The Kraken King

by Meljean Brook

  Clear turquoise water rolled gently below. She didn’t see any shadows beneath the surface, no monsters of the deep, and she couldn’t believe that she’d ever wanted a glimpse of one.

  A flyer engine whined behind them. She couldn’t look around, but wasn’t surprised that Cooper was following.

  “Let me go now!” Mara called when they skimmed closer to the water. “It’ll be easier for you to land without me!”

  True. And it was only a ten- or fifteen-foot drop.

  Letting go was almost as painful as holding on. Her muscles screamed as she eased her arms open, and Mara splashed feet-first into the water.

  Zenobia shifted her weight to slowly turn, gliding in a circle back to Mara’s position so that she wouldn’t land too far away from her guard. As it was, she’d probably have to swim until they figured out how to get four people aboard a flyer designed to carry only one.

  Swim. Even though her arms were dead things, and she had a heavy bag of gold strapped to her back.

  Oh, dear God. Frantically she tried to unbuckle the straps, but her hands were weak and the tension of her weight suspended from the glider prevented her from wriggling out. She pushed at the wing lever and dropped when the wings folded.

  The water rushed up, slapping at her feet and her stomach then dragging her down, warmer than she expected, but no less salty and terrifying when it closed over her head. Her skirt tangled around her thrashing legs. A watery buzz filled her ears and the wavering shape of a flyer appeared overhead. Cooper. She just had to reach the surface. She pushed her thumbs under the leather straps at her shoulders, trying to force them off, but they were tight, even tighter now, as if she were still hanging from the glider.

  Or being pulled upward. She broke the surface, coughing and grabbing for the flyer’s foot runner.

  But that wasn’t Cooper’s boot. Instead of hard brown leather, it was soft and supple, and covered in a fine red dust.

  She looked up. Black hair. Dark eyes over high, arching cheekbones. A firm mouth and an angular jaw clenched with effort. He was close, so close, leaning out of his seat and holding her up with his fingers wrapped around the glider’s straps. Then he lifted her out of the water with just one hand, even though she was a tall woman, her pack filled with heavy gold and her skirts soaking wet.

  The ocean rained from her dress, splattering his loose trousers and a white tunic streaked with dirt the color of rust. He set her on the runner and slid forward a little, an unspoken invitation to fill the space behind him.

  What to do? She looked for Mara. The mercenary was climbing onto another flyer, taking the seat behind the pilot—her rescuer’s companion. Cooper looked on and nodded at Zenobia when she sent him a questioning glance.

  Very well, then. She glanced down at the seat. She couldn’t straddle it properly unless her skirts were up by her knees, but she wouldn’t be missish. She yanked them up and swung her leg over, her dress squelching as she sat.

  A moment later they rose into the air—heading toward the ironship. Her body stiff, she gripped her rescuer’s sides. This shouldn’t be any different than sitting behind Mara.

  But it was.

  He was much taller than she. Even sitting, her eyes were only level with the back of his neck. His shoulders were broad, and his thick black hair was tied up in a short knot. With so little room, she had no choice but to press up against him, and he was hard with muscle everywhere they touched—against her breasts, cradled between her inner thighs, beneath her hands. His abdomen was ridged steel against her fingers.

  And she was wet. Dripping everywhere, and she’d soaked him through. He had to be just as uncomfortable as she was.

  More so. Blood stained his left sleeve. He’d been shot—yet he’d still pulled her from the drink.

  With one hand, and a marvelously strong arm.

  She’d never been so glad that Helene had taught her a few Nipponese phrases, including expressions of gratitude. “Arigatou gozaimasu,” she said against the back of his neck, and hoped that she hadn’t garbled the pronunciation.

  His body tensed against hers and he responded with a terse nod.

  Well. Now this was awkward.

  She leaned back a tiny bit, trying to put a little space between her breasts and his back. Saturated, his tunic was all but transparent. The silk clung to the thick muscle hugging the groove of his spine, revealing a design tattooed across his shoulders, black against smooth brown skin. An animal, she thought, but with too many limbs and a cone-shaped head—

  Oh, dear God. Her stomach clenched into a tight ball. Those weren’t limbs. They were tentacles.

  He had a kraken inked across his back.

  And she’d seen that tattoo before. Not on a man, but in a letter that her brother had sent in the days when he’d still been smuggling weapons. The tattoo had belonged to one of the most powerful men in the Horde rebellion. Archimedes hadn’t known the man’s real name, only the name the others had called him—a man who was just as ruthless as the creature tattooed across his back, a man who became just as fixated when something attracted his attention, a man who never loosened his grasp.

  This was far more adventure than she’d hoped for. She’d only wanted to see a little danger from a distance.

  Instead she’d fallen straight into the clutches of the Kraken King.

  ***

  The calm of the battle had given way to fire. Ariq’s arm burned. His blood raced. His flesh hardened. He only had to glance down to see the woman’s leg, smooth and as pale as a fish belly. But he didn’t need to look. The image had been painted behind his eyes.

  A yellow ribbon tied the stocking over her left knee. The right stocking had slipped down her calf. Above that was only skin.

