Brellitine Grever and The Sea of Gelled (The Brell Trilogy Book 1)
Page 12
“So… you know?” She said cautiously.
“Know who you are?” He finished. “No. That what I was trying to figure out all this time. I don’t know why Callum has a special interest in keeping you safe.”
Maybe she hadn’t put the question correctly, but she was glad that she hadn’t. If she had mentioned the rebel group’s location, and as Lukas didn’t know about it… she shuddered to think about the consequences. That would be exposing the whole group, all the rebels. She suddenly realised that she had been quiet for quite a long time, and he was looking at her expectantly.
“Lukas.” She said, “I honestly don’t know why Prince Callum —" she had difficultly remembering to add prince “— told you to do all this. I don’t even know him personally! I’m as clueless as you.” She shrugged her shoulder, hoping that Lukas would believe her.
“Oh, ok.” He said, still sounding doubtful. “So, are you going to have your ‘starfish’?”
Brell had completely forgotten that and her rumbling stomach reminded her to feed it. “Is it vegetarian?”
“Yes,” he said slowly, looking at her in a puzzled manner.
“Good.” She bit into it. A second later she stuffed the whole thing into her mouth. God, it was so tasty. Was it so delicious just because she was hungry? It was like a complete fruit mix. She could taste pineapples, strawberries, mangoes, cherries, lemon, apples and even grapes. Did fruits even grow in the ocean?
“What is this called?”
“You don’t know what it is?” He had trouble keeping a straight face. “It’s called a simple b —” he stopped. The mirth in his voice vanished. “We’re here.”
She had been so absorbed in the starfish thing that she had completely forgotten where they were going. But the moment Lukas said those two words, she pulled herself together and realised that she was a few meters away from the colossal white front gate, but hidden behind a rock. A huge stone wall ran around the castle and it was at least fifteen feet high. Water rippled in an odd manner above the barrier, and this extended to cover the whole castle. It seemed like a protective shield – of course, because the stone wall itself couldn’t stop merpeople from swimming over the castle.
“Why are we hiding?” Brell whispered.
“The guards know me, well, because I’m a messenger, and I’m supposed to go through the front gate. You are supposed to go via the back gate. If they see me with you, suspicions will arise.”
She then noticed the two dark, huge, burly mermen with olive tails whose two swords crossed together at the middle. The swords glinted maliciously in the sunlight.
“So, you will have to go through back gate. I’m guessing you already know that.” Lukas said. “It is just around there …” he pointed to the east side of the castle, to where there was a dark alley next to the wall.
“Oh,” she uttered, pulling her chin back as a trickle of fear ran down her spine.
He smiled. “It was really nice knowing you Susan. I do hope we meet again.”
She thought for a second and the words that came out of her mouth were the truth. “I’m glad I met you too Lukas.” Although she barely knew him, there was something about him that made her trust him.
He grinned and swam out of their hiding place. He approached the guards with an envious amount of ease. While the guards opened the gates she quickly swam past them towards the direction Lukas had pointed to. She turned around just in time to see him disappear into the castle.
The murky alley almost ran parallel to the castle wall. It was narrow, stinky and gloomy and she pressed herself against the castle wall to move forward. After thirty feet or so, the alley widened to merge into a bigger area, where guards were patrolling next to a comparatively smaller gate than the previous one.
Brell approached the gate and a guard blocked her way. She straightened her back a little to match up to his height, but he still towered above her. An intimidating scar ran over the area around his right eye. It looked familiar. Then, it hit her, all too suddenly. He was the same guard who had taken Pauline’s twins away from her… the two little nautilus shells in the cemetery.
“Pass?” he said in a gruff voice.
She removed the slip that the fortune teller had given her. Seeing it, she remembered her brother’s cap on the ebony floor and the desire to see his chubby face flared up inside her again.
The guard inspected it by passing a black seashell over it. The seashell glowed red for a moment. Then he handed the card back to Brell and pushed opened the gate, just a little bit. She squeezed herself through it and swam into Castle Meethe.
Chapter 14: Salamandar
Brell’s eyes focused on the small door in front of her. It was her size, made out of a dark wood, but had a square ebony knob the size of her whole hand.
“Turn this knob three times to the right and then two times to the left, then push it” Meaken had told her. Brell firmly grasped it and did as instructed before pushing it hard. It didn’t budge. So she used her whole body weight and shoved at the knob. After a lot of pushing, it slowly sank into the wood and the door swung open without a sound, to reveal the servants’ quarters.
It took Brell at least three minutes to process everything around her. It was morning time, and the little grimy brown passageway that she stood in was buzzing with activity. Rows and rows of doors that ran on either sides of the passage kept bursting open and mermaids spilled out of each door into the already packed common area. Some were giggling like little girls and others screaming on the top of their voices. All of them seemed to be getting ready for a day’s work. Each had a green dull shirt with a sparkling white apron over it. The colour of their tails varied from bright magenta to blue. And none of them paid any attention to Brell as she tried to worm her way through them to the end of the corridor.
