a thousand kicks away. Sameramis was the first among the eight, the most experienced. And Sameramis was the only Alkimides in the king's trusted Eight, a concession to the house that contained the royal line.
Tharsaleos motioned for them to approach, and then lifted the lid away and stared into the box.
"My favorite cousin, Stratolaos."
A man's face stared back, something like disappointment showed on the features, the clear gray eyes wide open, clearly dead. His long black hair had been hacked off in places, his nostrils cut, his ears shorn from his head.
"Well done. I have one more task for my dear cousin. Take him to the well of eels and let them feed." The king paused as if reconsidering. "Will the eels hunger after so small a meal, do you think, Sameramis?"
"They always hunger, milord."
"Yes, you are right. Feed them also with Stratolaos' wife and son."
An hour passed, and the king had gone back to his maps, drawing a path from the depths off the New England coast to the middle of the Wreath-wearer's yard. Then he summoned his war-bard.
He showed her the path on one map of the Atlantic Ocean's floor that continued on to the map of coastal New Hampshire. "Take me there." He jabbed his finger into a green stretch of the map right on the coast.
Theoxena followed the lines with her finger, humming softly to herself. She nodded, understanding what the king wanted from her, and swam across the room to get ready. "I have heard the story of the Wreath-wearer." Theoxena glanced over her shoulder, unwrapping her lyre from its case and plucking a few strings. "That she lives among the surfacers."
"Your ears are better than most," said King Tharsaleos. She was the war-bard—whose ears could be better at picking up the rumors and currents in the city?
"Not in this. I heard it from my daughter."
The king looked up from the maps to Theoxena, watching her cross the chamber with her lyre. "Which one?"
Theoxena's delicate fingers damped the strings. With a tone as sharp as jagged shark's teeth she said, "My youngest, Nikasia."
"Nikasia has your bleed, does she not?"
"She is young. She is not me yet, my lord."
"How quickly do the Kirkêlatides bleed?"
"Slowly." She plucked one note and turned her eyes on him, the irises a solid feral orange. "How quickly does a Dosianax bleed?"
He held his war-bard's eyes for a moment, tempted to ask her if she was threatening him. He had known Theoxena since she was a child, trusted her as much as he trusted anyone, but he still had to be careful. The Kirkêlatides—distant descendents of Circe—were deadly. Still, he distinctly heard "Would you care to find out... how quickly a Dosianax bleeds?" in the silence after her words.
"Queen Isothemis has given me two children, Theoxena." He forced his eyes to the map with some effort.
"Neither have your bleed, so I've heard." She tilted her head to the side with something dangerously close to pity. "Nor do they have your dear wife's bleed."
King Tharsaleos kicked up from the map table, enraged, pointing to the surface thousands of feet above him. "Get on with it! Show me this woman."
Theoxena strummed a chord playfully. "Your granddaughter?"
"You push too far, Kirkêlatides, always too far. Do not play with me, wife of Epandros!"
One of the lyre's strings went sour and snapped with a flower of blood from Theoxena's fingers. At the mention of her dead husband's name, she curled into a shuddering wreck, her three black braids winding around her throat. Her fingers shook as she restrung the instrument from a spare in the case. The sea blurred around her eyes.
The king kicked to the ceiling of the chamber, glaring down on Theoxena. I killed your beloved Epandros, poisoned him along with his seven companions.
It was the king's turn to express pity, but it was a condescending show, the same expression he'd worn years ago when he had lied to Theoxena—when he had told Theoxena that her husband, Epandros was dead, killed in an assassination attempt by an exiled prince, Gregor Rexenor.
The King's face turned cruel, daring Theoxena to look up at him. I commanded you to create eight war-horns—with voices that hate life. Who do you think blew those? Your dead husband, in my army, put one of those horns to his rotting lips, and blew the hard work of his own wife. Drink your tears, let them burn your throat, you stupid, stupid—
"It is tuned, milord," said Theoxena softly. "I am ready."
Tharsaleos nodded curtly. "Let us see this Wreath-wearer, then."
Theoxena wiped her eyes before studying the maps again, tracing the path drawn by the king across the Ocean into the shallows and above the waves to a point on the surface.
She plucked three strings, pulled two at the same time, and sang a few soft words about cleansing the location, darkening the room, sealing the walls from leaking sounds, a preparatory epaiodê for her song about seeing, a distant eye that watched a faraway place, the bright surface of the earth above the waves, reflecting the light into the chamber where she sang.
A disc the size of a face appeared in the water in front of King Tharsaleos, hardening into something that could be moved with strong hands, the morning sky above New Hampshire in its surface, firing a bolt of blinding blue against the king's chest.
"Move the eye and you will find your Wreath-wearer, my lord," sang Theoxena, her eyes showing more white than iris.
Tharsaleos curled his thick fingers around the lens. It was cold and rigid under his skin, like ice. He shoved it back, tilting the view forward and a field of green replaced the blue.
"Slowly," said Theoxena, coming out of her trance and paddling to the king's side.
Tharsaleos eased the lens back and... there was Kassandra in a flowery pale blue cotton dress, dancing in the middle of a long slope of rich green grass. She jumped, hanging in the air, defying the Earth's gravity, her long legs spread, toes pointed. She dropped, did a short hop, and twirled, her arms looping above her head.
Theoxena looked puzzled. The young woman seemed fragile in her dress and her braids flying in the wind. "What is she doing?"
"That is a pirouette, I believe. Something from a dance the surfacers do."
Theoxena reached for the lens, thinking something had gone wrong. "She is the one who defeated your Dosianax guard? That woman is the Wreath-wearer?"
Tharsaleos stared at Kassandra, puzzled by something himself. "Yes."
"She defeated that killer, Stratolaos? By herself?"
The king turned to her. "Tell me everything you know of that."
Theoxena scowled at him. "Only what has been said in the City. That Stratolaos was defeated by the Wreath-wearer, a woman from the surface. Nothing more."
The king nodded grimly and turned back to the lens.
Kassandra sang to herself as she jumped and twirled. "... the honored sweet prophet of summer for mortals. The Muses love you and gave you shrill song. Old age does not wear you down, wise one, earth-born one, lover of song. You cannot suffer, your flesh is bloodless, you are almost like the gods."
"That is an old song," said Theoxena.
Kassandra's form drifted from view and Tharsaleos swiveled the disc right to capture her again. She had vanished. The wind off the Atlantic shook the branches of the pines, a warped watery view of a big white clapboard house in the background blurred past. Solid green filled the lens as the king shoved its view to the ground. He tugged it and the flare of True Helios filled the chamber, blinding the king and Theoxena.
"Where did she go?"
The king leaned into the elliptical window, grabbing more of it with both hands, jerking it so hard that light and color bled into each other. He held it firm, scanning the house, his nose almost touching the cold surface.
Kassandra's face suddenly filled the window, one side of her smiling mouth lifted mischievously.
"No peeking, granddad."
She pointed, the tip of her finger an inch from his face, wagging it, as if he was a naughty child. "You killed my grandmother, Pythias, but not before she had a daughter, Ampharete. You killed my mother, but not before she had me. I'm coming to kill you." She stepped back, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "I was thinking of having your severed head mounted on my bedroom wall. My sisters think it's disgusting. I think it'd be adorable. Oh, and thank you for the bleed. It will make cutting off your head that much more satisfying—knowing that I'll be doing it with some of your own magic. Isn't it elegant the way this has worked out?"
Theoxena's mouth dropped open. She quickly closed it. The king killed Queen Pythias? That was the first time she had heard this. And the king's bleed was going to the Wreath-wearer, Pythias' granddaughter?
Tharsaleos shook off a wave of dizziness. There was something about listening to her through the lens that rattled his senses. Perhaps Kassandra was trying to trace the path back to him, a reverse trace? He started to explore that, but something she had said proved more distracting.
"Sisters? You have siblings?"
"Two. Adopted by my father. They're not here now or I'd let you meet them. I borrowed this—" She pulled the front of her dress tight. "—from my sister, Jill. It's so light. I'm not much of a dress girl, but I can see why she likes them."
Kassandra's eyes narrowed and hit him hard. Her smile drifted away and she bared her teeth at the king. In one moment, she changed into something different—but
still with a girlish voice. "I let your four killers go. Next time, I won't play nice. This is war, grandfather. You send your pet, Mr. Fenhals, snooping around and I'll send him home in a box. Do you understand me? You send anyone... anyone comes to my doorstep, Stratolaos or some other Dosianax thug, your war-bard—" Theoxena stiffened and kicked closer. "Anyone, and I'll eat them alive." Kassandra opened her mouth wider and bit down twice, clicking her teeth. She jabbed her finger at him and her voice went lower and angrier. "Don't fuck with me, you murdering piece of shit. Enjoy your throne. Take a good look around the City, because when I come home... Well, won't that be fun?"
Kassandra put on her smile.
"Time's up!" She shoved her open hand at the lens. It shattered, and jagged wedges of ice flew into the king's face. The room went black. Tharsaleos kicked frantically, coming away with a deep scratch on his right cheek. A bead of blood sprouted from his eyebrow.
He kicked against the wall, rage burning him. Turning to Theoxena, he said, "See what this monster is made of."
"I... If she has come into her power—and she has your bleed—even I will have trouble going against her by myself, milord." Theoxena's gaze wandered, her lips opening slowly, and in an awed whisper, she said, "She destroyed the army of the dead."
The king turned away, angrier. "Her father is Gregor Lord Rexenor."
Theoxena's gaze shot to him, wildness blazing in her eyes. Her upper lip twitched. "I will go—at least to discover the nature and extent of her plans and power. I will not promise to destroy her or return with her bracelet." She hauled some of her anger inside, into a cold hard lump of ice. "Her father, now, he is a different matter."
The king smiled cruelly. "You will have your moment for revenge, Theoxena. If you can kill or capture my old Rexenor slave, do it, but the Wreath-wearer is your primary concern. Do not tarry. Tell me what she knows, who she has gathered around her, what she can do, what these sisters can do. We must prepare for the war in the north. It is time to remove House Rexenor from the ocean floor, from the world, from history, out of all the memories of the Seaborn."
Chapter 12 - The New World
Right of the Earth-encircler, dark-haired Lord of the Sea! Souls arise, with third fore-fathers by our sides we will kill the old kings!
—Alkimides battle cry
Aleximor opened his eyes, looking out at the pure black of the deep Pacific, but there was something missing inside. He couldn't feel Corina Lairsey. She had sunk into herself, brooding or plotting. He gave her another moment's thought, and then moved on to something more pressing.
Something on the outside.
He felt it in the water, a distant repetitive thumping, but so rapid it was almost a hum, and so far away that he couldn't fix his senses on it. He looked up into the night. Something was there, moving, high above him, maybe even on the surface.
Six days he had followed the curve of the land to the tip of Baja California, training this new body to move correctly in the water, keeping mostly to the shallows. Then he went into open water, planning to pick up the west coast of South America at some point. He was about halfway between continents, a thousand feet deep, when he heard the slow rumble of something in the water with him.
He felt Corina stirring inside his head, weak threats and long dull pauses.
Perhaps I am not eating enough? He looked down at his host body, unsure of the correct feel of its weight. It had been so long since he had eaten anything—so long since he had needed to.
Since obtaining this body, he had snapped up a few fish with his bare hands, slicing them open with Corina's dive knife, devouring them raw.
Corina woke feeling hollow and drained of energy. She was getting used to the sense of weakness that went along with someone else controlling her physical side—but this weakness... her body was consuming itself.
He just wasn't eating enough to fuel it.
Anything. Fish is fine. Just eat something.
Raw fish didn't bother her. He hadn't eaten at all the first three days—apparently out of practice. Then he figured out what that gnawing feeling in his stomach was, and started catching fish. The burn inside had made anything taste good, and Corina had watched hungrily as he peeled off the silvery skin and carved out cubes of meat.
Over the last few days depression had driven her into the background, becoming more of the listener and watcher. Her mind was still recovering from his last threat, to bind her to some rotting skeleton.
Now, she was hungry again—hungry enough to heave herself above the depression. And she was angry. If he was going to move in, the least he could do was take care of the place. Hey shithead, get something to eat! I'm wasting away here.
Aleximor's eyes dropped to the black foamy skin that stretched up his forearm, and then drifted to the blue Corina had used to paint her fingernails.
He was ignoring her.
To Aleximor, the woman's thoughts were strange, and although she spoke English, she spoke a barbarous adaptation of it.
It had been more than two centuries since he had spoken any language aloud. Evidently things had changed a great deal.
How else had the world changed?
He recalled strange tales of the surfacers' abilities to travel over the waves. When he had been imprisoned, men of the surface used wind to push their ships, long, deep wedges of wood. And sails, vast squares of billowing white, as if they'd harnessed clouds to drive their vessels.
So much time had passed and with it, he imagined, the world had moved beyond his imagining.
Tired and still hungry, Corina sank back into the dark rocky hollow in her head, steeped in her pool of sorrow, playing five minutes of memory over and over again, that scream of light and motion that made up the last moments she'd seen her mother and father alive.
They'd gone to the movies, and halfway home a red-light running drunk driver had killed her parents and left her alive.
Her mother's smile over the front seat, her father's smile in the rearview mirror, saying things like "What do you want to do when we get home, kiddo?" All followed by pain and sorrow stronger than anything she'd ever felt.
Corina didn't know her mind could shudder, but that's what it did. It halted over one thought, that she was weak, and it caught in her head, split into pieces, and repeated in overlapping flashes, a movie caught in a loop, playing the scene over and over.
Corina screamed and it stopped. But she felt its shadow, heavy, draped over every new thought, dragging her down like the ocean's surge catching her feet, coming up her legs and around her waist.
I walked away from the car.
Corina's thoughts froze because she'd noticed Aleximor tensing up, holding his new body motionless, as if listening to her. Then he spoke directly to her—in her own concerned voice.
"I am saddened to hear of the death of your father and mother, Corina. Is there anything crueler than purposeless death? My mother died young... at the hands of my father. I killed my father over it many years later."
Corina counted to ten slowly, arranging her thoughts, trying to hold onto order. If this thing was going to speak to her in a meaningful way, she'd need every gram of her wits. You can hear me?
He answered at once. "There are times when your thoughts are unclear, almost as if your words are... I cannot think of a more appropriate word than... buried, but yes, I can hear you."
Her own voice talking to her was a strange experience. She tried to hold her thoughts still, but they moved around on their own—and even worse, the questions surfacing in her mind were not the ones she'd have liked to share with a centuries old raiser of the dead who happened to be sitting in the captain's chair in her body.
The thoughts came anyway, several variations of "Can you see what I imagine?" and "Will you let me go?"
He smiled with her lips, a soft compassionate tightening at the corners of her mouth. "I hear the music you dream about, most of it is very beautiful to my ears." My ears. "I see some of the things you imagine, but I do not understand them. It is very bright, scenes of the surface where you lived." His use of the past tense sent a cold burn through her mind. "Let you go? I will consider it, Corina."
Consider it... She repeated the words, mimicking his words using her voice. I will consider it.
He pointed up at the black heaven of the ocean, and through her own eyes, she could just make out the blue of her fingernail polish at the edge of a field of luminescence he had created around her.
It was starting to chip.
She couldn't stop the machine in her head. I will consider it.
"Shhh. Do you hear that, Corina? That deep growling sound?"
Yes. A sourness crept into her thoughts. You have done something to my hearing. It's sensitive. I can hear something moving in the water below... too.
She wanted desperately to say "below me" but the word 'me' didn't seem to fit anymore.
"That is a fish, some kind of shark. Do you hear that snap of water at the end of each tail stroke. That's a deepwater shark." He felt her jolt of panic. "It will not bother us, Corina. Do not fear it."
I can hear... There is a rushing noise, faint but it's always there. I can hear that. I can also hear that really fast thumping.
"The first is the tidal motion."
The tides?
"The pull of the moon... " He started to articulate what he understood of tidal forces. "The oceans swell in response—"
I know what tides are. You're telling me I can hear them?
"I said that, but do you not hear that new noise, lower, a rumbling rhythm?"
Her thoughts went still for a moment. Maybe it's a motor. That's what it sounds like. A boat's propeller? Maybe a ship? How deep am I?
"What do you mean by motor?"
An engine that turns the propellers on a ship.
"What is a propeller?" The way she used the word was strange to him.
A big metal thing with blades that spins and drives the ship. The motor turns it.
"A ship?" She heard the excitement in his question. "The sound is different, not what I have heard from any surface ship before." With that, he kicked off into the night, straight up, pushing his legs until his muscles burned.
He made tiny course corrections every ten minutes. It took him an hour to reach the first hint of sunlight in the ocean. Corina, looking through his eyes, noticed the water around her brightening like pale traces of dawn, and then broad blinding daylight landed on her.
Everything went dark. Aleximor closed his eyes to prepare for the deep punch of shock that always accompanied the breaking of a barrier, and there were few as shocking to the system as the interface between the sea and the air.
Aleximor shattered the surface. A blast of dry air hit his face, tightening around his skin in a swarm of tiny pinpricks, like the clinging legs and mandibles of crabs walking over him. The water stung his eyes, he coughed, and vomited the bile in his stomach across the ocean's surface. His lungs erupted, throwing a few liters of water over his tongue, pasting it to the floor of his mouth. His throat burned, the lining of his esophagus shriveled, his lungs complained nastily, shuddering and pretending they didn't know what was expected of them.
He choked out a question. "And creatures find it comfortable living up here?"
He balled his fists and rubbed the seawater from his eyes and lashes. When he opened them, trying to focus through the blinding sun's light, he saw... it—a leviathan the surfacers had summoned from someplace inhabited by monsters the size of mountains.
Giant walls of orange and glistening red, streaks of rust a mile long like blood trailing along the flanks of a predator. Tiny white lettering, Maria Draughn, rolled along the top edge like the blazing symbols of pyromancy at the fire's finger tips.
Aleximor tilted his gaze to the sky. Rising out of the flames were battlements of gleaming white, hard metal edges, thousands of tiny oval windows, white structural works, bars and beams bound with cables, bent in submission to some god's will. They shivered and strained against the cables, creaking wildly, ready to unfold and throw off attackers like the long fingers and blocky knuckles of a giant's hands.
"It is a white city in a bowl of fire!" Aleximor shrieked the words, but couldn't make his body move out of its way. The wall of fire cut through the waves, shoveling the ocean aside, thundering toward him. His eyes fixed on the white lettering, thinking that they might be some key to defeating it or turning it aside. "What does it mean? Maria Draughn?"
That's the ship's name!
"That is a ship?"
Corina's thoughts piled up in her head, but she pushed them aside to get to the really important ones. Get out of its way. Now! Swim as fast as you can. Move, you idiot!
Aleximor kicked onto his back, pumping his legs. High above him, a man in dark blue clothing leaned over the fire's edge and yelled at him, waving his arms madly. Others joined him, some turning to yell for more watchers.
Aleximor was certain they would wake the giant white claws to pluck him out of the sea. He curled backward and dove, but found that there was more of the ship under the water than he had expected.
A large bulb of orange metal preceded the rest of the walls through the waves, and he kicked it trying to push his body out the way.
The force of the ship's hold on the sea seized his body. The monster had him in its grasp, bending him in half, spinning Aleximor like a wheel, folding him before snapping him open. He felt the thumping of the propellers in his bones. He reached for more water in the wrong direction, one hand banging against the ship's hull, a hard ceiling, rough with stony beds of barnacles.
He sucked in seawater, his lungs protesting.
The ocean slammed him against the hull. He slid headfirst, pinned between the cruel face of the sea and unyielding steel. Barnacles sliced through wetsuit material.
Corina's ponytail whipped him in the face, jolting his thoughts into motion. He threw out his hands against the force dragging him along the hull, squinting through it to get a good look at the dark sweep of churning water coming at him, the blur of the ocean caught in the blades of the propellers and thrown behind the ship.
The collar of Corina's wetsuit hooked a barnacle outcrop, wrenched his neck, and spun his body into the working end of the ship feet first. His skull hammered against metal. The ocean flashed white, and then pulled his mind into a cold motionless night.
Chapter 13 - Plans
There are many ancient tales of rivalry between the Telkhines and the Heliadai (sons of Helios). The Telkhines created their own star, a bright crystal in the heavens that rivaled Helios itself, and incurred the envy of the Heliadai. The Telkhines sent their star aloft in the night and brought light to the shadows, and the Heliadai conspired with Zeus to overthrow the power of the Telkhines. The island of Rhodes was once called Telkhinis, the island of the Telkhines, and Zeus Cloud-gatherer drove them from their island on the surface to the depths of the ocean.
—Journal of Michael Augustus Henderson
"Whoa! They're kissing."
Nicole joined Jill at the window to get a view. "About time."
"So sweet." Jill nodded, one side of her mouth lifting into a smile.
Nicole looked over her shoulder. "Hey, Kass! Zyph and Henderson are finally getting it on!"
Kassandra took the stairs from the kitchen two at a time and went on tiptoes to see out of the window at the landing. She cleaned up what Eupheron said in her head. "After all the hand-holding, it's about time."
Across Ocean Boulevard, on a bench overlooking the Atlantic, Michael Henderson kissed Zypheria of the Alkimides, his long legs stretched out on the gravel—although one shoe was digging insistently into the ground. Zypheria's fingers played with the stubbly short hair at the back of his head, and he hooked one of his arms around her to tug on her braids, lifting her mouth to his.
Ampharete's voice glided by in Kassandra's thoughts. Zypheria deserves so much—more than I can ever repay her. She brought you back to me, my daughter. For her to find love... it is something she gave up when we became sisters, when her mother took me in. It is something that only entered my life once... and even then it was... a necessity. You must tell me more about Michael Henderson. Is he handsome? Is he honorable? Does he truly love Zypheria? What are they doing at this moment?
Kassandra flinched at the word, "necessity" referring to the one love in her mother's life. Her eyes widened as Mr. Henderson tugged Zypheria's braids harder and kissed her throat. There was something less than honorable about it... but in a good way.
"Yes, he does, Mother. He is tall with very short blond hair—we all think he had too much taken off. It used to be longer and it hung in his face. He wears glasses. He is a scientist and a teacher, and he's writing a history of the Seaborn. For a surfacer, he knows a great deal about life in the sea. And he has courage. Lady Kallixene gave him the curse and he stood with Rexenor at St. Clement's against the Olethren—and he remained until the end. It's a cool day. Autumn's here, and the waves are gentle but noisy on the rocks. The two of them are sitting on a bench on a small cliff above the Atlantic, and Mr. Henderson is pulling Zypheria's hair... uh... playfully."
Ampharete sighed loudly in her head. The rush of waves on the rocks, the wearing rhythm of a soft sea on the unyielding earth, the smell of salt in the air—these work deep triggers in the human soul. It is a combination stronger than a cool spring breeze carrying the scent of wild flowers.
"Wild flowers... Wild. Flowers."
Jill looked over at Kass with a curious expression.
Gregor appeared at the bottom of the stairs. "What's up?"
Jill and Nicole spun and, at the same time, said, "Michael and Zypheria are finally getting to the good part."
"Really?" Gregor climbed up have a look. His smile was a little sad. "About time."
Kassandra watched a minute longer, then turned, climbed the next flight of stairs, and took a seat on the top step, resting her chin in her hands. "How do you know about wild flowers, mother? I thought you had never been above the waves."
I have never seen the surface with my own eyes.
"Then... "
Lady Kallixene told me stories and showed me things. House Rexenor has communicated and befriended surfacers from the beginning, from the day the Cloud-gatherer betrayed our ancestors and sent us to the abyss. It is why Kassander's father, Geryllos, chose a seabird, a creature of the air with wings that lives in or near the sea, as the new sign of his house. Without appearing to change the subject, Ampharete shocked the hell out her with, Do you know why Lady Kallixene arranged my marriage to Gregor?
Kassandra's eyes landed on her father, who still wore his serenely sad smile as he took the stairs back down to the kitchen.
"I didn't even know it was arranged. I just thought... you were in love."
It worked out that way, but it would never have happened without Kallixene's proposal and my pursuit. It certainly did not begin with love. I did not even like him when we met the first time—although... Her voice changed, shortening the spaces between each word. He did have a seadragon, Barenis, the only one I have ever seen.
Kassandra's scowl deepened. It was suddenly a girl's discussion about a guy's suitability based on the vehicle he drove—Did you see what he pulled into the parking lot driving?
Ampharete sighed. Barenis was beautiful, purple as squid's ink, a dangerous slice of the abyss with wings, and she spoke to me. I think she liked me. She was very old. Barenis, she said the name, reminiscing. Dragons are something out of Telkhines stories, and very few survived the Alkimides purge. Gregor even let me ride her. He... intrigued me, but he was too shy and spent too much time in the library or traveling with his teacher, Agathonumos.
"The abyss mage, the student of Strates Unwinder." Kassandra's voice went high. "Dad had his own seadragon?" And then even higher. "You pursued him? What happened? How did you two, you know, hook up?"
She felt her mother frown over her words. Kallixene told me something.
Kassandra let a few seconds slip by. "You're going to tell me or do I have to guess?"
Gregor had the bleed of magic off Lord Nausikrates, and that the Rexenor nobility bled wide and fast, and that her son nearly had all of it off his father.
Kassandra folded her arms when she felt a course change. The conversation turned directly into uncomfortable territory.
"I know this now," she said irritably.
Kallixene told me that her power was still secure, that neither of her children had been chosen to take it from her... and that a granddaughter most certainly would. Kallixene spent years above the waves when she was in her twenties, going to school, learning everything she could about the surface, their machines and their science.
"What are you talking about, science, like genetics? Lady Kallixene knew that if you and Dad had me that I would get her bleed?"
And Gregor's bleed. You would have both, something extremely rare among the Seaborn.
"So, you and Dad—"
Do not use that phrase, "hooked up." It sounds like you are catching fish.
Kassandra's body tightened with rage, and she held as much of it in as possible. "Funny, I don't see the difference." Her voice turned bitter. "Trolling for Rexenors instead? What did you use for a lure? Something shiny?"
How dare—
"Don't tell me what I will or will not dare."
And do not tell me that you are not plotting something grander than I could ever imagine. I feel it in your thoughts, Kassandra. You hide it well. Making plans for years—and in the end, you will use every friend and enemy in your path to secure them. I know. I have floated in the same space. Tharsaleos—my own father—killed my mother. I spent every day of my life hiding from him. I was not fated to have the bleed from anyone. Not one drop! I had nothing but the Wreath of Poseidon. And I will tell you what you may dare when we speak of the decisions I had to make. I made them because I was forced to. I did not go to Rexenor seeking a husband—or have a child. I went seeking allies. Rexenor, the hated, the outcasts, the exiled great house. But plans change. I had to change with them. I understood. Zypheria understood. Lady Kallixene understood.
"Did you even ask Father? Did he understand?"
Yes! He loved me—enough to help me win back my throne, enough to seek something that even the great Strates Unwinder thought a fool's errand.