  Ariq didn’t know if she was bare all the way up, where she cradled him between taut thighs.

  He forced himself not to wonder. He forced himself not to feel her slim form against his. He forced himself to forget the sight of her bare skin.

  Instead he remembered her expression when she’d jumped from the falling balloon. Serenity. Acceptance. As if her entire life had been leading to that moment and she faced it without fear. Her expression mirrored how Ariq imagined Taka would look before going over the cliffs, and through Ariq’s calm had crashed the thought that, once again, he’d waited too long. He’d left too late. And he’d narrowly avoided the agony of finding his brother’s body only to watch this woman leap to her death.

  Then her pack had become a glider. By the relief and gratitude that had burst through Ariq’s heart, it was as if she’d saved both herself and Taka—and saved Ariq from watching his brother die.

  It made no sense. Ariq knew it didn’t. He was still grateful to her.

  So he didn’t look down—only ahead, his eyes slitted against the wind. In the distance, a sailor on the deck of the ironship waved a yellow flag. They’d spotted him and were inviting him in.

  Behind him, the woman shifted her weight. Looking at her companions or at the burning airship.

  Zenobia. The mercenary had shouted her name when their balloon had collapsed.

  What sort of woman hired mercenaries to provide additional protection while traveling aboard a military vessel?

  Highly skilled mercenaries—and Zenobia their primary concern. They protected the other woman, but every maneuver the mercenaries made had given Zenobia another layer of defense. Even now, the man had positioned his flyer so that he could watch over her, though it exposed the other woman’s back to Taka, who was bringing up the rear. And the female mercenary riding with Taka could cover them both.

  So Zenobia was the priority. Or the pack she carried was.

  He’d never seen a contraption like it. Brilliantly designed. An emergency glider and waterproof satchel in one. Ariq thought she carried gold in it; not even the water saturating her clothes could account for her weight. But money was easy to come by—and coins didn’t need to be kept in a waterproofed pack.

  Documents did.

&n
bsp; Perhaps whatever this woman possessed was important enough that the French had offered to escort her. Or perhaps the aviators had no idea who and what they’d carried on their airship.

  Ariq didn’t care about what she carried. He only wondered about the woman herself.

  She faced forward again. Her small breasts pressed into his back. Her hands tightened at his sides.

  They were only breasts. They were only hands.

  But she was bare. She was pale. And she was under Ariq’s protection for now.

  Her skirt fluttered and snapped in the wind. Almost dry already. Careful not to touch her skin, he tugged her hem down over her knee and anchored the material between their legs.

  She sucked in a breath, her breasts hitching against his back.

  “You’ll burn,” he said in French.

  A silence followed. Then she tucked the opposite side of her skirt over her left knee and said, “Fortunately your giant shoulders and head block the sun, or I would have to pull my dress up over my face, instead.”

  Humor. More seductive than bare skin. With a short laugh, Ariq nodded his—apparently—gigantic head. Now he wished that Fujimaru didn’t approach so quickly and that the flyers weren’t as swift. In fifteen minutes, they would be aboard the ironship. Not long enough.

  “I must thank you again,” she continued. “And apologize for assuming you were Nipponese.”

  It was a sensible assumption. They were on a Nipponese flyer, heading toward a Nipponese ironship. So why think differently now?

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  A brief hesitation preceded her answer. “Your speech. My maid was raised in a Horde enclave in the Ivory Market. You sound much like her.”

  A plausible explanation, yet also a lie. The Golden Empire stretched across three continents. There was little possibility that Ariq’s accent was so similar to a woman’s from the Ivory Market. But although Ariq wanted to know what had revealed his origin, she obviously wanted to conceal that knowledge.

  And he wanted her renewed stiffness to ease. “English, French, and Lusitanian men look the same to me. I never know where they’re from until they speak.”

  Some of her rigidity faded. Curiosity filled her voice. “Can you tell where I’m from?”

  “Johannesland.” He wasn’t familiar enough with the individual principalities to be more specific. “Your speech is similar to others I’ve met from that part of the Americas.”

  She stiffened again, very slightly, and Ariq wondered who he’d met that she also knew. But she didn’t say.

  “Do you know who attacked us? Or why?”

  “No,” he said. “But I will.”

  “It shouldn’t be difficult. Any group of men stupid enough to attack a French naval airship in broad daylight surely don’t have brains enough to cover their tracks.”

  Sheer stupidity, he agreed. Four of the flyers had been shot down before Ariq and Taka arrived. Two more had been taken by mercenaries dressed in servants’ clothing. The rest had been dispatched with a few guns. A small contingent of warriors could effectively attack a target with proper preparation—Ariq had led several against the Golden Horde’s war machines. It only required a solid plan and careful execution. He saw nothing of planning or execution here. Every pilot had been killed and all of their flyers destroyed or captured.

  Stupid. And unlike the marauders. “They’ve covered their tracks for months,” he said. “Yours isn’t the first airship they’ve destroyed.”

  “Oh.” The reply seemed uncertain—as if she wondered whether to apologize for suggesting that he should have easily found them before now. He preferred the question she asked, instead. “What did they take from the others?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? I don’t understand. Were the ships all French, then, and the marauders at odds with them?”

