The Sea King

by C. L. Wilson

  Someone—the Shark or some other rabid krillo of a pirate—had stolen Summer Coruscate. That someone—the vile coward!—had crept into her room, laid his foul hands upon her. Frightened her. That someone had stolen her from the safety of her home and her family and the Calbernan prince who had, in every way that mattered, already pledged his life and his heart to her.

  That someone—and every living soul who had aided him—was going to die.

  As would anyone who stood between Dilys Merimydion and his liana.

  Khamsin had still not given him her answer.

  He clung to his rage, using every ounce of the discipline he’d honed over a lifetime to keep it caged. But, gods, oh gods, it wanted free. It howled for release. Clamored for destruction.

  It would be so easy. The sea was one of the most primal forces of the planet, and it would leap to Dilys’s command. The sea would surround this city and swallow it whole—taking every living creature in the Llaskroner Fjord with it.

  Only the certainty that Gabriella would never forgive him gave him the strength to keep that desire in check.

  Gabriella . . . moa myerina . . . moa liana . . . I will come for you. Whether they allow it or not, I will come for you.

  It would be better for all if they allowed it.

  So he shed his pride like the useless skin it was and said, “Please, Myerial Khamsin.” His voice shook, a testament to the power raging beneath his thin veneer of calm. “Send me with your blessing. Trust me to bring them back. I beg you.” His claws dug into the stone floor.

  At last, Khamsin gave him her reply. “Bring them back to me,” she said, her voice low and thick. “Bring my sisters home.”

  She laid her hands upon his head. A shock shuddered through him. He lifted his head in stunned surprise, reaching for her wrists, holding her palms to his face as power—her power—poured into him.

  Her eyes went silver, shining bright in the darkness of her face.

  His back arched. What she gave him was like his mother’s gift and Gabriella’s, and yet so different. His mother’s gift and Gabriella’s felt like lava poured from the center of a volcano. This was crackling ropes of lightning called from the heart of some great storm.

  It fed him and lashed him, roiling and clashing inside him, a tempest, angry and wild and deadly powerful.

  Around him, the Wintermen yanked swords from scabbards and leapt towards him, shouting, “Release her, Merimydion!”

  Ice crusted on his back. A roar, the enraged howl of a terrible beast, shook the room.

  He felt them all—Wynter and his men—lunging towards him. The awareness was exactly like his sea sense, as if the air had turned to water and they were frenzied sharks darting in for the kill.

  He released Khamsin’s wrists and flung out his hands. His fingers splayed, and her power pulsed from his palms, rolling out from him like ripples in a pond. His attackers flew back, tossed away on that invisible wave.

  They leapt back to their feet, and he crouched, snarling, prepared to destroy them.

  “Stop!” Khamsin’s voice lashed the room like a whip of lightning.

  Dilys froze, panting. His body trembled with scarcely contained violence. The urge to kill was a red haze veiling his mind, but she who had given him this strange, electric power that roared through him had commanded him to stop.

  “Dilys! Wynter! All of you! Stop it this instant! Put your weapons down. Now!”

  Dilys was unarmed but not weaponless. With effort, he sheathed his claws and calmed the wild, mad, turbulent power boiling inside him.

  As he did so, Wynter snatched Khamsin out of her chair and thrust her behind him, shielding her with his body. “Are you all right, min ros?” he asked in a harsh whisper. His eyes—now pure white from the deadly magic he had not tucked safely back away—remained fixed on Dilys.

  “I’m fine,” she assured him. Her slender brown hand stroked his arm in a calming caress. “It’s all right, Wyn. I’m fine. He wasn’t hurting me.”

  “Then perhaps he can explain”—Wynter’s voice grew colder and more forceful—“what the fark he was doing?”

  Dilys straightened from his crouch and forced his muscles to unclench. “She granted me her blessing to go after her sisters,” he said. “And she shared with me her power so that I might use it to bring them home.” He bowed respectfully in her direction, though she was still almost completely shielded by her husband. “My thanks, Khamsin of the Storms. Your gifts are powerful indeed. They will serve me well. I promise you I will find your sisters, and I will bring them home.” To Wynter, he said, “Call off your guards and get out of my way.”