"That damn Telkhines book? You sent him into defeat—on that fool's errand."
Kassandra felt her own heart racing along with the leaden weight fall of her mother's shame. There was a long painful silence.
I know. Ampharete sobbed. I am so sorry. It was never your father's fault. It was mine. I drove him off when our love grew strong. It scared me, and I hurt him, and to win me back, he left me... on that fool's errand. His love competed with the Wreath. Anything else on earth or in the sea is ultimately going to lose against the gift of Poseidon. I felt guilty at having it while I denied everything to Zypheria. She had no life outside of protecting me. The few who were bold enough to approach her, soon learned how high the price would be for loving my friend, my protector, my sister. She swore to protect me with her life. I accepted her vow, and held her to it. She would die in place of me... and I would have let her. I would have ordered it—I did order it!
"You ended up on the wrong side of that one."
Agathonumos created an island for the porthmeus. When I passed the Wreath to you, I went with it. An echo of me remained inside my body, enough to hold the door against the Olethren for a short time, until they broke it down and ripped me apart. I commanded Zypheria to die saving your life, and she did what she could. Both of us did.
"Zypheria's my friend and protector now. I'm not sure she would die for me. I don't think I could ask her to—although she acts like I have when I ask for a peanut butter sandwich." Kassandra brought Zypheria to her thoughts and smiled at her reaction to some of the foods she liked. "She's like an older sister who bosses me around and knows things I will never know. She's still loyal to you."
And you.
"I won't ask her to give up her love."
Make your plans, plot against my father, promise anything to anyone, except that. That is all I ask of you, daughter. Do not take it away from her.
"Agreed."
Promise me also, that you will protect her.
"I promise. No harm will come to her that does not come to me first." Kassandra's voice sharpened, whittled to a point as she waited. "Would you have me promise the same for Father?"
Yes. Of course.
"Good. I wanted to hear you say it. I have already sworn that. I will not allow Tharsaleos to take him away from me." Her voice went quieter. "You know he sits on the same bench in the evenings, and he looks at the silver waves and the moonrise. Do you know what he does, Mother?" She didn't wait for Ampharete's answer. "He cries. He sobs like a child. Not for me. Not for the years he spent inside a tomb in the prison of the king. Not for some old dragon. Not for his failed House, not for his father, not for the poverty his mother and sister endured for years. He cries for you."
Kassandra threw the back door open, slammed it behind her, and stopped on the concrete walk, breathing in the ocean air. She bounded down the stone steps, her bare feet digging into the moss and soft grass.
She spun once, waited for something to happen, a feeling to well up inside her, and then spun again. This is good, but what is it about it that makes Jill giddy? Jill was the dancer—a theatre major with an emphasis in dance—and when she stepped onto the lawn and moved, the whole world brightened.
I can only make it gloomier.
A cold wind sliced through the pines, making them creak and gyrate. The sky was pale and faraway with streaks of white thinned to translucence like a sheet of cotton spread tight over a still blue background.
Kassandra wandered across the yard in the general direction of Nicole, who was on her stomach in the shade with her sketchbook, using the low stone wall as a windbreak. She was doing something white against dark blue in oil pastels.
Nicole Garcia had it all; she was an artist and an exceptional student, breezing through her political science degree. Kassandra watched her working in her sketchbook, her long brown fingers gripping a stick of pastel, sharp strokes defining a human figure in pale blue, several more fluid movements filling in the spaces, graceful and strong.
Kassandra felt a stir of feelings, a mix of admiration, and love, and even a mild current of envy. Nicole was tall, with beautiful skin, browner than her own, long black hair that she always wore in braids as if she'd come from the sea, and she had a well of calm in her soul that Kassandra wished she could tap into.
Kassandra didn't want to intrude, and took a seat on the stacked granite that walled in the yard, waving at Zypheria and Mr. Henderson on the other side of the street as they strolled by, holding hands, on their way to North Hampton Beach.
Nicole glanced up when they passed. She noticed Kassandra sitting nearby. "Are you okay?"
Kassandra looked over at her, distracted. "Fine. What's up?"
Nicole paused with a frown. Pointing across Ocean Boulevard with a piece of dark pastel, she asked, "Question for you or your Wreath buddies. What happens if Michael and Zypheria have a child? Is it a Seaborn or a human—I mean surfacer? Do you make a child go through the drowning?"
Kassandra chewed at her lip. "If you're asking if babies are born with the curse, then yes. Eupheron says that's most likely." After a pause with her eyes fixed in the distance, she added, "My mother says to ask Lady Kallixene when she arrives."
Nicole's shoulders tightened and she sat herself up in a cross-legged position, flipping slowly through sketchbook pages.
Kassandra leaned toward her. "Is that Jill?"
Nicole nodded, grinning mischievously at a picture of a slender blond girl at the beach, hand on her hip, long tanned legs braced apart. "With tiara."
She tugged a few pages back and folded the rest around the end of the book. Nicole rubbed one finger through the color along Jill's cheek.
Kassandra sat on the grass next to her. "That's really good. Just like her."
Nicole looked over, smiling. "Jill the princess."
"Perfect skin, tiny feet, no hips. More of one than I'll ever be."
Nicole laughed and flipped another page around, the dark blue one with a pale girl in the foreground, dropping through the ocean, one hand above her head, releasing a final breath like a bouquet of bubbles, saying goodbye to someone on the surface.
"Me?"
Nicole shrugged uncertainly. "I took some liberties. You never say goodbye, no blowing kisses. You just go. No looking back. So I made sure to put a hand wave in."
Kassandra stared at the girl in the water, her skin white with a blue tint, a sword in her right hand, three long braids sticking straight up as she sank in the deep. "Why am I so pale? I'm like a ghost."
"You're the Ocean, Kass—capital O." Nicole ran a finger into the gradient blue background, bright turquoise at the top, nearly black at the bottom. "This is what I see when I picture you underwater. You're cold even in the shallows, playful but with a mean streak." Nicole gave her a smirk. "You're a siren. Lure them onto the rocks, girl. That's where you're strongest. Look what you did to an entire army when they came out of the water to get you." Nicole moved her shoulders in a flowing wave motion. "You have eternal rhythm, just like the tides, the roll of the surf is like your heartbeat." Nicole's eyes drifted away from Kassandra to the Atlantic, and her voice dropped to a cheerless whisper. "Bitterly sad even when you are the cause of the birds' sweet cry, and the most important advice for anyone you meet?" Nicole swung her eyes back to Kassandra. "Same thing you tell anyone exploring the seashore. You tell them never to turn their backs on you."
Kassandra choked down a retort. She held Nicole's hard coppery eyes a moment longer, scowled over the decision to admire her for her honesty in nailing her character to the wall, gave her a nod, and then turned toward the ocean, child to a mother, watching the long iron gray bars tumbling into the coast of New Hampshire.
"You are the smart one, Nicole," she said in a faint whisper. "That is why it must be you."
"What must be me?"
"Nothing. I have to go." Without looking back, Kassandra jumped the stone wall, dashed across Ocean Boulevard, went down the face of the cliff and into the cold gray waves.
Chapter 14 - Iced Wine
Eupheron grew up behind the scenes of the Seaborn court, constantly guarded; well educated, but alone and friendless. There were no less than eight attempts on his life. In spite of all this, Queen Kleonike eventually crowned Eupheron king, arranged his marriage to a prominent noblewoman, Daphne, and passed on the Wreath of Poseidon at the end of her reign. He was called Eupheron the Liar the moment he took the throne.
—Michael Henderson, Seaborn History
Captain Martim Teixeira was almost sixty years old and he'd been at sea, or very close to it, for all of them. He
wasn't tall or intimidating; he was a quiet, fair man with three features that qualified him for commanding a cargo ship: piercing eyes, a fine aristocratic nose, and large brown hands that had worked every wheel, bolt, switch, and cover on every ship on which they'd found themselves. He was an intuitive sailor, and he trusted the feelings his mind sent him.
There was a young woman in his medic's quarters with sheer connective tissue between her fingers—not her toes however. She'd surfaced a hundred meters off the bow where the forewatch spotted her, and she'd survived a horrible headlong drag along the ship's hull, squeezed between the Maria Draughn and the Pacific. She'd fought her way clear of a slow-moving propeller but became disoriented and slammed her head into the rudder.
An engineer and a third officer fished her out of the water, getting her to another third who doubled as a medic on board. She was breathing and, except for some cuts, bruising and lack of consciousness, appeared healthy.
Teixeira held the report from the spotter in one hand and the California driver's license issued to Corina Lairsey in the other. If there were such things as mermaids, they did not carry licenses to drive cars in America.
The crew, all eighteen of them, had come up to see the woman—who they called "mermaid" or "gorgona" or "nixe" depending on where they were from. Teixeira had already disciplined Pinnet and another of his crew for fighting over Miss Lairsey—and she hadn't even opened her eyes yet.
Gabriel Pinnet, of the engineer's crew, was always in trouble, always throwing his fists around. The captain had already signed the man's termination papers. This would be Pinnet's last run on any vessel captained by Martim Teixeira.
The rap of knuckles on his cabin door drew the captain's eyes from Corina's driver's license.
"Come in."
The door swung in with the second officer, Alfred Harvey, taking up most of the doorway. "Sir, you wanted to see me?"
"Sit down, Alfred."
The second officer nodded, crossed the captain's quarters, and took a seat under one of the forward-facing windows. Teixeira had selected Harvey to keep an eye on Pinnet because he was the tallest and most intimidating deck officer on board. He had a burning glare that could cut holes in softer metals. He shaved his head regularly, he had big white teeth and looked as if he could eat the ship's low-grade bunker 380 fuel and suffer nothing more than a few cramps and some belching.
"I hate to do this to you." Teixeira rubbed his tired eyes. "I can't lock Pinnet in his cabin, but I can't let him have the run of the ship either. And with this woman aboard... " He handed the second Corina's driver's license. "The man's unpredictable. I confined him to quarters until 1600 for using his fists in an idiotic squabble over Miss Lairsey. He seems to be under the impression that our mermaid is attracted to him. He's either an idiot or she's put him under a spell because he's told me that he'd do anything including die for her. Take your pick as to which one's more likely. He's free now, but I cannot have him... disturbing her."
"You want me to watch him?" The look he gave the captain held more meaning than in his words.
"Keep him occupied, play cards with him, anything to keep him from bothering the woman—at least until she wakes."
"No problem, captain."
Gabriel Pinnet glared like a caged animal when Second Officer Alfred Harvey stopped by his cabin with two bottles of wine and some cards.
His face expressionless, Harvey gave Pinnet a good going over, noting a drool of something oily staining the front of the man's uniform. Damp blooms of perspiration under his arms spread toward the rolled-up sleeves at his elbows; grease streaked his forearms. There was a sweaty sheen to his cheeks and stubbly chin.
Pinnet had a raw oozing cut that ran from the center of his forehead into his hairline on the right side, the result of one of his earlier scuffles over the woman in the medic's quarters.
McHutcheon, a third officer with medical training, had tired of patching up Pinnet weeks ago, and although he had gone to school to study forensics and medicine, and was considered "the doc" at sea, he'd never sworn anything to Hippocrates or stated out loud or in writing that he would continue offering medical treatment to those who didn't appreciate his effort. Captain Teixeira was fine with that.
Harvey grinned and shook his head. "You're a swine, Pinnet. When did you shower last?"
Pinnet's slow gaze landed on the bottles of wine, remained there thoughtfully for a moment, and then he returned the officer's grin. "In my own sweat, sir? Or a proper one from the stalls?"
Harvey was already looking beyond Pinnet, around the man's cabin. The bunk was piled with dirty clothes and garbage. None of the lamps were on and the stink of rotting food, urine and old engine oil crept into the hall, up Harvey's legs, chest and into his nostrils, needling his senses and making his eyes water. He forgot about Pinnet's counter questions and took one step back, clutching the bottles of wine higher as if the stench could somehow seep through cork and affect the contents.
"A couple drinks and some cards tonight, Mr. Pinnet?"
"Here?" He threw a thumb over his shoulder.
"No. I was thinking my cabin. Have a wash and meet me upstairs in ten minutes."
Pinnet didn't answer at once, but stared at Harvey blankly while whatever mental arrangement he had in his head fell into place. Harvey's expression went cold. He knew Pinnet as a weasely underhanded bastard, and he went with the be-careful vibe his subconscious was feeding him.
Pinnet ran his tongue along his lips and nodded. "Yes, sir. I'll wash and run by the galley on the way up and pick up some ice?"
Harvey's mind went through the ship's layout in under a second, determining if Pinnet could somehow reach the woman without him knowing. The galley was another two decks down, and McHutcheon's cabin where the woman slept was two above. Harvey would wait at the foot of the stairs for the lout, and lead him directly to his cabin. Then it was his plan to play cards and get Pinnet too drunk to bother anyone, something that shouldn't be difficult since—judging by the smell of the man's breath—the third engineer was halfway along that path.
With all routes to Corina Lairsey secured against Pinnet, Harvey then spent a moment wondering about the ice. They were approaching the canal at Panama. It was a hot day and the evening wasn't going to cool down. The idea of diluting wine with ice wasn't pleasant but he'd play along. "Sure. Ice for the wine. Bring enough for both of us."
Three hours later, Second Officer Harvey had won four hands of Mexican Poker and his iced Cabernet was going down as smoothly as the evening. It wasn't until he kept losing contact with reality in two minute chunks that he thought something was wrong. He leaned heavily on his elbows and couldn't lift his head.
Pinnet placed one hand firmly on the table across from him, cards against his chest, grinning. "I made your tray of ice especially for my beautiful mermaid, something to loosen her up, but since you brought the wine, I had no choice but to cool you down with it." Pinnet licked his lips. "Sir. Perhaps she is still asleep, waiting for my kiss to waken her." Pinnet's burbling laugh made Harvey's stomach lurch.
Pinnet poured himself another glass of wine, dumped his cards on the table, and waited for Second Officer Harvey to slide off his chair to the floor.
Ten minutes later, a little before midnight, Pinnet lifted his glass to the unconscious Harvey and rose from the table.
"Good night." Pinnet staggered off with the officer's keys.
Corina heard the rattle of keys, hard metal clicking, and the slow whine of heavy steel hinges. The clicks and rattles were sharp with a trailing echo, the sounds hitting heavily painted metal walls. The world came into her senses slowly. She felt a slow rocking motion, the gentle touch of gravity pulling at her ankles, then at her shoulders.
Confusion folded in on her like the branches and briars of a haunted forest. Where am I? I'm on board a boat. She repeated the thought because there was something odd about it. I am on board... I am... I am awake? But he is not.
Time slipped by faster than she could push her thoughts into focus, connect them, draw conclusions and act. There are mountains in my mind. She felt the strange feeling again, and she spent a few seconds trying to put some order around them. Thoughts flowed and merged over
her mind's—the closest word she could attach to it—terrain. Sometimes it's shallow and rippling like the surface of a sheltered cove, sometimes it plummets like a waterfall, and in places—she felt these by a prickling fear—there were edges to the terrain, sharp edges that led to something bottomless, suffocating, black as pitch. To go over an edge was to fall into madness. Somehow a normal mind steered away from these edges, but there seemed to be no guides or guardrails along the terrain where Aleximor had stuffed her.
I can hear with my ears. I can smell with my... I can smell the ocean, salt in the air. I can smell someone in the room with me. A man, perspiring, smelling like... sour dirt and motor oil. I hear his breath, solid thumping puffs of air. I can hear his heart racing, exhilarated, the fear of getting caught.
The intruder's warm, moist hands slipped around her wrists, dragged her arms over her head, and held them against a soft pliable surface. A bed, she guessed. I'm lying on a mattress.
Corina pushed her thoughts toward something that felt like higher ground. One of the man's heavy calloused hands held her wrists down, while the other worked at a zipper at her throat. Hard scratchy knuckles rubbed along her neck, below her ear.
Something was different... about the zipper. It lifted the soft material away from her skin when he tugged on it. I'm not wearing my wetsuit. They've taken my gear. Someone's dressed me in something else. It felt like sweatshirt material.
The zipper growled open to her navel, where the thick cloth folded and hung up the zipper's progress. The intruder gasped in frustration, hitting Corina's sense of smell with a gush of wine.
He's been drinking... a lot.
She processed everything like an observer, with detached analysis, breaking down the intruder's movements on her body, studying every bit of information coming in through her senses. Her anger stirred slowly, but it was a deep volcanic rumbling that sent shivers and twists seismically through the terrain of her mind.
Then her motor functions kicked in.
She stamped her left foot flat against the bed, throwing the bottom half of her body into the air, brought her right leg against her chest, and hooked his neck in the crook of her knee, holding the intruder's head in place with her thigh.
Crush his throat.
She heard the words in her inner voice but wasn't certain they were her own. She gritted her teeth and thrust her legs together.
"Wait, Corina. I have thought of something more suitable." Her own lips moved, and made the sounds, but the thought behind them wasn't her own. "A broken man would be of no use to me."
Her body came alive and released the intruder, kneed him in the face, and kicked him away. Pinnet staggered across the room, falling backward. The keys went flying. His hands went to his face, and Corina sprang into the air, bounding from the bed to the center I-beam running the length of the ceiling. Her fingers curled around the flat blade of metal, snapped open, and dropped her to the floor. She landed in a crouch like a cat.
Corina hadn't made her body jump six feet in the air to the ceiling. Aleximor was awake and in control.
"He is a most disagreeable person." Aleximor straightened and closed the zipper, sniffing with distaste, watching the man on the floor. "Thank you, Corina. You have undoubtedly saved us from a painful and humiliating experience. For my part, I will see that our unwashed, groping friend never again has the chance to take an innocent young lady against her will."
Pinnet crawled away, shaking his head, as if to throw off confusion. His nose hurt and he couldn't stop his eyes watering. He backed into the far wall, pushed off the floor and stood up. He tried to focus on Corina and his lips pulled away from his teeth, yellow stumps lining his mouth.
Aleximor watched him coolly, digging blue-painted fingernails into his palm and then tapping softly with the pads of each finger, the thin webbing between each undulating with the motion. He sang softly.
There was a sound like fingernails tearing loose and hooks materialized in the air in front of Aleximor's hands, four hooks that looked like jagged coral. Two of them drifted together and joined along the stem with the deadly sharp arcs a finger's width apart.
Across the room, Pinnet stared back, the muscles in his face slackening in wonder. His eyes—starting to clear—went wide and fixed on a point just beyond Aleximor's fingertips.
The hooks shot away and looped around Pinnet's head. He started to twist his neck around to follow them when they stopped sharply, the double hook an inch from the tip of his nose, the two singles aligned with each ear.
Pinnet's brows ground together. His eyes crossed slightly, trying to focus on what was obviously some kind of weapon floating in front of him. He reached a hand up cautiously.
The double hook dipped as it drove in and caught his nostrils. The singles punched through his ears into the sides of his skull. The four of them went rigid, stems toward the ceiling on invisible line, and lifted Pinnet off the floor.
Pinnet wriggled around in the air, struggling in silence a few seconds, as surprised as Corina. Then he shrieked, his fingers clawing at the hooks.
Aleximor sang a swift stream of words, calling his familiar, something that looked like a cross between a monkey and a clawed hand of metal. It dropped out of the air and scuttled across the floor on ten legs like a crab.
The thing hopped, caught hold of Pinnet's swinging ankles, and crawled up the front of his body. Its pointed claws worked through Pinnet's uniform like a walking pair of scissors. It dropped blue threads and snipped wedges of material in its wake.
It circled under Pinnet's left arm and walked along his shoulders, ducking under his arms, puncturing and scissoring, severing tendons, until his arms hung loose at his sides, dead weight with reflexive twitching in his hands. It crawled up Pinnet's spine and emerged on the top of his head, its ten arms extending and clenching like a giant's armored fist, getting a firm seat.
The thing dug six of its legs into the back of Pinnet's head while four in the front extended, swung in over Pinnet's pain-contorted face, and neatly scooped out his eyes, juggling them on sharp metallic points.
It stuffed the white lumpy knots into Pinnet's screaming mouth and, edging forward over Pinnet's brow, it forced the eyes down his throat. Pinnet gagged and spit, biting the metal arms as they plunged at the back of his throat.
Then Aleximor's pet lifted its body a few inches off Pinnet's forehead. A glowing faceted orb of blue fire ran down the wrinkled bridge of the engineer's nose, burning a dark line along the skin. It stopped against the stem of the hooks in Pinnet's nostrils. The forward fingers caught it, rolled it around the obstruction, and pushed it past Pinnet's lips to the back of his throat.
The blue fire scorched his esophagus smooth. It settled in the pit of his stomach, cutting through the lining, muscle tissue and bone, cauterizing as it passed through each. The blue ball of fire dropped from between Pinnet's legs and spun smoldering across the floor. A quart of thick brown bubbling fluid followed, seeping down his legs, the combined liquid contents of his stomach, intestines, bladder, mingling with blood.
Aleximor made a few gestures with his fingers, snapping them into his palm, and the hooks vanished, dropping Pinnet inelegantly to the floor. He ignored Corina's screaming for him to stop. He walked over and dug one foot under Pinnet's corpse and gave it a shove.
"Skatophagoi surfacers. They will pay for sending this animal to threaten me. They will all pay."
Chapter 15 - Lady Kallixene
The Seaborn use several names to identify their power, with goeteias (sorcery, magic) the common term used. The bleed-holder can maintain his or her power as long as there are no genetic descendents able to receive it. The bleed selects the recipient, not the bleed-holder, and although in almost every case, the bleed line is restricted to direct descendants, it is possible to jump branches on the family tree and flow to a niece, nephew, grandchildren. As awful as this sounds, there are many stories of siblings killing each other over the bleed of a parent, either to eliminate competition, or out of hatred of the one who finally does receive it.
—Michael Henderson, notes
"What did she say?" Kassandra tried to read the look on Nic's face. Nicole was digging through short-term memory for the sounds Jill had made over the phone a moment before. The sounds formed words that were repeatable but incomprehensible. "She said... something about reverse French... and glitter something... " She showed her teeth with a tentative smile. "I don't know. You talk to her."
Kassandra stared blankly. "Reverse French... braids? Her hair? Is that what she's talking about? Something with her hair?" She shook her head, convinced. "Lady Kallixene isn't going to want glitter in her hair."
"I don't think so either." Nicole's expression softened, thinking back on her only memories of the Rexenor ruler, commanding soldiers on the front steps of St. Clement's. "Kah-lix-uh-nee. I love her name. She's a classic Queen Elizabeth I archetype."
"Right-o," said Kassandra in what she thought sounded like a British accent. "But with a sword she's actually killed with. And don't forget to put 'Lady' before her name. Always."
Nicole hesitated, then said, "Are you Seaborn always fighting? Always at war with one another?"
Kassandra frowned and rolled her eyes as she punched in Jill's phone number. "Apparently. The nine dominate politics and their cities back up against each other inside one giant city, someone's idiotic idea to pack them all into one place and hope they behave."
"The Nine-cities. Enneapolis. The silent cities," said Nicole in awe. "Is it beautiful?"
Kassandra slid her phone against her ear, nodding. "Beyond anything you can imagine, and I've only seen it from a distance." She pointed at Nicole and gave her a steady gaze. "I will see to it that one day you will get a view from the most commanding position in the city. I'm working on it. For now, picture a curvier, taller, floating New York City against a pure black sky, lit up blue—hang on, Nic. Jill? I can tell you right now, Lady Kallixene isn't going to want sparkles or whatever you have planned for her hair." Kassandra nodded again, staring into the distance. "But Nic said you said something about reverse French something with glitter. Oh. Okay." She tilted her phone down, jutting her chin at Nicole. "Not hair. Jill's made a nail appointment for Lady Kallixene."
Nicole pulled her mouth into a worried upside-down smile. "And that's going to go over better than the hair?"
"We'll ask her and see what happens." Kassandra shrugged. "In fact, I have a few questions for Grandma myself."
"She's here?" Gregor called over his shoulder halfway down the basement stairs.
Kassandra opened her eyes and released a breath, focusing on the kitchen and the faces of her sisters. She nodded her head.
Zypheria, who didn't like the defensive shortcomings of the kitchen, stood off to one side unarmed, her hands curled into fists. Gregor had sent Michael Henderson to the store for wine and, on the way back, a pick-up order for a couple boats of sushi and sashimi at Shizuko's.
"She's here."
"Kassandra, stand in the middle. Girls, I'll get the—"
"She's already through the gate, Dad." Kassandra was the only one who seemed relaxed.
Gregor's cheerful voice came from the basement. "Oh. Hello, Phaidra!"
Gregor's sister was the first to appear at the bottom of the stairs, dressed... like a surfacer, in shorts and a tight orange Lycra shirt that showed off her muscular build. She held a drawn sword like a dagger, point down. Seawater drained out of her black braids, splattering the concrete at her feet. She didn't smile but her eyebrows jumped when she saw Gregor. She gave his arm a squeeze then her eyes lifted warily to the kitchen.
"I have to secure the location myself, Gregor. You know Mother."
He followed her up the stairs and leaned against the fridge, waiting beside Nicole, Kassandra, and Jill.
Phaidra gave short bows to the sisters standing with their backs to the counter in the center of the kitchen, and even spared a nod for Zypheria. She paused to scowl at the crossbow bolt sticking out of the ceiling above the sink, made a signal with her left hand, and headed into the living room. A dozen soldiers in silver-scaled armor climbed the stairs in two rows, swords drawn, eyeing Gregor, his daughters, and Zypheria unemotionally, dividing into several groups to search the house.
Inside Kassandra, Andromache stirred in response to the armed men. The warrior queen within her forced a sword to appear in Kassandra's hand. She clutched it tight and quickly hid it behind her back.
Zypheria gave her a nod and her lips stretched into something close to a smile. She mouthed the words, "Do not ever bow first."
Gregor breathed in the strong ocean scent coming up from the grotto and sighed.
Jill leaned forward in front of Kassandra with a grin at Nicole. "Did you see what Aunt Phaidra was wearing?"
Nicole nodded and jerked her head to the stairs. At the same time a piercing whistle came from somewhere in the house.
Both of them snapped to attention.
Lady Kallixene moved into the kitchen as if she was floating on the air, her long gold brocaded gown rustling like seaweed on the concrete steps. Even her arms moved fluidly as she lifted one over her head, her elbow slightly bent, her fingers spread, webbing tight. Her other arm slipped low in the opposite gesture, making a large S.
"What does it mean?" Nicole leaned against Kassandra's shoulder and breathed the words through her smile.
"Think it's a formal... " Kassandra whispered back, her voice trailing off as she spotted three young men in silver brocaded tunics with the Rexenor seabird stitched in black, following Lady Kallixene, several steps behind her.
Jill did her worried scowl without appearing to scowl expression, a hardening of the skin around her eyes. Nicole simply glowered at them. Kassandra let the smile that was forming inside her rise to her lips.
