Rake got to his feet, picking up his shirt. “I know. I beg your forgiveness.”
No one spoke during their walk down the hill to the hawk-master’s house. Jazadri ushered Rake into the front room, and Kestra slipped past them, through the sleeping chamber and into the large, open space where Takajo kept his birds. Some might have found the smell off-putting—offal and feathers, old wood, fish bones, and bits of half-eaten meat; but to Kestra it smelled like childhood. Like refuge. Her mother wouldn’t leave the hill, so when Kestra wanted space, or sounds other than Lumina’s doleful lectures and the clatter of pots, she came to the aerie.
She walked between the cages and perches, murmuring to the birds who perked up at her passing. Her eyes flicked over the row of tiny hawk hoods and tethers, hung neatly on pegs; and below those, the leather bracers, gloves, and shoulder coverings that Takajo used to protect himself from prying talons. Idly she fiddled with the training toys in the wooden box by the back door—fake fish, spring-loaded rabbits, false octopus tentacles made from rubberplant stems.
Takajo was in the yard beyond the back door, cleaning up the training area. He siphoned filthy water from one training pool into a narrow half-pipe that ran out under the fenced enclosure and down to the sea-wall, where it spilled through a hole and emptied into the surf.
He bent his head to Kestra, a brief acknowledgement of her presence, and she hopped onto a barrel to watch him work.
“The monster went crazy this evening,” she said. “He nearly ate Jaza.”
Takajo did not raise his eyes. “What did you do to set him off?”
“What did I do? Nothing. Why do you assume that I did something? He’s a beast, Takajo. Eating flesh is what he does. It’s written on his bones.”
“I thought you were smarter than that, little hawk.”
Kestra pressed her lips together, but after a minute of silence, she gave in. “Mai touched him, just below the waist. She said he went into an odd state after that—a kind of panic. And then Jazadri said something—called his bravery into question. So he attacked.”
“That would do it.”
“Why are you defending him? He scared all of us. He could have hurt Mai.”
“Not defending, Kestra. Understanding.” He faced her, the hard lines of his features sharpened by the gleam of the nearby lantern. “I love you like a daughter, child, but your imagination needs exercise beyond the kitchen and the garden. Think about the tale he told, especially the truths he did not speak. Try to imagine the depth of the pain he has endured.”
“I know.”
“But you don’t know. And you won’t let yourself truly feel it. Come.” He led her back inside, to a cage in dark corner. A half-grown hawk fluttered brokenly across the cage floor, its eye scarred and its wing bent. Snatching a scrap of meat, Takajo held it to the creature’s chipped beak, and the bird gulped down the food.
“What happened to it?” Kestra asked.
Takajo cupped the hawk in his palm and passed it to Kestra. It settled into the hollow of her hands, nudging her thumb with its beak. “An attack while it was out hunting. It was barely able to return to me, and it has not flown since. The mermaids broke its body and dulled its spirit. In this way, the bird and the boy are not so different.” Takajo’s eyes, shadowed under his heavy brows, bored into Kestra’s. “I have been wondering what to do with it. And now I will leave that choice to you.”
Without another word, he strode back outside.
Kestra stared at the bird—soft feathers coating a warm body, the tiny heart beat-beat-beating against her palms. She tilted her hands, watching the flare of the damaged wing as the creature tried to balance itself, tried to fly. Failing, it pecked her thumb sharply with its broken beak, drawing a dot of blood.
The hawk was half-blind. Damaged. Useless for hunting. Good for nothing but hopping about, snapping impotently at anything that alarmed it.
A mercifully quick end was best.
Kestra shifted the bird into one hand, her fingers finding its neck, just below the head. One twitch, and it would be over. She’d killed the mermidon Scythe with less hesitation.
The bird and the boy are not so different.
