A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

  He swallowed. Smiled feebly.

  There were no answering smiles.

  * * *

  He sat…well, half sat and half floated…in a room in the Palace of the Sea King. There had been no doubt in his mind, even though his captors had spoken not a word to him, that the enormous, fantastical pastel confection he was taken to was a palace, and who would have a palace like that except the Sea King?

  The room to which he had been brought, after much swimming through what he could only call “gardens” and in and out of corridors, was as plain as the exterior was embellished. Four white walls, one door. Two armed guards inside, two outside that door. No windows, but there were huge seashells mounted on the walls that glowed. By now, he was getting used to arcane lighting, he supposed; he scarcely spared them a glance. He’d been brought here long enough ago that he was beginning to get bored.

  From terror to boredom…well, perhaps he shouldn’t be complacent. It might just be that the Sea King really had been angry with the owner of that ship or its captain, and he had just been the convenient sacrifice. After all, how could the Sea King have known that he was on that particular vessel, much less have found out about him and Katya?

  Unless, of course, Katya had told him….

  But still, the course of his journey from the Jolly Sturgeon to here was far from predictable. It made no sense for the King to have known….

  Then again, there were all manner of spells for scrying and finding….

  But then, why leave him here for so long?

  Because the King wanted him nervous…or wanted him off guard.

  He thought about that. And he reminded himself of several important truths. That this was Katya’s father. That he needed to make an ally of this man. No matter what happened in life, you came with either the burden or the support of your parents, and that never changed, no matter what else did.

  He knew what his own father’s reaction would be; the King of Led Belarus would welcome an alliance with the Sea King with open arms. Sasha’s father would think Katya was adorable, and probably consistently underestimate her, which was not a bad thing at all.

  But what of the Sea King?

  The room looked as if it was used more for storage than as a prison. It was lined with chests made of shell and metal—or at least, he thought it was shell. He wondered if there was anything in them that would be of any use to him….

  He sidled over to the first one and opened it. The guards paid him no attention at all, so there probably wasn’t anything here that they would consider a weapon. Yes, well…if ever he got out of this, he would have to have a word with their trainer.

  The first two were empty. The third contained odd bundles, soft cloth drawstring cases that contained—strangely lumpy objects. Well, he thought the cases were cloth. It was hard to tell, really—would cloth disintegrate down here? This was a more surreal world than that of the Queen of the Copper Mountain. He pulled one out, and pulled open the drawstring and looked inside.

  He gaped with astonishment to see a balalaika.

  Quickly, he slid the instrument out of the bag. It was a balalaika, all right. But such an instrument! It was carved of pearly yellow shell, and he couldn’t imagine the clam or oyster that was large enough to have supplied the top and bottom of the instrument. All the frets and the tuning keys and pegs were ivory. The sounding hole was a delicate lacework cut into the shell. It was a stunning piece of work. And he discovered by trying it that it was perfectly in tune.

  At this point he didn’t even trouble to wonder how the sound could carry underwater. It just did. That was all that mattered.

  He held very still for a long moment, letting everything settle into his mind; what he knew, what he did not know. This moment was important. He sensed that he was at a crossroads of sorts and that what he did now was going to set the tone of his life for a very long time indeed.

  Now he could use this instrument for any number of purposes. He was a Songweaver, and the fact that it had fallen straight into his hands could only mean that The Tradition was working powerfully in his favor. He was, with no doubt, intended to use it.

  The question was for what?

  He could probably put his guards to sleep and escape, trusting to whatever spell made it possible for him to breathe underwater to keep him from drowning. He could definitely make for the surface. He might be able to escape pursuit. He might even survive on the surface long enough to find land or be rescued by a passing ship.

  He could most definitely subvert one of more of the guards to his aid, as he had done with the Goat and the Wolf. In that case, with allies, his escape would certainly be a success. He could get to land. His new allies might even know where Katya was.