Damn you, Grandmother, you are bold to bring them along. She noted that two of them had the Rexenor lord's house family appearance, the dark hair, the wider buttonish nose with blue-green eyes—and the third had lighter shoulder-length curly hair. Obviously from an unrelated noble family, no doubt intended to be Kassandra's escort.
Lady Kallixene stopped a few paces from her granddaughters. Her hair was a lot grayer than they remembered and her braids were nearly cotton white with a few granite stripes. Her eyes were as dark as ever, piercing points of infinity scanning the kitchen with a mother's it'll-do borderline approval. They rested on Zypheria and then each of the girls in turn, stopping an instant too long on Kassandra, before moving past Nicole to Gregor.
"You look well, my son."
"As do you, Mother."
"Except for your eyes, which seem to have lost most of their ability to perceive. I am old as the sea, Gregor."
He smiled. "You will not hear it from me."
A smile pulled at her lips. She bowed her head and he bowed back at almost the same time. She bowed to Zypheria who managed to bow her head right before Lady Kallixene. She bowed to Jill, met her eyes, and, taking in the thousand-dollar pale yellow skirt and jacket she was wearing, said, "You are stunning, Jillian. Your skill with sailing boats, and your keen eye and candor are welcome in my family. You remind me... of myself when I was young."
"I'm very honored, Lady Kallixene," said Jill, curtsying. She straightened, leaned forward, and whispered loudly and conspiratorially at the same time. "By the way, I love your gown. Is that silk? We're going to have to get you down to Newberry Street for shopping. I've also made you an appointment with my manicurist to get something fancy for your nails."
Kallixene nodded. "I look forward to it."
Jill's eyes slid to the right and met Kassandra's for a moment. She gave her a thank-you nod for advising her to change into something more conservative, taking Kass's recommendation that a short skirt with fishnets would not necessarily be received as "going for an 'oceany' look."
Kallixene bowed to Nicole, held her eyes while the seconds ticked by, and a smile came to her lips before she released her. "Nikoletta? You have grown wiser. I welcome your strength and understanding in my household."
"You honor me, Lady Kallixene," said Nicole and bowed low, grinning at the Hellene form of her full name.
Phaidra and her troop of soldiers appeared in the kitchen, swords in scabbards. Three of them slipped behind Kallixene to stand beside Zypheria, hands behind their backs, legs braced apart.
Kallixene took a step closer to Kassandra, and they locked eyes for nearly a minute. Jill shuffled nervously. Phaidra and Zypheria wore identical suspicious expressions. Some of the Rexenor soldiers and all three of the young men in her wake exchanged wondering looks. Kassandra blinked, tilting her head down with a warm, genuine smile, and Kallixene followed her, but with tears pouring from her eyes.
"Lady Kassandra, you are truly Poseidon's Chosen."
Then Kallixene bent down and got on her knees.
There were several gasps, but Kassandra's shocked yelp drowned them. She dropped to the floor and threw her arms around Kallixene, her sword still in her hand, the scabbard digging into the gold brocade as she squeezed.
Phaidra and her soldiers snapped alert, their hands going to their swords. The three young noblemen backed up to the top of the stairs. Zypheria kicked open the cabinet below her and the stock of a loaded crossbow fell against her thigh. She didn't reach for it. She pulled an entire drawn sword out of nowhere, and gave Phaidra and the entire Rexenor guard a look that clearly said: who wants a window seat on Charon's boat?
Kassandra kissed the tears off her grandmother's cheeks. "Do not do this, Lady Kallixene. Please, get up." She released her grandmother, helping her up with her right hand. Kallixene noticed the sword in Kassandra's left hand. She blinked, the sight of the weapon right in front of her taking her by surprise.
Kallixene swung her head to Phaidra, who had her blade half-drawn. "The house is clear of danger, daughter? You gave me the signal!"
Kassandra took in Zypheria's stance and weapon and then tossed her sword to her. She grabbed Kallixene's left hand and helped her to her feet, still scowling at Zypheria. "What the hell's going on?"
Zypheria bowed low, leaning back at the same time, surreptitiously shoving the crossbow inside the cabinet. She flipped the two swords she now held, hilt out, and slid them onto the kitchen counter behind her.
Kassandra's eyes moved over the Rexenor soldiers, to Phaidra, then back to Zypheria. "Answer me!"
Zypheria tilted her head down. "Milady. The Rexenor guard moved in offensive preparation when they noticed you had your sword."
Kassandra held her gaze another moment. Nodding curtly, she said, "Very well. Sorry, Grandmother. Sorry, Phaidra. Queen Andromache got a little tense when your guard came up the stairs with weapons drawn. She summoned it. I did not."
Kassandra sighed and let her gaze stop on her aunt, and then moved to the guards. She rapidly curled two of her fingers in, a hand-me-my-sword gesture, to Zypheria, who slid it off the counter and tossed it back to her. Halfway across the space between them it dissolved in the air, vanishing, and every Rexenor guard blinked in surprise. The three young men at the stairs gaped.
Ten seconds of silence followed, ending when the back door slammed.
"Who's hungry?" Michael Henderson shouted over the soldiers crowding the kitchen. He shouldered his way in with the groceries.
"Coming through." He stood a head taller than some of them, six-foot-six with a lanky frame and four overstuffed plastic grocery bags in his fists. "Fellow Rexenors, stand aside there. Excuse me, please. Fresh sushi! Shizuko says hello, Gregor. Man, the store was packed. They didn't have the wine I wanted. Got something from Australia to try. I also got a couple cold white Zinfandels. Let me get those in the fridge. Why's everybody hanging out in the kitchen? It's nice outside. Sun's out and Zyph and I set up tables and chairs this morning."
Then he noticed Kallixene and Kassandra just getting to their feet in the middle of the room. He swung the bags around and handed them off to Phaidra and Gregor without bothering to confirm that either of them had taken them. "Lady Kallixene! You're crying? It's the young ladies, isn't it. Aren't they amazing? Give me a hug!"
Kallixene smiled, wiped her eyes, and held him at arm's length, bending back to get a good look at him. "You have not changed, except you're hair is so short, Michael Henderson. You look like a criminal."
"Why thank you, my lady, and yours... " He looked her over for a few seconds. "Is a whole lot whiter. Fortress construction contractors stressing you out?" He bent down and drew her into his arms, cupping her shoulder under his chin and knocking his glasses askew. "You need a little vacation, Lady Kallixene. You, me, a couple friends." He winked at Zypheria. "Let's head out to Fiji for some wreck diving. What do you say? Don't answer now. Think about it. We'll talk later on." He released her, but left one arm wrapped around her shoulders.
"Come on, everyone." He waved them out of the kitchen, mildly annoyed at their anti-social behavior. "Wine glasses are in the cupboard behind Zypheria. Hand those out, will you dear? Grab a chair in the backyard. Gregor and I will bring the boats around. Shizuko set us up with some exotic stuff this time. I also have sake if you're interested. Anyone know how to use chopsticks? Don't worry. Your fingers work just as well. If you don't like sushi or sashimi, then... hmmmm. There's always peanut butter and jelly. I also have a bag of potato chips. After that you're on your own."
"Peanut butter?" Kallixene shook her head. "I must have some. Just a spoonful. I have not tasted peanut butter in thirty years."
Kassandra tilted her head to Zypheria. "See?"
Zypheria handed two wine glasses to a pair of Rexenor guards and shot back a look that plainly read: this only proves the existence of mental illness among Americans and the Seaborn nobility.
"What would you like, Mother?" Gregor pulled one of the wine bottles from the bag.
"Perhaps you can start by explaining the bolt in your ceiling?" She pointed to the fletching and shaft sticking out at a shallow angle over the kitchen sink.
His mouth opened, but Zypheria, in a perfectly serious voice, said, "We're going to hang a plant from it. Lady Kassandra found a beautiful fuchsia at the nursery, and I was looking for something unique for a hook."
Kallixene raised an eyebrow but followed Kassandra through the living room and out to the back walk. They descended imperiously to the grass, Kallixene's arm looped through Kassandra's.
"She doesn't lie nearly as well as you, Granddaughter."
"Few do."
Her grandmother leaned in and whispered accusingly, "What have you done to Nicole?"
Kassandra pulled away. "What do you mean?"
"I can hear her say her own name in her thoughts and it is not 'Nicole' or 'Nicolette,' but 'Nikoletta.' What are you doing to her?"
"I have taught her Hellene." Kassandra shrugged innocently. "She likes the traditional form of her name."
"You have dragged her into some plot of yours. Don't lie to me."
Kassandra stopped and swung Kallixene closer. Her voice dropped to a cold monotone. "I doubt, Grandmother, that you would be able to determine if anything I say is true or false. I have the Lying King in here." Kassandra tapped the side of her head.
"I know you are grooming Nikoletta for something. Her mind is open to me. Is she to replace Zypheria? Be your bodyguard? What is it?"
"My father adopted us all. She is my sister. That is all you need to know."
They strolled among the pines in silence for a moment.
"Your hand is hot,
Granddaughter. Do you have a fever?" Kallixene looked over at her.
"No."
"Perhaps you should go for a swim?"
"Perhaps I will."
"How often do you go into the ocean?"
"Nearly every day."
"Where do you go?"
"Here and there."
"And everywhere?" She tugged Kassandra's sleeve up without warning. "Why are there burns on your arms?"
Kassandra jerked her sleeve down. "What makes you think I would answer such a question?"
"I know what you are doing, girl."
"Don't call me that. And you have no idea, Grandmother, because if you did, you would do everything in your power to stop me." Her expression changed in a heartbeat from coldly serious to carefree happiness, a storm cloud suddenly shoved aside to let the sun through. She laughed lightly. "Oh, that's right. Everything in your power still wouldn't be enough." Her smile curled maliciously. "You do play smart, Grandmother, and I will always admire you for that."
"What are you talking about?"
"Getting on your knees? Welcome to my family? The tears, the three young... suitors matched to your three young granddaughters." Kassandra's jaw tightened as if she was trying to lock down her words to a moderate level of civility. She gave up. "What, are you still pimping for Rexenor?"
"How dare you!"
Kassandra rolled her eyes. "Do not tell me you haven't calculated all of this to make it difficult for me to... " She ground her teeth.
"To what? Hurt me?"
"If you like."
Kallixene took in a slow deep breath as if trying to make it go on forever. She waved in admission.
Kassandra glanced over at the three young men hovering around Jill. Kallixene followed her gaze to the lighter-haired one.
"That is Menophon's youngest son, Nereus."
"Stop it." Kassandra's eyes snapped to hers. Lady Kallixene's commander of the guard, Menophon, had died horribly in the battle with the king's dead army, dragged into their midst and torn apart. "Don't make me angry or I'll break your soul like you and my mother broke my father's."
Kallixene's expression started toward a questioning scowl.
Kassandra raised a warning finger. "Pretending not to know what I'm talking about is a fine way to make me angry. It's unspeakable what you did to him. You hurt him badly, pushed him into a relationship with the Wreath-wearer."
Her grandmother paused while a pair of motorcycles roared up Ocean Boulevard. "I did not do anything. She loved him. I wanted... I wanted desperately to help Ampharete. Nothing more."
Help Ampharete? Nothing more? "You cannot lie to me." Kassandra leaned in close, bumping shoulders with Kallixene, whispering furiously. "Between you and my mother's love, you broke my father's soul."
"I did no such thing!"
Kassandra grabbed her grandmother roughly and swung her face to hers. "Then look me in the eyes and tell me you did not sell your only son cheap to the Wreath-wearer—a son who was perhaps going to be greater than Kassander. I am the Wreath-wearer. I know what we're capable of—and how high we'll go to get what we want."
Kallixene spun out of her grip and they continued walking, not meeting eyes. They circled the yard and approached the white plastic tables with half a dozen Rexenor guards. Some of them looked up to watch them. Phaidra stood off to one side talking to Nicole, and both of them broke off to turn in their direction. All three of the young nobles remained around Jill, and she swatted one playfully in the shoulder, her laughter cutting through the air like sunlight.
"Can we take this conversation someplace private?" Kallixene's voice was cool, a little louder, so that the others in the party could hear her. "And then, Lady Kassandra, I will answer your questions."
Kassandra stopped grinding her teeth to say, "Certainly." She left Kallixene in the protection of her guards, turned, and sang softly. The wind whispered, and she walked into it. When Nicole turned, Kassandra was gone.
She needed to feel the ocean on her skin. She dove out of the air and into the water a mile offshore, a small disturbance in the slide of blue between the crests of two great waves. In three minutes, she was over the edge of the continental shelf, missiling through the water at a hundred knots, an angry snarl of turbulence following her, Eupheron's voice in her head, telling her she needed less drag or her wake would grow and overwhelm her. She was doing well, but she needed more "throughness." She needed to move not just through the water, but all the way through the water, between it, not in it, but inside it. That is how the immortals do it.
Kassandra returned home two hours later as the sun was setting. She came up through the grotto gate and the basement into the kitchen, her head tilted to one side, listening to one of the noble young men singing to Jill on the back steps. She smiled, rummaging through the medicine drawer for the burn cream. There was a hole scorched through the shoulder of her shirt. She dabbed the ointment on and went upstairs to change into something less deteriorated.
The three young men in Kallixene's party had latched on to Jill like remoras, gliding in circles, hovering on every word on her lips, one taking her hand and leading her to the far side of the yard, while another followed and sang of the sorrow of Thetis.
Kassandra slipped by them—in the air—unseen, and overheard one of them whisper to his brother the ancient Hellene equivalent of "surface girls are so hot."
Kassandra slipped out of the air right behind Jill, startling them all. She nodded her head to Menophon's son to continue his song and slid her fingers through Jill's hair.
"Kass, where have you been?"
"Here and there." She closed her mouth to see what Jill would follow with.
"And everywhere?"
Kassandra froze at the same phrase Kallixene had used. She then pulled Jill's long gold hair into three even sets, twining them, slipping the soft bundles over her fingers. "And everywhere."
Chapter 16 - First Binding
The ancient historians (archaioi sungrapheis), the chroniclers and keepers of genealogies among the Seaborn tell us that there were nine original houses (poleis) of the Telkhines sent to the ocean's floor, and that centuries later, other disruptive families and individuals unwillingly joined them. Among the latter groups are the offspring of sea divinities of various strengths and forms (e.g., sea daimones), and at least one line, the Kirkêlatides, are said to be descendents of Circe (Kirkê), sorceress nymph of the island Aiaia, daughter of Helios and Perseis and grand-daughter of Okeanos, of whom Odysseus and his crew ran afoul. (She turned Odysseus' crew into swine).
—Journal of Michael Augustus Henderson
"Corina?"
She stopped screaming when her own voice started calling her with a concerned tone.
"Corina, you are upset?"
That didn't approach what she was feeling. I'm having trouble understanding what you just did to that poor man. That was the most horrifying thing I have ever witnessed. Deep within, Corina wondered about her use of the word "horrifying"—it wasn't one she would normally use. Am I picking up your speech patterns? A truly horrifying thought then occurred to her: I know your songs—all the words to the one about drawing out the soul in blood. Am I turning into you?
Aleximor frowned, then kicked Pinnet again. "I do not at all comprehend your reason for showing this thing sympathy, Corina. It was not a man, not a 'poor man', not any thing that deserved sympathy. It was an unleashed animal with vicious proclivities, a thing that deserved nothing more than to be hunted and mercilessly killed. It was sent to harm me and, for that, even a king must pay." His words tightened with anger at the end of his statement. He managed to unclamp his teeth and add, "Even a king must pay eventually."
Aleximor gave Pinnet another kick and stepped over the body, placing his feet carefully to avoid setting them down in the bloody fluids pooling around the abdomen and legs.
Crossing the room, he stopped at the door to the cabin, and turned to take in the room.
He nervously tapped his fingers in the center of his palm, webbing going tight. He recognized some of the pieces of furniture, but everything was sharp and boxy, angular planes joined to each other, horizontal spaces fitted into perpendicular ones. Even some of the softer, pliable shapes, pillows and cushions, had corners and edges. He blinked repeatedly. The room was difficult to look at, so flat and shiny and sharp.
To Corina, it looked like what she'd expect from a modern crew cabin aboard a ship. There were dark-stained wood cabinets lining one wall, a simple single bed on a matching dark wooden frame. The ceiling was high, painted a high-gloss light yellow, with three I-beams running the room's length. There were medical books in a bookcase underneath a small porthole window. The bed stuck out into the room's center and beyond it was an alcove with an accordion door that served as the bathroom with a toilet, stainless steel sink, and mirror.
"What is this place?"
A cabin on board a ship, probably the ship you didn't get out of the way of. I think it's sort of a Law of the Sea, that a ship must stop to help someone in distress.
He was only half listening to her, distracted by the alien space, staring around the room. "The world of the surfacers is exceedingly strange. It's flat and there are so many edges and surfaces. Perhaps it is because I cannot see it from above or even from a different angle. I am fixed to the floor and can only observe the world through eyes at this height."
Have you been to the surface before, I mean before you ended up inside the cave?
"Never. I have heard many stories, however. I had no desire to see it, a world so bright that it blinds you, so hot with Helios burning in the heavens that it bakes your skin and organs."
Total darkness is better? How are you able to see at all below a hundred feet?
"That is also why I could not come to the surface. I enhanced the organs with which Nature provided me. I could see in complete darkness."
Then it wasn't complete.
"Not complete for me. It is for most others. Because of this, I could come no nearer to the surface than ten or fifteen times my height. True Helios would have destroyed my sight."
True Helios?
"The sun."
I take it there's a false one?
"A twin. It follows a hemispheric path over the Nine-cities of the Thalassogenêis. A bright white ball of fire that some sorcerer with a self-damned soul formed and put into motion a thousand years ago." Anticipating another question, he added, "I do not know if the Helios in the deep follows the same path and duration as the one above."
That wasn't the answer to the question she was going to ask. She wanted to know what self-damnation meant and what it had to do with fire, but she ignored the questions spinning through her mind.
Aleximor glanced down at Pinnet's body, frowning at the smell.
It's beginning to stink like a public bathroom. Let's get out of here.
Aleximor closed the door and stepped into a narrow hallway with blue industrial low-pile carpeting. There were three other doors in the hall, all of them closed. The air smelled salty, but there were dull mildewy drifts, the tangy scent of fresh paint, and something else, the smell of dirt and oil, which reminded Aleximor of the stink of the man he'd just killed.
Obnoxiously bright yellow lights cast overlapping angles and blocks of shadow along the shiny walls.
What time is it?
"Tide will tell." Aleximor looked down the hall and then turned back into the Medic's quarters. "I cannot hear the ocean clearly enough to determine. Is there something on a ship that will show me the time of the day?"
How about a clock?
Aleximor smiled at Corina's sarcasm. He had originally concluded that Corina had lost her senses permanently during the change. She'd seemed outlandish, confused, even deranged, made of bursts of thought that made no sense, long trains of violent music playing in her imagination, the same simple thoughts repeated hundreds of times, abusive language, and bouts of incoherent shrieking.
Now that she was speaking to him, he'd revised his estimation of her cognitive abilities. They were indeed intact. The sarcasm gave him one more hint of what she must have been like before he stole her body. Perhaps, he thought, all surface women were this odd.
"I have seen a clock before, tarnished and green with age, and when I cleaned it—knowing that it must have been something important to the surfacers—there was, underneath the coral growth and creeping sponge, a very delicate instrument with gears and metal bands and tiny fasteners. The front of the clock had numbers and metal bars that seemed to turn and point to them."
Aleximor swung around the medic's quarters looking for something clock-ish, but without much to go on in terms of shape or size other than flat and about as big around as his head. He'd last seen a real clock almost two hundred years ago.
Whoa! Turn back to the bed. Big red numbers. There!
Aleximor fixed his eyes on three fiery square digits, a 2, a 3, then an 8, followed by the tiny letters, am. Even the numbers in this surfacer's world were blocky and sharp. He wondered if anything flowed, curved, undulated here. Was there nothing of grace and pliancy in the world above the waves?
Two-thirty in the morning—if that is the correct time. A ship like this must pass through several time zones on every trip.
"Is that late or early?"
Depends who you are.
Aleximor frowned, thinking that, on the other hand, too much sarcasm wasn't healthy.
Corina caught his vibe. It's early. Everyone on board, except maybe the officers controlling the ship, is probably asleep. The sun won't be up until six o'clock or somewhere around there, so nearly four hours to ourselves. Let's find out where we are. I mean, where we are in the world, but we should also get our bearings on board this ship, find out how big it is. The one that ran over you was a cargo ship with containers on the deck and cranes.
"Maria Draughn."
Corina felt a wave of something soft float over her thoughts, a warm breeze, a mother's breath on her child. She shuddered, certain that what she felt was the glow of admiration from Aleximor. Then he confirmed her fear.
"Corina, you definitely improve on acquaintance."
In what manner have I improved?
"To name a few, civility. You have a strong will. You have a calculating mind, Corina. There is strategy in your words. I will take your advice, but I have one task to complete before we explore the ship."
What is it?
He ignored her, looking around the room, mumbling to himself, "They took my knife."
He stepped back into the medic's quarters and closed the door softly, heading for the bathroom alcove. He rummaged through the drawers and pulled out a sharp-tipped pair of stainless hair-cutting scissors.
Corina stopped her thoughts, alarmed as he grabbed the scissors like a dagger, her blue fingernail polish, chipping but intact, the webbing between her fingers tucked neatly into her fist.
What are you going to do with that?
"I cannot do this alone. I am going to bind our handy friend to me, and use him to do some of the more difficult work. He's fresh, so this will not be as dangerous as raising the Spaniards. I will not have to deal with Akastê." He paused, considering something, then added, "On the other hand, you're fully alive."
I've always taken that to be a good thing.
He made a disdainful ticking noise with his tongue. "Normally, yes. But for someone like me, a whole, unadulterated life is a burden. It limits my abilities."
Aleximor approached the body carefully as if it could jump up at any moment with a surprise attack. The pinkish brown liquid was drying in the carpet, leaving a darker ring at the edges. It was like wet sand at the shoreline, except the blood and intestinal soup was crusting up along the perimeter.
Aleximor crouched next to the corpse and turned Pinnet's head so that the blank stare of empty bloody eye sockets faced him.
"Stiffening in the neck and shoulders."
She felt the urge to wash her hands. What are you, like a coroner?
"I do not understand the word, Corina, although, it is similar to your name. Does it have something to do with the king or crown? Are you a coroner?"
A coroner is a medical examiner, someone who determines the cause of death. And no, I am not, nor do I want to be a coroner. She couldn't hold back an accompanying contemptuous remark. Nor do I want to be a bone-gatherer—or whatever you are.
"Ostologos is an old title, the sorcerer who helps the king or queen manage the dead army, the Olethren. I am, however, much more than that. I have my own fortress and army, bound to me alone, and far superior to the king's ancient army of the drowned dead."
Knowing this was a ridiculous question given what she'd already witnessed, she threw it out just to see what he'd respond with: What good is an army that's dead?
He sighed.
"When my eyes last looked on the abyss, there were over a hundred thousand of them in the Olethren, pulled from broken ships, sea caves, from the floor silt that swallowed their bones. There may be many more of them now. They are the remains of surfacers who have drowned. The Sea has taken their spirits, and in many cases, with the right enticement, can be made to relinquish them."
Corina wondered about this. He said the Sea with a capital S, making it sound as if the Sea were someone hawking souls for the right price.
He picked up her thoughts.
"Very dangerous. Tempestuous bitch. She goes by many names. Akastê—the Erratic One—is what she's called herself with me. She takes many forms, has power over the ocean's currents, and she owns anyone who drowns in them. You met her when I forced her to give me the Spaniards. My ancestors bargained with her, and—for a price—she has allowed us to bring the dead back from death into our world and bind them to the soul of the king of the Thalassogenêis."
Seaborn. She translated the word without thinking. These drowned dead people can fight?
"Walk and swim and hold weapons... and above all, kill. They kill everything they touch. Some are given spears or other devices of destruction. They bite, they claw out eyes, they snap bones. And they cannot be stopped. The Olethren do not surrender and they do not take prisoners. Once the Seaborn king or queen releases them, they do not stop until all life is driven from the foe's stronghold. Then they return to their fortress."
And this happens often?
"They have been used by the Thalassogenêis for over two thousand years. I have only seen a king bring them out for war twice. They were created by the current royal house, Alkimides, in order to bring down the former royal house, Telkhines. An immortal would fear them. They can be broken individually, but the army cannot be defeated without defeating them all, and with so many of them, that is impossible."
While he spoke, Aleximor's eyes drifted to the dead man's greasy blue coveralls, stopping on the oval patch with the name, Pinnet stitched into it.
"Pinnet."
The bone-gatherer bent closer, turning his neck to line up his face with the corpse's pasty gray face. He dragged the zipper down, tugging the blue material, exposing the upper chest and shoulder on the right side.
"Pinnet. Mr. Pinnet." Corina shuddered hearing her own voice sing to the corpse. "I hope, for your sake, that you will be a good deal more helpful to me in death than you were in life."
With that, Aleximor drew his arm back and hammered the scissors deep into Pinnet's shoulder. Blood oozed from the wound instead of spurting. There was no heart pumping it through the body. It pooled in the depression made by Aleximor's fist, thick and oily, seeping between his fingers.
What are you doing? Corina shrieked the thought.
"Something the king's Olethren cannot do—take the souls of those they kill. My army is far fewer, only five thousand, yet far greater in ability and speed than the king's. I have also devised a method for harnessing the psychai of the freshly slain, a temporary binding that passes the harvested psyche back to the master binder—me."
With that, he got back to work. He slammed the scissors into Pinnet five times, cutting away a flap of muscle, spraying wet chunks of flesh and chips of bone against the wall, splatters of it peppering Corina's face. He was after the bone, for the same reason he'd taken pieces of the four Spaniards. Corina watched in horror as Aleximor raised one of the larger fragments right in front of her face, and she saw her own fingers running with blood, slick on her nails, gathering in the webbing between each finger and damming up against the ridge of muscle across the top of her palm.
It hurt her... mind to see her own bloody hands, but she didn't feel the least bit sick—because Aleximor didn't.
Aleximor sang softly, a litany about death and life and the trading of one for the other. The cramps started in Corina's chest, stabbing into her belly; muscles contracted, squeezing her lungs, tearing them from her ribs. Her body felt too small for her bones. Her joints ached, and there was a separate agony in the space between each vertebra. The color drained from several hundred strands of hair, going pure white from scalp to tip.
She gasped the words, What have you done to me!
"Death, Corina Lairsey. I have given some of this life in order to bring Pinnet back. He is now bound to me, completely in my control." He paused at another jolt of spinal pain. "Do... not... worry." He breathed, squeezing tears from Corina's eyes. "I have accepted some of death and given some of your life in return. It is perfectly safe. I have done this before. Pinnet is fresh and will not require a significant amount." His words trailed off into a gurgling rasp and saliva oozed from her sagging mouth. Corina's bloody hand opened and the chip of bone had been reduced to powder, mixing grittily with Pinnet's blood.