She closed her eyes and let herself sink back into Rake’s story, into the ugliness of what had been done to him when he was young, so young, and ever since. She knew there was more that he hadn’t said—vicious words, agonies untold. Relationships of a sort, but only cold, impersonal ones, without any of the affection he clearly craved. After his slavery and his sacrifice for Jewel, to be touched where the Queens scarred him, and then told he wasn’t brave—it must have been unbearable.
Her eyes opened, centering on the fierce feathered thing in her hands as it struggled to fly again.
Rake was like the bird—and not. When she saw him dancing clumsily with Mai, she’d had to force back a peal of laughter—not because the sight was worth mocking, but because it was endearing.
He was wounded, not broken. Healing, not hopeless. Bruised yet brave.
Worthy of a chance to be something better than his past. Something more than a monster.
She moved her fingers over the bird’s neck and along its body, stroking it into repose as Takajo had taught her to do.
“You survived,” she whispered to it. “You wanted life. Who am I to take it away?”
-20-
Rake
Rake shot into the sea like a mermidon’s spear, piercing layers of ocean, relishing the flow of the liquid over his skin and scales. Rather than stinging, the saltwater salved the bites and cuts across his torso, but the wounds still ached as his muscles flexed.
He felt his body shifting inside, altering its internal pressure as he dove deeper. Still, he paused some distance down and swam in a circle, allowing himself to adjust. Dive too quickly, and his insides would revolt, sending noxious gases to his brain. The effect wouldn’t kill him as it would a human, but he’d be dizzy and useless for a while.
After a few moments he resumed his descent, angling for the Bone Trench. He’d been nearly correct about the spot where the Wind’s Favor should drop him off. He had to alter his course and swim further east, but before long he saw the winding black scar slicing through the floor of the ocean.
Again he paused, acclimating. He thought of Mai and how fascinated she’d been with the idea of the Bone Trench and its lonely denizen.
“How deep would you say the trench is?” she’d asked eagerly. “How deep can mermaids dive? Do you begin to feel the pressure at some point? Your bodies must be uniquely adapted to the depth. That mermidon I dissected had thicker, stronger bones than most humans, but her ribs were more—bendy. And she had a second organ, near the right kidney, that seemed to be designed for pumping extra blood to the genitals and tail. Not exactly a second heart, but similar. Her actual heart was larger than a human’s too.” She had pressed her ear to Rake’s chest, impulsively, before he could protest. “Your heart sounds even bigger. I wonder if you have a second blood-pumping organ too.”
“Breathe, Mai,” Kestra had said with a half-smile. “Maybe you’ll get to preserve his heart for study before all this is over.”
It was a cruel thing to say, and when she lifted her eyes to his, there was a hint of regret in them, as if she’d spoken before she thought. But it was no more than he deserved, after the way he had behaved on the previous night. He’d already vowed to himself that there would be no more such slips, no more violent episodes. No more loss of himself to the memories of Below.
If Mai’s insight was correct, Kestra’s hatred and harsh words were a wall, like the one around Kiken Island. He had only to chip away at it with smiles, to lave it again and again with kindness, like the ocean wearing away stone over time. Eventually, she would have to trust him. Maybe even feel warmly toward him.
Mai seemed to like him already. Before he dove off the ship, she had given him a light squeeze around the ribs. “Come back safely,” she said, and then scurried away across the deck and busied h
erself uncoiling a perfectly coiled pile of rope.
Rake thought of that brief embrace as he hovered above the Bone Trench. Come back safely. The words warmed him inside, a soft glow, because someone besides Jewel cared about him, wanted him to return in one piece. And it wasn’t only Mai, either. Jazadri had clapped him on the shoulder with his uninjured hand, and even Flay had said, “Good luck, fish.”
Taking courage from all those things, Rake plunged into the dead blackness of the Trench.
His eyes had been slowly adapting to the brightness above, though he doubted he would ever be able to walk in daylight without shielding his face and squinting. But his growing familiarity with sunlight meant that he became blind in the depths more quickly than usual. He sank lower, bumping against a giant rib here, a salt-crusted skull there.
Down, down, and then forward, through deepest dark. He could see nothing, not his hands as they swept back the water, not even his claws when he held them briefly before his face.