  “Wait just a frosted minute.”

  Dilys’s temper snapped. His claws, which he had retracted, shot from his fingertips once more. “Enough! Every moment you delay, my liana and her sisters are at risk. Your queen has given me her trust and her blessing. I am going. I do not want war with Wintercraig, but war there will be if you do not get out of my way. Now, MOVE.” The last word vibrated with Command.

  In startled unison, every Winterman standing between Dilys and the door moved aside.

  He rushed through the cleared path and out the door.

  Behind him came the sound of swearing, then the clatter of boots on stone as Wynter and his White Guards gave chase.

  “Merimydion! Damn it. Merimydion, you blue bastard, stop!”

  Dilys paused at the door that led outside to the gardens. “No, I will not stop. I’m going to the fjord to make the sea give up its secrets, and then I’m going after Gabriella and her sisters. You release my men and tell them to meet me at our ships. We sail within the hour. I will not break my vow to your liana. But if it makes you feel more at ease, you may send men from your White Guard with me when we sail—up to a dozen per ship. I have seen them fight. They will not be a burden. Do not bother with your Ice Gaze and do not make further attempts to stop me. Neither will work. Your wife shared her gifts with me, and I will use them if I must.”

  The Winter King glared at him in a mixture of outrage, confusion, and fury. “What do you mean my wife shared her gifts with you? And what the fark did you do to us back there?”

  Dilys tamped down the urge to strike out. The Winter King was wasting time Dilys did not have—time Gabriella and the Seasons did not have. “Free my men. Send them to my ships, along with what men you wish to accompany us.” He hesitated, then to ensure that Wynter would leave him in peace, he surrendered the news that had come to him along with Khamsin Atrialan’s power. “And tend to your liana, Atrialan. Your children have decided to be born now.”

  After a moment of shocked blustering, Wynter Atrialan barked out orders to free Dilys’s men and dispatched several dozen White Guards to set sail with them. Then he fixed Dilys with a last hard look, his gaze sharp enough to cut glass.

  “Do not fail us, Merimydion. Find the Seasons and bring them home.”

  Having won, Dilys decided he could spare a moment to be gracious. He inclined his head. “My men and I will track them to the farthest corners of Mystral if we must. One way or another, Wynter of the Craig, we will bring your liana’s sisters home.”

  Wynter returned a curt nod, then spun on his heel and abandoned all pretense of calm to go racing back to his wife, his long legs making short work of the distance between them.

  Just before Dilys ducked through the door to head down to the fjord, he saw the Winter King emerge from the room with his slight, very pregnant queen clutched in his arms. He was shouting for the royal healer, Tildavera Greenleaf.

  Dilys turned away and headed for the fjord at a dead run. He ran for the same reason Wynter had run. Because his woman needed him.

  No. No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t run for her need—although he would, without question. He ran for his own. Not because she needed him, but because he needed her. Because the slightest threat to her safety made his blood turn to ice and his heart pound so hard it nearly burst from his chest.

  He didn’t bother running
all the way down to the water’s edge. He dove from the garden terrace. For a long stretch of seconds, he soared, weightless, a diving seabird. Then his body pierced the sea like a sharp spear, and he was soaring again, but this time in the denser, still weightless world of the ocean.

  Power roared up inside him. He pulsed it out. A beacon of awareness, of searching, that raced with electric speed from one tiny molecule of water to the next.

  The pulse filled the breadth and width of the fjord in an instant then kept going.

  As it went, he sent out a second, slower but stronger pulse of power.

  If the first pulse had been the crack of an electric whip, a bolt of lightning leaping though the cells of the sea, this pulse was the rolling heave of some great colossus shrugging beneath the mantle of the earth. It rolled out of him like a tsunami, a wave of immense power shifting entire oceans as it went.