"Slowly. It must be done in very small amounts."
Until what? Answer me! What is the result?
"I will have restored the form of the soul and position I once created for myself. Until I have traded every last piece of life away, and I have become not dead, but death itself. That is when I cannot be harmed in life, and where complete power lies."
Corina's thoughts split and shuddered apart, crumbling into uselessness.
Chapter 17 - Ritual Drowning
In the absence of any studies or teachers of fire magic, Lady Kassandra of the Alkimides relied on her influence with the immortals, the sea daimones—especially Ochleros, to teach her the methods for summoning and manipulating fire, molten rock, and controlling their energy and reactions. She learned many other skills from them as well.
—Michael Augustus Henderson, notes on a conversation with the Wreath-wearer
Jill thumbed the remote, swung her purse off her shoulder, and hopped into the minivan's driver's seat. The morning sun, low over the ocean, beamed through the tinted glass windows. The side doors slid back automatically with a growl of metal wheels on tracks. Nicole jumped in the third-row seat. On the opposite side of the van, Aunt Phaidra nodded her head, thanking the door for its apparent courtesy, and slid into the seat.
Kassandra got in next to her, holding in a smile at Phaidra's alien world alertness, eyes darting to everything that moved, touching unrecognizable knobs and vents. She nodded again at the door as it slid closed automatically.
Phaidra played with the armrests, which swiveled up and down while everyone else put their seatbelts on. Jill started the engine, and the jet of air from the vents startled Kallixene, and made Phaidra jump into some sort of seated combat position, one hand out, fingers spread, and the other curled into a fist.
Kassandra rested a warm hand on her arm, and leaned close. She slid her eyes forward, indicating Jill and Kallixene. "While the girlies are getting their nails done, would you like to shop somewhere else?"
Phaidra spread her fingers, staring down at her nails curiously. "What colors do they paint them?"
Kassandra shrugged. "Anything you want." She reached up front and tapped Jill on the shoulder. "What about the webbing between Lady Kallixene's fingers?"
"No problem." In the mirror, Jill gave her a sympathetic look with one eyebrow raised. She kept the look as she turned and backed the van into Atlantic Avenue. "I told Maxine my grandmother's a mermaid."
"You what?" Nicole shouted from the third row seat.
Jill took the sunglasses off the top of her head and slid them on, pushing the transmission into drive. She adjusted the side mirrors as they sped west toward Route 1, and then she glanced back in the rearview.
"I told her that Lady Kallixene's a mermaid and she wants her nails done. Something retro gorgeous, like a reverse French in a sky blue, but with something new and fun—a glittery edge or stars, you know." She saw the worried looks from Phaidra, Kass, and Nic. "What? Everything's covered. Maxine's cool. This is a private appointment. And just to be sure I told her that if she told anyone about the mermaid thing, my grandmother would turn her into a barracuda."
Kallixene smiled, pleased for the most part—but there was a sinister edge that made it clear that if Maxine talked, the best she could hope for was a barracuda. She patted Jill's arm indulgently. "We're fine."
The air jetted from the vents and Phaidra kept tilting them to direct the currents toward Kassandra, who eventually reached up and shut off all the air to the back seats.
"So... " Nicole began, ". . tell me and Jill about the drowning thing." No one really wanted to talk about it, but that had never stopped Nicole. She cleared her throat from her seat in the back row and continued. "What happens? Kass says it hurts a little. Who's going to be there. Is it all underwater? Give me the whole run down, start to finish."
Kassandra leaned sideways against the sliding door. "Did you ask Michael Henderson?"
Nicole shook her head.
Phaidra twisted around and grabbed Nicole's hand, firm but affectionate. "Gregor will be there. Lady Kassandra, some of our guards. Mother will sing to you. You will release all of your air. Close your eyes then. Do not watch it rise above you, for I have heard that surfacers see their life in the air they breathe, and watching it leave their bodies is distressing. Do not panic. Let the ocean come inside you. You will become one of us. It will be safe with Mother guiding the change to your bodies."
Jill made a face and glanced in the rearview at the mention of bodies changing.
"Zits," said Kassandra. "That's another thing. My skin's clear in the water. But it never fails. I won't be above the waves an hour before a raging pustule shows up on my nose or chin." She pointed to one along her jaw.
Jill made another face in the mirror.
"The change works for other mammals and cetaceans," Kassandra added. "Dolphins and orcas are air breathers not a whole lot different from us, but ours need to live in depths unnatural to them and they can't surface for air, so they must change, too."
"Yeah, Henderson explain that once," said Nicole.
Kallixene listened intently without turning around. She pulled down the visor and lifted the lid to her mirror. The lights blinded her for a moment, and she squinted through her lashes at the close-up of her face.
Phaidra turned back, what she saw in the vanity mirror catching her attention. "What do you have around your eyes, Mother?"
"What is it called? Eye liner?"
Jill added, "A metallic violet liner that matches her top."
Kallixene let Jill dress her, and she came out of her bedroom wearing a black skirt and hose with a sleeveless top made of some purplish material that warped and pulsed in iridescent splashes when she moved. Nicole had muttered something about "taking Grandma clubbing." Phaidra had stared at her mother as if she didn't recognize her. Kassandra had simply shaken her head.
"What changes exactly?" Jill looked at Phaidra in the mirror and then at Kallixene.
"You won't feel the cold in the water or the pressure," said Phaidra.
"Your hearing is affected," said Kassandra. "Your eyes will become more sensitive, but most of the changes are on the inside, doing things that permit your body to take in the sea and live off its power. It only works in the water. The hardest part is coming back out to the Thin. You have to get the water out of your lungs. Your new power will help you with this, but it burns a little."
Nicole slouched in her seat, stared thoughtfully out the window, and whispered, "My new power."
Kallixene slapped the mirror shut, swung up the visor, and turned in her seat to give Kassandra a hard stare. "And what surprise do you have up your sleeve?"
Kassandra just smiled. "It wouldn't be a surprise then, would it?"
Jill swung into a space right in front of the Triple M (Mad Maxine's Manicures) and killed the engine, jumping out of the minivan with a delight that seemed to halve the gravity of the entire planet.
"Come on, Grandmother, we're right on time." She held the door for Lady Kallixene, and waited a moment for any other takers.
Kassandra and Nicole glanced at their watches, wondering how eight minutes after the hour could be considered "on time". Phaidra glared through the open door at the scrawny heavily eye-linered, nose-ringed teen with long blond hair manning the cash register.
She shook her head, and turned to Nicole. "Where else can we go?"
"This way. See you in a few, Jillie," she shot over her shoulder, and headed across the parking lot to a mega sporting goods store.
"A few... minutes?" Phaidra asked hopefully.
"Hours," Nic and Kass harmonized.
Inside the store, Kassandra had to lead Phaidra around by the elbow, because her aunt kept stopping in the middle of the aisle and staring at the boats and paragliders hanging from the ceiling. "Come on, we'll check out Zypheria's favorite place in the store."
Nicole chewed her lip and followed them. "Diving and swimming section?"
"No, we go down that aisle for a laugh. Soon, you will too. Hunting's her favorite section. You should see her with the crossbows. It's like Christmas. If I let her, she'd be in here for hours, chatting with the geezers behind the counter about carbon fiber gunstocks, arrow ballistics, and killing penetration. She's very discreet with her fingers—the webbing, and completely lies about her underwater purposes." She gave them a lopsided smile. "Of course, they all fell in lust with her when she told them her favorite time to hunt was in the pouring rain." Kassandra dropped her voice. "I usually have to drag her out of here. She thinks it's funny. It's damned embarrassing. If she's here more than fifteen minutes, all the men line up at the front counter, right against it, the one with the fishing reels... "
"Why?"
"Let's just say my Zypheria arouses—not another word, Eupheron—arouses certain thoughts in them. I'm guessing it has something to do with fantasies of her running through the forest in a soaking wet T-shirt, no bra, and a loaded crossbow."
Sure enough, when the three of them approached the hunting section, one of the salesmen, a gray-haired red-nosed man in a short-sleeved collar shirt, spotted Kassandra, grinned and asked, "Did you bring the huntress with you?"
Nicole ran with it, smirking at the old man. Then in a flat bored voice, she said, "Artemis sent us down to look for stiffer quarrels."
He went red, cleared his throat, and pretended to straighten the stack of safety guides on the glass counter. "What can I do for you ladies?"
Kassandra brought her hand down flat and her name bracelet rapped against the glass. "Same thing. Let's see the crossbows."
An hour and a half later, with their heads stuffed with crossbow stats, "over 350 FPS of velocity, a nice flat trajectory, includes a fiber-optic sight," and a tree of numbers hanging off terms like "draw weight" and "power stroke," they walked away from the counter with three big boxes and several bags of accessories, mostly ammunition. Phaidra stared down the old man who jokingly asked, "You stocking up for a war?"
They took a table in a sandwich shop three windows down from Mad Maxine's where Phaidra almost threw up when Nicole urged her to try some Ranch dressing. Kassandra said she didn't feel well and ate nothing. Aunt Phaidra ended up with an obsessive hunger for kettle chips, scaring the young man behind the counter by going back four times and wanting to pay more for each bag than the marked price.
They spotted Lady Kallixene and Jill coming out of Maxine's, and only just managed to stop Phaidra from going right through a clear section in the window after them. They steered her through the door and she dashed into the street with Kassandra and Nicole following.
Kassandra slowed her pace, scanning the shoppers. Nicole lost her grin when she looked over at her sister's cold serious stare. "Kass, what is it?"
Kassandra didn't look back. She just held up a finger.
A second later, she said, "Someone's here, in the crowd. I can feel it." She jutted her chin at Nicole. "Take a walk. Head toward the toy store and then circle around on the sidewalk. Tell me if you notice anyone like us."
Nicole started to frown but stopped when she understood "like us" meant "Seaborn". Determination settled into her expression and gaze. "You got it."
"All the way around. We'll pick you up at the end, past the video store. Watch the way they walk. I'm going out to the street to get a wider view. Phaidra's with Lady Kallixene."
Phaidra had jogged away from them, going to the minivan, meeting her mother and Jill. Kallixene opened the passenger door, but stood in the gap, immediately aware that something was wrong. Her gaze met Kassandra's and she jerked back at the amount of information hitting her. She nodded, got in and slammed the door. Phaidra got in the back, the doors clicked shut, and Jill backed the van out of the space, cruising along the store windows and strolling shoppers.
Kassandra crossed the parking lot, sliding between cars, surreptitiously glancing behind her, or tilting her head back, pretending to watch a small airplane droning overhead while dropping her gaze to roam over the shoppers: a family pushing groceries in two carts, a construction worker with a toolbelt heading for his truck, a woman with a crying baby. She lost Nicole and scanned the storefronts, picking her out halfway along the strip with a video store on the end—and, right in front of her sister, walked a tall woman with long black hair, moving with a graceful gliding motion, her arms pumping the air energetically. She wore a long dress with leggings, Seaborn fashion.
Kassandra doubled back, angling toward the video store to meet Nicole there, following the woman with long hair, trying not to focus sharply on her in case the Seaborn could feel it. She scowled when Nicole picked up her pace and walked right by the woman, then slowed to match her speed, several shoppers in front of her. Kassandra jutted her head sideways, trying to warn her. Didn't Nicole notice her?
Then she understood what her sister was doing. Nicole slowed in front of a bakery, let the two shoppers pass her, and—without appearing to look—walked right into the black haired woman, almost knocking her over, grabbing her arm, in the last second, to steady her.
"Bold, Nic."
Kassandra picked up speed and crossed behind a row of cars. She watched Nicole apologize, smiling stupidly, gesturing at the stores as if they had distracted her. Then Nicole turned and continued at a quick, properly embarrassed pace to the end of the row of stores. She walked into the parking lot and stopped next to a boxy silver Honda with roof racks. Pretending the car was hers, she fumbled in her pockets for imaginary keys. The lady with black hair reached the sidewalk's end, turned around and headed back the way she had come, looking through the shop windows.
Kassandra slid around a Jeep with enormous tires and caught up with Nicole as Jill drove up with the passenger side sliding door open. Nicole jumped into the backseat, nodding her head. "Yup. She's one of us. I walked into her, pretending to be clumsy, and noticed her hands. She has webbing."
Kassandra and Phaidra kneeled backwards on their seats, their arms over the headrests. Hidden behind the dark-tinted van windows, they watched the woman walk away. "Who is she, Lady Kassandra?"
"I don't know. I've never seen her before. She felt different too. I picked something up from her, a different sort of... signature." Her eyes went unfocused, her brows knuckling up with internal concentration, and she whispered a song in someone else's voice. "Something ancient, a sweetness too pure to find among mortals and mortal voices."
There was a chilly silence in the van. Jill slowed down, cautiously passing a parked North Hampton police cruiser bristling with speed-trap gear. She passed through two more intersections along Lafayette before her heart slowed to a normal rhythm.
When they turned right on Atlantic, heading east, Kallixene held up her hands, webbing tight, her fingers straight, the moons of the nails a creamy opaque and the ends an iridescent bluish red.
"She's gone. Forget about her. Look at my nails!"
While the noble ladies went into town to have their nails done and shop for archery supplies, Gregor, Michael Henderson, Zypheria, and seven of Kallixene's Rexenor guard piled into a pick-up truck and headed out to Rye to prep Stormwind for sailing.
Michael Henderson led a basic sailing course. "Stormwind's a cutter, which means she's got a single mast. She's a fore-and-aft-rigged boat with multiple headsails—she's got three. Notice also that the mast is set further aft than a sloop's."
The Rexenor guards, none of whom had ever set foot on a sailboat, noticed only because he pointed at the shaft of metal sticking up out the boat, all of them exchanging the same puzzled look: "What in Poseidon's name is a 'sloops'?"
Henderson paced the forty-two feet, stem to stern, while he explained the purpose of the multiple jibs, which, "with the forestaysail dropped and combined with a reefed mainsail and the full staysail, makes for a damn tight rough-weather rig."
He lost them all at "forestaysail," although there was some nodding at reefing the mainsail because they all knew what a reef looked like, and one of them made a knowing draping motion with his hands, as if at some point they'd take the sail off and stow it under the boat, but only when they approached the tropics. One of the Rexenors stared at the harbor's mouth and out to sea, wondering if there was a reef within a thousand leagues.
"Michael," said Zypheria, interrupting his monologue on how much weather justified flying the small jib. "I think it would be wiser to show them how the machinery works, how to raise and lower the sails, what the wheel does, and maybe a little bit about how the wind works."
"Excellent! Gather round." He pushed the chrome wheel one way then the other. "This is how we steer Stormwind."
Lady Kallixene and her party drove up in the middle of the afternoon, dressed for getting wet. In forty-five minutes they were underway with Jill skippering, the sunlight in her hair, fingers tight on the wheel, her favorite place in the world. Nicole and Michael Henderson handled the cloth, and everyone else was just along for the ride, gulping in gusts of salty air and pointing at seagulls, fascinated at things with wings.
Kassandra sat at the bow, chin in her hands, brooding about the strange Seaborn woman in North Hampton.
They passed the Isles of Shoals, flat slabs of brown rock miles off the port side. There was mild chop and a good wind. They sailed until they reached a uniform horizon, a flat line of blue that was almost black, broken with little ruffles of white in every direction. Jill yelled that Stormwind was coming about; the sails snapped and the boom swept the space over her head. Nicole dropped the jib while Mr. Henderson hauled down the mainsail, and left the boat drifting in the currents.
"I believe we are ready," said Lady Kallixene, but the wind whipped her words away.
Kassandra tugged on the elastic of her bathing suit bottoms, snapping it lower on her butt. She hopped lightly to the narrow runner along Stormwind's starboard side, arms out for balance, her face lifted to Helios, her eyes closed, and one tear rolling down her right cheek, a silvery line on her skin.
"Kassandra?" Gregor called from the mast where he was helping Michael Henderson furl the mainsail. "Are you okay?"
She ignored him, but everyone else on board turned to her as she let her head fall forward, and the teardrop slipped off her skin into the sea. Breathing in spasming sobs, she curled her fingers around something gold and shiny, clutching it in one fist, and without looking back, dove in after her tear.
The Rexenor guards moved to the starboard side, glancing at Lady Kallixene and Phaidra for cues. Kassandra surfaced a minute later, her eyes red and swollen, wearing a defenseless smile. "Come on in. The water's great."
Nicole didn't have to be told twice. She peeled off her sweatpants and shirt, wearing a dark blue one-piece suit underneath, and dove in. She came up shivering, her teeth clattering, cutting through her words, urging them to hurry.
Zypheria, Lady Kallixene, Phaidra and all but two of the guards went in at the same time, hardly moving the surface of the ocean. Michael Henderson and the remaining Rexenors were going to take Stormwind for a trip up around Newfoundland before returning to Rye.
Jill was last, hugging Gregor, who jumped in just before her.
Kassandra circled and then surfaced between her sisters, pulling them together with a hug. She kissed each on the cheek and whispered, "Be calm. This will be over in a minute. Afterward, we'll dive deep to the Rexenor stronghold. You are my sisters. You will be Seaborn. You will have everything afforded to you by right."
She kicked to a position behind them as Phaidra took hold of Jill's shoulders and Zypheria took hold of Nicole's. Lady Kallixene faced them, but kept shooting Kassandra suspicious looks. Then she noticed the thing that had come from Kassandra's tear, thundering out of the ocean like an island. The Wreath-wearer couldn't cry because she used her tears as doorways for Ochleros, a king among sea demons.
Ochleros' head and shoulders stuck up out of the blue right behind Kassandra, an enormously muscular humanoid made of the waves and foam and turbulence. His head was bald and splotchy gray, like a granite boulder rounded by storm waves, with a craggy brow ridge over abyss-deep black orbs that stared without pupils or detectible focus. Ridges of clashing currents rolled up his back. His shoulders tumbled into the ocean five feet on either side of Kassandra. She looked like a child in front of him, braids swinging in the wind, innocently unaware that the shadow she cast on the face of the sea had monstrously long teeth and claws, but a closer look revealed a drop of it in her soul, like a splatter of ink on white paper, a stain of his power in her dark eyes.
Lady Kallixene snapped her hands open nervously, spraying water. "I cannot concentrate with him here."
"He's helping me." Kassandra rubbed her eyes.
Jill and Nicole glanced over their shoulders to see what the problem was, but they had met Ochleros several times and, on the list of anxieties, ranked him lower than imminent drowning.
"Helping with what?"
"Mind your own business, Grandmother. Get on with it, or I will do it for you."
Phaidra's mouth dropped open, stunned at hearing anyone command her mother. Zypheria shook her head, resignedly. Nothing Kassandra did surprised her.
Kallixene let out a long controlled breath, trying to hold on—with her iridescent fingernails—to her patience. "Very well. My granddaughters, Nicole and Jill, you have agreed to go with us, and we have selected your partners in the rite. Close your eyes, take your final breath, a shallow one, and push as much of it out of your lungs as you can, then we will begin."
Nicole glanced at Jill, and winked before shutting her eyes and emptying her lungs. Zypheria flipped upside down, grabbed Nicole's ankles in her strong hands, and kicked into the depths.
Nicole shuddered as the dark water closed over her head. The cold on her face was like a slap, and she opened her eyes because her lungs reflexively pulled in the sea. There was no air left in them.
Jill gave a last exhale and launched a fist-sized mass of bubbles to the surface. She jerked her legs hard, trying to break Phaidra's grip, but kept her eyes shut tight.
Lady Kallixene dropped into the sea with them, starting her song about a home in the dark sea and bestowing the curse on her two beautiful granddaughters. She sang about "the flow of life from birth to death, first to last breath... breathless breathing... doom of the Cloud-gatherer, boon of the Earth-encircler."
Kallixene sang, her eyes half-closed, and the Rexenor guard formed a semi-circle around her, their hands white on the grips of their swords. They feared the huge demon accompanying the Wreath-wearer, although all of them had seen this one and benefited from his presence once before, in the final moments of the battle in Nebraska against the king's dead army.
Behind her back, Kassandra took a small curved knife from Ochleros, flinching as she touched the tip to her skin. She cut an inch long crescent-shape into the meaty part of her left palm. Reversing the step , she cut the shape into her own right palm.
Jill's eyes fluttered open, snapped wide, and then relaxed as she drew the ocean inside her. Nicole closed her eyes as her lungs worked the fluid, straining to move it. Sharp cramps prodded and poked their insides, rearranging organ functions. A burn raced through their bones, stepping up their spines, fanning over their shoulders and their arms to their fingertips. Nicole made chewing motions against the ache in her jaw, and opened her eyes.
Kassandra swung her hands from behind her, blood following like a cape of sheer black. She grabbed Jill by the back of the neck and cut a small crescent in the muscle tissue on the left side, then the opposite with Nicole. She glanced down at the knife and heaved it over her shoulder to Ochleros. Before Kallixene or Gregor could question her, she placed the cuts seeping blood from her palms directly over those on her sisters' necks, digging her fingers into their skin.
"Do it, Ochleros."
"Are you certain, Lady Kass—"
"I said, do it!"
Kassandra closed her eyes. She felt a jolt through her body that shoved her organs around. There was a metallic taste in her mouth. A burn deep in her stomach... reminded her that she hadn't eaten yet today.
"What happened?" she whispered over her shoulder, her fingers still clawed into Nicole's and Jill's necks. "I didn't feel anything."
Ochleros' voice was a deep volcanic rumble. "You have not yet given up who you are, Lady Kassandra. Perhaps that is when you will feel something?"
She whispered, her thoughts a mile away, "Or maybe nothing is exactly what you feel when you give it up."
Kassandra released her sisters as Gregor swam to her, a look of horror on his face. "What have you done?" He looked at her hands and then at Nicole and Jill.
She sounded disappointed. "Nothing, apparently."
She waved him away, holding one hand out to Ochleros. Her fingers trembled and she focused on them to keep them still. She held up her other hand. The blood and the deep cuts were gone. There were no marks of the knife on her sisters' necks.
She blinked away the rush of questions, and lifted her eyes to her grandmother, nodding. "Please, put your bracelets away, Lady Kallixene. I have brought my own."
Ochleros' enormous fingers opened and a small jumble of gold fell into her hand. She picked out two of the bracelets. Then she spun Nicole and Jill by the shoulders in opposite directions so that they now faced her.
She held each of their gazes for several seconds.
"Close your eyes, my sisters. Think back to lovely St. Clement's Education Center, in the middle of Nebraska—as far from the ocean as my grandfather could stick me. Dammit, Jill, you knew everyone in that school. Remember the day you two scared the hell out of me, the day you brought me to the administration office to meet Mrs. Lindsey, the day she dug out my personal effects envelope and gave me my name bracelet, collecting dust for years. It was the day you ended my sentence, the day I discovered the school was no longer my prison, that I was free to go. I had my name back. I became an Alkimides again."
She flipped over the faceplates in her palm, pushed one over Jill's pale hand and the other over Nicole's brown hand. They looked down at them, bright against their wrists, staring at the Alkimides stamp.
Kassandra took their hands, tugged them around so that they faced their grandmother. "By the grace and generosity of Lady Kallixene, we are Rexenor and Megalesios. We are also Dosianax, the house of the current king, may his rule end soon. But above all, we are Alkimides, the royal house of the Thalassogenêis, the chosen of the Lord of the Sea, may his rule never end."
Lady Kallixene bowed to Kassandra, and then to her sisters.
"Welcome, Jill and Nicole, to our world."
Nicole turned to Kassandra, opening her mouth, releasing the heavy fluid, an expression of wonder struck deep into her features. "So, this is what you've been doing all this time?"
Kassandra laughed. "This isn't half of it. Wait until you see the Rexenor fortress or the Nine-cities." Her eyes went unfocused at her own mentioning of the city, as if a particular distant memory had the power to magnetically attract all of the thoughts in her head toward a single point on some mental horizon.
Jill put her hand on Kassandra's shoulder, bowed her head to Lady Kallixene, and tried out her voice under the sea. "You took my breath away, Grandmother."
Kallixene started to smile, but at that moment Kassandra—in a burst of possessed rage—threw one fist above her head and half-sang half-screamed the Alkimides war cry, her voice a siren's song that hooked their senses and chilled the thoughts in their heads.
"On Alkimides!" She was a young woman on the outside. "Right of the Earth-encircler, dark-haired Lord of the Sea!" On the inside, part of her had been there, storming the walls of Telkhines outposts with three thousand of the drowned dead—the seed of the Olethren. "Souls arise, with third fore-fathers by our sides... " She drove the Telkhines from the Nine-cities, led the hunt for them to their old homes in Rhodes, and to the ends of the earth.
"We will kill the old kings!"
Chapter 18 - House Rexenor
The food of the Seaborn is simple, fish and arthropods making up the main dishes with various plants of the sea—grown in the light of Helios' Twin—used for flavoring. I have heard that there are confectioners in the Nine-cities that create wonderful gelatin cakes, but over all, Seaborn fare appears very limited. It can be assumed that some Seaborn traveling to the surface have found the cuisine above the waves so superior that living out of the ocean is preferable.
—Michael Henderson, notes
The Rexenor fortress blended into the volcanic stone of a serrated branch of the mid-Atlantic mountain range, thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean, high walls with concave faces and needle-like spires shooting into pure black hydrospace. A dance of light across the Lasthenes Massif, a central tower of lumpy rock rising above the walls and capped with a smaller fortress. A cold blue orb floated a few hundred meters above the walls, spraying light in all directions, mimicking the sun Jill and Nicole had left behind. It shimmered in velvety bands off a protective shield that domed the entire fortress and half the mountain.
Lady Kallixene's party dove through the night, gliding on a barge as big as a school bus on currents that knew no sun, through a fluid as black as ink, a darkness that played with the human senses in ways that Jill and Nicole had never experienced. Light blinded and hurt the senses. Darkness thrilled them until they spent every moment striving to perceive. The senses delighted in its purity.
Jill suddenly understood why Kassandra referred to anything that went up, rose, or lifted as wrong or bad in some sense. Thin was evil and depth was good for people who lived at the bottom of the ocean.
Nicole pointed at a small array of lights like fireflies fanning out in the blackness a mile way.
"Those are mine," said Lady Kallixene. "The perimeter guard has detected our presence and they're preparing for our arrival, two lines of guards to guide us to the front gates."
"What if it was a trap? What if we kidnapped you, took all of your guards hostage, dressed up as Rexenors and came calling as the Lady of the fortress?" Nicole said it in a half-joking tone.
Kallixene stared at her with a serious expression. She let it fade into a smile. "Who is this 'we' that will do these things?"
Nicole shrugged. "I don't know. Me and Kass."
Kallixene nodded. "We have ways of verifying our numbers and condition long before we approach home." She pointed into the nightwater, and Nicole, leaning forward, caught faint outlines of soldiers, glints off spears, the flat mammalian caudal fins of dolphins and killer whales enlisted in the service of Rexenor. "They have trailed us for miles. Not all the flashes of bioluminescence you see are anglerfishes and comb jellies. Some of them are my own scouts, and... you and Kass do not know the codes with which we signal in response."