He wandered, and he waited for the voice.
When it spoke, bright and delicate in his mind, he actually welcomed the sound.
“My loyal memory-maker,” it said. “You’ve come back so soon.”
“Gracious giver of treasures,” he replied. “I bring new memories for your admirable mind.”
“You found the treasures you sought? You’ve been on land?”
“I have. And in turn for my memories, I hope to ask you a question.”
“I have always been generous with you, my lovely fishlet.” The glittering tentacles curled around Rake, winking their lights, zapping his nerves with paralytic poison. He hissed at the pain, his gills spasming, tail convulsing. Biting back a scream, he watched the creature’s gelatinous body pulsate as he was drawn nearer and near to its sucking mouth. When his forehead made contact with the orifice, he could have sworn the creature sighed with pleasure, swallowing memory after memory of the past several days. It drank greedily, finishing within moments.
“And what,” it said, “did you wish to ask me?”
Rake couldn’t answer at once. He had to wait for the pain to recede, for his scraps of consciousness to fuse into solid thought again.
“I would like to know if there are any more of your kind, any more monst—powerful gods—in the sea. The humans have tales of an immense creature, large as a mountain, that came up from the bowels of the world during the Great Upheaval. They say that the creature devoured many of my kind, before we fled here. The human captain claims to know of an area where this creature might be, about four days’ sailing from the island.”
The Horror’s thoughts exploded like sunlight into his brain—a piercing beam of interest, a focus so intense he nearly lost his mind to it.
“I saw as much in your memories,” it said, and its inner voice had changed, had turned hungrier than ever. “You wish to find this old god, this monster, as you say.”
“I mean no disrespect. The humans call me ‘monster’ too.”
“No offense, little one. I know of this monster because I was once a part of it—or rather Them. We were many, joined into one, until the earth moved and spat us out of our home beneath the bottom of the sea. I was separated from Them, torn from Their protection. I was carried away on a mighty current and crawled into this hole to be safe. I have waited here, subsisting on the energy of others, sucking memories in hope of finding one that knew of Them, and of where They came to rest. Come, I will show you.”
Before Rake could protest, he was smashed to the mind-mouth again. His brain burst with pain as images flooded in—flashes of a dark place, much deeper than the sea, where he was but one mind linked to many in a shining, rippling mass, tentacles interwoven in complex webs—himself, one segment of a mighty Thought, existing under the shelter of other creatures, armor-plated, who fused with him and around him.
Then came a great heaving and cracking of the world’s bones. He was disgorged, along with his companions—spat out into the wild, terrifying ocean. Immediately Their great Self was attacked—gnawed and pricked by small, vicious creatures with strange upper bodies and scaly tails. Pain came with those attacks, and a tearing, a tearing so acute that Rake screamed with the memory of it. He was ripped from the others, disconnected from Them as they cried for him, whirled away by a sucking current. He could see Them in the blue distance—his beautiful collective, immense, unstoppable, opening multitudes of mouths to swallow the tiny attackers—but They could not stop him from being dragged away, being lost.
When the current ebbed and he floated free, a massive shark tore off one of his tentacles. Pain came with the loss, but worse was the pain of being severed, of being apart from Them. He wriggled down into a crack, and followed that crack to a deeper one, where he wedged himself into the safety of the rocks and waited, re-growing his missing tentacle. With the remaining ones he poked cautiously upward, seizing prey as it passed by, or waiting for the creatures that inevitably lost themselves in the black gullet of the trench. He sucked memory after memory, thirsty for news of Them. Hungry for a way to get back, to be joined to Them again.
The stream of the Horror’s memories ended.
For a moment Rake was nothing, no one. Floating dismembered and unmade in an unfathomable darkness.
Then his mind twitched.
Slowly, achingly, he regained himself, drawing threads of thought together.
I am Rake.
I have—I have a Jewel. Spawn named Jewel.
Land, legs—Kestra.