“Hey, watch it!” A mermaid muttered as Brell tried to get past her. She squeezed in the middle of three mermaids who looked like triplets.
“Sorry!” she kept on saying every time she had to push past somebody. Many times she found herself caught up in a flurry of activity, unable to see which direction she had come from or which side she had to go to. She couldn’t even move along the sides of the passage because the constant opening and closing of doors barricaded the way. So she was stuck in the middle, and forced to move between hundreds of mermaids pouring in from all directions. After being alone for almost two days, the number of mermaids around her was overwhelming.
Finally, after an enormous amount of struggle, she managed to stumble through to the end where there was an important looking crimson door with a silver knob. Straightening her dishevelled hair and clothes, she rapped her knuckles firmly against the door.
“Come in.” A wheezy voice said, followed by a round of severe coughing. Brell entered and closed the door behind her, cutting out the chaos and noise with a relived sigh.
The red room that she was in was… red. It almost seemed like Lily’s purple madness, but in red colour. Red curtains lined with sliver, red cushions, red floor, red tables etc. adorned the room. The only not-red object was Brell herself. The floor was flat, as it would be in a building made by humans.
“Well,” the breathless voice said, “Are you going to stand there all day?”
She spun towards the voice and faced a red desk with a small merman sitting behind it. His dark skin was furrowed with deep wrinkles and his tiny face was hidden under a long white beard that never seemed to end. Two glittering black eyes and a little stubby nose managed to escape from all the white hair. He wore a burgundy shirt with black gloves.
“Wear it,” he pointed to something behind her with a thin, bony finger. “I can’t stand purple.” She turned to find a huge red coat which covered her arms and tail and slipped it on.
“Name?” the merman said, gazing at her intently. She noticed a small card on his desk reading. “Mr. Thomas Red”.
“Mr. Red,” she said as sweetly as possible. “My name is Susan Morris, and —” Mr. Red coug
hed thrice and then waved his hand in front of his face. “Please, call me —” cough “— Thomas.”
“And,” she continued “I applied for the job because I really need it.”
Thomas scribbled something down on a piece of parchment. “Clean those for me,” he said. Suddenly a pile of dirty dishes popped right out of the water next to Brell with a basin, a bar of soap, a sponge and a towel. At first she was too surprised to move.
“Susan, haven’t you ever seen magic?” the old man wheezed as if every day one sees dirty dishes popping out of nowhere. “Come on, I don’t have all day!”
She shook herself, smiled and went to work. She picked up a plate, the soap and the sponge — familiar items. Then she proceeded to scrub the plate with the soapy sponge gently cleaning the plate like she had done several times in the Hopkins’ farm. Once she was done with the pile, she looked at Mr. Red who was coughing his head off. When he finally stopped, he snapped his fingers loudly.
A crumpled skirt, shirt, gown, tank top and a dirty table materialised next to her. Random items and a grease stain dirtied the room. The window panes of the room suddenly became grubby.
“Fold and iron the towels and the clothes, clean the table and the windows and clean the room.” He said. “This will show me how good you will be at your job.”
She rolled up the sleeves of the coat and began to work, smoothing over the clothes with her palm before folding them. All this was something she was so used to, that it wasn’t tiring.
He said, “It seems as if you have experience in this field. Do you?”
“Well sir, I used to work all the time at home.”
“Ah, I see.”
She finished everything and while she was scrubbing the windows — the last thing she had to do — she heard a knock on the door. Brell turned to the red door, but no one entered. Then she saw a similar door directly across the room, probably emerging from the castle itself.
A tall, lean merman swam in as if he owned the place. He had straight, light brown hair that was side-swept and styled with so much gel that it looked like his thinning hair was drowning in it. His weak mouth perfectly complimented his equally skeletal and pointed nose. His typically black eyes looked even blacker against his papery, pallid skin. He wouldn’t have looked scary at all, had it not been for his tail. It was as black as his eyes and very long. She had never seen anybody in Gelled with a black tail. He wore a black shirt that revealed a thin, weak chest.
The second he came in, Thomas leapt up and bowed so low that his beard touched the floor. “Sir Salamandar,” he said so respectfully that Brell found herself bowing with a cloth still in her hands. And there, with her back bent, she remembered what Callum had told her about Salamandar.
“Every year she sends her most trusted servant, Salamandar, to get a human heart for her.”
Her heart filled with disgust.
Zeldae’s trusted servant, Salamandar… that horrible merman who had ruthlessly snatched Timmy away, and had brought him here. How could he do such a thing — had he no feelings at all? A burning hatred started building up inside her. She quickly straightened up.
Thomas must have been frightened of Salamandar because his hands fidgeted and he said in a high-pitched voice, “Sir, what can I do for you?”
Salamandar spoke in a voice that was steady and firm, unlike his appearance. “The Great Queen wishes to see you, Thomas. The Cage is losing its effect. Go at once, for she seems to be in a particularly… off mood today.”
The rate at which Thomas sped off was enough to convince Brell that Zeldae should never be put off.