Nicole shook her head at what appeared to be bitter sarcasm in her grandmother's voice. "It just occurred to me, Lady Kallixene. I didn't mean to upset you."
"Nothing ever just occurs when Lady Kassandra—or any Wreath-wearer—has a finger in it. Do not forget that." She didn't want to say it, but the words spilled out like a tipped box of needles. "You can bet that she has already planned her own funeral."
As if on cue, a blaze of pale blue light streaked across the night like a comet.
"Speak of the devil."
Kassandra had not ridden the barge on its descent, instead bolting off to the east without a goodbye-wave right after the ritual. She tired of Kallixene's snippy tone and her father's concerned questioning glare—which made her soul curl into a hot lump of torment every time he caught her attention. Fear weighed down every word from his lips, but it was something in his eyes that pleaded with her to let him help her, that some madness had crept into his daughter, and if she would just come to her senses for a moment, he would explain how to expel it.
Of all those present at the ritual, Kassandra felt her father might be the only one who had a hint of what she was planning. He had been the one with the bleed in the family, and he was as accomplished a sorcerer as she knew—outside of her own head. She couldn't risk his questions. At least not in front of others.
So, she had kicked into the night—passing between the water as Eupheron put it, not through the water—sobbing without tears, circling the coastline of the Bay of Biscay twice before returning to meet the party as it arrived at the rebuilt fortress of House Rexenor.
The pale green glow of the Wreath faded and went dark halfway through a spiraling path under Lady Kallixene's party, and her personal guard snapped alert, drawing swords at a signal from Phaidra.
Kallixene had one of her guards signal the scouts to expect Lady Kassandra and let her through their defenses, but frowned when they reported their inability to find her.
Just as Kallixene passed an angry reply to her signaler, a huge killer whale swept in from the left hand side, gliding up to the edge of the barge with a saluting Rexenor soldier in the saddle and Kassandra standing in a crouched position right behind the orca's dorsal fin, her arms tucked in hydrodynamically.
As they approached and slowed, Kassandra danced out of the archer's stirrups, slipped around the front of the armored orcaman and pushed up the cheek-guards on his helmet, leaning in to kiss him. She closed her eyes and kissed him again, harder. Then she danced away, slapping the soldier on the shoulder before landing on Lady Kallixene's barge.
"Did you see that?" she said to Nicole and Jill. "King Eupheron has taught me to suppress the damn Christmas-tree glow of the Wreath so you can't see me coming."
"Great. Just what we need." Kallixene gave her signaler's arm a squeeze to tell him to cancel her message to the scouts. She glared at the departing killer whale and its rider. "Who was that?" She snapped each word off like a prisoner's fingers in the hands of a torturer. "How did you manage to—" She struggled to find a word other than infiltrate. "—get a ride from one of my own house lords without approval?"
Kassandra waved in her escort's direction with a puzzled look, blinking as if hurt by her grandmother's suspicion. "That's Nereus, Menophon's handsome youngest son, the escort you chose for me." Then her confused expression and tone slid into open contempt. "I thought we were supposed to be friendly. I arranged to meet my assigned escort before he departed, and he happily agreed—more than happily. I believe his words were, 'I would do anything for you, Lady Kassandra.' I thought it was part of your purpose in bringing three noblemen to my father's house, pairing them up with your granddaughters. Please, I beg you to correct me if that was not your intention."
Nicole shook her head, wondering how Kassandra had the audacity to schedule—way in advance—to meet up with Nereus, apparently for the sole purpose of using him to mock her grandmother's fortress defenses.
Lady Kallixene closed her mouth, collected the line of attack she had organized, and threw it away. She displayed a sharp smile and bowed her head. "I am pleased you understood my intention so thoroughly, Lady Kassandra."
"What are you girls going to do first?" Gregor slipped back to sit next to Kassandra, his purpose to break up the tension his biological daughter had smuggled aboard. Jill and Nicole sat cross-legged on the barge's floor, staring into the black space above, occasionally pointing out flashes of light.
Nicole glanced at Kassandra, held her eyes a moment, and then turned to Gregor and said, "What did you do first when you came out of the sea, Dad?"
He laughed bitterly. "I was one of the king's porthmeus slaves."
Kassandra flinched and grabbed his arm, shaking him as if to jog something loose. "The very first time above the waves?"
He shook his head as if that set of memories belonged to another life and he had to plug it in and give it a minute to come online. He blinked. "Oh, yes. Mother took me shopping in Boston when I was eight. We walked right out of the Charles River, into downtown traffic, and a taxicab almost hit me." He laughed. "She dragged me up and down streets with nothing but clothing shops—and all the surfacers stared at us."
Kallixene's face brightened. "And the only place you wanted to see was the store with the big metal bear out front."
Phaidra laughed. "The toy store. I remember that!"
"F.A.O. Schwartz," said Kallixene. "I bought him a submarine made of little yellow plastic blocks. It had little surfacers that went inside and they wore masks if they wanted to explore our world." Anticipating the next question, she added, "It survived the Olethren and the destruction of the old fortress, buried in the sand."
Gregor stared off into empty water with a reminiscing smile. "I remember how difficult it was to put together because there were so many little pieces and the box and directions disintegrated before we reached home."
He said the word "home" and squeezed his eyes closed to hold off tears.
"I am deeply sorry." Gregor blinked and looked at his daughters. "There is a reason I do not visit the fortress often. The painted plaster walls of our house in New Hampshire do not invade my dreams."
Kassandra tilted her head back, suddenly understanding. "The stone. Walls of stone."
His eyes slid over to her. "I have nightmares." He nodded to Jill's puzzled look. "The lithotombs. I spent twelve years in them."
"But they're filled with air, I thought," said Nicole.
Kallixene fell silent, folding her arms as if she were cold, staring down at them.
"I cannot imagine the pain of the lithotombs," said Phaidra.
Kassandra looked at Kallixene, but she spoke to her aunt. "How long do you think you could endure it, Lady Phaidra?"
"Not an hour!"
"No," said Kassandra seriously. "I mean really. How long?"
Phaidra looked at Gregor who stared at the barge's floor. Kallixene came out of her daydream scowling at her granddaughter.
Kassandra asked her question again. "How long would you be able to survive the lithotombs, Aunt Phaidra?"
"Why do you press me, Lady Kassandra? I do not plan to find myself inside one. Any answer is irrelevant."
"I would expect that very few of those in the king's prisons anticipated finding themselves there, and yet, there they are, inside a block of stone without the water on their skin, screaming in panic, clawing their fingernails raw on the walls of a sealed stone box swinging from chains in the floor of the abyss. Punishment worse than death." She leaned toward Phaidra. "Guess if you must. You know how curious I am. How long would you last, Phaidra?"
"Kassandra!" Kallixene's voice trembled with the shout, as if the question burned her. "Please."
Kassandra leaned back. "It's funny, Grandmother." There was nothing funny in her voice. "Have you even been to the lithotombs? I can still hear the pain in my father's voice, shouting at me, calling me a liar—through the stone wall, because he thought I was another of King Tharsaleos' tortures, the voice of a girl with his daughter's name taunting him, trying to trick him. I relive the nightmare of running to find him in the prison. Of running away from Nebraska into an ocean I didn't know with a demon I met the day before to find my father in the abyss, and no matter how fast I swim, no matter how loud I plead with Poseidon, I never make it in time. I always arrive minutes after the king has taken him away. All I can hear is the ring of the chains that once held the tomb to the floor as Ochleros moves them with his claws." She held her mouth shut, holding her teeth so tight they hurt, locking eyes with Kallixene. I didn't see any goddamn Rexenors down there looking for him!
"I don't have time, Lady Kassandra." Kallixene kicked away, grabbing a thick waxy tablet out of an assistant's hands, marking it with a stylus, and handing it back.
"When?" Kassandra trailed her.
"You have done nothing but torment me since we came above the waves. Please give me some peace."
"Not until I get what I came for."
"And then you will give me peace? What is it? More about your father?" She beckoned her to one side of the main assembly hall, a vast room with raised benches and her throne, and then into an empty dining hall.
Kassandra followed, shoulder to shoulder, glaring at her. "Torment you? You saw my father on the barge. You did that to him, Grandmother."
Kallixene held a hand up while she sealed the door behind them.
Kassandra continued in an enraged whisper. "You fed my father to the Wreath-wearer." Everything that had been building since Kallixene had cut short their argument in the backyard stacked up in the front of her mind.
Kallixene whirled with an accusing finger pointed at her. "He loved Ampharete, and he willing—"
"He had no will!" She shouted at Kallixene. "Once my mother wanted him, he had no will. Shut up, Mother!" Her gaze flew back to her grandmother. "You might as well have cut him up and fed him to sharks. They would have treated him with more kindness."
"How dare you!"
Kassandra threw her arms above her head in exasperation. "Why does everyone use that phrase with me? As if you or anyone can do anything to limit what I dare."
Kallixene glared at her, grinding her teeth.
"Go on, Grandmother." Kassandra's tone softened. She's bluffing. Call her on it, steer the talk toward bleeding. "I can see plainly how you maneuver. You think you still have enough to take me on?"
"The Megalesios line does not bleed quickly."
"Quicker than you think."
"And you have your father's bleed."
"Nearly all of it."
Kallixene accepted defeat, dropping her shoulders. "With two bleeds you are—"
"I have four of them." The shock of rising emotion frightened her. She tried not to sob. "I am a monster, Kallixene. My head is so full it feels like it's going to explode." She loosened her fists and took in a deep pull of the ocean.
Kallixene's shock tightened all the muscles in her face. "Four? Is that even possible?"
"Without losing my sanity? I'm not sure... I'm not sure I'd know it when—or if—the answer ever comes to me." Use the word 'trust' in a statement. She will follow, defeated. Chase with an apology. "Or if I'd even trust you enough to tell you."
The fury died in Kallixene's eyes. "Your anger frightens me. You are nothing like the girl who followed Ephoros into the sea."
"No, I'm not... anymore. Ephoros is dead, and I have grown up. I'm sorry. It's not as if I'm angry enough to kill you—I wouldn't have given you this much time to argue about it if that were true. I wouldn't even be speaking to you if I did not think—"
"If you did not think you would get something from me?"
Kassandra hit her with a hard focus, nodding. "You do have insight into what the Wreath-wearers are like, Grandmother. It will make this easier."
"Easier to what?"
"As you said, hurt you." Kassandra whispered the words. "I love you, Grandmother. If I had a choice, I would not ask anything of you. You have already given one life to the Alkimides line."
"I have given many."
"I am speaking of your own blood. Of your own flesh, my lady."
Her grandmother lowered her eyes. "In private, call me Kallixene. You did a moment ago."
Kassandra leaned forward, about to say something, and stopped herself, studying her grandmother. That was very smooth. It's some kind of reliance-building tactic she's throwing back at me. Does she keep up the title and formality in order to have this kind of disarming leverage when she needs it? I was close to accepting it without thinking. She offers a high value gift that creates an obligation, and obligations can be called in. Damn, you are good at this, Kallixene.
Kassandra gave her a quick bow of her head. "I cannot get a straight answer out of the others inside, but I think I have finally figured what the Wreath really is—part of its purpose at least. It's a strategy engine. An instant general—just add seawater. It was Lord Poseidon's attempt to better the ruling power of the Seaborn, something like a benign monarch development process. I want to do the right thing... only there are days I think that... " She shook her head, hesitating over the rest of her statement.
"What?"
"Benignity is overrated. I have a thousand plots going, Kallixene, all in pots on the stove, and half of them are on high—everything else is simmering. I have a scheduling system in here—" She tapped the side of her head. "—that giganto-corporate project managers would kill for. I have the generalship of Andromache plugged so far into my brain, she can become a part of me any time I wish. I have immortals at my beck and call. The ocean has submitted to me. I can open my eyes a certain way and see walkways right through the air... because there is moisture in it. And I cannot stop until Tharsaleos is off the throne. I have four bleeds of power coming into me at once. Compared to my mother, compared to any of the Telkhines, compared to any other Wreath-wearer, I am a monster."
Kallixene looked at her in terror. "Or a goddess."
"And the difference is?"
Kallixene scowled, confused, and her eyes started filling with tears. It was like some devil's bargain, coming back to haunt her, returning again and again, taking more. "What do you want from me, Kassandra?" She sobbed the words.
"You bargained with her. I want the same thing the last Wreath-wearer wanted."
Kallixene's eyes filled with a gush of fresh tears, but she didn't understand, shaking her head. "Your father?"
"One of your children, Kallixene. I'm talking about Phaidra." Kassandra brought out the third bracelet with the Alkimides name on it and handed it to Kallixene. "This is for Aunt Phaidra. I need her to be my eyes inside the City, and she won't be able to get in with her head on her shoulders as a Rexenor." Kassandra turned at the door. "I love you, Grandmother. I promise you that I will do everything in my power to see that as little harm as possible comes to her. If I succeed, Rexenor will return from exile in greater standing than any other house in the Nine-cities. I will see to it personally."
"Why don't you get along with Lady Kallixene?"
Nicole's question took a few seconds to penetrate Kassandra's mood as they kicked across the assembly hall, weaving through small groups of Rexenors awaiting judgment or approvals from the Lady of Rexenor. Some looked up, staring at the two sisters as they passed.
"It is not your enemies who are most likely to thwart your plans, but your friends."
"Okay, now try answering me without maxims, Ms. Bonaparte. And that's it. You've used up your 'thwart' ticket. You only get one thwart in a lifetime. I'd better not hear that word out of your mouth ever again."
Kassandra stopped in the water, one side of her mouth turned up, a finger crossing her heart. "Not as long as we live. I promise. 'Frustrate'?"
"'Frustrate' is fine. How about just plain old 'prevent'? What's wrong with 'prevention'? Why should anyone suffer the indignity of being thwarted?"
"How come you get to use thwa—the T-word so much? And I only get one?"
Nicole shrugged simply. "I'm on the Dean's List. You're not. Honors students get certain privileges."
"Speaking of, has anyone mentioned the library?"
"What library? Whoa." Nicole grabbed her shoulder. "No changing the subject. Not until you tell me what's up with you and Lady Kallixene."
Kassandra's thoughts had already started plodding down a mental side street. "Didn't Napoleon crown himself emperor?"
"Something like that. Pope Pius the Seventh wasn't good enough. Napoleon handed over a pile of land to the Vatican in exchange for the approval of placing the crown on his own head. Thinking of doing the same?"
Kassandra looked at her with an unreadable expression. "I'm not asking anyone's approval. It's the former king or queen—or someone honorable—who traditionally crowns the new one, but there's no way I'm going to let my murdering grandfather place the crown of the ruler of all the Seaborn on anyone's head. I will do the crowning myself."
Nicole elbowed her. "Enough. Tell me about you and Lady Kallixene."
"Okay." She looked around to see if anyone was watching them. "This way." Kassandra grabbed her sister's wrist, turned, and hauled her to the end of the crowded assembly hall, down a brightly lit tunnel and into a large room with a low ceiling, full of armor on racks.
"Where are we going?"
"Where we can't be overheard. Sound travels fast through water." Kassandra snapped the lock on the door, turned and gestured over her shoulder, in the direction of the hall where Lady Kallixene oversaw all of House Rexenor's administration. "It's not that we don't see eye to eye. It's that we do."
Nicole frowned at her.
Kassandra frowned back. "I would trust her with my life, but not my schedule or my plans. She meddles too mu—"
"Kass! Listen to yourself. That's shit and you know it. You tell me the real reasons." Nicole glared, her fists going tight. "And you better not give me one more bullshit Wreath-wearer line."
Kassandra jabbed a finger at her. "Then you better be damned sure you want to hear this!" she shouted, holding Nicole's eyes, surprised at the strength of her mental defenses.
Nicole swallowed, leaned back, and nodded her head. "Please? It hurts to see you two fight. I feel the anger whenever you're in the same room. I thought you loved her."
"I do, okay?" Kassandra nodded. "Kallixene made the decision to bring me into this world." Kassandra glanced around the empty room. "And she traded my father to Ampharete to have me."
"Traded? To your mother?"
"Do you know why my mother named me Kassandra?"
"After the greatest Rexenor lord. You've told me."
"But do you know why?"
Nicole shook her head.
"Because my father, Gregor Lord Rexenor, was going to be the next Kassander, but she knew he wasn't going to make it through all of this... intact. I am named after my mother's and Kallixene's two-bleeds-in-one-person experiment! I am named after the original promise of the man who got used up in the research, Nicole."
"But Dad's awesome. He's—"
"Dad isn't even a tenth of the man he was when he was our age. Dad was one of the most powerful sorcerers in this place. Dad could talk to the old ones of Rhodes, what remains of the Telkhines. Dad had his own seadragon. Do you know who carries around the other ninety-something percent of what used to be his power? Me! I die every time I look at him—because it's me who's killing him. And I can't even cry about it! I am his destroyer, Nic, and my mother and my grandmother made me what I am. Is this what you wanted to hear?"
Nicole shook her head, her mouth open but empty of words, her eyes filling up.
"No Wreath-wearer bullshit, Nicole. Welcome to my family. Just desperate plans for regaining the throne and restoration of an exiled great house—and we'll walk over our own goddamn children to get there."
Nicole grabbed Kassandra by the shoulders, her tears smearing the water in front of her face. She embraced her sister and held her so tight that the wound on her right side throbbed.
"I'm sorry." Kass dug her chin into Nicole's shoulder. "I should have told you this. I need you. To hold me together. Just for a little while longer. You are the smart one. You're the artist. You're the Renaissance Woman. You're on that damned Dean's List." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Please. I will give you anything. Just promise me you will help me get that murderer off the throne."
"I promise." Nicole released her, holding her at arms length, trying to read anything in her dark eyes. "We're sisters. I promise."
Kassandra closed her eyes, shivering, her face going pale.
"Are you okay?"
Kassandra waved at her wearily. "Fine. I did something... and I don't think it worked the way I wanted it to. Besides, you want to ask me something."
"I do? I mean, yes, I do."
"What is it?"
"Are you... " Nicole hesitated. "Are you the disease or the cure?"
"I'm the Wreath-wearer. Part of me doesn't even think in those terms. Part of me is scared that I am the first."
"Okay," she said slowly. "I don't understand why you don't take the throne right now."
Kassandra pointed to her head. "Because it's telling me I'm not ready. I still need many things. Some of the things it wants me to do I can't even tell you—or I'm ashamed to tell you. One I can. I need an army—either created and trained by me, persuaded to fight for me, or somehow compelled or paid to fight. Less than five thousand."
"From where?"
"I've answered that a hundred ways. Everything from kidnapping Navy SEALs to the appearance of an entire army out of thin air. A hundred paths. I've set them all in motion. One of them is bound to succeed."
Nicole looked doubtful. "SEALs—as in elite fighting forces?"
Kassandra placed a hand on her hip. "Not really kidnapping. You don't think I could persuade them?"
"How?" An answer shot to the surface of her mind and she blushed.
"What do you take me for?" Kassandra's mock anger slid off her face, replaced with a scheming smile. "Sure, I could do them all. I did think of that—but only because I was listing every possible method of getting them to fight for me."
"And how would you actually do it?"
"Give them the curse. If I have assessed them correctly, very few would refuse to join me in return for the powers you now have."
In a whisper, Nicole said, "I guess I can see that. One more?"
"Sure." The word was bright, a forced cheerfulness, and the effort it took was obvious.
"I have to know. Did you plan to tell me this? I mean what you said about your mother and Lady Kallixene. Is this part of some schedule?"
Kassandra nodded before she even considered a lie, and then a look of panic hit her features. "I'm so sorry. I am the Wreath-wearer. I can't turn it off. I have it all in here. Down to you standing up to me and squeezing me tight and forcing me to shed my tear and summoning Ochleros with—"
"Lady Kassandra," said the demon's rumbling voice. "I have brought Lady Nikoletta's armor and sword as you requested."
Nicole spun away from Kassandra, glaring at Ochleros.
"Please believe me, Nic."
"It's okay." Nicole sounded distracted, and held up one hand approvingly. "I stood up to you. I think I expected it. I would have... I had already made up my mind not to believe you if you said this wasn't planned. I promised without making it a condition on the rest. I will help you." She stared at the knee-length hauberk of silver scales Ochleros held out to her. "You're giving me my own armor?"
"And a sword."
Nicole kicked up to Ochleros, unafraid, and took the armor off a stiff frame made from what looked like a tree of some woody kind of coral. There was more scale armor clothing folded over one of the branches.
"Pants too?"
Kassandra nodded. "Put them on. This is a three-dimensional world. They can come at you from any direction. An attack from underneath is especially effective. You don't want a spear up your twat."
"That's—" Nicole stuttered the next word. She squeezed her legs together, looking down with a worried look. "—d-dishonorable!"
"To say the least." Kassandra laughed.
Chapter 19 - Tribunal at Sea
The Wreath of Poseidon was a gift of the Lord of the Sea to the Alkimides family for their victory over the Seaborn Royal House, Telkhines. Bitter, as are many gifts of the sea, the Wreath quickly became a burden to the new Royal House, steering the Alkimides more than guiding them in their rule over the Seaborn.
—Michael Henderson, notes
Deputy Art Ramirez of the Monterey County Sheriff's Department stepped cautiously from his patrol vehicle, coming around the back to use the armored sedan for cover. He twisted up the magnification on his lenses and scanned the spectral data of the compact car parked in the weeds next to a couple of wind-gnarled cypress trees. A week's layer of sand and dust coated the old Toyota compact, opaquely sheeting the windows. He noted the lack of footprints near the vehicle and approached cautiously.
Nothing appeared out of the ordinary in the scan of the car, blocks of color with a lot of warm pink because the sun had baked the metal and plastic body for . . .
SatStat cut into his comm in a pleasant woman's voice with, "The target vehicle appeared in its current location between 08:14 hours PST October 4 and 17:50 hours PST October 4."
Deputy Ramirez crouched down and wiped the sand from the Toyota's rear license plate with one gloved hand, and whispered, "Nine days."
Satellite Status continued after a computationally intensive pause with, "Single occupant for the target vehicle, possibly female, shoes: no, footprints lead west from vehicle, terminate in the Pacific Ocean."
Ramirez stood up, turning to face the low wind-smoothed dunes. Nothing but the gulls crying and grass shooting from caps of creamy sand.
The plate-run status service cut in, this time in a man's clipped tones, "Target vehicle registered to Corina Lairsey. C-O-R-I-N-A. First name. L-A-I-R-S-E-Y. Last name. Female. Age: Twenty-two. Height: five feet seven inches, one hundred and seventy point one eight centimeters... "
He let the voice slide into the background as he scraped the powder off the rear driver's side window and peered inside. Corina Lairsey's clothes and shoes had been thrown into the backseat on top of what looked like a large musical instrument case, and next to it, a wad of elastic webbing used to hold scuba tanks in place.
Ramirez straightened, a chill running under his armor. "Repeat that, Status."
The service paused for context and then responded. "Report filed October 6 with MPU. Corina Lairsey reported last seen AM October 4."
Ramirez's twelve-year-old daughter, Catherine, was taking diving lessons in Sand City while he stood beside the vehicle of a diver who had apparently gone into the Pacific nine days before and never come out.
"Stat, I need a Coast Guard notify on Corina Lairsey, and a vehicle pick up."
The deputy climbed to the peak of the dunes and stared out at the Pacific Ocean, empty except for rec traffic, mostly sailboats. "Where did you go, Corina Lairsey?"
"Corina Lairsey?"
She couldn't focus, her thoughts gathering too much momentum to stop when she needed them to, stumbling by like a drunk trying to stick a key in a lock. She heard someone calling her name through the ice-cold alcohol rinse she seemed to be soaking in. It was a man's voice, with an accent she couldn't place, something close to Spanish. For a moment, she dreamed that the voice was Aleximor's real one, that she'd been rescued and Aleximor had been expelled, and her body was hers again.
But it wasn't his voice.
There was a torrent of thoughts sloshing around her mind, the rush of a fear so deep-cutting it hurt to remember, and looking back meant blindness.
Don't look back. You're not going back. He's going to kill you. He's going to kill you slowly.
The scene in front of Aleximor's eyes pushed through her defenses.
She saw the captain of a ship and two other officers sitting across from her. Corina's thoughts coalesced, and took in the scene as clearly as she was able to through whatever psychological game Aleximor was playing. What's wrong with you? Did they give you something to... um... calm your nerves? It doesn't feel like you're pretending. After a moment's consideration, she added, I don't need you weirding out on me.
He rocked back and forth, staring vacantly at the table, occasionally glancing up at the three men.
She didn't like the cold bureaucratic looks the officers wore.
Oh my God, they're going to try me and execute me.
They'd caught her with scissors, blood everywhere, running down her arm, Pinnet's body on the floor—obviously one of the crew—and there she was with the murder weapon. Thoughts piled up in her mind, tumbling over one another. What kind of laws prevail at sea? Can they hang me from the yardarm? Plank walking. International waters. Whose jurisdiction? No passport, sold into slavery, Interpol, South American prison, Count of Monte Cristo, nameless grave. She thought of never seeing her sister or aunt again. She thought about the cool Pacific on her skin—her own skin, about her music, about her car parked next to a cypress tree, baking in the dry California sun.
Cypress branches, the symbol of mourning.
The oldest of the ship's officers, a gray haired grandfatherly man, watched her with intense rust-brown eyes. He leaned across the table, sliding his hat aside and patting the arm of the man on his left, a huge angry bald man in an officer's uniform with a handgun in a holster on the table in front of him.
The captain said softly, "Miss Lairsey? Please tell us what happened."
A sharp biting anger uncoiled inside Corina. When did you kill Mr. Pinnet? How many days have passed?
She remembered a dream of night, infinite darkness, loose gravel under her bare feet, blindness, and a strong wind at her back, as if she had been teleported somewhere outside her body.
Where have I been?
Aleximor was tight with his memories and thoughts, and it was only when he let his guard down or in his dreams that Corina picked them up clearly. He opened something up in his soul and told her, Two days have passed, Corina. I thought you might tell me where you have been. I have called for you. I thought you had somehow fallen into insanity or... departed.
She spent a few seconds entertaining insanity and how pleasant that might be.
What do they want? Tell them that Pinnet tried to rape me, he touched me, tried to rip my clothes off.
Her own voice, rough with pain, echoed her thoughts for the uniformed men in the room. "Pinnet attacked me and tried to rape me, he touched me, and tried to tear off my clothes."
Corina wondered if Aleximor had been playing the confused victim in order to buy time for her, because he suddenly lifted his head, making eye contact with the officers and spoke clearly.
"He held my hands down, and then I kicked him."
Stay in character. You need to put some pain back in your voice. Look, the older one's shoulders just dropped. He's relieved to hear you say Pinnet attacked you. This was self-defense. Tell them that everything happened so fast. The man pinned you to the bed and the next second you were grabbing the scissors out of the bathroom drawer. Tell them!