Pain, stabbing incessantly behind his eyes.
“I may have given you too much,” came the Horror’s light, dancing voice. “Forgive me. I was eager. I have waited so long for someone who knew of Them, someone I could trust to find Them for me. But you will do it, won’t you, my beauty? You will find my other selves, my Entity.”
Rake managed a single coherent thought. “Yes.”
“When you find Them, give Them your memories of me. Show Them where I am, and They will come. They are my home. I am their missing piece. They are lost without me, as I am helpless without Them. And once we are together again, We will give you one thing you ask.”
“You already know what it is.”
“You want Us to destroy your race? An odd request.”
“Maybe not all of us,” Rake said. “Perhaps you could spare the nurseries.”
The tentacles around him relaxed, withdrawing. “I will try. But We are not known for our delicate dealings, fishlet.”
“Nor are my people. Yet here we are, the two of us. Changing our way of existence.”
A ripple of amusement from the Horror passed through Rake’s mind. “Go, my friend. And be careful. My kind subsist on energy, on thoughts and memories, but other parts of our Collective enjoy consuming solid meat, every century or so. And by my calculations, They will be growing hungry again. Take care that you are not eaten before you can speak to Them.”
“Any suggestions on how to avoid being eaten?”
“They should be resting, waiting. Communing within, as We used to do.” Rake sensed a pulse of longing from the creature. “Find one like me, a drinker of memories. Any that are awake will try to enter your mind, and you will be able to pass on my message.”
Rake could barely think with the hammering pain in his head, but his limbs were becoming mobile again. “Thank you. I will find Them and bring Them to you.”
“I knew you would be my salvation, sweet one,” murmured the Horror.
He didn’t try to answer, but swam upward in the dark, fighting the weakness and sickness, pushing it from his body with every stroke, climbing toward the surface.
When he burst through the liquid skin of the sea and saw the Wind’s Favor floating nearby, relief flooded his body, a cool wave driving out the last of the Horror’s poison. He sped toward the ship, unsure how long he’d been gone, desperate to reach it before too many of his kind collected nearby. Flay had promised to keep the Wind’s Favor moving so as not to attract too much attention from
the high mermaids; but as Rake neared the ship, he saw a dozen mermaids darting around its submerged hull. One of them, a slim young mermaid spawned by Calla’s favorite servant, was darting over and under the ship’s spikes, as if it were a game.
For a second he was tempted to warn her against such foolish play, but it would have been stupid to draw attention to himself. By now, Shale had surely told everyone in the Realm Below that Rake was a thief and a traitor. These mermaids would likely kill him on sight. And why should he care if one of the cruel females impaled herself? They claimed to be smarter than males. Let them prove their superior intelligence.
He slunk down further into the deep, concealing himself in a thicket of kelp. He would have to get through at least a dozen high mermaids and mermidons to reach the ship. He had no viper eel this time, no disguise. How could he manage it?
A clawed hand gripped the back of his neck, splintering his already sensitive skin with pain. Rake bit back a cry and thrashed.
“Hush, Rake.” A familiar voice.
“Shale.” Rake forced himself to be still.
“How are you alive? The mermidons who chased you told me that you and your spawn were eaten by merlows.”
“Almost,” said Rake. “But not quite.”
Shale’s claws sank a little deeper, and he brought the nails of his other hand around to Rake’s throat. “The Queens want to kill you personally, slowly, but it would be so much more satisfying to do it myself.”
“No doubt. But if you kill me, you’ll die along with the others when judgment comes.”
Shale laughed, but the sound was hollow, uncertain. “Judgment?”
“Think carefully, Shale. If I didn’t die among the merlows, where have I been all this time?”
Shale extracted his claws from the back of Rake’s neck, switching his hold for a tighter front grip that nearly sealed Rake’s gills. “Where have you been?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Rake, struggling to force out the words. “But if you distract the others and draw them away from here, I’ll give you one piece of advice that will save your life when all the rest perish.”
The Teeth in the Tide Page 22