  “No.”

  “Westerners? Naval ships?”

  He shook his head. “Smugglers, merchants, miners, and travelers.”

  “Passenger ships?” Sharp astonishment softened to confusion. “What did they have in common?”

  “They were all airships.”

  “And men on flyers destroyed them?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. What purpose could the destruction serve? Crippling an enemy, perhaps. But it doesn’t sound as if there is one enemy.” Her voice had dropped, as if she were speaking to herself rather than to Ariq now—until she asked another question. “What could the motivation be?”

  Ariq grinned into the wind. He hadn’t expected an interrogation. But although her questions were the same that others had asked over the months, he liked that they came so quickly.

  And though his gratitude made little sense, now his attraction did. It was not just his boiling blood; she was not just hands and legs and breasts. She also possessed humor and an agile mind. Those both made the sensation of her body against his more enjoyable—and he no longer forced himself to ignore how she felt. He allowed himself to wonder whether she was bare between her legs.

  Then she said, “Perhaps it’s a diversion to make everyone turn their attention here, while their true target lies elsewhere,” and Ariq realized what a careless fool he’d been.

  Her first questions had taken an expected route—straightforward. Most people thought in the same way, in a direct line between cause and effect. When they learned of an attack, they assumed the motivation was money or enmity. A simple explanation. Even when their motivations were hidden, their schemes took direct steps: If a man wanted to make a woman jealous, he paid attention to another woman. Most people never stepped sideways. But the woman behind him did. Easily, too, as if it had been no effort for her to imagine an indirect cause for the attacks.

  Not just an indirect cause, but a logical one.

  A woman who plotted. She might not pose a threat to Ariq or his town. But he would take more care until he was certain she didn’t.

  “Nobody’s eyes would turn in this direction,” he said.

  There were smugglers’ dens festering to the south and a few mining towns to the north, all built with the approval of local aboriginal tribes. Fujimaru had been searching for the marauders, but only because the ironship’s commander was a friend of Ariq’s. No one else gave a damn about the settlements here.

  Except for the rebellion. They’d funded their war against the Golden Empire by smuggling technology and selling it to the west. Destroying the smugglers’ dens would strike a great blow to the rebels.

  But the Khagan’s armies would never attack so indirectly—or use flyers of Nipponese design. And they would have no reason to attack a French ship.

  “Your attention turned this way,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “My people have been among those killed.”

  She nodded. “So if these attacks won’t draw defensive forces away from another location, the diversion might be in the number of airships attacked. The marauders could conceal their true target by destroying many.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve thought of that already.”

  Yes. But until this woman, no one else he’d spoken with had. “Each airship could have been targeted for any number of reasons. So far, not one seems more important than any other.”

  “And our airship?”

  “You would know better.” Ariq couldn’t trust her not to lie again, but he wanted to hear her answer.

  “To my knowledge, no one and nothing of significance was aboard. My friend is the wife of an ambassador, but he is already in the Red City.” She paused, and he hoped she would speak of herself, but she only continued, “I think the target must have already been destroyed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you said they hadn’t been so stupid before this. And sending a dozen flyers against a French battleship would be an efficient way to get rid of any pilots who might expose whoever was pulling the strings.”

  Ariq shook hi
s head. She’d taken another sideways leap, but although it was logical, even brutally clever, it exposed her inexperience. Such diabolical schemes suited villains in costume plays, not real men.

  “No?” she asked. “Why?”

  “Because no one who commands other men would toss them away so easily. There are better ways to persuade them to silence. And if they must be killed, there are more efficient ways to do it.”

  A shiver raced through her body. Had he frightened her?

  If he had, he hoped it wouldn’t stop her questions. They’d been coming more rapidly as their flyer neared the ironship, as if she wanted to fit them all in before they landed.

  Ariq had more questions, too. He wouldn’t have time for them.

  Quietly, she asked, “How would you do it?”

  “I wouldn’t kill my own men.” But he’d kill others by whatever means necessary.

  “Would you sacrifice your men?”

  Inexperienced. But still clever. She would reach the same conclusion that Ariq was heading toward.

  “I would,” he said.

  “Easily?”

  “No.”

  Her breath shuddered against his neck. “If they sacrificed so many men, it must have been very important to destroy this airship.”

  Gaze fixed on Fujimaru’s iron deck, Ariq nodded.

  “Why, though? What could they possibly gain?”

  Ariq didn’t know. But he could imagine one possibility: a clever woman with secrets and documents. If she’d been the target, they’d come for her again.

  Ariq intended to stand in the way.

  Directly ahead, the ironship pumped smoke into the sky from three tall stacks. Uniformed sailors waited on the deck. Ariq slowed his approach, and the flyer’s drone whined above the deep thrum of the ironship’s engines.

  Ariq pulled back on the levers, angling the flaps to begin their descent. The bullet wound in his arm burned. He gritted his teeth—then forgot about his arm when Zenobia’s hands slid from his sides to wrap more securely around his waist.

  This flight hadn’t been long enough. He wanted more of her touch—he wanted more of her.

  Ariq hoped she could be persuaded to have him.