Song of the Current

by Sarah Tolcser

The shadowman’s voice seemed to come through a thick fog. He turned to Kenté. “You may be able to resist me, you see. But your companions cannot.”

  Many things happened at once. Kenté reached for the sky. Markos and Daria disappeared. Nereus let out a ferocious war cry, yanking a knife from the back of his trousers, and sprang—not toward the shadowman but at me. Seizing my arm, he sliced my hand open. A flash of pain burned my palm.

  “Ow!” I clutched my bleeding hand. “Why’d you—”

  Then I realized. I was awake again. Blinking away my grogginess, I tried to refocus on what was happening.

  Cleandros laughed at Kenté. “You think yourself powerful enough to hide them from me? The masters at the Academy will purge you of such childish overconfidence.” He made an impatient gesture, as if brushing aside cobwebs.

  And froze, sneering voice caught in his throat, when Markos and Daria did not reappear.

  Turning to my cousin, he spat, “You have no training. You shouldn’t be able to veil them from me. It’s not possible!”

  Before I could move to stop him, Cleandros aimed at the spot where they had vanished and pulled the trigger.

  No one cried out. No blood spattered the deck. They simply weren’t there.

  He advanced on Kenté, ramming powder and shot down the pistol. “Where are they?”

  I scrambled backward, dragging my cousin with me. My heel hit the foot of the bowsprit and I stumbled, grabbing onto a stay for balance.

  “I might’ve ransomed your cousin back to the Bollards,” Cleandros told Kenté, anger curdling his voice. “But enough is enough. Let this be a lesson to you.”

  Behind him, Nereus lunged for the gun, but it was too late.

  The shot struck me in the right side of my chest, red blood spraying out in a mist.

  Pain—searing pain. My whole arm seized up. Spots danced in my eyes. My breath was uneven and raspy, as if I suddenly couldn’t gulp in enough air. Blood matted my shirt and waistcoat. I staggered, slipping on the bowsprit. My hand loosened on the stay.

  Time seemed to slow. I heard, as if from a great distance, my blood dripping on the deck. Below me, the sea rose and fell.

  There are some sailormen who say the drakon is nothing more or less than your fate coming for you. If it was still down there, would it be drawn like a shark to my blood in the water? Was this my fate, to be gulped up by a sea beast like the Nikanor and her ill-fated crew?

  No. Understanding flooded through me. The drakon belonged to the sea. And so did I. That same drakon had been following me since the river. As what—a protector? A guide? If I was right, the drakon would no more hurt me than cut off her own tail.

  I let go of the stay—and dropped into the sea.

  The shadowman laughed. Distantly I heard Kenté scream as I hit the water. I couldn’t feel my right arm, and my legs were like limp dough. A wave sloshed over me, stirring the blood that clouded around me like spilled ink. I inhaled a gulping mouthful of ocean, salt stinging my nose.

  I had been wrong. And my life would be the price for my mistake.

  Then I heard her.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “I greet you, ssssssister.”

  Something slippery but solid rose under me. I tangled the fingers of my good hand in the tuft that trailed from her back, which looked like feathers but felt like seaweed. Her neck was dotted with clumps of barnacles. With the last of my strength I tightened my knees around her body.

  She burst forth from the waves like an explosion. She was beautiful.

  Foam sprayed out from between the drakon’s teeth as she swiveled her head. On Vix’s deck a wherryman stumbled backward, screaming. The scent of salt and snake dampened the air. Water streaming into my eyes, I fought to hang on.

  “Show me our enemy!” she hissed.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured Cleandros, concentrating hard on his gilded robes and plain face. Shivering uncontrollably as I tasted blood in my mouth, I hoped somehow she could understand me.

  “Ah! I smell him,” the drakon declared. “The sandy grit of sleep. The sweet taste of darkness. I have eaten one of you before.”

  Cleandros turned to face her, and then it was as if the world went black. The shadowman vanished, and so did everything else—the sky, the rolling waves, and Vix.

  I heard the drakon laugh. “Fool. The sea does not fear the dark.”

  She sprang, arcing out of the water like a rainbow, and I clung to her back as she flowed under me. She plucked the shadowman from the bowsprit with a bone-shaking crunch. Her sides convulsing under my legs, the drakon swallowed. With a splash her head hit the water on the other side of Victorianos’s bow.

  The world plunged back into twilight, just in time for me to see the ocean rushing toward me. My stomach lurched and I took a last frantic breath.

  I sank.

  And sank.

  I knew nothing.

  After a long while, it came to me that I was not dead. I thought I might be breathing, or at least bubbles flowed out of my nose. I tried to keep count of the seconds as I drifted down, but it was like trying to grasp the wind in my hand.

  I gave up and let myself float.

