by Caro Carson
Peasants, soldiers, Kayna—they were all insignificant humans. And yet, she carried magic, the magic she’d prayed for, the magic she hadn’t thought to feel again after Merlin’s disappearance.
Just a little longer. The quest is almost over.
The ruby hung in a pouch around her neck, hidden under her clothing. She could feel the energy of it against her breast. At first, she’d felt protected by its magic, but as darkness had forced the horse to a walk, she’d started to worry. She feared that she was somehow absorbing magic from the ruby, magic that Arthur would need to survive his injuries.
When she reached the royal tent at Camlann, she was told that she must keep going. Arthur had been taken to an isle called Avalon in the hope of better healing. Another day of hard riding brought her to the edge of the ocean as dusk was falling.
She left the sweating, heaving horse on the shore and dropped in exhaustion into a black boat. It had been waiting on the shore, and she had known without question it was for her—or for her ruby. The oarsman, a silent specter she suspected was not quite human, rowed with a disciplined steadiness, and Kayna had only minutes to catch her breath as the boat glided over a calm ocean toward an island that glowed emerald green in the last rays of the day’s sun.
They made shore before she was ready. Climbing out of the boat and up the rocky edge of the island seemed impossible. She unfastened the cloak pin at her throat and let the heavy wool drop from her back. She felt too tired to hike up her blue gown, but somehow, she made it out of the boat and up the ledge, and took in the scene before her.
Her quest was over.
Arthur, the greatest king who’d ever walked the earth, was dead.
Kayna was too late. The ruby was useless to a dead man. Arthur’s body lay in regal repose on a bower of apple branches, surrounded by figures in hooded, black cloaks.
She dropped her gaze, unable to bear the sight of the king laid low. The grass at her feet was unnaturally green, such beauty amid such a tragedy.
The grass wavered. Rippled. Although the toes of her boots and the hem of her dress looked sturdy and solid, the grass looked like it was both there and not there, as if Kayna were looking through a gem, and seeing what was on the other side.
What was on the other side was water.
She snapped her gaze up to the funeral bower, then higher up to the trees. The island itself was disappearing, turning into mist. The black-robed people who stood like solemn pillars around the body of the king were fading away.
But Kayna was not. As the sun set, the land underneath her feet grew faint. The ocean felt icy, seeping through the leather soles of her boots. She turned to run for the boat that had brought her here, but it, too, was turning to mist.
She whirled back toward Arthur’s funeral bower, causing ankle-deep ripples in the ocean of grass. “Don’t go! I’m still here.”
As one, the black-hooded figures turned to look at her. Kayna yanked the pouch from around her neck and clawed within it for the ruby. She held it up, feeling desperate as the ocean reached her knees. “For Arthur. The ruby is for Arthur. This is why I’m here.”
With a distinctly feminine shrug of the shoulders, one of the figures turned away, unimpressed, but another held out her hand toward Kayna. Obediently, Kayna moved toward her. With the first step, however, Kayna floundered. Her all-too-real body couldn’t get traction on the disappearing earth. With a flash of white lightning, the ruby was suddenly no longer in her hand, but in the hand of the black-robed woman.
A sorceress. These must be the queens, Morgana’s sisters, taking King Arthur to his eternal resting place. And she, Kayna, was...no one. She should not be witnessing this. She was not a royal warrior like Arthur. Not a sorceress. Not even a knight on a quest. She was merely a messenger, and one who had arrived only, it seemed, in time to die.
The sorceress put the gem in the folds of her robe and turned away, returning to her vigil over the dead king.
Kayna was sinking into the grass, cold ocean water soaking her up to her thighs now. Instinctively, she looked toward the king for guidance as she’d done when he was alive, but he, too, was fading, no longer human like she was. The face that had inspired confidence in everyone around him looked haggard, ragged. He’d died a hard death.