  Every Calbernan was born with a seagift. All Calbernans could manipulate waves and currents to some extent. Even in the doldrums near the equator of Mystral, no Calbernan ship ever stalled, not even when the sea was still as glass and the sails hung dead-straight from the masts. Most Calbernan Houses could commune with one or more of the myriad species that dwelled in the oceans as well.

  Dilys of House Merimydion could commune with them all.

  Every creature, from the tiniest amoeba to the largest whale, to the wild, cold-blooded beast, the kracken, that great, deadly dragon of the sea that dwelled in the darkest abysses of the ocean.

  As he floated, weightless, in the water of the fjord, sending his power out into the sea, the golden trident on Dilys’s left wrist glowed sun bright.

  “This is my mate,” that second pulse called, carrying with it a vivid, sensory image of Gabriella that shared every sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch of her that Dilys knew. “Find her. Find the ones who took her. Show me the way.”

  Two hours later, Dilys stood at the helm of his ship, the Kracken, as it sailed out of Konumarr’s harbor and down the Llaskroner Fjord towards open ocean. Ari’s Orca and Ryll’s Narwhal followed in his wake, along with the remaining three ships from Dilys’s fleet.

  He’d found his missing men—Synan and all nine others—at the bottom of Llaskroner Fjord, wrapped in sailcloth and weighted down with lead ballast. Dilys expected to find them drowned, their foreheads branded with the symbol of the Shark, but if they’d died at the hands of Dilys’s greatest foe, the krillo hadn’t had time for his usual torture. Instead, Synan and his men’s throats had been slit and the right half of their faces, including their ears and a goodly portion of their scalps, had been sliced away. The grim finding helped put an end to any remaining suspicion that Dilys or his men were behind the abductions.

  He’d also found a trail to follow. In response to his inquiries, the inhabitants of Llaskroner Fjord had shared with him images of a ship that had sailed into the harbor under cover of fog. The same ship had dumped the bodies of Dilys’s men overboard as they departed. No doubt to cast suspicion for the abduction on Dilys and his men, a ploy that might have worked had not Dilys returned as soon as he had.

  As it was, however, whomever had created the fog had been complacent in thinking Dilys was away from Konumarr, because while the fog prevented any pursuers from seeing or identifying the ship above the surface of the water, those precautions did not extend to the eyes below the water. And while most nonmammalian sea life didn’t have particularly long memories or a particularly accurate sense of time, Dilys’s swift return to Konumarr had enabled him to extract from the Llaskroner’s many small, marine minds enough detail to piece together a reasonably specific description of the ship’s keel. He’d sent that description out to pods of whales, seals, and dolphins and asked them to help him locate the ship he was seeking.

  So far, none of the hunters had reported a live sighting of the ship, but he had received multiple reports of a mysterious, fast-moving fog bank that had traveled west across the Varyan several days ago.

  Dilys had traded his shuma, belt, and bands for the Calbernan version of armor: the blue-green loincloth lined with rings of hardened steel; the protective chest, arm, and shin guards; and the thick leather belt that strapped two sheathed swords to his waist. His trident was belowdecks, hanging on the wall of his cabin along with his shield. The twelve White Guards Wynter had assigned to Dilys’s ship were just coming back above decks after stowing their gear in the bunks below.

  He regarded their plate-steel armor with distaste.

  “You and your men should lose that armor,” he told the Winterman, a commander of the White Guard named Klars Friis. “Plain furs are better than that.”

  “Oh?” Friis arched a white brow.

  “Tey. If the ship goes down, my men and I can swim in our armor. You White Guards will drown in yours.”

  The Winterman paled a bit beneath his golden skin. “You expect this ship to sink?”

  “Expect? No. But ships do on occasion sink—especially in battle. And given that whoever took the Seasons has powerful magic at their call”—it took powerful magic indeed to hide a ship on the water from Calbernan eyes—“you can be sure there will be a battle. A fierce one, I expect. Exchanging your armor for something that won’t take you straight to the bottom of the ocean seems a wise precaution.”

  Friis blinked, then said gruffly, “I’ll speak to my men.”

