by C. L. Wilson
“I know that, too,” Dilys said.
With its narrower lines, shallower keel, and smaller length, the Shark’s ship would have no trouble navigating the passage through the reef, or sailing the long stretch of calm shallows that ran for two hundred miles between the reef and the Ardullan coast. Dilys’s Kracken was at a distinct disadvantage. His ship was wider and longer, built for battle, not for racing through tight, curving passages lined with razor-sharp reefs.
“Who do we have near the south Kuinana Gate?”
Kame named two ships.
“Send them to block off his escape.” Not that boxing the Shark’s vessel behind the reefs would net him Nemuan. Even if Nemuan couldn’t reach land and disappear into the dense jungles of Ardul, the reefs of the Kuinana were riddled with undersea caves. Nemuan and his entire crew could abandon ship, and Dilys might never catch them. It was much easier for Calbernans to hide themselves in the water than hide a ship . . . they could simply make the creatures around them think they were sharks or dolphins.
“I’ll try to slow our quarry down before he enters the Kuinana, but if that doesn’t work, you follow him in.”
“Tey, moa Myerielua.”
Dilys clapped a hand on Kame’s shoulder. “If for some reason, I don’t make it back, there’s a message in my cabin for my Uncle Calivan. See that it gets to him immediately.”
“Tey, moa Myerielua.”
“Good.” Although Dilys was almost certain it was Nemuan in that ship, he hadn’t shared his suspicions with his crew. He wouldn’t blacken the name of a Calbernan prince without incontrovertible proof. His crew wasn’t stupid. They’d noted the same things Dilys had, but none of them would suspect a Calbernan of rank—especially a prince—of being the murderous pirate responsible for the deaths of so many of their own and the kidnapping of the three Seasons. They all thought the Shark was a powerful magician.
Leaving Kame at the wheel, Dilys dove over the side of the ship. The ocean here was as warm as bathwater. He let the clean, salty depths surround him, let his senses flow out.
With his pursuers closing in on him, Nemuan had dropped the invisibility enchantment on his ship. Either he was focusing all his efforts on maintaining his ship’s high speed, or whatever spell he’d been using to mask his ship had run out. The now visible fleeing ship was not Nemuan’s Wave Dancer but a different, unfamiliar vessel. Dilys didn’t find that surprising. A prince of Calberna was hardly likely to commit grand treason in his own vessel.
Focusing on a fifty-mile swath between the swiftly cruising ship and the Kuinana reef, Dilys began pulsing fist after hammering fist of power into the sea. The ocean swelled up, then smacked down, swelled up, smacked down. Slowly, great waves formed, five foot, ten, twenty. Too high for Nemuan to risk a reef entrance through the Kuinana’s treacherous northern gate. He would have to calm the seas before he could.
Calming the seas would take time.
Strong webs plumped between Dilys’s fingers and toes. He gave a kick and speared through the waves swifter than a dolphin, continuing to send out those pulses of power before him as he went. Behind him, the Kracken and the rest of the fleet sailed on the same magic-fed current Dilys was using to propel himself.
As he swam, Dilys sent calls to every large sea creature within twenty miles of Nemuan’s ship, ordering them to pursue the vessel and do everything in their power to slow it down.
It wasn’t long before Nemuan’s ship began to falter. Dilys’s waves were churning the waters, disrupting currents and turning the entrance to the Kuinana into an impassible, frothing white explosion of huge, crashing waves. Whales and dolphins were harrying Nemuan’s ship, slamming against the hull to slow its speed. Nemuan’s crew had begun harpooning everything in sight, turning the sea around the ship bloodred.
The Kracken had caught up with him. Dilys rode a spout of water back aboard deck as he and the rest of his fleet closed in around the foundering vessel.
“It’s over!” Dilys shouted, pitching his voice so that it could easily be heard by Nemuan’s acute Calbernan ears despite the distance between them and the turbulence around his ship. “You have nowhere to go! Heave to and prepare to be boarded. Surrender the Seasons!”
Dilys calmed the waves and called off the attacking whales and dolphins as the Calbernan fleet closed in. The Dancing Ray, one of the shallowest-keeled vessels in his fleet, came abreast of the foundering ship and used grappling hooks to tether her in preparation for boarding.