  Or—

  Or—

  He could do the honorable thing.

  Katya was out there somewhere and probably in need of help. Her father knew where she was because he had sent her himself.

  If Sasha made a clean breast of it, told her father what had gone on between them, and told the truth, that he was trying to find Katya to help he—

  Well, the Sea King probably would not kill him until Katya was safe again.

  It would be hard to do. It might be dangerous. There might be costs and repercussions he had not dreamed of. But that, and not escape, was the honorable thing to do….

  With a sigh, Sasha searched for words and music in his mind, and began to sing. This song was going to take all of his craft as a Songweaver.

  He sang of how he and Katya had met, how they had felt their spirits akin from the moment they had first set eyes on one another. Then he changed to a minor key and sang of the loneliness each had endured because of what they were and had to be for their people. He sang of Katya’s loneliness as well as his own, for by now he knew the shape of it, too. Part of him had served to fill that loneliness, and his spirit retained the impression of it.

  By this time, his guards were listening, and one or two of them had tears in their eyes—

  At least, he presumed he had moved them to tears. He hoped it wasn’t laughter. But the two in question had turned away for a moment and were rubbing their eyes. If he had moved them, that was important because he needed them to fetch the King; he needed the Sea King to hear this for himself.

  He changed back to a major key, and though he did not go into the kind of detail that would have turned this from a ballad of love into a bawdy one, he made sure that there was no doubt of what he and Katya were to each other. Now all four of the guards were hiding smiles; he tried not to make this part sentimental, for coming after the previous section, that would be cloying. He kept it respectable, but earthy.

  And if that didn’t get the Sea King’s attention, nothing would. Hopefully the King would not demand his head…

  Now he changed to a minor key again, and sang of how duty had called her and he had waited, waited, realized that something had gone wrong and she had been taken from him. He sang despair, then resolution, reprised the theme of loneliness and—

  “Oh for the sake of all that is sane, do stop.”

  His hands, which had been forming a complicated chord, fumbled it into a dissonant twang as he looked up.

  There was a tall, blond man standing in the doorway, hands on his hips. He wore a golden-scaled, fish-skin tunic, and tight-fitting trews of sharkskin. If the coronet hadn’t given it away, the demeanor, and the resemblance to Katya, certainly would have.

  “Apparently you are unaware of just how well sound carries underwater. You have half my courtiers and family swimming about looking for me to plead with me to forgive you,” the handsome, strong-featured fellow said, arms crossed over his chest, wearing—to Sasha’s intense relief—an expression of amusement. “And the other half are swimming about looking for a way to help you escape.” One eyebrow rose as he examined Sasha. “You’ll be a very useful sort of Drylander to have about, I think. Between the two of you, you and my daughter might just equal a Godmother.” He raised the other eye
brow. “Of course, you’ll have to marry her. You did intend to do that, I assume? I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here, on your intelligence. I am supposing you were going to ask me for her hand, otherwise you wouldn’t have been wailing about your undying love in the heart of her father’s palace—”

  Relief suffused Sasha, and he was very, very glad that he could answer, honestly, “I already asked her, gracious Majesty. She consented, and if you would grant me the honor I—”

  “Ah good, that’s settled then. Now, let’s get down to tactics. Here—” the King took the balalaika from his nerveless fingers and thrust it at one of the guards who had been wiping his eyes. “You put that away. You, Drylander, come with me.” And as he grabbed Sasha by the elbow and bustled him away, the King turned and shouted back over his shoulder, “And stop sniffling.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “I know exactly where my daughter is,” said the Sea King, leading Sasha through a bewildering array of corridors and out into the “gardens” again. It was very peculiar to follow someone swimming rather than walking. It was even more peculiar to be walking through “gardens” and see fish rather than butterflies and bees darting past. “The problem is that neither I nor any of my people can help her. She’s the only one of us that can freely walk on dry land.” He made a face. “Well I can, but one old warrior isn’t going to do her much good right now. She got herself some Champions, but they can’t come underwater. You, my good fellow, are exactly what I need. A foot in both worlds. So time to go talk to the Champions and see what they’ve found out.” He made an abrupt turn into a netted enclosure. “We’ll need some mounts. We need speed we can’t supply on our own.”