Aleximor dialed up the mental disarray. "Every... thing. It happened very quickly. He pinned me to the bed. I did not know what to do. I—"
The next thing you remember!
"The next thing I remember... I was taking the scissors from the drawer and... and... "
You don't know what happened next. It's all a blur.
He brought her voice down to a whisper. "I do not remember what happened after that."
Now, cover your face with your hands. Can you cry?
Aleximor gasped loudly and sobbed into his hands.
Not bad. Don't overdo it.
The captain cleared his throat. "I apologize, Miss Lairsey. I am so sorry."
Don't look up. Keep your head down. It's the older one in the middle speaking.
"I am Martim Teixeira, Captain of the Maria Draughn. Mr. Pinnet was a... violent man, and I am terribly sorry for what has happened."
Corina wondered what kind of name Ta-shay-rah was.
"Miss Lairsey," said the skinny boyish looking officer to the captain's right in a polite British accent. "I... er... have a few questions for you. I'm Second Officer McHutcheon. I cover the medical needs of the crew. Can you explain the skin between your fingers?"
Smile sheepishly. Corina felt Aleximor tense up. Don't know what a sheep is? Guiltily, as if your friends talked you into getting your nipples pierced. More muscles tensing. Didn't you do anything outrageous when you were a kid—just to piss off your parents? Hurry! Make a face. Say, "It's all the rage in Hollywood. Cosmetic mermaid surgery. All the girls are getting it done." Say it just like that.
"... all the girls are getting it done."
McHutcheon stared at Corina as if an eye had opened in the middle of her forehead.
Shrug your shoulders and glare at him defiantly. Do it!
"Fine," said McHutcheon softly, not knowing how to respond to someone who purposefully mutilated her hands. Californians, they were notorious for such behavior. "Can you tell me, Miss Lairsey, what happened to Mr. Pinnet's eyes?"
Oh shit. He ate them?
"Miss Lairsey, we looked around my cabin when we cleaned up... after the mess, and his eyes... they're gone."
Tell them you don't remember. Say it, "I don't know." Put your face in your hands, sob a little.
"I don't know," whispered Aleximor, curling into a shuddering knot, burying his face in his hands.
The room was still except for Corina's trembling and sniffling. The three officers watched her with varying levels of concern. The second officer, Alfred Harvey, was on Teixeira's left. His fingers played with the snap on the holster strap, his little finger tapping the handgun's black plastic grip.
Harvey cleared his throat. "Miss Lairsey. I have a couple questions."
Aleximor looked up, eyes puffy and red, then he went into a full breakdown with tears streaming down his face. "Stop staring at me, please. I am not a monster. I don't know what happened. I don't remember."
Yes, you are.
The captain and McHutcheon looked away, uncomfortable. Harvey seemed unmoved by the display. "This doesn't have anything to do with Pinnet's attack. I'm simply curious."
Corina felt something heavy drop inside her body. Aleximor sensed danger in Harvey's tone.
Aleximor brought Corina's voice low and solemn. "What is it?"
"We brought you on board and you had a sealed container for your driver's license and a few other possessions." He gestured casually with an open hand. "Why are there two rings in the pouch when, with the skin between your fingers, you cannot wear rings?"
Ha! Get out of that one. What you get for fucking with my hands!
Aleximor nodded, relieved, wiping the tears from his eyes. "They belonged to my mother. She and my father died in a... terrible . . .
Fucker! Car accident. Say it. A drunk driver killed them.
... and I carry them for... " Aleximor's whispering voice trailed off. He was fishing for something to say.
Damn you! You carry them because they mean a lot to you, it's like Mom is with me, when I carry them.
"... because they remind me of my mother, as if she is with me when I carry them."
"Return everything to Miss Lairsey," said the captain, annoyed at Harvey's question. Aleximor's eyes dropped to his hands, but he looked up at the slim watertight pouch Harvey slid across the table, grabbing the gun on the return trip and putting it out of sight.
"I'm sorry," said Harvey roughly. "I didn't mean to upset you further." He didn't ask his last question—why there were four pieces of what looked like bone in the sealable pouch.
"I think we are done for now, Miss Lairsey," said Teixeira, turning to McHutcheon. "Can she return to your cabin, Daniel?"
"Yes, sir. The room's been cleaned. We don't have any women's clothing on board. Sorry, Miss Lairsey, but we have collected something for you to wear."
Aleximor bowed Corina's head almost to the table and whispered dejectedly, "That will be fine. Thank you."
McHutcheon continued as if speaking of nothing more serious than the weather. "We've zipped Pinnet in the bag and put him in the cooler on deck three. Phari turned the refrigeration on for me. I can perform a cursory examination for cause of death, sir."
Teixeira cleared his throat, indicating with a sour look that, although a response was required, he found it distasteful. "The insurance company suggested it and more. I told them we would do what we could." He held up a hand to stop McHutcheon from continuing the discussion, and turned to Harvey. "See that Miss Lairsey gets to her room safely, Alfred."
"Sir." Harvey stood, scraping his chair against the rough wood floor.
He led Corina up a flight of metal stairs into the sunlight. Aleximor, stunned for a moment, held his hands over his eyes, squinting painfully at the dark blue surface of the ocean off the starboard side the Maria Draughn. He breathed in a lungful of the sea air.
"Beautiful."
"This way, Miss Lairsey," said Harvey, directing her along the open corridor to a white painted metal door standing ajar at the other end. They went through it, down a flight of stairs, turned right at the crossing of two long hallways. They made a left down a short hall with a white metal wall at the end, blank except for a big red fire extinguisher below a sign that had the word "Fire" in half a dozen languages.
He opened McHutcheon's cabin with his set of keys, and held the door for her. At the threshold, he gave Corina a curt nod, his face tight with something he wanted to say. "I don't trust you," he managed in a low voice. "I don't know what it is about you, but you haven't been truthful."
Aleximor took this in with an appropriate blank stare. "I am not certain I understand you." His gaze dropped to the name badge. "Officer Harvey."
Harvey didn't answer, but gave her another nod and extended his arm to the door.
Corina's thoughts sharpened to a bitter edge. Which means you will be the first to die, Officer Harvey.
Aleximor latched the door and made a careful circuit of the room, looking in all the corners for intruders before smiling to himself and responding to Corina. "You heartless villain. Harvey is not next."
It seemed to me your obvious next move. Who then?
"The physician, McHutcheon."
Why? I liked him. He scared me the least of the three.
"Did you not catch the current—the curiosity—in his tone when he asked about Mr. Pinnet's eyes? Not Harvey, but McHutcheon. He is meddlesome, but incautious. Harvey is wary, and anticipates a move against him. It will not come for days."
Saving the best for last?
"I would not say best, but the one who possesses a moderate amount of common sense. Intelligence, wisdom, these are simpler things to manipulate. Common sense is another matter. The captain is another one to watch." Aleximor stopped to ponder something. "Corina." He paused as if selecting his words carefully. "You have astonished me several times... in the great similarity in the turn of our minds." He actually sounded nervous, which scared Corina more than his anger. "We are alike in many ways, and, in such a short number of days, I have come to have a high opinion of your judgment. So much, that I cannot help fancying that with enough time together you and I will grow to... enjoy each other's company."
Please... Her thoughts begged for a response, rolling awkwardly over each other. Don't. I can't... She reined in every stray notion, held them in mental fists with knuckles going white, and then continued in a controlled manner. At this time I can only consider you an unavoidable evil. I see no resemblance in our characters, motives, or judgments, and certainly nothing that approaches a faithful portrait. And because nearly all of her thoughts surfaced as something Aleximor heard: Why am I speaking like this?
"Have it as you choose, dear heart. We must dance together for some time. Until I can devise a method for extracting you."
She didn't want to piss him off, either. What did you expect? That my acceptance of this would be ready, that I would be grateful? I said unavoidable. It doesn't mean I won't speak to you. Or think to you... or whatever this is called.
"I happily accept that, Corina Lairsey."
Go to the mirror.
She felt her body tense up. "For what?"
Normally one stands before a mirror to see what one looks like. I just want to see what you've done to me.
Aleximor made his way to the alcove that served as the cabin's bathroom, pushing the accordion door back as he stepped inside.
I look like shit! I have bags under my eyes. Ponytail's still tied—and a Bride of Frankenstein stripe of white hair. I'm still wearing the sweatshirt and pants you killed Pinnet in? And that's blood all over me? You didn't change? She didn't wait for him to answer. You've let me go to hell. Open my mouth. Holy fuck! Brush my teeth. You let me sit in front of those three—and speak—with my teeth looking like that?
"How do I brush my teeth?"
Corina sighed. You sea people—they must be rotting in your skulls.
He grinned, showing her teeth again in the mirror. "Sharks do not clean theirs."
They also have several sets of them. There should be a tube of something. This is the doctor's cabin, so there must be toothpaste. Look at the bed. I think someone's laid clothes out for me. There may be other stuff.
There were two pairs of sweatpants about her size, two T-shirts, one a faded black cotton, another with ¡Vamos a vacilar! in bold white letters. Aleximor picked through a plastic baggy full of what looked like supplies someone had accumulated from various Mexican resort hotels, a toothbrush, tube of toothpaste, hair brush, shower cap, a razor and little bottles of shampoo and lotion.
He looked at the razor curiously.
That's for my legs.
Corina felt the muscles in her face tighten into a questioning scowl. Aleximor twirled the handle between two fingers. "How do you use this for your legs?"
Shaving. Underarms too.
"Must I?"
Yes, it is... expected. With you in here, I am dreading taking a shower. I don't even want to think about... other things.
"A shower?"
People up here take a shower or bath, get in the water once a day to clean off.
"Do they really? And Mr. Pinnet?"
Apparently had a disregard for society's rules. Probably didn't brush his teeth either. Most people take a shower every day. They get up, they brush their teeth, they take a shower, they go to work or school.
"And what did you do, Corina?"
God, it's the weirdest thing, hearing my own voice ask me questions. I went to school. I worked in a coffee shop in downtown SJ.
"What sort of school?"
Music. I play the cello. I'm a comp major.
Which meant nothing to Aleximor. "Comp? What is a chello?"
Composition. It means I am being trained to compose, to make music. A cello is a string instrument, usually played with a bow.
"I have not played in many years."
Centuries.
"Yes," he said almost sadly. He made a defenseless gesture toward the baggy full of bathroom supplies and the sink. "If you would, Corina, instruct me in what to do."
Teeth first. Get the tube and the little brush. The big brush is for my hair. Open the cap. Squeeze a little onto the bristles. A little! Okay, wipe some of that off. Not on the damn towel! Scrape a little off with your finger and let it go down the drain. Turn the water on. Right knob is cold water. Now brush.
Aleximor stuck the brush in tentatively and the toothpaste spread over her molars. He pushed harder, rubbing the paste into the teeth.
He gagged, his eyes watering. "Buggering Hades!" He bent forward and spit foam all over the counter. A spray of white hit the mirror. "It hurts! This paste is poison." He cupped water in his hand and slurped it into her mouth, spitting and coughing.
It's minty. All toothpaste is like that. Don't be such a weakling. You didn't even start brushing. At least two minutes in there. Come on.
He reluctantly stuck the brush back in her mouth, pushing it along her teeth and gums, making painful faces, glaring at himself in the mirror—and in effect, glaring at Corina. "If this is some sort of trick, I will make you pay." He used the same tone he had used with the corpse of Pinnet, telling it that he would make them all pay, but with the toothbrush and a mouthful of foaming toothpaste, Corina had trouble understanding his threat, and so she ignored him.
Spit it all out. Rinse the brush. Okay, let's move on to the hair. Take the ponytail out. Let's see what we have to work with.
Her hair came out of the ponytail like an unfolding dragon, snapping and shuddering like chiropteran wings—everything short of breathing fire. Her hair stuck out and poked her shoulders in stiff wiry bundles.
That's just gross. My hair's crunchy. Shit, I need a shower.
Chapter 20 - At the Captain's Table
Naiads are long-lived river witches, descendents of the Potameides, with far-reaching powers over freshwater lakes and rivers. Some of them have cultivated powers over rain storms. They are traditionally at odds with—and sometimes outright enemies of—the Seaborn, but Kassandra managed to sway an entire family to help her fight the great army of the drowned dead, the Olethren, carrying out her plans with freezing rain and weather.
—Michael Henderson, notes
Bend over. Place the towel evenly on both sides, bring them together at the forehead and twist. Tighter. Okay, now straighten up and push the top over my head. That's it.
Aleximor stood in front of the mirror with a decent towel twist. The black T-shirt, which smelled strongly of laundry detergent, was too short, curling just above Corina's navel. The faded blue sweats were baggy, bunching up around the ankles, and hung so low on Corina's hips, it showed the top of the V-cut of her pelvis. She sighed to herself when Aleximor's eyes dropped to the skin above the waistband.
Fourteen or four-hundred, that's still all you males think about. God, I'm totally skanked in these. Maybe you can make a belt or something.
"If the waist of the pants is excessively low, that is skanked?"
Something like that. It's not something I—or even you—should strive for. Open the drawer next to the sink. See if the doc has safety pins.
Five minutes later, with blood oozing from pin sticks in both thumbs, and Aleximor in a sour mood, Corina had her way and the sweatpants clung nicely over her hips. They still belled around her feet, but that couldn't be helped without cutting them, and they had probably confiscated all the scissors during Pinnet's cleanup.
A knock on the door brought Aleximor around, bringing his webbed hands up into claws. He froze, a song starting in his throat.
Say, who is it?
He cleared his throat. "Who is it?"
"Harvey, Miss Lairsey. The captain has asked me to escort you to the dining room for lunch."
Aleximor turned to look in the mirror with a questioning stare.
Don't you know anything? Tell him we're not ready. Come back in ten minutes.
"We're—I am not ready, Mr. Harvey. Will the captain allow me ten more minutes?"
"Certainly. I'll wait here in the hall."
Let's look at my hair. Hang the towel. Don't just throw it on the floor. Let's... um... run my fingers through my hair. Oh. It doesn't work with the mermaid hands. Get the brush. What do the Seaborn do with their hair?
"Braids, for the most part." He brushed her hair straight and used one finger to split it into three even sections. "Most commonly in three braids, two on the side, one in the center."
Interesting. Do you know how to braid hair? And keep it down. Mr. Common Sense is right outside the door.
"Certainly," he whispered. "Men braid their hair as well."
Really? I'd like to see that.
"It is mainly a preparation for war—or special occasions." Aleximor stared into the distance, his vision going foggy as he concentrated on twisting and looping Corina's hair into braids. He found rubber bands in one of the bathroom drawers and tied them off. "We will not remain here long. You will see many of them—as soon as my work here is complete."
She was afraid she already knew the answer, but asked anyway, "Work?"
"Gathering the dead," he said casually, pausing because her question interrupted his thoughts. "What was I... oh, yes, braids. The king's trusted, the oktoloi, wear theirs in braids every day. They are killers. Every day is war for them. They are the front line to the king." As if he couldn't remember mentioning it, he said, "I am going to kill the king, you know."
Yes, I am aware of your... displeasure with the Seaborn royalty. And some group called Rexenor. That Kassander, the one I saw in your dreams, he was a Rexenor. Then there's a guy named Strates Unwinder. You sure hate a lot of people.
With a very satisfied voice, he said, "Then it is settled." His voice dropped. "Let us kill everyone on board the Maria Draughn. We will then go the Nine-cities and find a way to kill the King of all the Seaborn."
Corina's soul shuddered, nothing settling inside her.
Barefoot, in baggy blue sweats and a tight black T-shirt, Aleximor stepped Corina's body into the hall, looking up and back for Harvey. The officer stood in the shadows of the nearest junction of hallways, holding his open hand in the direction of the stairs.
"This way, Miss Lairsey." He gave Corina a quick, professional look. "I see that you have found everything. I'm sorry about the clothing. Captain Teixeira requested the smallest sizes of the crew."
Aleximor looked down at Corina's body in the somewhat skanky attire. "These work quite well, thank you. And please thank those of your crew who provided them. I shall find a way to return the favor."
I'm sure you will.
The dining room fell silent when Corina stepped through the door with Second Officer Harvey, forks lifted halfway to mouths, heads swiveling toward her, eyes narrowing. The captain sat at a table in one corner with two officers and five empty chairs. Eleven of the crew occupied three more tables in the room. Aleximor looked around, taking in some of their expressions. Most of them puzzled him, but he thought he saw admiration in one or two, deep curiosity in several more.
It appears that Mr. Pinnet was not well liked among the crew. There is fear in their eyes, but praise as well. Corina huffed—in her imagination. Praise? Are you making me talk—think like this? Her thoughts seemed to come out normally, but then they quickly adjusted to some kind of mold imposed by Aleximor's thought patterns. It was like hearing the echo of her voice—she shouted her thoughts across the canyon and somehow the canyon walls changed them on the bounce.
Captain Teixeira stood, folding a white cloth napkin. He placed it next to his plate, pulled out the chair to his right for Corina, and held it while she tried to figure out how to use one. She gripped the seat as if it was going to buck her off it. She had trouble sliding it closer to the table. Wedged between the chair's back and table's edge, she picked up the dessert spoon, staring at it, an inch from her nose, put it back in its place. She shifted the forks, clinking the salad with the entree. She looked around the dining room as if she had never seen one before.
"Is everything fine, dear?" Captain Teixeira leaned toward her. "You look lost."
Aleximor snapped straight, sliding up in the seat. "Yes, Captain Teixeira. As well as any can expect after the journey I have had. I understand that I have you and your generous crew to thank for finding clothes for a wayfarer on such limited notice. Please pass on my gratitude."
"I... will," said the captain roughly, put off balance by her formal tone. "I would ask you a few questions, Miss—"
Aleximor put one hand on the white linen next to his arm, folding the web of skin between each finger neatly into the palm. "Please call me Corina."
Are you flirting with the old man?
"I am Martim." He bowed his head formally, his gray brows curling into each other, as if to say that it was perfectly acceptable to use his first name. He lifted his head, his rust-colored eyes fixed on her face, thinking that he had been at sea for three of this young woman's lifetimes. "I have worked on ships of every type on every ocean in this world, Corina. I have the sea in my soul. I have lived near the water or on it over sixty years. So long, that I cannot help but imagine ocean in all directions, and the sight of brown rock and steel cities standing above the blue always surprises me. I won't say that anything I have witnessed in the last two days surprises me because I know the Sea, I have felt her fingers, and her clay. The medium in which she works, is the unimaginable."
Aleximor tensed up at the mention of the Sea, taking his hand off the table and placing it in his lap.
Teixeira picked up her tension and patted the table where her arm had rested. "You have nothing to fear now. I have alerted Interpol and the American embassy in Sâo Paulo. We are scheduled into Sâo Luís in three days and Pôrto Alegre in eleven. I will see to it that you have transportation from there to Sâo Paulo."
"That is very kind of you," said Aleximor in a whisper, eyes on the empty ornate china, his fingers absently pleating the hem of the black T-shirt. Corina heard the stream of thoughts flowing in his mind, a waterfall's noisy rush for the bottom of the gorge.
Corina answered a couple of his obvious questions. Interpol is the international police. They will question you about the killing. And they will mean business—not like the officers on a merchant ship. That talking to earlier was more likely a standard questioning with witnesses for insurance purposes. If Interpol doesn't like what they hear, we could end up in jail.
Aleximor twitched at the last word, making fists and curling his toes into the plastic tiled floor.
Captain Teixeira went on in a calm grandfatherly tone. "When you have settled in, I would love to hear your story." His eyes met Harvey's on the other side of Corina. "We all would. We have asked ourselves how is it that you managed to swim close to eighty kilometers offshore? We have found no acceptable explanation." He hoped this would be enough to spark the answers to questions he felt uncomfortable asking, such as how she had managed to survive the drag beneath the ship. "Do not answer now, or give thought to it. Please eat. Mr. Wilkins has made excellent chicken salad sandwiches. There is also a green salad, apple pie."
The captain waved for the tray and poured ice water into the glass in front Corina. The sandwiches looked good, even with the wilted lettuce and skimpy amount of chicken.
Damn, I'm hungry. I love chicken salad—you love chicken salad. Take two.
Harvey sat on Corina's right, his face impenetrably serious. He picked at a couple potato chips, pushing them around his plate, breaking them one at a time with his index finger.
Aleximor held a triangular cut half a sandwich inches from Corina's face, sniffing it, fingers sinking into the bread, swallowing dryly at the thought of putting it in his mouth. What was this hideously creamy chunky mixture squeezed between two wedges of a stiff foamy substance? This did not even look like food.
Take a bite! I'm starving! Are you the Bone-gatherer or aren't you? You work with rotting human corpses for a living—you raise them from the dead! And you're going to let a little chicken and mayo hold you up?
He took a bite, teeth sinking through bread into the fibrous meat. The gush of tart creamy mayonnaise over his tongue made his stomach lurch. A slippery piece of lettuce poked at his gag reflex. He clamped his mouth shut tearing the rest of the sandwich away, fingers shaking as he dropped it onto the plate. He held his face still with intense concentration and chewed, crushing the mix with his molars, grinding it into smaller swallowable lumps of sour buttery fibrousness.
He managed to get one bite down, and by the way he glared at the remains of the sandwich on his plate, it was clear that he wasn't going for seconds.
The potato chips, on the other hand, he adored. He munched them, snapped them into pieces between his front teeth, licked his fingers, let them soften into a salty potato-y paste on his tongue.
"These are divine!" Aleximor declared, sliding another pile onto his plate and devouring them, ignoring the stares from around the dining room.
Officer Harvey, Corina's unofficial escort, led her to Maria Draughn's bow to show her the coast of Panama off the port side. The ship was enormous to Aleximor's mind, even with Corina telling him that, as far as modern ships went, it was relatively small. Like Officer McHutcheon's cabin, everything was flat and angular, painted dull red or yellow.
"That is Cambutal and there's Venao coming up." He pointed over the bow. "We're heading into the Gulf of Panama."
Aleximor was silent, content to listen to Harvey's geography lessons, astounded that the surfacers had managed to carve a channel through the land, joining two seas in the process.
Officer McHutcheon made his way through the containers on the deck to the bow. "Miss Lairsey, the captain has asked me to check on your wounds."
Aleximor turned, and Corina hoped her own effort to put a questioning scowl on her face helped. "What wounds?"
McHutcheon looked at Harvey with a puzzled expression. His gaze swung back to Corina. "Your back, Miss. I stitched four lacerations and bandaged the rest. You don't appear to be in discomfort. I can provide medicine if you like."
Tell him to stop calling me "Miss". Corina's fine. So, you managed to "lacerate" my back on your devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea hull-length joy ride? Why don't I feel anything?
"You may call me Corina. Please do. And I feel fine, Mr. McHutcheon." Aleximor tilted his head back, which Corina realized was what sea-people did to mean the same thing as shaking the head. "What would you have me do?"
McHutcheon looked at Harvey again for approval, but spoke to Corina. "If you could come back to my—well, your cabin for a few minutes, I'd like to see if the stitching is secure. I'll also change your bandages and check for infection."
"Very well."
She followed Harvey and McHutcheon along the hatch covers, through shadowy passages between deck-mounted containers, forty-foot long orange and blue metal boxes.
Some nice dark hiding places there, said Corina in mock suspicion as Aleximor took in every detail of the ship's crowded deck. He didn't answer her.
McHutcheon shut the cabin's door and Aleximor—apparently without thinking—pulled off the thin black T-shirt.
What the fuck are you doing! Cover yourself. McHutcheon wants to look at your back. Not your front. Corina collected her anger, and commanded Aleximor. Ask him where he wants you to sit.
"Where would you like me to sit, Mr. McHutcheon?"
"Daniel, ma'am," he said, eyes averted, cheeks a little red. "Anywhere is fine." He pointed to the edge of the bed and opened a kit of first aid supplies and stainless steel tools, mainly tweezers and scissors.
Harvey, who had stopped just inside the door, took a few steps closer, frowning and jutting his chin at Corina's back. Two strips of cotton gauze with thin brown lines of dried blood ran at opposite angles across her scapulas. Seven clear adhesive strips crisscrossed her back. There had been other scrapes and bruising when they hauled Corina from the Pacific.
They were gone.
McHutcheon nodded to Harvey with a scowl, peeling off one of the bandages for a three-centimeter long gouge that he'd sewn together. His mouth parted, dropping all the way open by the time he worked halfway through the gauze removal. "Th—the stitches are gone?"
Aleximor looked over his shoulder. "I heal quickly, Daniel."
The officer's hands trembled and he let go of the bandage.
Aleximor added an insistent look. "Can you remove them? They itch."
"Sure, Miss... Corina." He removed both inch-wide strips of gauze and tape. Her skin was unblemished beneath them. He removed the other bandages, leaned back and attempted, unsuccessfully, to shake his head. "Quick—quickly is one thing. You don't even have scarring. Nothing. Very unusual. It's as if... " His voice trailed off. He started over. "When we took you from the water, the back of your wetsuit was in shreds. The skin on your back—from your shoulders to about your hips, was scraped and ripped in twenty places. I soaked up a towel-full of blood."
"And now they're gone," added Harvey, his voice dripping suspicion.
"I hope it will not sink me in your esteem," said Aleximor with a pause and a tightening at the corners of Corina's mouth, a hint of a smile.
What was that? Are you getting snarky?
Aleximor ignored her. "May I replace my top?"
McHutcheon stuttered something and nodded, packing away his tools.
Officer Harvey rubbed the back of his bald head, a tired I-really-don't-need-this look on his face. He folded his arms and glared at her as she stood up, walked to the curtain-covered window and put the black shirt back on.
McHutcheon left the cabin in a hurry, and Harvey, filling the doorway, pointed at Corina. He kept his voice low. "You're trouble. I know it when I see it. I want you off this ship." His voice went icy. "And I'll do what I think necessary to remove you."
"My thoughts are clearly bent the same way, Officer Harvey."
He spent a second wondering if she was referring to getting herself off the ship or him. He went with the first and held out his open hands in an I-don't-want-any-trouble gesture. "If you are not the evil I feel you are... "
Aleximor turned. "In which case you may be sure of my pardon."
Boy, he's got you pegged. You're sure McHutcheon's going first?
As soon as Harvey left the room, Aleximor lifted his eyes to the center I-beam and called down his familiar, the metal crab thing. It dropped to the all-weather industrial carpeting, landing in a crouch. "I am certain, Corina."
Aleximor fared better at dinner because the ship's excellent cook, Mr. Wilkins, made a broiled white fish for the captain and his party. The wine went straight to his and her mind, and half an hour into the meal, they were slurring words and making up a fabulous tale of their appearance eighty—no one-hundred—kilometers off the coast of Guatemala.
Corina listened with the rest of the crew—except those who manned the controls—as Aleximor, who was in top form, explained how he had been diving off Southern California and came up to find his boat missing.
Pirates took it?