Salamandar casually slipped behind Thomas’s desk. To her, he almost looked like the amphibian he was named after. What a slimy person. “I will be continuing your test,” he said and glanced down at the paper on which Thomas had scribbled on earlier, then quirked an impatient eyebrow at her. “Miss Dorris, please continue.”
Brell corrected him as politely as possible. “It’s Morris, Sir.” and quickly cleaned the window before he could respond. She could feel his spine-chilling eyes on her. When she finished wiping down the window she turned towards him and found him staring at her with questioning eyes.
“I believe I’ve seen you somewhere, Miss Morris,” he said in a quiet, deadly voice.
She tried to make her face look as pleasantly surprised as she could. “I get that a lot Sir, but I highly doubt it. I live in Morten area.”
But while she spoke those last two words, her mind raced. Of course Salamandar had seen her before! It was obvious. When he had come to kidnap Timmy, he must have seen Brell in the other bed. The only difference was that he had seen her on land and now she was in the sea. But still, if he realised the connection, it would prove fatal.
Salamandar was still staring at her, frowning. But then he proceeded to check the towels and the window panes. She was glad that she was wearing the red coat. She had rolled down the sleeves and they were so long that they hid her fingers while she reached for her bracelet. She did not dare to look at the crystals in the open with him in the room.
She looked down at the floor as her fingers moved through each crystal that Lily had given her. The black crystal was supposed to be bigger than the others, so she focused on figuring out which was smaller and which was bigger. She closed her eyes to concentrate, not wanting to pull out the wrong crystal. Her fingers had just grasped a grey crystal, when she heard a loud gasp. Her eyes flew open and seeing the look on Salamandar’s face, she knew that he remembered who she was.
Chapter 15: New Fish
When Brell was a little girl, she used to have trouble sleeping because she missed her father terribly. So she used to crawl into her mother’s bed and snuggle next to her. Her mother would begin to tell stories and that would comfort her enough that she could sleep. Once, when she missed her dad more than usual, she went to her mother’s room and saw her sleeping. At first she thought that she had probably gotten into the wrong room because her mother looked so different in her sleep. The wrinkles next to her eyes seemed to disappear and there wasn’t a constant worried look on her face. She looked so much younger.
When Salamandar had taken away Timmy, he had barely glanced at Brell — just enough to know what her face looked like. But at that time she was sleeping, her eyes closed. When she shut her eyes to concentrate on finding the crystals on her wrist, Salamandar saw exactly what he had seen that night.
Brell gulped and yanked out the grey crystal. He hardly looked at it; his wide black eyes were solely on her face.
“How?” he spluttered, looking like a choking chicken, his face turning red.
Before he could raise an alarm or attack her, she held the crystal in front of her face and furiously recited what she had just cooked up.
“Forget my face, forget you saw me,
Give me the job as is your duty.”
She thrust the crystal between her teeth and used all her strength to bite into it.
CRACK! The grey mist poured out. It seemed to understand her desperation and advanced towards Salamandar with lightning speed.
“Wait a minute!” He started to say, but was stopped. The grey mist had glided right into his nose and open mouth. He stared at her in a shell-shocked expression and his body convulsed horribly.
Brell held her breath in anticipation, feverously hoping that the crystal would work.
His body finally stopped quivering and he blinked several times. For a moment she thought she saw the grey mist in his eyes but then they turned back to black.
“Miss Morris!” he said smoothly, and all the tension in the water dissolved. “Sorry for the confusion. Where was I?” He examined the clean room and the window pane while Brell stood silent, shocked.
“It seems like you passed the test. You have done exceptionally well in all, according to Thomas’s notes.” He seemed completely normal. “You may go to section D-5, where you shall find a set of clothes that have to be worn every day. Here are your daily duties.”
She let out the breath she didn’t realise she had been holding. “Thank you.” She quickly swam out, closing the door behind her. His creepy black eyes still seemed to burn a hole into the back of her head. Her heart thudded. What a narrow escape!
Even though she had used up one of her precious crystals, it was completely worth it.
The corridor was deserted and there was not even one sign of the previous chaos. The mermaids must have left by now, so that made Brell hurry even more. What had Salamandar said? D-5.
Back in the main hall, she found that the doors were in small groupings of five, and she searched until she found D-5 and pushed open the brown door.
The room had whitewashed walls which badly needed repainting. Four slender beds ran parallel to each other and were pushed up against the right wall. There was a bedside table with two drawers next to each bed and a basin with a single mirror was present at the far left corner of the room.
She swam inside and saw that the two beds nearest to the door were scattered with clothes, brushes, nail polish, necklaces and earrings. Choosing the last bed furthest from the door, she opened the drawer and pulled out three sets of dull green shirts and a white apron. She glanced at the list of duties that Salamandar had given her and sighed. It was almost as if she was back on the farm again, dumped with unwanted chores.
She started when she realised that she was still wearing Thomas’s red coat. Not wanting to go back to the office with Salamandar there, she neatly folded it and placed it in the drawer to return it later. She changed into her uniform, washed her face with air that came out of the tap and hurried out into the corridor, looked around, and went up through the large passageway in the ceiling, entering an enormous hall.