  Sasha looked at the half-dozen smiling faces that pointed their snouts in the King’s direction and bobbed their heads with excitement. “Ah, sir, these are dolphins—”

  This was the first time he had ever seen dolphins up close. They were bigger than he had thought, and very agile. Their eternal smiles were quite charming. From time to time one of them would leave the enclosure to go to the surface to breathe, and it was breathtaking to watch them shoot away so gracefully, and return just as quickly. The graceful grey bodies, wonderful to watch from above the surface of the water, were astonishing from below.

  Thanks to the dragon’s blood, he could understand what they were saying, too. “Me! Me!” “Pick me, Majesty!” “No, me! I’m fastest!” “I’m strongest!” “I’m both!”

  “Exactly,” said the King, and looked over the choices. “Bow-wave and Spinner, if you please.”

  “Awwwwww.” There was a disappointed chorus as two of the dolphins separated from the pod and presented themselves for harnessing. Both bowed to the King, then nudged each other like a pair of teenage boys before settling. The King waved away any help from a young Triton who came swimming up belatedly to serve him; as one of the two dolphins went to pluck a second harness off the net wall, the King harnessed the first. Then he fed both dolphins the same seaweed balls that Sasha had eaten.

  “Just hold onto these handholds on the harness here and here. Then you lay yourself along Spinner’s back like this—” The King demonstrated, and awkwardly, Sasha tried to copy him. “Now take us to the Champions, lads.”

  There was no warning; with a powerful surge of his entire body, the dolphin shot forward.

  Sasha hung on for dear life. It was a good thing he had strong arms; he was not so much riding as being pulled along. The sea floor shot past, and then, abruptly, dropped away, and they were in a place he could not even have imagined—beneath the surface of the deep sea.

  First a mortar, then a Goat, now a dolphin, he thought, with a combination of bewilderment and irony. So what do I ride next? A dragon?

  As the water rushed past him and he did his utmost to keep from interfering too much with the dolphin’s powerful undulations, he had to laugh a bit at that thought. No, that would be a bit much. Even for me.

  He had never been aware of just how serene—and just how empty—the wide sea really was. He and the King and the two dolphins appeared to be suspended in a zone of endless milky-blue water. From where they swam, you could not see anything of the bottom, the water went on into the distance with no horizon. He cast a glance upward. The surface was visible only as rippling reflections. With no landmarks to go by, he couldn’t tell how fast they were actually going. It might have been faster than a galloping horse, they might have been crawling. The pressure of the water moving past told him “fast,” but his eyes told him nothing. Neither he and the King, nor the dolphins, had to surface for air because the dolphins at least were under the same spell that he was, allowing them to breathe water instead of air. As for the King—probably the Sea King could already breathe water, just as his daughter could.

  Then something dark loomed in the distance, and it was coming up fast—

  And they were in the middle of life again.

  The dark thing was a rock wall rising up from the deeper sea floor, and life clung to every crack and ledge of it. Kelp and other seaweeds, sea fans, some coral, lots of barnacles and shellfish. He spotted crabs and lobster scuttling about, and plenty of fish flitting in and out of the kelp patches. This, it seemed, was their goal, for the dolphins shot to the surface, taking their “riders” with them.

  Sasha spasmed in a cough, spat a little water, and was breathing air again. The two dolphins spouted a blast that was more water than air, and did the same. All four of them bobbed in the sunlight, in a relatively placid cove. At a nudge from his escort, Sasha swam toward the very narrow beach of what appeared to be an island. It was quite a precipitous one; a shallow cliff rose abruptly from that beach, a dark basaltic cliff, jagged and showing only a few patches of green where moss and bushes found a foothold. And it wasn’t until part of the cliff face moved that he realized that it wasn’t cliff face at all.

