by Chris Howard
At the other end of the room, Erix leaned casually against Melinna, stuffing his mouth with food from their table, nursing his bandaged arm, determined to see Nikasia react stupidly in front everyone in the room.
"Has our little Nika got all her fingers?"
She gave him a freezing stare at the word "our." What, is he part of the family now?
"I've a cousin missing two." Erix laughed as she tucked all of hers in. "Don't you worry, unless the judge's a nasty one. They start with the hand opposite your favored, and work their way in from the little finger. On a man it's bad enough." His face brightened as if with good news. "On a girl...well, then it means marrying below her station, doubling her dowry, not nearly as fetching when a girl's missing a finger or two."
Nikasia looked right at her sister Melinna, tall and beautiful, her long black braids wound into loops and spirals. "Bold before others, he's a silent coward in a room alone with me."
She was just starting to smile at her sister's gasp of jealous rage, when her thoughts drifted into a dream of being alone in open water with her father's murderer. These people—her own family, their loves—didn't matter anymore. They never had mattered. The only thing that mattered in all the cold world was killing her father's killer.
That is how I will see the deed in the eyes of Gregor Rexenor. If he is silent when facing his death, then he is guilty, and he will die. I will give him the chance to plead, to tell me the story of my father's last moments in this sea. What did he see in my father's face? What were my father's final words? Did the Rexenor allow him to speak before taking his life? Or did he just kill?
Chapter 8 - The Untrusting Book
Gregor Lord Rexenor, son of the late Lady Kallixene and Lord Nausikrates, spent the afternoon cleaning a two-hundred gallon aquarium in which he kept a very old book.
The book, hundreds of rolled and ragged-ended scroll cuttings bound into a codex, rested in the water on sea-worn boulders that lined the tank's floor, brown and red-crusted lumps of granite that jutted with higher algae, swaying fronds of deep red Porphyra, olive ruffles of Alaria, and other common benthic inhabitants of the New England rocky intertidal zone.
Gregor hoisted a bucket with a label that read "Pickles" as high as his shoulders, stepped around a fifteen-gallon plastic drum of fresh seawater, and headed into the kitchen, walking like a penguin with the silt and old aquarium water sloshing against the bucket's walls. He turned sideways to get by the kitchen island, a butcher-block topped cabinet fixed to the center of the kitchen's floor, set the bucket down on the edge of the sink, and tipped it in.
He stared out the window over the sink while he emptied the bucket, following a few cars passing along Ocean Boulevard where it curved around the edge of Little Boar's Head in North Hampton, New Hampshire, between his property and the Atlantic.
A moment later, he was back in his study, which contained many books—bookcases full of them, books on marine biology, oceanography, sailing and small craft handling, marine navigation and weather, advanced mathematics, encyclopedias, hundreds of paperbacks, and a whole shelf on parenting with titles like, A Single Dad's Guide to Raising Difficult Girls and Fathers and Daughters—How to raise them to be independent, teach them to drive, and get them out of your house.
Of all the books in the room, there was only one that required immersion in seawater.
Two three-gallon loads of water later, Gregor set the pickle bucket aside and placed a shallow plastic tray across the top of the aquarium. The pumps churned the water against the glass, splattering the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt as he reached in and lifted the large volume with thick end boards off its resting place in the center of the aquarium.
His gray-streaked black hair fell into his eyes as he lifted the book, heavy with water, into the tray. The ocean oozed from its pages, bubbling from pores in the binding, filling the tray to its rim. Its face exposed to the air, the book curled at the edges and swelled up, breathing in the seawater, leaving a few beads to run to the tray's corners when Gregor pulled it off the top of the aquarium.
He smiled grimly at what he took to be a sniff of discomfort from the book, shifting the load to make walking easier, his fingers hooking the tray's lip; brown seams of scar tissue ran along the insides of each where someone had done a messy job cutting the webbing away.
"Just take a moment. Can't have you sitting in old water."