Seconds later, there was a burst of powerful magic and the ship Dilys had chased halfway across Mystral exploded in a fiery ball, raining fire and molten shrapnel upon every ship in a two-hundred-yard radius.
For one stunned, horrifying moment, Dilys couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. He could only stare in mute horror at the fiery inferno that had been Nemuan’s ship. Then the shout of one of his crew brought him snapping back into himself.
“Gabriella!” Dilys howled her name and dove over the side of the Kracken. He pierced the water deeply and began swimming with desperate speed towards the burning wreckage.
The sea was aflame with a dreadful, unnatural fire. Heat scorched him when he surfaced, turned the tropical ocean’s sparkling blue waters into a hellish red-orange sea when he dove. The shattered hulk of the pirate’s ship lurched drunkenly on the fiery waves.
“Gabriella!” he howled her name again. Shrieked it.
There were men in the water, screaming and thrashing as the unquenchable flames stuck to their bodies and consumed their flesh. The water did not douse the flames. Instead, it almost seemed to feed them. Some of the burning men were pirates. But most were Calbernans. Sailors from the Dancing Ray.
He ignored them, his mind utterly possessed by the driving need to find Gabriella and save her. Nothing else mattered. Not even the agony of friends and countrymen burning alive in a flaming sea.
He summoned a spout of water, riding it up towards the broken shards of the ship’s deck. “Gabriella!” he shouted. The whole craft was engulfed in fire, hardly an inch untouched by the hungry, licking flames. No place for him to stand, no way for him to search for her. Even here, beside the burning craft, the heat was so intense the water beneath his feet was starting to boil. Some distant part of his mind was aware that his own flesh was cooking, both from the scalding water bubbling at his feet and the fiery inferno burning before him, but he kept searching, kept screaming her name.
Something exploded nearby. Flaming debris struck his arm and flung him backwards into the sea. He surfaced quickly, aware of a sharp, searing bite of heat and pain. His arm was on fire, and his swift plunge into the sea hadn’t doused it. He slapped at the flames with a bare hand, and cursed as fire spread to his palm as well. The fire was like burning pitch. Sticking to whatever touched it. He slammed his burning hand back over the burning patch on his arm and held fast, hoping to smother what water couldn’t put out.
“Gabriella!” he screamed again. And despite the futility of it, too mad with horror and grief to admit that no one could still be alive in the fiery inferno, he swam again towards the burning wreckage.
“Dilys!” A small rowboat bobbed in the waves nearby. Ari was leaning over the prow. The tang of sea magic surrounded the small craft and its crew, a fresh scent wafting beneath the acrid smoke and stench of burning wood and flesh. They were using their seagifts to keep the fire away from their boat. “Get the Hel out of there!”
He ignored them and dove towards the fiery, sinking ship. Even here, beneath the waves, the fire was still burning, the heat overwhelming, but Dilys dove towards the shattered, sinking, flame-engulfed ship, no thought in his mind except the need to get to Gabriella. To find her. To save her.
Hands grabbed him from behind. He fought them, claws out, fangs snapping, roaring and thrashing, screaming her name. “Gabriella! Gabriella!”
Something hard smashed into the side of his head.
Before the magical, inextinguishable fire finally died away, seve
n ships of the Calbernan fleet were sunk. More than two hundred Calbernans were dead or missing. The Kracken and its crew had nearly been among them, until they discovered they could smother the fire by dousing it with sand.
After the flames finally died down, the grim business of recovering bodies began. Ari and Ryll had arrived with the rest of the fleet, and they, too, joined in the search. They searched throughout the rest of the day and on into the night, using the glow of their ulumi and the senses of the ocean’s denizens to penetrate the darkness of the night-shrouded ocean.
A few hours before dawn, the Calbernans searching the wreckage made a chilling discovery: the remains of two women burned beyond recognition and torn apart so violently by the explosion, it was hard to identify all the pieces. But two parts were easy to distinguish. One was an arm, the other a charred, ravaged bit of once delicate skin—both bearing the distinctive raised birthmark shaped like a rose.