Corina helped out with modern terms and places, because left on his own he came up with wilder tales: How he was picked up by fishermen—Corina had to reel him in a little at this point—and how they "sailed" to Mexico, where they dumped her overboard when she refused to ". . .work the fishing nets."
Corina interrupted him and demanded that he change the action to working instead of... performing something else—knowing that the East Coast Swing and conga lines weren't high on the list in Aleximor's mind of things she was expected to perform with—or on—the crew.
This is getting more ridiculous with every word. But Aleximor plodded on. They dumped you overboard with your wetsuit on?
"... and to my inexpressible vexation, I found myself far at sea—at night!" he made a gasping expression, and turned up the tension. "A shark circled three times. I went very still and he departed without my blood."
Look at them. Do they really believe this crap?
McHutcheon caught Teixeira's eye from the door, and the captain waved the second officer over. Harvey was right behind him. The officer who doubled as ship's physician looked sick; his fingers trembled, his face bone-pale with sweat dripping from his chin. He held his hands in a surgeon's just-scrubbed arrangement, stiffly in front of him.
Teixeira stood up, looking past the doc to Harvey. "What is it?"
"He did a prelim autopsy, captain."
Teixeira leaned away from them. "Already? I thought it was just an examination. Where?" With a frown at McHutcheon, "You always are an enthusiastic fellow."
"In the cooler on deck three. I think you should hear this directly from McHutcheon," said Harvey, pushing the doc forward.
"What is it, Daniel?"
"To rule out some kind of food-borne poison I... Pinnet's eyes, sir."
Teixeira waved dismissively. "Miss Lairsey gouged them out, I know. It's a horrendous thing, but look what he was about to do to her."
"But the eyes, sir." It looked as if McHutcheon was going to lose his lunch. All of the blood drained from his face. "I found them in his stomach, sir. Pinnet ate his own eyes."
Teixeira's mouth dropped open, and then he fell back into his chair.
Chapter 21 - Dreaming
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music.
—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare
Spend your time and thought—and energy—wisely.
Kassandra frowned at her mother's words.
She means spend them on the war, said Praxinos. Not on that young man.
The Wreath-wearers were divided over where she should spend her time and thought and energy.
He is a soldier. Learn from him, said Andromache.
He's gorgeous. Eupheron mimicked Andromache's stern voice. Learn from him.
Kassandra smiled, liking Eupheron more and more. "Nereus."
Her whisper became a shape in the water that darted in the darkness before her. She indicated a direction with a finger and it swam off like a fish seeking Nereus, slipping under doors, passing guards, courtyards, windows, until it found the son of Menophon sleeping in his bed.
Her whisper circled his body, gathering all its remaining power, then drove into his chest and touched his heart.
Nereus woke, clutching his bed, his blood thumping in his ears.
"Kassandra?"
He felt her, an echo of her warmth, as if she had been in his bed a moment before.
After calming his heart, Nereus kicked across his room, changed into something presentable, and left his family's house. He found Kassandra perched on the south facing wall of the Lasthenes Massif, the tower of rock that loomed over the rest of the Rexenor fortress.
He looked left and right as he swam to her. "Where are your guards?"
She didn't turn around. "I sent them away." Then, understanding his question, she added, "I don't think they're protecting me, so much as protecting the rest of Rexenor from me." Before he could ask why, she glanced over her shoulder and said, "I don't just bite." Then clicked her teeth.
She just caught his grin before she looked away. He rolled in the water, landing with his toes right on the edge of the wall on Kassandra's right. To a thinling, the move would have been acrobatic, but all the Seaborn moved as he did.
So smooth in the water. She looked down at his feet, and then let her focus wander up to his shoulder before she turned away. "Why aren't you afraid of me?"
"I am. Why don't you ever look me in the eyes?"
She felt her neck muscles tense, wanting to turn toward him. "I want to." She stared at his open hand instead, the gesture he'd made with the question. "I can't. Because I can turn you inside out with a look, Nereus." She liked saying his name. "Because I can make you... do things you don't want to do... with a look."
Eupheron chuckled in her head. Let's see if we can get him to turn you inside out.
Eupheron! Ampharete shouted and Kassandra bent against the pain in her head.
"Shut up, all of you." She grabbed Nereus by the arm, and he leaned back to hold her up.
The two of them stood on the edge of the battlement, staring into the pure night of the abyss.
Nereus sang softly about seabirds, the wet sand capturing their prints, the hollow roar of the waves, and the cry of a tern flying over the ocean, through storms and arctic winds, a bird that flies away and never returns to land.
There was no magic in him. He did not have a bleed from either of his parents, but there was something in the song. She felt it in the water, then inside her, a fluttering in her stomach, a sweetness in her mouth.
"The air is so weak." She whispered her thoughts aloud. "It cannot carry a song like the sea does. Music's effect on surfacers is so diluted,
yet it still has the power to capture their souls—even my soul."
After a few minutes, Nereus pulled her fingers off his arm and took her hand. "I wouldn't mind it."
"Mind what?"
"If you... turned me inside out."
Kassandra was silent a minute, then looked down at the Rexenor fortress. "Not here."
"Anywhere. I will follow."
She gripped his hand tighter and went headfirst off the wall, straight down into the dark. They were through the front gate, saluting guards, and into open water in seconds.
Kassandra squeezed with her fingers. "Do you trust me?"
"I am here, milady."
She frowned at the formality. "Want to go to the surface? Not to my house. There's some witch watching the place. Let's go someplace else."
Nereus smiled. "Lead on."
"Okay. I'm still learning this. I've never taken anyone along with me—so hold on."
He bowed his head to her. "Always."
She took in the solemn expression on his face. "Really. I mean, whatever you do, don't let go of me. The Ocean will rip you into pieces if we are not in contact. We'll be going fast. Even with practice I'm not always certain where I'll end up."
Kassandra grabbed Nereus and sang the song that dimmed the glow of the Wreath. Holding him tight with both hands, she called on the Ocean.
Nereus gasped, then shut his mouth. They were rocketing through the sea. He closed his eyes against the strain, his fingers digging into her skin.
It was over in what felt like minutes.
They surfaced along a sandy beach with tall buildings and bright city lights to their right, Kassandra stepping out of the water, bending once to get the sea out of her lungs. Nereus, not nearly as accomplished an interfacer, took a few minutes, coughing out water and sucking in gurgling lungfuls of air before he was ready to discover where she had taken him.
Kassandra grabbed Nereus' hand and led him up a set of stairs to an esplanade that ran along the ocean. She walked up to a man in a suit who was just putting away his cell phone. She smiled and said, "Buen día señor. ¿Sería tan amable en recomendarnos el mejor hotel de la ciudad, el más lujoso, con una gran vista al mar?"
The man looked at her for a moment, startled by her appearance. She was strangely dressed and soaking wet. But then he nodded knowingly, pointed in the direction of the city lights, and spoke in the same language.
Kassandra thanked him and pulled Nereus after her. "Come on. This way."
"What did you ask him?" Nereus looked around, jogging along with her. "Where are we?"
"Just south of Buenos Aires." She ran ahead, stopped and spun on her heels, closed her eyes when she kissed him. Digging one hand into the pocket of her shorts, she took out a small plastic packet. "I have my dad's credit cards. Let's get the biggest, most expensive room we can find."
Lord Gregor and his three daughters from the surface stayed for twenty-one days before Kallixene wanted a break, wanted her quiet fortress back to herself, and politely told them to go home—at least for a few days. The formalities tired her, the constant swimming around, and every family with a boy—and even a few with girls—begging an audience.
The young men of Rexenor kicked after the young ladies with their old-fashioned manners and formalities, singing them songs, asking permission to hold their hands, trying to catch their eyes when they passed by, fighting each other to be the first to bring them giant blooms of bristly serpulid worms that looked like bright red and yellow Christmas trees.
Jill was still the most approachable, perhaps because she fit in the least. Lady Kassandra—although obviously Seaborn, fluent in their native tongue and manners—scared them. Her ever-present crown—the Wreath—glowing green around her head, the gift of a god. Only Nereus asked for her hand in any of the dancing at the festivals. Nicole kept trying on her armor, in love with its smooth pliable fit on her body, appearing at one of the celebrations with her sword which, for some reason, put the boys off. She blushed when one of them, at Kassandra's instigation, called her basileia—princess—and then word got around that she, too, understood Hellene.
On the final evening, Gregor and his daughters met in the open fortress at the top of the Lasthenes Massif with Lady Kallixene, Phaidra and a small party of nobles and important friends of the family. The Lady of Rexenor gave each of her granddaughters a long dress of gold brocade, similar to the one she wore at her entrance in New Hampshire—which quickly jerked Jill from her steep envy-dive over Nicole's new armor.
Previously unaware of Jill's feelings—and angry at herself for not seeing them—Kassandra left in the middle of the party, returning less than an hour later with a small gold ring with an oval-cut emerald, presenting it to Jill without telling her that she had dug it out of the sand under the wreck of a Spanish ship.
Nicole nudged Kassandra. "Aunt Phaidra's looking for you. She was frantic when she heard you'd left. You didn't tell anyone where you were going."
"But I didn't say goodbye," said Kassandra as if this should have been enough for them to anticipate her quick return.
Jill and Nicole shouted back at her at the same time, "You never say goodbye!"
Phaidra swam up, excited, a blaze in her eyes that Kassandra remembered from their initial meeting in the shallows off the coast of Texas, back when Phaidra hated her niece on first sight.
She surprised Kassandra with a hug, flashing her Alkimides bracelet, and putting her lips to her ear, whispering, "The City! I have never been there. Why didn't you just ask me? Why go through mother? I'll bet she gave you a terrible time."
Kassandra looked sad for a moment. Recovering, she said, "Oh, come on. She's a pushover." She cleared her throat. "We'll be back from New Hampshire in a few days, and we'll plan the whole thing. I chose you because... " Kassandra drew away and showed her a clever smile. "Because I know you're not one to cower down here in the dark."
Phaidra jerked back, stunned, then grinned when she recognized the words. "You accused me of doing that when we first met."
"Remember that? I thought you were going to kill me—with your bare hands—and I had my sword out." Kassandra shook her head. "I think I said, I give you permission to cower down in the dark, which is even worse."
"Gods, even then you were a... What is the word surfacers use?"
"Bitch?" Kassandra ventured.
"Bitch! Yes!" Phaidra laughed. "Mother says you are different now. No, you're just more of one. That damned Wreath is a bitch maker."
Jill and Nicole floated off to one side, mouths open, frozen halfway to laughing.
Kassandra looked at Phaidra sagely. "Not its primary function, but I will add that to my list of things it does to me." She gripped her aunt's shoulder tight and pulled her closer. "Now, before we return from New Hampshire, you must participate in the assembly here, learn the rules of conduct, the order of presentation, what your mother says in response, how she is addressed by those who wait on her. Everything that you can learn here. I need you to know it."
"What?" Phaidra looked sickened. "Why?"
"It's what surfacers call homework. Five days. We're going to back to New Hampshire to check on the house, find out more about one of the king's spies watching the place—the woman with long black hair we saw in town—then we're coming right back here."
Kassandra released Phaidra and kicked to Jill and Nicole.
"We have to go."
Nicole stared straight up at thousands of meters of pure black ocean, opening her arms wide, a broad smile on her face. "I wish I could stay here forever."
The silence made her look down, her eyes wandering to her sisters. Jill grinned, understanding, but Nicole regretted saying it because she didn't like the sudden intensity in Kassandra's eyes. She attempted to recover with, "I mean, I don't feel like returning to the mundane. I know it's just a few days on the surface... we'll be back here soon."
Kassandra let half a smile reach her lips. "I know what you meant, Nic."
The house in North Hampton, New Hampshire gave her nightmares. Kassandra whimpered and made a growling noise deep in her throat, but she didn't wake up.
Tharsaleos. Fucking murdering Tharsaleos. She pictured his snarling gaunt features, his coiled gray hair and jutting beard. She hated calling him king, and stopped herself whenever the word came to her lips. He was her grandfather—the only living one she had because this one had killed the other one, Nausikrates Lord Rexenor.
In her dream, the kitchen downstairs swung into view and four soldiers, all with Tharsaleos' face, came up the stairs, spears stabbing at her. She had her sword out, ready to lop heads off shoulders. Their hands would be next—take their identifying bracelets. She let loose her battle cry and swung at the first to reach the top step.
Then their faces changed, becoming different soldiers. They were men with families. They had children. They had mothers who worried when they left the Nine-cities on a secret mission for their king.
Stratolaos, their commander, at the bottom of the stairs, reloaded his crossbow.
The three others, two with blue eyes, one with milky greenish-brown irises—these men were not the king, but in his service. They were loyal House Dosianax soldiers—some of the deadliest killers known to the Seaborn.
She shouted at them, warning them off. "Don't make me kill you!"
She had to fight them as well as her own sword skills. She had to fight Andromache inside her, who wanted to end this quickly. She had to placate the Wreath, which had other plans for these men. She steered the blade away from a thrust that would cut through the man's spine, driving it into his shoulder instead—something from which he'd heal.
Then she felt light, her feet leaving the floor. The world tilted steeply. All the air left her lungs. Her back hit the kitchen island counter, and it shook every thought from her head. Her sword clattered on the kitchen tiles. She stared up at the ceiling, wondering what had happened. Minutes seemed to pass before she noticed the spiky end of the bolt sticking out from her armor on her right side.
She tugged at it curiously, then climbed to her feet, anger flooding into her mind—an anger that overwhelmed her, that could wipe continents off the earth. She begged the other wearers in her head: Please make it stop! The anger took control of her. She didn't even feel the bolt standing stiffly from her side; the endorphin drive had kicked into high.
She screamed the Alkimides war cry and hacked into the right arm of the nearest Seaborn, into the bone, cutting away armor scales. Blood ran down her sword, globs of it floating off the edge, hitting the floor in little drumbeats. Her voice came through the noise of blood cold and clear, and she caught Stratolaos' eyes before he could look away. "... têi kreagrai tôn orchipedôn helkoimên es abysson."
Zypheria grabbed Kassandra by her shoulders and shook her. "Milady, wake up."
Her eyes closed tight, Kassandra screamed, "Don't make me kill you!"
"Come on, Kass," said Nicole.
"Please, milady, wake up." Zypheria shook her harder.
Kassandra grabbed her attacker's throat with one hand, blocking her left, and swung her legs around Zypheria's middle, locking her ankles behind her back. She shoved Zypheria's head back, releasing her throat, lining it up for a clean cut. Her sword slapped into her fist in the middle of her swing.
"Kass!" Jill's shriek broke her dream.
Kassandra stopped her sword at Zypheria's neck, drawing a line of blood that dribbled along the edge to the tip, staining the sheets with a dark bloom. Kassandra jerked back in horror, throwing the blade away. It hit the plaster and fell into the space between her bed and the wall. She held her hands open and climbed off Zypheria, shaking uncontrollably.
She staggered away, getting her back against her dresser. There was a hint of recognition in her gaze as it darted to Jill and Nicole and then back to Zypheria.
"Is it her? Or is it Andromache?" Nicole's voice came from far away.
Kassandra blinked, focusing on Zypheria. "No. It is me. I would be holding Zypheria's head right now if Andromache had been here. I am not half the swordswoman she is."
The four of them stood rooted to the floor for a minute, silent, wondering what to say next. Kassandra dropped her gaze to the floor, ashamed to look at them. She sat down on the bed, her face in her hands.
Michael Henderson and Gregor reached the door at the same time from opposite ends of the hall, jolted out of sleep, Gregor tying his robe closed.
"What's the screaming about?" said Michael groggily.
Gregor stared at Kassandra, but said nothing.
Zypheria gave them each a look that clearly told them to get lost. "It's girl talk. Go back to bed." She said something about calling on the Dark Mother and some nonsense about the Mysteries, nothing for the men to see.
Henderson and Gregor exchanged glances and wandered back to their rooms.
Zypheria kept one hand to her neck, nodding to Nicole. "Can you get me a towel? Jillian, please heat some water, enough for all of us to have hot chocolate."
With the sisters out of the room, she sat down next to Kassandra and put her arm around her. "What is wrong?"
"I killed them," Kassandra sobbed. "I killed their wives, their children."
"You let them go, milady."
"So that the Nine-cities would finally have news of me and my grandfather could do something far worse. I used them. I should have beheaded them and taken their bracelets when I had the chance. They would have died honorably—in battle. But I am evil." She gave Zypheria a pleading look. "What is wrong with me? Why would I do that? I knew what the king would do. I decided their fates while their spears were pushing at me. I stopped Andromache from taking their lives and let the king do it for me. If only that damned Stratolaos had missed me."
"How would it be different? Eupheron has healed you."
Eyes red and swollen, Kassandra clutched at Zypheria's knee. "Something happened when the bolt hit me... went through me. The Wreath took control of me. Have you seen the paint on the ceiling in the kitchen?"
Zypheria scowled, shaking her head. "I noticed the hole in the wall over the basement stairs."
"I melted the paint. It dripped from the ceiling. It had me like a monster—I am that monster. For an instant, I could have sunk continents under the waves. I could have killed a billion people without a thought."
There was doubt in Zypheria's voice. "You are the Wreath-wearer. It is a burden. Your mother fought it all her short life."
"But my mother had no bleeds."
"And you have Gregor's?" As if broaching a delicate subject, she added, "Do you also have Lady Kallixene's?"
Kassandra hesitated, shaking her head to one of the other wearers. "I have my father's, Kallixene's, Isothemis' and Tharsaleos' bleeds. Four of them."
"What!" Zypheria gasped, terror on her face. She jumped to her feet, whirling with one hand in a fist. "How did this happen?" She didn't expect an answer and, by the way her brows knotted angrily, she had concluded much of it already. She suddenly understood Kassandra's unpredictability over the last year, especially when she was in the same room with Lady Kallixene. She opened her mouth to curse the bloody stupid Rexenors. Then she realized she couldn't because Lady Kassandra was one, and the tangle of deeds and desire so tight and intricate that it would only cause harm.
She wiped her expression clear when she heard footsteps coming down the hall. She stood and went to the door to get the towel from Nicole. "Can you start a fire in the fireplace, milady? We will be down in a few minutes."
Nicole nodded and went downstairs.
Zypheria cursed the universe under her breath and sat down on the end of the bed. "People say the Telkhines went bad because they could host more than one bleed. Two bleeds and they went insane. They ended up like King Eupheron, who could not have a normal life. You know what he is like. He was king in name only. Queen Daphne ruled the Seaborn. The tales I heard from Lady Ampharete made my thoughts freeze. Power beyond his control—and he could not stop."
That sounded familiar.
Kassandra started to nod, then went still. Her face went gray. She jumped up, holding her mouth as she raced for the bathroom to throw up. Zypheria followed resignedly with a change of pajamas.
Zypheria took a cautious sip of hot chocolate, swallowed it, then cleared her throat to get the attention of the three sisters. They sat around the fireplace next to the kitchen, Kassandra in a big leather chair, Jill and Nicole sitting together on a couch. Zypheria sat on the coffee table between them.
"Michael has asked me to marry him, and I... " She bowed her head to Kassandra. "I have come for your consent."
"Congratulations," said Kassandra, raising her mug with Jill and Nicole. "I wish you all the joy in the sea."
She bowed her head. "Milady. I appear to have all of it already. I only wish I could return some to you."
Kassandra stared at her. Choking back emotion, she said, "Zypheria, you're like a mother to me. You were a sister to Ampharete. You are my family. I would not expect Jill or Nic to call me 'milady'. I want you to stop calling me that."
"I am your maid and your soldier. I will do anything you ask but that."
"Please?"
"Do not ask it of me, milady. I could no more do that than call the queen by her first name. It would be scandalous."
"Since when does scandal bother you? You don't call Tharsaleos king."
"He is not Alkimides. And he is not the Wreath-wearer."
"I'm telling you it's okay."
Zypheria shook her head. "Instead, if I could ask one thing?"
"Name it."
"Please... please don't ever ask me to make you a peanut butter sandwich again."
Completely serious, Kassandra bowed her head. "You have my word."
Chapter 22 - McHutcheon's Fire
Within the abyss, Lethe, measureless in sweep, glides smoothly on with placid stream, and takes away our cares; and, that there may be no power to retrace the path, with windings manifold it takes its sluggish way, even as the vagrant Maeander with its inconstant waters plays along, now retreats upon itself, now presses on, in doubt whether to seek the seashore or its source.
—Seneca, Hercules Furens, 679
Daniel McHutcheon nearly fainted when he walked into the cold storage room on deck three, his footsteps echoing off the insulated aluminum walls. It was empty on the Maria Draughn's return trip, large enough to store two hundred pallets of boxed fresh fruit, and could be sealed and gassed with ethylene and other decay inhibitors. It was also supposed to be cold, which made McHutcheon pause at the open door.
He backed out and looked along the metal walkway around the forty-foot wide shaft into the lower decks. "Who's there? Harvey? Why'd you leave the door open? The stink's bad enough." Halfheartedly, he added, "Now you let the cold out."
It was hot and humid above decks and even the closed hatches didn't keep in the cool. McHutcheon walked in, the temporary fluorescents he had clamped to the beams buzzing like insects above his head. Dual halogens on a tripod, hot bolts of sunlight standing at the head of the table, hit Gabriel Pinnet's decaying body in hard white light as it lay in the black zipper bag, the abdomen sliced open from McHutcheon's foray into forensics. He had taken three anatomy courses in college, two with real corpses—pieces of them actually, and several passes in complete virtual. He had performed an abdominal section twice, and so that was where he started with Pinnet, stopping as soon as he discovered the eyes melting in digestive juices in the stomach.
Other things had come in with the warm air and McHutcheon, while he snapped on surgical gloves, bent close to Pinnet's gaunt face to inspect the tiny squirming white barrel-shaped thing. It looked like a grain of rice, moving clumsily along Pinnet's right nostril.
A spasm of disgust rolled up McHutcheon's throat, and he swallowed a sour fluid surge from his stomach. He had seen maggots before, but not on a dead human, and even on a human as foul as Pinnet had been, the tiny crawling thing made him shudder. He noticed more of them, a cluster around one of Pinnet's eye sockets, glistening and oozing over each other, making faint wet crackling noises. Not strong enough to eat through the skin, the larvae gathered at the openings into the body.
McHutcheon stretched his hand out, extended one finger and tugged on Pinnet's chin. The jaw was tight, but he worked it open, using two fingers, while keeping his distance. The teeth parted and a swollen maggot-covered tongue filled the space.
"Oh, God," whispered McHutcheon, turning his head. At the same moment, a flood of incongruous thoughts piled into each other in his head. How could anyone decay this quickly? Pinnet had been stuffed in the body bag an hour after Miss Lairsey had killed him, and from there straight to cold storage. There were no flies down here, not inside the cold room. It didn't make sense.
McHutcheon got a firm grip on his stomach, kept his eyes away from Pinnet's face, and lifted the right hand. Sections of skin sloughed off in his grip, slipping fluidly away like pieces of an oily surgical glove.
Pinnet was falling apart in front of him. It was as if, instead of lying in frozen sleep on a rack in cold storage, they had thrown Pinnet on deck, exposed to the humid air, tropical temperature and flying insects.
McHutcheon backed away, turning his gloves inside out and tossing them into a cardboard box he was using as a trash bin. There was no sense proceeding if the room wasn't being chilled. He followed a web of conduit to a weatherproof box on the far wall, closing the thick insulated storage room door on his way over. He cut his thumb shoving the slide latch up, but that was enough to open the thick metal cover. There were two rows of black rocker switches inside and a faded handwritten legend on the inside of the door. He scanned the illegible list and then went with his impulse to try all of the switches. He found six loose levers and moved each one to the right in turn. The last one in the row seemed broken, unfastened from the hinge, and it wouldn't stick when he thumbed it to the right.
McHutcheon fiddled with the breaker, shoving the lever back and forth, frowning up at the chiller. If he could not get the storage room cold again, Pinnet was going to turn to soup in the body bag. He heard the drip of fluid from the table to the floor. The corpse was already well along the autolysis cycle, in which the body's enzymes ate through the cell walls, releasing all the internal fluids, and heading—at a good pace—for bloating. At this rate, the body would be a slack self-digested liquid mess by the time they made their first port. He doubted if the coroner in Sâo Luís would even be able to recognize Pinnet when they showed up with a bag of rot and bones.
So it was quite a shock to Daniel McHutcheon when he felt Pinnet's firm grip on his shoulder.
Aleximor lurched, grabbing the first shelf in the bookcase and tipped all of McHutcheon's medical books onto the floor. The muscles in the host body's legs gave way and he tumbled over the corner of the bed, somersaulted, and landed on his back, splayed across the thin blue industrial carpeting.
What the hell is this? What are you doing! Corina felt a tingling along her spine; deep cramps uncoiled in her stomach. A hissing sound filled her ears, going thin and stinging, a noise like needles.
Aleximor couldn't answer in words. He rolled on his side, curling his legs up in agony, squeezing his eyes tight. He made grunting noises with Corina's throat; eyes filled with tears that dribbled down her face. Her body shuddered and twitched. A dark bruise blossomed on her forearm, another one, sickle shaped, spun blurrily around the right side of her ribs.
In Corina's pain-twisted voice, he said, "He has acquired his first one."
Who? Acquired what? A deep chill swept through Corina's mind.
"Mr. Pinnet has killed and performed the binding."
Who? McHutcheon?
"That would be... my... presumption."
Corina felt a dozen separate dull pains shoot up through her feet, as if she was standing on a floor of small knuckle-sized cobbles. Lifting one foot transferred all her weight to the other, making it worse.
There was darkness all around her.
"What are you doing?" Corina's voice was loud in her ears, but it was her own voice under her control.
Aleximor did not answer.
"Shit." She felt mentally cold. Her first thought shoved all the others out of her head. "I've lost touch with my body." She tried to bend the last word into a question, but didn't have enough evidence to turn it all the way into one. She couldn't move her body's fingers or open her eyes to take in McHutcheon's cabin. This must be somewhere else. Am I in some other body?
She tried her voice again. "The place with the roaring black wind."
She had a body of some kind. She could not see it, but she felt its presence, gravity weighing her down, pressure in her lungs, the touch of a strong wind on her skin, the emptiness around her. She crouched down—her toes spreading painfully wide over the rocky ground, sharp points sticking into her bent knee—and picked up a handful of stones; some of them were jagged, stabbing her fingers, but most were rounded smooth by the constant wind.
A mordant question shot directly from her mind to her mouth: "Wouldn't it be gross if these turned out to be knuckle bones, billions of them?"
She was mildly disappointed when they turned out to be simple gray-mottled, non-ossiferous beach rocks. She could see them suddenly, dark against her hand, as if someone had switched on a night light.
She dropped the stones and jumped to her feet, wincing at the sharp points pressing into her bare soles. A bright yellow star fell in the infinite night, across the sky in the wind's direction. It lit the ground under her, just enough to allow her to make out details. Corina reached for the star, not wanting it to leave her alone in the dark—and because of the lack of reference points it appeared to be right overhead.