Gregor set the tray down beside the kitchen sink and returned to the aquarium. A crease in the tray's corner allowed water to collect, an inch deep, and dribble steadily into the sink, down the drain, through the bend, coating the pipe, and eventually into the septic system. The book spent a little more energy, a driving surge that rode over the passive channel gravity created, strengthening it, punching out through the septic system's leach lines, into the earth. The network was tenuous for hundreds of feet, but the book had learned many things sitting in the water, listening to the conversations of Gregor's family and friends, enough to curse the Rexenor lord for buying such an enormous piece of the exposed surface of the earth—and right next to the Atlantic Ocean. The property taxes alone must be ghastly.
It cursed and it pushed the thread of water deeper into the cold earth, requiring more power, latching one handful of water molecules to the next at the thinnest points in the communications chain. It pushed the channel of water through near solid ground, driving through seams in the rock and cold compact dirt. Tree roots had to be avoided, as they drew water and could break the channel at its weakest points. The book pushed harder. The course broke through clay, seeped through a line of crumbling rock, inched into compressed sand, and...
The sea. It had found the sea. Thalassa! The book rejoiced.
"What did you say?" Gregor stumped into the kitchen, lifted the pickle bucket, and poured three more gallons of aquarium water into the sink.
I miss the sea, Lord Gregor. The book flipped one end-board up casually, ruffling a few pages as it pushed the words into Gregor, or what it could perceive of Gregor, a blur of soul-form, a foamy glow of animate mind and human structural silhouette.
Reminiscing. That is all.
It squeezed another pulse of energy along the channel to the sea, pulling it back into land, picking up the blood signature of one of its ancient masters, one of the Telkhines.
As Gregor reached the kitchen door with the empty bucket, the book flipped up an end board again, and because it could not help boasting of its abilities, said, By the way, I do not think it wise to pour seawater into your drain. Your septic system is not fond of it. The bacteria in the septic tank are not the sort that get along with the seaborn.
Gregor returned to the sink and placed one hand on the book's cover. "I miss the sea as well, and my home. Soon. Very soon, we will return forever." He choked on the word, "home," and made a pinched face as if swallowing something sour.
He picked up the bucket, crossed the kitchen to the study, and dunked it into the aquarium for another three gallons, muttering to himself. "Landlubbers. Even the damn bacteria."
Beside the sink, the pages went rigid in fury, tasting the enemy in the air, and searching the house, finally found the blinding soul-form of the Alkimides, Kassandra.
Two of Gregor's three daughters sat at the dining room table, bent over a dozen open books, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Aristotle's Politics, big maps of Napoleon's campaigns, a half-played game of chess between them.
Nicole ran her finger down a page, frowning when she reached the bottom without finding what she was looking for. With a thump, she threw the thick block of pages to one side to browse the index. She browsed the topics and page numbers and reached across the table to move a knight on the board.
Kassandra tapped her pencil on a text in ancient Greek, her bare feet hooked on the rungs of the chair. She spoke softly to herself in words that sounded like one side of a conversation, and she looked up occasionally with dark, deep-musing eyes that weren't always focused on the outside world. Without looking at the chessboar
d, she reached out and took one Nicole's bishops.
The book on the edge of the sink in the kitchen found the third daughter, Jill, outside the house, back to one of the lookout pines on the edge of the property, her fingers curling through the thick blond hair of Jordan Chandler. She pulled a kiss from somewhere deep inside him—deep enough to pull him off balance, and force him to push her against the rough bark.
With Gregor out of the room and one attentive thread on that Alkimides bitch, the book turned the remainder of its thought to its quarry, Alexander Shoaler, one of the Telkhines, the same blood line it had discovered years ago, moments after waking from a two-thousand year old sleep. The Telkhinos had been a baby then, stumbling around in the surf, dangling from his mother's hands.
The book sent its searching channel up the sand, fingering the lumps of granite, questing for the distant blood-son of twenty generations of Telkhines. The man was here, somewhere close in the waves. The book forked the path into two seeking threads, one going shallow, the other deep.
Nicole looked over at her sister. "How long?"