Guinevere’s words would have given him ease. Kayna would never get to deliver her message. The peace and rest, the passion and love—Arthur had died without hearing it. Kayna was going to die, too, a failure in her one quest, but her tears were for the king, and for the queen’s grieving heart.
“Please,” Kayna said, taking another slogging step. “Can the gem be placed in the king’s hands, as his wife wished?”
She was utterly ignored, as insignificant as a piece of seaweed on the waves.
“It was a gift of love,” she whispered, as lightning forked the sky.
The green grass disappeared entirely, and Kayla made a grab for the nearest apple tree, but her arm plunged through the misty image of the trunk. Then her whole body dropped chest-deep into water so icy, she gasped.
“Please,” she cried out, although she hardly remembered what she was begging for. “Please.”
She watched Arthur fade. She thought of Guinevere’s anguish, and the brief moment of hope Kayna’s prayer for magic had given her. Guinevere’s grief would only be the worse for it.
“Please. Don’t let a gift of love be in vain.”
As the robed women became so faint she thought they were no more than an image burned into her memory, the one sorceress turned back to her and held out the ruby as if she should take it.
Kayna reached with one arm and tried to take a step, but she only kicked through water.
Swimming—she was swimming, as she’d seen the young boys do in the dairy cows’ pond. She swam arm over arm, kicking her way toward the ruby. Her body seemed to know how this was done, although she’d never done it before, but in another great jagged flash of lightning, the island, the robed women, and the king all ceased to exist.
The sun was gone. There was nothing but night, only air and water.
Am I dead?
Kayna tasted salt. Her teeth chattered in the cold ocean. She was not dead, but she would be soon. Lightning cut through the black sky once more, and she lay on her back, trying to rest and float, although the waves were getting choppier and breaking over her face, and the cold was numbing. She might freeze before she drowned. It seemed a better way to go.
The next flash of lightning was beautiful, the forked white light reminding her of the antlers of a glorious stag, one who must have evaded hunters year after year, a wise creature to have earned such antlers. Kayna floated on her back, growing paralyzed by the cold, knowing she would live only minutes longer. She would die young; she would never have glorious antlers like that.
The next flash of lightning changed everything.
A ship.
A ship unlike any she’d ever seen, twice as large as it was possible for a ship to be, was coming toward her with fearful speed. It had a dozen white sails instead of one, and all were taut with the wind.
She was not going to die by freezing, nor by drowning. She was going to be plowed under by a ship so massive, it would never notice her as it cut her with its keel.
As lightning lit the ocean, she screamed.
“Man overboard!”
Acting on reflex, Griffin ran for the railing and released the lines closest to him. His crew did the same, and the ship lost speed as her sails went slack.
The canvas flapped uselessly in the wind as cargo nets and fishing nets were flung off the starboard side, but Griffin knew it was no use. They’d been moving so fast, the unlucky sailor who’d fallen overboard had to be far behind them in the dark water, despite their emergency measures to slow the ship. Griffin turned toward the stern and scanned the churning sea of their wake. He saw nothing. No one.
He took off his tricorne in respect, and tried not to wonder what it must feel like to know you’re a dead man,
watching your ship leave you in its wake.
A shout went up. “I got ’im!”
Impossible.
“Haul ’im up, boys, haul ’im up.”
Griffin slammed his hat back on his head and watched the action from his place on the upper deck. The net that had caught the man was toward the front of the ship, not the rear. The man who’d fallen overboard could not have fallen from his ship, then.
They hauled the net over the railing, letting the human-sized lump fall to the deck with a thud. As they untangled their catch, Griffin kept his eyes on the blackness in front of their ship and waited for another flash of lightning to illuminate the ocean before them. There must be a ship up ahead, one which had lost a sailor over its side.
Lightning filled the sky and lit the ocean. There were no other vessels in sight.
A strange hush fell over the Redemption, then one of his men screamed in terror.
“It’s a mermaid! Kill it!”