  It was a dragon.

  “What ho!” the dragon said genially, as Sasha froze. “Visitors? Oh good! Oh the Sea King, even better!”

  As if one dragon hadn’t been enough, a second dragon’s head popped up over the back of the first. “The Sea King! Wonderful! Then we are finally going to be able to get on with the rescue!”

  The word rescue resonated with another he had heard on the other side of this journey. Champions.

  He stared. “You’re the Champions,” he said, making it a statement and not a question.

  The first dragon, who was a sort of dark translucent grey, nodded. “Adamant and Gina, Champions of the Order of the Glass Mountain,” he said proudly. “We don’t really have a Chapter House.” He chuckled. “Really, how would we fit into one?” The second dragon, this one a dark seagreen also nodded.

  “I didn’t know there were any dragon Champions.” Sasha felt rather dumbfounded. His mind was running in tiny circles of reasoning trying to fit “Dragon Champion” into what he knew of The Tradition and failing utterly. “Isn’t it usually Champions slaying dragons?”

  “Oh now that was tactful,” the Sea King said sarcastically, emerging from the water onto the beach. Sasha noted absently that it was sadly obvious how much more practical the Sea King’s garb was for this than Sasha’s was. The Sea King’s sleeveless tunic and trews shed the water and were already dry. Sasha was still dripping.

  Sasha flushed, as the second dragon sighed. “All the ugly old prejudices. As if we didn’t have enough problems with nasty sorcerers trying to force us into the Traditional Path of maiden-eating. Really sir, I could just as well have said, ‘Oh, a Seventh Son, so how dimwitted are you? Must I limit my conversation to monosyllables?’”

  Sasha flushed. “I deserved that,” he acknowledged. “Let’s try again, shall we? My name is Sasha, Prince Alexsandr of Led Belarus to be precise, and yes, I am a Seventh Son. I didn’t know that it showed.”

  “It does when you are by your nature magical,” the second dragon said. “And when you know what to look for. I’m Gina, and this is my mate Adamant.” She turned her head, and gazed fondly at
the charcoal-colored dragon. “We were ambushed by a paper bird that gave us a message about captives in the castle of the Katschei. Not knowing what that was, we went looking for an explanation, found a Triton, and—” She shrugged. “The Sea King has good agents, and this Triton was one of them. The Triton suggested we come here and gave us a good grounding—when we got a full explanation, we decided to wait for His Majesty to see if he had anything more he could help us with. We are not from this part of the world, and we really need an expert on The Tradition hereabouts.”

  Sasha made a self-deprecating face. “I don’t know about expert, but I know a bit. Katschei the Deathless used to live in a castle north of my land of Led Belarus, but I’m afraid he couldn’t live up to his name. It was rumored that he thought he would be clever and invade some land that didn’t have him as a Traditional evil, where no one would know what he was or be able to defeat him. Since most of the enchantments around his castle suddenly evaporated, we assume he came to a bad end. The castle has been vacant since.”

  “Well it isn’t now.” The first dragon—Adamant—shook his massive head. “Can I assume that it was not originally in the center of a hot, sandy desert?”

  Sasha blinked at both of them, dumbfounded. “Ah,” he managed to say. “No. Rather impenetrable forest, then a hedge maze, according to The Tradition.”

  “Hmm. Then the desert must be the work of this ‘Jinn’ that the note refers to.” The green dragon gave the impression of a frown. “So far we have a ‘Jinn’ moving into the castle, creating a desert around it, and evidently kidnapping maidens who have some link or other to magic, which is how you, Majesty, got involved in the first place. I assume from what the Triton told us that you sent your daughter to investigate and she is the owner of the paper bird. Would you say that your daughter is clever?”