Kassandra held her gaze for a minute. "Not very long."
"Like we should start packing for the Nine-cities?"
Kassandra focused on something internally. "Hundred and sixty three more events and connections need to happen, fall into place." She shrugged. "Give or take a hundred."
"No idea what that means. Give me an example of an event or connection?"
"Well, I've planned for as many as seventeen people dead before we can go home and get my asshole grandfather off the throne. Could be hundreds depending how my grandfather reacts."
Nicole leaned away from her. "Who dies? Those Kirkelatides? What's their deal with dad? Why do they want to kill him?"
Kassandra nodded, but no real commitment to who dies. "I'll tell you the whole story sometime. It starts right after I was born, like days after I came into this world, but here's the outline: the kings and queens of the seaborn have had appointed eight trusted soldiers as bodyguards for a long time, a thousand years or so. They're called the oktoloi, the Eight, sometimes called the Trusted Eight. They've sworn to defend the king or queen to the death, and in many cases they have—actually died in the line of duty. Anyway, the only king who has ever lost all eight in one swoop is Tharsaleos—and very few know that he killed them himself. He blamed their deaths on dad. As far as the seaborn know, Gregor Lord Rexenor was the killer of the Eight."
Nicole nodded, staring down at the open pages of the book in front of her, but not reading them. "And Phaidra? Dad's really concerned about her. I'm really concerned about her."
Kassandra went still for a minute. "Yeah," she said quietly. "I need to find a way to get into the king's prisons and bust out our favorite aunt without jeopardizing the rest of the strategy. I had originally planned to release her when we took the Nine-cities, and that still may be the way this plays out. I really wish it didn't have to be that way."
"Okay."
Kassandra let the silence slip by for another minute, tapping her pencil against the wood, then moved on. "Eleven of the conditions that have to be met have to do with you, Nicole. And then there are new events and potentials inserting themselves all the time, new things I have to fit into the plan, schedule, deal with."
She dropped her pencil on the dining room table. "Jordan's gone."
Nicole looked over, sliding her chin in her palm, her fingers playing with the ropy knobs of her braids. "I heard him drive off, too."
"And the tide's coming in." Kassandra untangled herself from the chair's rungs and motioned to the back of the house. "Let's see what's keeping her."
The two of them headed through the kitchen into the living room and out onto the back walk, stopping at the head of a set of mossy granite stairs that dropped to a sloping acre of grass. Giant old pines studded the property along the edge, pillars that held up the sky, and Jill danced in the grass among them.
Nicole pulled her bra strap over one muscular brown shoulder, straightening her sleeveless shirt, which had the words "I Hit Like A Girl" in big pink letters down the front. She jabbed Kassandra with her elbow. "Pirouettes."
"Yup."
They stood at the top of the stairs, barefoot on the damp stone, and watched Jill twirl for three long minutes, throwing her arms out, her face tilted to the sky, her white toes curling in a cumulus of soft green grass.
Nicole shook her head. "How many do you think she's going to do?"
"Enough to make herself dizzy." Kassandra stared at Jill another minute and whispered without meaning to, "I have never been that happy." Her eyes felt heavy, not with tears, but the swelling that accompanied them. She couldn't look away from her sister, spinning like a ballerina in the backyard, the wind off the Atlantic lifting her gold hair into a silk banner. She always let her braids unwind when Jordan came to see her.
Kassandra sighed. "I wish..."
Nicole smiled slowly and threw an arm over her shoulder. "What does the princess, summoner of sea-demons, possessor of every last seashell Poseidon used to own, wish for?"
Kassandra paused to ponder that, but Nicole didn't let her thoughts wander far.
"Tell me your wish."
"No."
"Come on."
"It's pathetic. All my wishes are. I was going to say, I wish I could cry."
"You're a freak. Get over it. Tell me what you really wish for?"
Kassandra kept her eyes on pirouetting Jill. "That everything can go back to the way it was."
Nicole let a few seconds go by. "And... you're going to tell me the way it was?"