Chapter Three
“Stand down.”
Griffin leapt from the upper deck and stalked toward the bow. They hadn’t hauled up a mermaid, of course. Mermaids were imaginary creatures. ’Twas more likely they’d hauled up a human-sized animal with fins, like a seal, or perhaps a young whale. Regardless, he didn’t want anything killed aboard his vessel without his permission.
“Stand down,” he bellowed again. “Captain’s orders.”
He’d spent nearly a year upon this ship as the bosun, the enforcer of discipline by unanimous vote of the pirate crew, so the sound of his voice still made men pause. They paused, but they did not move. No one wanted to relinquish his view of the supposed mermaid.
“Make way.” Griffin had to throw an elbow—or two—make that three—to force his way through the crew, until he broke through to the center of the circle. There, motionless in the cargo netting, lay a mermaid.
Impossible.
The mermaid was a maid without question. In the glow from the ship’s lanterns, her skin was as pale as a pampered lady’s. From the waist up, she was nude, her beautiful breasts bare and encircled by the wet tendrils of her long, brown hair.
Lightning flashed. From the waist down, where pale legs should have been, Griffin saw only the solid blue curve of her tail.
Saints above.
Griffin almost, very nearly, made the sign of the cross at the supernatural sight. Long habit prevented him. If he behaved as though he were afraid, his men would not follow his lead.
The mermaid looked up at the men with terror in her own dark eyes, clearly as afraid of them as they were of her.
“Kill it,” ordered one sailor, and another raised a club.
“Avast.” Griffin shoved the club-wielder aside and stood over the mermaid. “I give the orders around here. Give an order in my presence again, Mister Tobias, and you’ll feel the lash.”
The female made a desperate plea to him in an unfamiliar language as she sat up and struggled to get to her feet. To her feet? But clearly, her movement was the familiar one of a human attempting to stand. She kept begging as she clawed at her long tail. With the next flash of lightning, Griffin realized she was tugging at a mass of sodden blue material wrapped around her legs. Not a fish tail—of course it wasn’t.
“She’s only a woman.” He meant to say it with authority, but there may have been a touch of relief in his voice. He bent to slip his hands under her arms, the sides of her breasts soft but icy against the sides of his hands, and he lifted her to her feet. She needed to stand to prove what she was to his men, for a fish could not stand. “Her skirts are overlong, that is all. Skirts, men, not fins.”
He kept hold of her when she would have tripped on those skirts. Her wet skin wasn’t slick under his hands, but rough like linen. It was linen. She was not nude, after all, but wore a fine chemise which had become transparent in its wetness.
The least superstitious of his men were recovering from their shock as they gaped at her in the glow of the ship’s lanterns. One whistled low. “At least the top half of her is all woman, eh, boys?”
The tone of the men’s laughter made her go still under his hands. Then she jerked free from his hold and crossed her arms over her breasts. The tilt of her chin would have made a queen proud as she delivered what sounded to be a blistering set-down in her language.
“Wot’s this, then?” another crewman said. “We just saved her bloody life, and she thinks she has the right to gibble-gabble demands at us?”
His men were so predictable. Even the lowest of the low, fishermen who were kicked off their boats or deserters from the navies of various countries, still held a strict sense of who outranked whom. For them, the one class they outranked were women. At every port, the only women in their narrow world were the kind they could pay to fetch their beer or satisfy their lust.
Griffin knew there were other kinds of women in the world. Women like the Lady Vivien. Women like this would-be mermaid, who maintained her dignity although she was half-naked and shivering with cold.
There were also women like his mother, God rest her soul, who’d raised men like him who were supposed to know better than to let a lady freeze. Griffin immediately shrugged out of his coat. The maid shied away from him, but he wrapped his coat around her shoulders firmly.
The men objected. “Now, Captain, wot’d you go and ruin the view for?”