The wind shifted and slapped her in the face, roaring stronger in her ears, whipping her hair. Dust blinded her, blotting out most of the star's light. She took a step back, swinging around to find a softer foothold, but she kept her hand out, grasping for the only thing that seemed alive in this place, the bright ball of light passing over her head.
She blinked in the dimness, glancing down to keep her balance. There was an edge to her new dark inner world, cutting a sharp black emptiness through the gravelly surface under her feet.
The rocky platform brightened, going gray and shadowy while the void beyond its edge remained perfect black. She looked up in time to catch the star... sort of. It passed right through her grasping hand, through her wrist, to lodge in the center of her chest just above the curve of her breasts.
The star slid through her skin with a punch of energy that knocked her off her feet.
She opened her eyes, and for a moment she thought the blindness had returned. Then she lifted her hand and saw it glowed with an inner light. She had fallen inches from the edge of nothing, one shoulder and her head hanging into it, her open eyes staring into the abyss.
Corina rolled and clawed frantically away from the edge, shoving rocks and hand-sized plates of loose slate-like stone over the edge. She waited, holding her breath, but never heard them hit the bottom.
She stood and looked down at her glowing body, a dim gold light spreading from the core—where the star had landed in her chest—out to her limbs. Her bones and muscle were pale shadows against her skin.
Corina sighed with a sharp annoyed edge.
Why are we always—always!—naked in dreams like this?
She glared up at the pure black sky. "Fuck natural! Where are my damn clothes?"
She cried the words to the endless gusting night.
She held her arms up, flexing her hands. A spark ignited her anger. The webbing Aleximor had added to her fingers had come through with her.
"Whose body is this?" She demanded to the darkness. "I want my old one back!"
Corina sat down angrily, ramming a sharp stone against her tailbone, cursing Aleximor. She folded her legs in front of her, breathed the night's air and stacked flat stones on top of each other until she had a slightly lopsided tower over two feet tall.
The second movement of
Beethoven's "Opus 130" played in her head. She tapped the rhythm on her bare knee, thinking that it felt as if she had broken up with Alan Yeater a year ago. There was a faint melancholy accompaniment, not enough to rile her, just enough to bore her. It seemed a long and uncomplicated time ago, a minor ripple in the pond, a wisp of low altitude cloud in an otherwise full sky of meteorological activity.
She got to her feet, holding back the urge to kick over her little stone tower, and marched off along the rim.
She walked the perimeter of her sharp, rocky... un-world... counting paces, determined to calculate its size. The glow from the captured star—or whatever it was—allowed her to see ten feet around and she stepped and stubbed her toes in a circuitous march along the edge.
"The circumference is little over three hundred paces," whispered Corina when she came upon her stone tower from the opposite direction. "What would that be? A good step is three feet. Nine-hundred feet around. Circumference divided by pi—3.14 equals the diameter... a little over two hundred and eighty-six feet across." She made a mildly impressed frown, thinking that un-worlds usually come in smaller sizes, and that she must have done something right in life to be upgraded to a roughly circular platform nearly three hundred feet wide. "Okay, so the radius is half the diameter. One forty three. Area's pi-R-squared. Three point one four times one forty three is... four hundred forty nine point zero two... times one forty three ... sixty-four thousand two-hundred nine point eight six square feet." In the tone of a perky real estate agent, she said, "Spacious living area, open concept design, upgraded kitchens and bathrooms, stone entryway, views of eternity from every window." Her voice went higher and perkier. "I love it! When can I move in?"
She looked down at the ten-foot section of illuminated gray rock around her, shrugging. "It could be worse," she said and began counting the ways. "It's like prison, but without the three hots and a cot—not to mention the benefits of companionship."
A rattle of stones off to her left broke her concentration right in the middle of debating the up- and downsides of being left here alone or exiled with someone she hated.
Corina felt the mental chill again as she walked carefully over the loose stones in the direction of the noise. She reached the edge before she found anything.
She looked over the broken lip of stone and jerked back. The floor of her stomach was pushing at the back of her throat; a raging fear of falling off shook her and she backed up several steps.
Her eyes chased a sound into the blackness. Something was moving... out there, across the void.
"Who's there?"
"Corina?" It was Aleximor. She heard his unique pronunciation, but his voice had a rough wet rotting quality. It was his original voice, his male voice.
"What do you want?"
There were sharp clicking and scraping noises like metal on stone. "You must return."
"You're lying. Why?"
"You have something of mine."
"You have something of mine!" She shouted back at him.
"We can cooperate, kill the Seaborn king and House Rexenor. I sensed that you and I are alike, and now you have proven it. I don't want to make you join me, Corina. I could do that, but that would break you, and I do not want to."
"I don't want to have anything to do with you. I don't know where I am, but until a minute ago you weren't here, so I was starting to feel comfortable again, something I haven't felt since you got inside me—you... killing, raising the dead, soul binding—and you're slowly killing me in the process. I don't want to have any part of it—or you!"
"You are part of me, Corina." She could hear a hint of laughter in his voice. "After what you have done, I am not certain I could extract you from your old host body. You have made your decision to help me, to become like me."
"Fuck off! I'll never do it! I am not like you!"
"You already have. You are. You made your decision when you reached up and plucked him out of the sky, dear, dear Corina. You see how simple it is for you? He was mine, but you took McHutcheon inside you and bound him to your soul."
She looked down, horrified at her glowing body, at the star burning inside her, at the pale glow she gave off, lighting the gray stone around her.
"You see. You are my Melinoe. You would make a fine ostologos. Your slave's physical form is hiding below the deck, but he is free to roam the ship—and he will. He must live off something. Even I cannot control him in death. McHutcheon is yours, Corina."
Chapter 23 - The Canal
I call on you Melinoe, saffron-veiled, of the earth, to whom dread Persephone, venerable queen, gave birth at the mouth of the mournful river Kokytos, on the bed of Zeus Kronion. Zeus deceived with guileful arts dark Persephone, mating with her in the guise of Hades. Hence, partly dark thy limbs and partly white. From Hades shadow, from Zeus ethereal bright. Thy colored members, men by night inspire when seen in spectered forms with terrors dire; Now darkly visible, made of night. Shining in darkness they meet the fearful fight. Terrestrial queen expel wherever found the soul's mad fears to earth's remotest bound; With holy aspect on our incense shrine, and bless thy mystics, and the rites divine.
—Orphic Hymn 71: "To Melinoe"
Corina woke inside her body, the fluorescent glow from McHutcheon's former cabin in her eyes. It took her a few minutes to figure out she was on her back. Her first impulse was to get up and run; there was a hint of hope that she had control back. Her eyes blinked. Hope died. Aleximor moved in just before her, taking the reins, and shutting her out of the control room. Then he made good use of her happily gloating voice. "You will see, in time, we will make a wonderful pair."
Her second impulse was to go with the silent treatment, but questions were piling up inside her mind and demanding answers. Besides, she hated the silent treatment. It was a total coward's way out.
Where were we a second ago? The darkness, the rocky sixty-four thousand square foot shelf in space? What was that place? What were the clicking noises coming from you? Why were we both there? They sounded like idiotic questions and something told her that there might be an advantage in keeping them to herself, in allowing Aleximor to believe she knew exactly where she had been. But she didn't have a trace of a thought to pin them to. Nothing in her head had prepared her for instantaneous appearance in a place so strange and then, in another instant, jump back to earth.
A man's voice, rough with the lack of sleep, answered Aleximor. "In time, Miss Lairsey? The captain has paired us up for the entire journey to Sâo Luís, which is where I've convinced him to drop you off—not waiting all the way to Sâo Paulo."
Aleximor sat up, getting his bearings. He remembered falling on the floor, but couldn't account for a significant gap in time during which his host body had apparently been moved to the bed.
He smiled flirtatiously at Officer Harvey. Scary as hell, thought Corina. "That is kind of you, Mr. Harvey. To look after me for the journey—even a shortened one. And you are right. We already make a wonderful pair."
"I know you won't try anything now," said Harvey with a warning finger pointed at her, trying to ignore her light tone.
Testing the waters, Aleximor raised one eyebrow, slid one of Corina's hands along her hip, down her thigh. "And what makes you so certain, Mr. Harvey?"
Suddenly you're the femme fatale. Corina couldn't believe how quickly the monster inside her had grown accustomed to her skin, known how to use every muscle on her face.
The officer jutted his chin at the ceiling, which presumably meant the control room forty feet above them. "The pilot from the canal authority is aboard. There are security boats on both sides of the locks. The ship won't be entirely under Captain Teixeira's command until we're beyond the Port of Cristobal."
"Locks?"
He might have had a secure lock on her body and its expressions, but he knew nothing about the world above the waves. Corina cursed, but couldn't help herself. We are going through the canal, the Panama Canal, a channel cut through Central America from the Pacific to the Caribbean Sea. A lock is like a big room without a ceiling—big enough to fit the whole ship inside.
Aleximor couldn't keep the wonder out of Corina's voice. "Into the Caribbean Sea, and from there into the Atlantic Ocean."
The ship sails in, the door is closed, water is pumped in, the ship floats to the next level, the door opens on the other side, and the ship sails on.
"The locks are a series of steps to bring the Maria Draughn to the level of Lake Gatun in central Panama—the lake is about eighty-five feet higher than the Pacific," Harvey explained. "Then there's another set of locks that step us down into the Caribbean. While we're going through, there's always a crew from the Panama Canal Authority aboard."
Aleximor looked at him with more interest. "Now, why would you tell me such a thing?"
Harvey started to shake his head, not understanding her question. "I want to be here when you make your... next move. Then I will stop you."
"Next move?"
"McHutcheon's missing. Officer McHutcheon. I know you had something to do with it."
"Daniel? The doctor? Missing?" Aleximor put on his most convincing clueless posture and tone of voice. He covered his mouth with one hand, horrified. "And you suspect me? That I had something to do with it?"
"More than suspect."
It took a moment too long, but Aleximor managed to raise one of Corina's eyebrows. "Really?"
"You killed Pinnet, Miss Lairsey. I knew Pinnet for a year—but I've known violent men like him all my life. I know—knew what he was capable of. Sure, he told us all stories, and he lied and exaggerated on a regular basis, but I have seen the real thing with my own eyes. I knew what he could destroy with his fists. I have been deceived by him—right under my own nose. And then you come along... You didn't just kill him. You butchered him. Gouged his eyes out and shoved them down his throat. You cut the tendons in his arms so that he couldn't use them. I think you tortured him. I don't know how you managed to surprise him, but you did. He grew up in some of the worst boroughs of London, brawling and breaking bones since he was nine years old. There is simply no way you could have overpowered him without... I don't know, some extraordinary ability."
Aleximor stared at him, face expressionless. With some effort, he forced a weary smile. "Oh, very well, Mr. Harvey. Think what you may. For now, I feel cramped in this box. If we are to be paired up, can you lead me outside? I would love to see the water. And these locks, these steps to the lake."
Harvey got to his feet, holding one hand to the door, still the gentleman with the enemy right in front of him. "After you, Miss Lairsey." He said her name with a stiffness that discouraged familiarity. "We have passed Miraflores, and we're just about to enter the Pedro Miguel Locks. If you've never been this way before, it's worth seeing."
The air was thick and moist, and squeaks and shrieks—strange to Aleximor's ears—came from the trees that lined the narrow channel leading to the Gatun locks.
Harvey pointed out one of the security boats keeping pace with the Maria Draughn, but Aleximor couldn't take his eyes away from the car carrier passing them, heading out of the Pacific-bound locks. It was larger than the Maria Draughn, not longer, but its hull towered over them, shiny blue and gray walls with long black slotted vents and windows.
One of the carrier's crew—or one of the canal authority's line handlers—waved, and Aleximor lifted one open hand, webbed fingers stretched apart in the air.
He had counted at least four handlers aboard the Maria Draughn and, as Harvey had given away the plans, he had no intention of causing trouble before the ship finished its journey through the land of Panama.
He was also interested in the skill and technology required to bring ships from one ocean to another by cutting channels through the land. The surfacers, he realized again, had progressed so far from his day.
Small noisy machines on rails rolled along with the Maria Draughn, pulling the ship through the locks on braided blue cords as thick around as Corina's arm. Doors as large as the front gates of the Nine-cities opened and let the ship pass into another long narrow box.
Every half hour one of the crew of the Maria Draughn stopped to convey orders from Captain Teixeira to Officer Harvey, or receive a status from him. Aleximor watched them openly, taking in the kinds of clothes they wore, their hair and skin color. The surfacers' skin ranged far beyond the medium browns of the Seaborn, from nearly black to pale like the inside of a shell. Some spoke English in accents so thick he couldn't understand their speech. They came from all over the surface of the world, mostly from places he had heard of, like England or India or Africa, but a few had come into the world on tiny islands in the Pacific or in central Asia from countries he didn't know existed.
The crew members glanced at Corina repeatedly in the few minutes they spent with Officer Harvey. Pinnet was dead, Officer McHutcheon had vanished. The trouble was obviously caused by the mermaid they'd mistakenly—or stupidly—taken aboard. The question was clear on all their faces: Who will be her next victim?
The Maria Draughn entered a large forest-lined lake with clumpy islands at the edges, a steady slow ridge of green water left in her wake.
Harvey leaned on the railing, watching his charge.
Corina Lairsey stared out at Lake Gatun, her focus darting to every boat, every shadow under the surface, like a child who has never seen so much water in one place. Her obvious sense of wonder took him back to his teens in Portsmouth where—not paying attention—he nearly ran down a young Royal Marine standing on the shoreline, staring out at the wide sea. Instead of getting angry, the Marine simply asked him if he "lived 'round here." When he nodded, the Marine called him lucky, explaining that he'd never seen water wide enough to not "have land at the other end."
"Have you any ships that go under the water, Officer Harvey?"
"Have I been on one, a submarine? Never."
"Submarine." Aleximor said the word slowly, savoring it. "How deep do they dive?"
He shook his head, frowning with a guess. "Regularly, a thousand meters, probably more if they wanted to. Research subs go much deeper, to the abyss, the bottoms of the deepest trenches in the Pacific."
Aleximor pressed the heels of his palms into the railing, looking along the Maria Draughn's hull. "Meters?"
Harvey shook his head. Americans. "Thirty-nine inches. About this high." He held his hand flat at hip level.
"To the ship's deck? Half of a fathom or so?"
He nodded, his brows rolling into a suspicious scowl at the question. Who understood a fathom's length but did not know what a meter was? He shook off the obvious answer.
A mermaid.
He saw the fear in the crew's eyes, and where there was fear, there would be hatred and violence. Half the crew were as certain as he that Corina had something to do with McHutcheon's disappearance. The other half went all the way over to the other side, declaring Corina to be a sea-demon in the form of a woman. This brought Harvey's mind around to the reason he was guarding her. He paused. Or was he guarding the rest of the crew from her?
Harvey cleared his throat, and let his angry scowl settle into place. "You know, there is a very old rule that goes back to Admiralty Law, and probably earlier, that goes something like, "He who kills a man on shipboard, shall be bound to the dead man and thrown into the sea."
Aleximor leaned away from the railing and looked down at his host body, thinking that it was fortunate that it would not apply to Corina, being a woman.
He lifted his gaze and smiled, saying instead, "Well, that would be something to experience—at least once." His gaze dropped again, but to Gatun's swirling dark green water. "I imagine it is quite painful to hit the water from this height—especially since everything falls so easily through this thin air."
Harvey's focus swung to the lake—but only for a moment. "Probably break half the bones in your body."
"How do you get off of a ship, once on one?"
"The tugboats push us up against the pier, we tie up, and lower the walkway."
"And when there is an urgent situation?"
He hesitated over explaining emergency procedures, finally deciding to just point the lifeboats out. "The orange boat there, mounted on those rails—that's the starboard lifeboat. There's another on the portside."
Aleximor stared hard at the two bright orange elliptical pods, trying to guess how they were used, but decided to cut his curiosity short. Harvey was suspicious. No sense in handing him fuel for more suspicion—or any other advantage.
He mimicked Harvey and leaned on the rail, watching the other canal traffic pass them in the opposite direction, a gleaming white yacht, a sharp gray military vessel with missile tubes and a forest of antennas, and two other cargo ships with orange, red and blue boxes stacked high on their decks.
The pilot boat came alongside just before the Gatun Locks, and another pilot boarded. A security boat made a pass as the ship slipped into the first chamber, and Harvey led Corina to the bow where they would be able to look over the top of the lock gates, into the chamber below. The Port of Cristobal stuck up through the haze in the distance, and beyond that, the Caribbean.
"I love the Pacific," whispered Harvey, almost to himself. "But this is my side of the ocean. I'm just more comfortable here."
"This is my side also," said Aleximor. His prison had been in the Pacific. This was like coming home after a two hundred year absence. He looked back along the rail, most of his view blocked by cargo containers. "Extraordinary, Officer Harvey. That you surface—that someone had the skill to cut a channel of water through the land, joining two oceans—and for ships of this size. Magnificent."
He stared at her, getting the I'm-not-from-this-planet feeling again, along with a deep out-of-time vibe. "Where in California are you from? I've visited the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach many times. I have sat in the backseat of a car on a six-lane road full of cars that did not move for fifteen minutes. I've walked down Hollywood Boulevard, seen a movie at Grauman's Chinese Theater. I don't know much about Californians, but, Miss Lairsey, you have... unsettled me several times with your questions and replies."
Tell him you're from Berkeley.
"I am from Berkeley." Aleximor said it flatly as if that would settle all manner of bizarre behavior. Harvey nodded, accepting this.
That was easier than... What is that?
A spasm of pain swept through Corina's middle, cutting deeply, a hot ripping pain as if someone had spun a circular saw blade into her kidneys and let it rip up through the bottom of her rib cage. She felt a dull thudding in her bones, then something hot and wet leaking inside her.
Aleximor clutched at the railing, fingers slipping on the thick paint. The red metal deck swung into view. He fell into it, and everything went dark.
Corina shoved her hands into the gray slabs of stone. She was on her knees, sobbing because the glow around her in the lightless space had doubled.
"Why? Another one!" she shouted into the night.The question filled a deep cup of anger and she stirred in the answer. She didn't want to ask who. Officer McHutcheon—dead Officer McHutcheon—had killed someone and passed the bound soul to her.
"I am as bad as you are, you fucking monster! You have done this to me!"
The wind howled past her, throwing smaller chips of stone into the air and over the edge into nothingness. A rain of gray flaky material dissolved into clouds in the gusts. She picked a few bits out of her hair, twisting one braid around to examine its white tip. More of her hair had lost its color.
"Corina, please." Aleximor's voice came from the black space beyond the edge of her prison. She heard clicking sounds as he moved. "You have succeeded where I expected you to fail. I have given you the chance to live for a thousand years or more."
"I am not alive. This is not living!" She looked down at the doubly bright glow coming from her body. There were deeper shadows at the edges of the flat gray stones under her feet. Shadows from the light coming from me—from two souls I have stolen from their original owners.
"This is your life, Corina." Aleximor's voice was calm, bordering on amused. "You made this place. This is you. The black sky, this roaring wind, the stones underfoot."
Her anger died and her voice came out in a whisper. "You see this as I see it? This place is mine?"
"We all build the worlds in our own souls."
"But then why is this place... so wrong?" My favorite things are music and the Pacific. Where are the violins and surf? Where's the concert hall in my head? Where's the ocean? Where's my damned Pacific Ocean? She spun away from Aleximor's direction and walked to the other end of her plot of soul-space. There was something right in Aleximor's words. She could feel it. The deaths of my mother and father are here, not buried in memories, but part of the air I breathe, part of the earth under my feet. Everything, it's here.
She felt a flash of shame at the thought that her parents might show up, like something out of a dream, and boy would they be disappointed when they found out their daughter's GPA had slipped to 3.24 last semester, not to mention she was now joyriding through Panama on a cargo ship, stealing the souls of the crew.
After a minute of appraisal, Aleximor answered her. "Interesting. It is not unformed. You are a complicated soul."
"Go fuck yourself," she muttered.
She reached the edge, the sharp line separating rock from nothingness, then turned and walked back. She looked up from the the gray stones to the clicking in the darkness.
"What are you? Why are you making that noise. Are you walking?"
"In a manner of speaking."
A bright star blazed into existence a little to the left of the direction she was facing. She squinted against the stab of light, its beams fiercely attacking the pure black space, clawing for something to perceive it.
She whispered in awe. "Is that you? I can't even look directly at you." The cause suddenly hit her. "Holy shit! How many souls have you... taken?"
Aleximor stood up, his long black hair twisting around his shoulders in greasy clumps, a thin black cloak tossed over one shoulder and across his body, one hand raised in greeting. The ground at his feet was smooth, flat, and gave off a metallic sheen. Then she realized he was standing on top of a huge machine with legs like a crab. It was a giant version of his familiar, the crab thing he had summoned to walk all over Pinnet, cutting tendons and gouging eyeballs as it went. He had been inside it, driving it—inside her soul-space, and then like an armored-division commander surveying a battlefield, he popped the hatch and climbed out to take in the view.
"I have lost count, Corina. Tens of thousands at least."
Stepping away from the edge, she headed toward the center of her space—giving new meaning to mooning. Kiss my glowing ass, Aleximor. Over her shoulder she asked, "Who is Melinoe? You called me that just before I left this place the last time."
"Melinoe is a beautiful queen of the dead."
"Really?" she asked, distracted by an unexpected flash of color in her empty black and white and gray world. She nearly tripped over the leg of a burgundy velvet chair with carved wood legs and back. The chair looked familiar. She had sat in this very one... somewhere.
She stopped and grabbed the chair for support. In front of it was a music stand and her cello. She leaned forward to read the sheets. Beethoven's String Quartet, Opus 130, Second Movement at the top of the page.
"One of the last things I remember hearing before you showed up."
She resisted the urge to sit and play, but not for long. "Oh, all right. One time through." She took her cello off its stand, tuned it, and closed her eyes. As soon as she jumped into the first bar, the sound of a violin began accompanying her. Then another. Then a viola.
Her tears started halfway through, but didn't run down her cheeks. They drifted off her face into the air. She slumped over the cello after the last note, exhausted, the bow slipping from her fingers to the rounded gray rocks.
Her head shot up when the sense of disembodiment returned, the feeling of being inside her body without control over it. The view of her soul slid away and when her eyes opened, a chipping, dull-red painted surface came into view, unfocused at first.
Aleximor dragged her body to its knees. Harvey, wary of a trap, had let Corina slide off the railing and fall to the deck. He'd left her there after turning her over and calling for an ice pack for the swelling on her forehead.
"How long?" Corina's voice was dry and choked with mucus. Aleximor looked over at Officer Harvey's shiny black shoes and coughed. "How long have I been lying here?"
"Thirty minutes." His voice was slow with indecision.
Aleximor waved away Harvey's help and climbed to the ship's railing. "You left me lying on the deck? Exposed to Hel—the sun? A gentleman would have carried me to my room."
A gentleman would have caught me, said Corina as Aleximor gingerly touched the knot on her forehead.
Harvey stood back, his arms folded, glaring at her. "I had one of the crew carry you into the shade." He indicated a pair of shipping containers stacked two high and casting a slightly cooler shadow over the bow.
"The crew? I find your behavior to be nothing like a gentleman's."
I think you're overdoing it.
"And I find yours to be nothing like a lady's. It was my opinion that you were faking an illness—and that I was again to be the dupe. Pinnet fooled me a few days ago. You have fooled us all—including Captain Teixeira, whom I consider near unfoolable. I won't let it happen again." He paused, his manners kicking in. "If you are truly not well, and this is not part of some plot of yours, then I apologize."
Aleximor looked up into his clear gray-blue eyes and held them defiantly for a moment. "I accept your conditional apology, Officer Harvey."
Harvey nodded, swallowing dryly. Despite all, he found something innocent and... melancholy about her that made him clamp his teeth shut to keep anything he might say from being said.
Harvey nearly choked when, in a quiet, lost voice, Corina said, "A gentleman would have caught me." But then Aleximor spoiled the moment by adding, "Everything falls so quickly in the Thin—through the air."
Harvey replaced his I'm-babysitting-an-alien scowl. Or mermaid, or whatever-monster-from-Berkeley-in- human-form.
He gestured to the bow. "We will enter the Caribbean shortly. A day and a half out from Sâo Luís." He swung his hand to the stern. "I think you should get some rest. The captain is expecting us for dinner."
Dinner was quiet and later than normal, nearly nine o'clock in the evening. The only people in the dining room were Captain Teixeira, Corina, and Harvey. They ate in silence and when the captain departed for the bridge, Harvey told Corina to return to McHutcheon's quarters.
Aleximor fell asleep quickly and Corina spent another few hours playing her inner cello, some Shostakovich, parts of a Beethoven sonata with the accompanying piano supplied by her own imagination—although she also imagined the possibility of a whole network of people locked inside their heads with some kind of link between them all, and apparently there was at least one pianist out there.
Aleximor woke suddenly in the middle of the night. Corina surfaced with him, taking in everything he sensed. He jumped off McHutcheon's bed, pulling the sweat pants higher so as not to appear the least bit "skanked."
Someone was trying to get into the room.
Corina heard them outside the door, but Harvey hadn't. The second officer leaned against the wall on a stool, dozing, his eyes fluttering every couple minutes at small shifts in the sea.
Is my hearing this good?
There were four of them in the hallway. She heard their breathing, the mingled thumping of their troubled heartbeats. One of them wore flip-flops—and he was pacing. Another kept running his fingers through his hair nervously.
What time is it?
Aleximor looked over at the clock. Four-twenty in the morning. He swung his gaze back to the cabin's door.
There was a raw scraping metallic sound, but not of keys. They were sliding something into the lock, trying to pick it, but it was clear there wasn't consensus on the next step.
"What'll we do?"
"What if she's awake?"
"She's a vampire. We must take her—"
Someone shushed him.
Aleximor, who had no idea what a vampire was, distinctly heard, "We must take her" while Corina, who did, heard, "We must stake her." Aleximor was curious enough to open his thoughts to her directly.
Where would they want to take me, Corina?
Stake me. They want to put a thick piece of wood—a stake—through my heart.
Why in the sea would they want to do that? That is folly. Besides he did not say, stake, but take. Why else would the other one make the shhh noise to quiet him? You're wrong. He clearly said "stake". Your argument rests on the false assumption that the speaker had finished speaking, when he obviously had not. "We must stake her" is a complete statement, while, without the mention of a location, "We must take her" is incomplete, hence the shhh to stop the speaker from continuing.
Jackass. How about "We must stake her through the heart?" My statement is incomplete as well.
You knew, simply in the context of four words, that the target for this assumed stake would be the heart. Why would you presume that these men would require elaboration? Where else would they put the stake?
Corina thought of several places she'd like to put the stake—once Aleximor was out of her body. Shut up. We're missing their conversation.
A new voice from the welcome committee in the hall whispered, "You saw Pinnet's face after she was through. Eyes