"I don't know. Happy. Sun-eudaimoneô. The world has been pulled out from under us, and you won't cry. I can't. I don't think I can bear to see Jill cry."
"Look after your own. Jill's happiness isn't in your control." Nicole shook her head. "Deep sea politics and armies from murdering grandfathers not keeping you busy enough?"
But Kassandra wasn't listening. She was grinning and waving at Jill, who had stopped, noticed her sisters, and laughed, stumbling to the grass because she was too dizzy to stay on her feet.
"Gods, she's more of a princess than I'll ever be. Fawning guys, shopping excursions. All she needs is that tiara. I don't know what I'd do in a clothing store with more than a hundred bucks."
Kassandra watched Jill, still somersaulting with an imaginary Jordan, and then glanced over at Nicole, noting how far apart they'd grown: Jill competed on phone time with call-centers, smiled every time Jordan texted her a string of X's and O's, and spent way too much time dancing like an elf in the shade of the towering pines at the yard's edge. Nic climbed them, shook the branches forty feet off the ground, leaning dangerously out over Ocean Boulevard, and when she said anything at all, it was something important, like the fact that she could see Boon Island Light from her perch.
Jill flopped on her back and went still for a minute. She made a high-pitched "eeeeeee!" noise and rolled in the grass, kicking the air, part of some latent Jordan reverie—and in a hundred dollar silk tank and a knee length skirt riding up her thighs with a price tag three times that. She'd kicked her lime-green heels—another few hundred dollars—into opposite ends of the yard.
Kassandra and Nicole looked at each other, and that was all it took to pull their faces into snooty, nose-ratcheting knots. At the same time they both said—in perfect imitations of the trust fund supported, Porsche-driving, perfectly dressed and manicured girls they used to go to school with: "Dah-dy will buy me a boat."
They burst out laughing.
Jordan Chandler sailed in races off Nantucket and the Vineyard. He had shelves of trophies and ribbons. His family had a place on the Cape, and Jill had visited him every summer for the last three years. The first summer, she'd come home after two weeks "with her man," sun-tanned, gold highlights in her hair, obsessed with sailing and packing a heavy new vocabulary with words like transom and jibstay.
And daddy—Gregor, as part of his encourage their interests plan—had
bought her a boat, Stormwind, a forty-two foot cutter berthed in Rye—along with eight pairs of deck shoes in a variety of colors, because, in Jill's mind, what was the point of having a deck without shoes to go with it?
"Oh, yeah." Nicole sighed. "More of a princess than anyone I know—certainly you."
Kassandra gave her a scary intense glare, and Nicole looked away with a jump of fear. Swallowing hard to get a grip on her thumping heart, she turned her thoughts to something that made her angry instead. Then jutted her chin down toward the beach. "What about Beach Guy?"
Kassandra followed her gaze. "Bachoris?"
"Speaking of never being as happy as Jill."
"I'm seeing him tonight." She read the question in Nicole's expression, and shook her head. "Just me and him. Going out for coffee. Getting to know each other."
Nicole whispered, "There's something about him I don't like."
"You bet there is."
The book, sitting in the tray next to the kitchen sink, tracked Gregor's daughters' movement outside the house, and with mounting irritation squeezed another thread of seawater down the channel. Time was slipping by. The book's extended senses felt its way along the sand into a shallow beach where the Telkhinos was in the sea with a long board of some unknown pressed and shaped fibrous material.
Alex Shoaler ran his fingers through his spiky hair, throwing off a shower of water, and lurched forward to catch the sand with his toes. He steadied himself on the slope, and then leaned back against the roll of the surf. Then spun toward the horizon, sensing something moving in the milky gray waves. He blinked away seawater. It was just a feeling, not enough to push him into acting on it.
Then he felt a cold, insistent tap on his spine. It fingered up his back, under his wetsuit, a chill burn on his skin. His hands tightened on his surfboard, and he swung it around in the chest deep water like a shield between his position twenty meters out from North Hampton Beach and the rest of the Atlantic.