They had found the Seasons of Summerlea.
“No.” Bereft, hollowed out as if his heart and every organ in his body had been ripped from his chest, Dilys stared at the gruesome remains, all that was left of two daughters of the Summer King. He refused to believe the truth before his eyes. “It isn’t her. She isn’t dead. She can’t be. I would know if she were dead!” But would he? She’d never claimed him. Their bond wasn’t complete.
“Dilys.” Bleak-eyed, wan beneath his sun-bronzed Calbernan skin, Ari started to reach for Dilys’s shoulder, only to let his hand fall away. There could be no condolence, no assuaging of grief. Not for this.
Helpless to lessen their cousin’s pain, both Ari and Ryll regarded him with agonizing sympathy.
“It isn’t her,” Dilys said again. “It can’t be her.” Numahao could not be so cruel. To take not one but two lianas from a man in one lifetime. To strip him of all those closest to his heart. Surely not.
But the raised rose birthmarks on those charred bits of flesh made a mockery of his protests.
Numahao could be so cruel. He was living proof of that.
“Why? Why?” His voice was hoarse, shredding as the words scraped through a too tight throat. His claws dug deep furrows into the planking of the Kracken’s deck. “I couldn’t save my father. I couldn’t save Nyamialine. I couldn’t keep Fyerin safe. And now G-Gabr—” His voice broke. He couldn’t say her name. Couldn’t add it to the list of his beloved dead.
And suddenly it was all too much. His grief too great to be borne.
Whatever it was, whatever the reason that his existence brought death and sorrow to the ones he loved, it must end now. And he understood why every unmarried adult male in House Merimynos had committed kepu when Siavaluana and Sianna had perished. Not for shame of being unable to protect their precious, adored women. Not to avoid burdening their House with too many sons. It was grief. Pain so deep, so unendurable, that ripping their own hearts from their chests was the only solace left to them, the only escape from the unquenchable, writhing agony of their loss.
Without Gabriella, there could be no Dilys. He could not live in a world where she didn’t.
He didn’t even want to try.
His claws sprang forth. Howling her name on a roar of anguish, Dilys drove his hand towards his own sternum with bone-shattering force.
Night had fallen, and Gabriella was once again pouring violent emotion into the cauldron of her captive magic. This time, the pain of what she was doing was worse than ever before. The monster was wild, furious, desperate to break free. It shrieked and raged inside her, turning her shackled magic into a volatile inferno that threatened to tear her apart. Despite her determination to keep quiet so as to avoid rousing suspicion, a low moan rattled in her throat.
Her collar vibrated against her neck. She didn’t think anything of it at first, but as she continued to push herself and her pained whimpers became cries she muffled against her arm, the vibration in her collar increased as well.
Then came a snap, like a bubble popping against her skin. Shards of agony pierced her brain, and everything went black.
When she woke, the sky was still dark, the sun still several hours from rising, but for the first time since she’d been collared, she could feel a hairline crack in the barrier standing between herself and her magic. It was so small as to be almost imperceptible, but to a weatherwitch who’d been cut off from her gift for weeks, that hairline fracture might as well have been as wide as a canyon.
She opened her eyes and glanced around the cabin. Solish was sleeping. The guard at the door was playing a game of cards to pass the time, the lantern beside him burning dimly so as not to disturb the viceroy’s sleep.
Gabriella fixed her gaze on the guard and for the first time in weeks tried to put Persuasion in her voice as she whispered, “You are very tired. Your eyes are so heavy. You can’t keep them open.”
A few seconds later, the guard yawned and his head began to nod forward.
It was working!
Emboldened by her success, she pushed a little more. “You have to sleep. Your whole body is so weary. You cannot stay awake another minute. You have to close your eyes and sleep now, and you will not wake up until dawn, no matter what you hear.”
The guard’s head slumped forward, chin resting on his chest, and she heard the rumble of soft snoring.
Elated, Gabriella reached for her magic, calling for its vast power to flood into the collar around her neck, hoping to burn it out. The collar went red-hot. Her flesh went hotter still. The Rose on her wrist was a glowing ember. The pain of it was terrible, as if she were burning alive from the inside out.