Because my mother raised me better than yours raised you. But that answer would only end in a fistfight. Like the rest of the crew, he was adjusting to the change from piracy, where everyone was supposedly equal, to privateering, where ranks had authority. He had to behave like the rank he was. Slinging an insult and backing it up with his fists was no longer the way of life aboard his ship.
One of his newer sailors stepped forward. Terrence, although a lad of thirteen, spoke with reason. “I don’t know which country she’s from, but she carries herself like a noblewoman.”
Several men grunted in agreement. The club-wielder tossed his weapon aside. Tobias picked it up. “Then she’s worth a pretty penny if we ransom her.”
“We’re no longer pirates, Mr. Tobias,” Griffin reminded him. “We don’t kidnap people for ransom.”
The men grumbled, dissent quickly brewing.
Griffin flashed a smile he knew would quell their discontent, for it was a greedy smile, the smile of a man contemplating gold. “We do, however, collect the reward money from the grateful gentry when we return their lost family members. A privateer’s reward is as rich as a pirate’s ransom, only you won’t hang for spending it. Now step to, men. Make fast the sails. Set an extra watch on the bow. Our noble lady must have fallen from a ship up ahead.”
He turned back to the young woman. Her regal bearing had not altered, but she would soon succumb to cold if not to the shock of a near drowning. He gestured toward the stern. “Milady, if you’d care to warm yourself in my cabin?”
She studied him a moment, then tried to take a step. She could barely move an inch, tangled in her sodden skirt as she was, so he scooped her into his arms and carried her. It wasn’t until he stepped over the threshold of his cabin that it occurred to him he was carrying her as a man carried his bride.
He kicked the door closed behind them and then stood in silence for a moment, his arms full of this dripping mermaid bride from the sea.
Abruptly, she pushed away from his chest and landed with a wet plop on her feet. They both staggered as the floor listed starboard. The ship, not yet under sail, was bobbing in the ocean like a powerless cork. ’Twas a challenge for Griffin to keep his balance. It should have been nigh impossible for the lady, but somehow she was keeping upright, one hand on the cabin wall as she shrugged out of his jacket. She held it out to him.
He made no move to take it. She was cold. She was, for all purposes, nude. Why on earth would she give him his jacket?
She gave it a little shake and scowled at him.
Fine, then. He took the jacket, trying to be as unaffected by her nudity as she was. Cle
arly, she did not realize that her linen clung to her so transparently. It wasn’t possible a refined lady could lack all modesty.
She struggled with the wet wool around her waist with one hand, then let go of the wall and used both hands to shove it off her hips and down her legs. She stepped clear of the whole mess and stood tall once more, her low boots hiding only her feet from his view. Only her feet. He gazed upon everything else.
Griffin felt the world tilt.
She was nude perfection, her creamy curves punctuated by the rose of her nipples and the dark triangle at the apex of her thighs. She said something to him and appeared to be waiting for his reply.
“Your shift,” he managed to say as the ship righted itself briefly, then rolled to the other side. She needed to realize that she was as good as naked before him. He plucked at the white linen of his own shirt and nodded toward her body. “Your shift. It’s...ah...wet, and...”
She looked down at herself. Instead of gasping in embarrassment or dismay, she bent at the waist, her long hair wetting the floor, and grasped the hem near her ankles. As she straightened, she wiggled, working the wet material up her body and over her head. She tossed it on her other wet clothing.
She held out her hands and nodded at him encouragingly, and for a startled moment, he thought she wanted him to come to her and—and do what? There were only so many things a man could do in the arms of a naked woman. Surely she didn’t want...
She dropped her hands with a motion that looked for all the world like she was saying Never mind, you’re too slow. She crossed to his bed, nearly running the last few steps toward it as the ship rolled once more and threw her in the direction she was going. She snatched up one of the furs. With a dramatic swirl, she settled it around her shoulders like a cape. It covered her to mid-thigh, leaving her legs bare.
Not a mermaid.
A pagan goddess.