  Dilys nodded curtly. Off the port bow, a large blue-and-white whale leapt out of the water. Massive flippers slapped the air as the whale’s body twisted. The creature slammed down on the surface of the water with a mighty splash.

  Dilys turned the helm over to his second mate and walked to the port railing. He held a hand out over the sea. A spout of water rose up from the waves below and engulfed his hand, connecting him to the ocean and all the creatures in it.

  Then he could hear the whale song repeating the tonal cries that had traveled through hundreds of miles of ocean from distant pods to the blueback whale that had just breached beside the Kracken to get Dilys’s attention.

  They had located the ship carrying the Seasons. It was already a thousand miles away. Whatever magic these pirates had at their call, it was damned powerful. Even among Calbernans, summoning an ocean current to speed a boat along that fast was a gift limited to those of royal blood.

  Dilys closed his eyes and concentrated on the power stored inside his body—the bubbling, lava-hot sea- and weathergifts bestowed by Gabriella and the crackling electric storm gifts laid upon him by Khamsin Coruscate.

  He channeled the seagifts into the ocean, reshaping the currents to his will. Spray misted over him, and the long ropes of his hair blew back from his face as the Kracken picked up speed.

  The crackling energy of Khamsin’s weathergift he called upon more cautiously. Her gift was wilder than his Gabriella’s, and very powerful. He could feel it fighting for release, the energy whipping at him in frenetic arcs that set his temper on edge.

  His admiration for Khamsin grew tenfold. How did she live with such a wild, fierce battle raging inside her every second of the day?

  Dilys used every ounce of his training to keep that magic in check, loosening his hold just enough to let a few wild sparks leap out. The sails of his ship gusted, the canvases bulging as wind filled them.

  The Kracken shot forward, cutting through the waves like a knife.

  Behind him, riding the wind and current he was generating, the other ships of his fleet followed suit.

  Chapter 20

  Summer groaned as she roused to consciousness. Her head ached ferociously. Her mouth felt—ugh, best not think about what her mouth felt like. The disgusting gag was still in place. Her stomach was churning wildly. Whatever sleeping poison her captors had used on her, it didn’t agree with her.

  “Awake, are you, my pearl?” crooned a voice Summer didn’t recognize. Foreign, accented, male. Eru, the common tongue, wasn’t his first language. She tried to place the accent—some sort of western land—but her mind was too muzzy to prop
erly identify it.

  She considered keeping her eyes closed and pretending to sleep until a large hand slid with shocking brazenness up her leg, underneath her nightgown.

  Her eyes flew open. She jerked away from the vile hand that dared to touch her.

  No longer locked in some musty, smelly hold and no longer blindfolded, she was on a bed, in a ship’s cabin. Her captor, his teeth a white slash grinning in a darkly bronzed face, watched her with unsettling black eyes.

  “You are a soft, pretty little thing. Which Season are you?” That cold gaze roved over her with leisurely insolence before finally meeting her murderous, narrow-eyed glare. “Summer, I’d say, with those lovely blue eyes. Hmm?”

  The man was tall, his dark skin weathered to a burnished teak. He wore his thick black hair in a simple queue and sported a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. His clothes were impeccably neat and made from obviously expensive cloth. In fact, he might have passed for a wealthy nobleman in the right environment, but she would have feared him even then. There was a cold, predatory gleam in his dark eyes, a snake coldly sizing up its prey.

  Whatever his plans for her, they weren’t good.

  And then he introduced himself. “Where are my manners? I am Mur Balat, purveyor of Mystral’s finest and rarest goods.”

  Summer’s stomach gave a sudden, queasy lurch. Her flesh went clammy, and her eyes went wide. Instinct had her rolling over, trying to raise up on her knees and lean over the side of the bed as her stomach spasmed.

  Balat—Mystral’s most infamous slaver—moved with unexpected swiftness, yanking free her gag and holding her head over an empty wooden pail as she was violently sick.

  “Easy, my pearl. The tzele the men gave you to keep you docile has this effect on some. It will soon pass.” His voice was gentle, crooning, almost soothing. As was the hand stroking the back of her neck.