Either she must have made some sort of sound or the smell of the scorching linens around her must have dragged Solish Utua out of his sleep, because he sat up in the bed, took one look at Summer, whose whole body was now glowing with the fire trapped inside her, and screamed, “Tzele! Bring the tzele!”
The door to the cabin slammed open. Three hulking brutes came rushing towards her.
All she could think was, No! She wasn’t going to let them touch her. She wasn’t going to let them drug her. She wasn’t going to be held against her will. Not now. Not ever again.
And every ounce of violent, volatile, enraged emotion, every second of pain, anguish, and humiliation she’d suffered since her kidnapping, every tear she’d shed, every prayer for salvation and strength, every single powerful emotion that she’d ever known, she poured into the bubbling cauldron of her magic’s heart.
And then she Shouted: “NO!”
And the collar cracked open wide.
And the magic she’d spent a lifetime caging burst free.
“NO!” she Shouted again. Time slowed, each instant stretching out, bringing every tiny detail into sharp focus. She watched the men rushing towards her turn into twin pyres of flame and ash. The man who’d bought her from Mur Balat met the same fate. Then the ship—Gabriella’s floating prison, sailing her towards the barbarian who thought he could own a Season of Summerlea—bowed under tremendous force, wood bending, charring, then splintering outward into an explosion of a million shattered, flaming pieces.
Sound travels fast over water.
Gabriella’s Shout—the scream of a Siren—traveled faster than any natural sound on Mystral. It raced across the Varyan. Shattered every window on the Calbernan Isles and every window for hundreds of miles along the eastern coast of Ardul. In its wake, dragged along by the great force of that scream, raced a massive wave, a tsunami speeding out from the floating pile of burning flotsam that had been an unwise warlord’s ship.
Every Calbernan in the Isles—every Calbernan sailing the Varyan—heard that Shout.
Hundreds of miles away, aboard the Kracken, Dilys heard that Shout.
With it came the searing harpoon to his heart . . . not the death blow of his own clawed hand but sudden, savage joy as his ulumi blazed to blinding life.
“Gabriella!” he roared. He leapt to his feet. “Helmsman! Weigh anchor! Set a course for the source of that Shout!”
“She’s alive.” He turned to Ari and Ryll. “She’s alive!” He laughed, knuckling at the tears streaming from the corners of his eyes. His cousins clapped him on the shoulder and dragged him close for hugs.
“You should take Ryll and the rest of the fleet with you to get your Siren,” Ari said. “My crew and I will stay here to finish the recovery efforts. We still have missing men, and families back home who will want to know we did everything possible to bring their sons home.”
“Tey, of course.” Dilys could hardly process. The wild upheaval of emotion had left him dazed. He hugged Ari close once more. “Thank you, Ari. Stay safe.”
“Always.” Ari jumped to the top of the ship’s rail and dove into the sea.
It occurred to Gabriella as she was treading water amidst the shredded, smoldering debris of what had been Solish Utua’s ship that Shouting her only means of transport to pieces might not have been the most brilliant move on her part. She’d left no piece of the vessel larger than the palm of her hand, which meant there wasn’t even anything big enough to use for floatation, and she was alone in the middle of a vast, empty ocean.
She knew essentially where she was. Now that she was free of the collar, the location of the sun told her that. South of the equator, east of the continent of Ardul, and several hundred miles southwest of the Calbernan Isles. There was no land within swimming distance.
Perhaps half an hour after her Shout, she saw several dark fins cut the surface of the water nearby. At first she thought they were sharks drawn by whatever blood had been spilled by the shipload of sailors she’d just Shouted to pieces, and her heart started to pound. Her magic roared up instantly, without even a call, ready—almost hungry—to Shout away the ocean predators if they came closer. Before she could unleash it, inquisitive dolphin faces popped up, and the air filled with the sounds of high-pitched chirps and squeals. Several of the creatures began leaping into the air, arching and twirling about before diving back into the ocean with a splash. They ringed around her, chattering and chirping, and it became clear they meant no harm, that they meant, in fact to keep her company, and possibly to protect her. An hour after the dolphins arrived, a handful of swimming Calbernans arrived, too.