  Beams of light shafted through the murky water, lending it a turquoise color. I couldn’t see the source of the light, precisely. Maybe it was all around me.

  How had I come to be here? I couldn’t remember.

  Something brushed my leg. I thrashed in panic, until I saw the yellow-and-black-striped body of a fish flitting away into the darkness. A second fish came to investigate, weaving about me.

  I swatted at my billowing shirt, trying to see where I’d been shot. The bullet had torn a ragged chunk from my flesh. Hesitantly I touched the pale, clammy skin around the hole, too squeamish to stick my finger in it. No trail of blood curled through the water.

  Perhaps I was dead. The colors of the sea and the fish reminded me of my dream about Mrs. Singer, the drowned wherryman’s wife. Perhaps it had been a true dream, a foretelling of my own fate.

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was in a city.

  I sat on top of a great tower, the ruins of ancient buildings spread out below me. Draped in seaweed and decorated with barnacles, some of the structures had toppled, the wooden beams that once formed their bones rotted away. The white stone remained, rounded smooth by time and water. Fish flitted in and out of the windows, and a hunk of bright coral grew in the middle of what had once been a road.

  A whole city, at the bottom of the ocean.

  Beside me stood a heron. I blinked in surprise. The heron didn’t look as if it was worried about breathing any more than I was. It stood on the tower wall on one spindly leg, with the other one tucked up into its feathers. Its beady eyes held steady on me.

  “I’m imagining this,” I told it.

  The heron spoke with a woman’s voice. “Why do you think so?”

  “Because I was shot in the heart. I’m either having fever dreams or I’m dead.”

  “Laughter. That isn’t where your heart is.”

  “How would you know? You aren’t human.”

  “Aren’t I?” it asked. Which annoyed me, because obviously it was a heron.

  “Don’t you know what you are?” I demanded, bubbles tumbling out of my mouth.

  “What do I look like to you?”

  “A heron,” I said.

  “How odd. Laughter.”

  “Why do you do that—say ‘laughter’? Why don’t you just laugh?”

  “I’ve been told my laugh unnerves humans.” The heron swiveled on its leg, hopping toward me.

  “What does it sound like?”

  “Like a hurricane gale. Like a hundred knives.” Her voice dropped to a hissing whisper. “Like a drowned man’s dreams.”

  A drowned man’s dreams. I thought again of the dreams I’d been having since the night I met Markos. Of the dead Mrs. Singer from the Jenny lying on a bed of coral, and all those strange, colorful fish. The fish ha
d been like these.

  “I know who you are,” I said.

  “We are both who we should be.”

  She who lies beneath, Nereus had called her. Her gulls had watched me, following me with round black eyes, since I was a child. She’d made a fog that only I could see through. Her drakon had protected me.

  And I was hers.

  “Why did you send me dreams about a dead woman?” I asked.

  “I sent you dreams of this place. The dead woman is in your head.”

  “Is the heron in my head too? Why did you say it was odd?” As the sea lifted and twirled my hair, I clarified, “That I see a heron.”

  “A bird of both the sea and the riverlands,” she said. “Maybe it’s not so odd after all.”

  “Why did I never see you before today?”

  “I could ask you the same question.” The water swirled around me in a gentle caress. “There has never been a day of your life when I was not right here.”

  I gazed out over the crumbling rooftops. “What is this city?”

  “The humans say it was lost,” the heron said. “But they are wrong. It is where it has always been, a testament to the fact that those I claim belong to me. Arisbe Andela. Nemros the Marauder.” Her voice dropped to a hiss. “Caroline Oresteia.”

  I shivered, remembering how Nereus had said the sea keeps the things she takes.

  The heron looked out at the city. “It’s only the world that’s changed.” There was a certain wistfulness to her voice. She switched legs, and with them, the subject. “Who is he, that one you travel with?”

  “Nereus?”

  The heron made a scornful sound. “I know him. He is mine. As much a part of me as the reef and the seaweed and the swimming fish. I mean the other one.”

  “Markos. He’s the true Emparch of Akhaia.” If she didn’t know about him already, I was reluctant to tell her too much. Nereus had warned me she was tricky.

  “Laughter. I should have known. I smelled the stink of mountain air about him.” I thought she would have wrinkled her nose, if she had one. “And yet there is something … Well. He is of no concern to me. As long as he who lies under the mountain still sleeps, as he has these past six hundred years.”

  “Why does Akhaia’s god sleep?” I asked. “Why does he talk to no one but the oracles?”

  I felt rather than saw her smile. It was a smile that suggested teeth, although I could not have said why or how. Herons don’t have teeth. “Because he made the mistake of going to war against me. And lost.”

  “Does every god have a country?”

  “Some have many cities and many countries. All cities that sit beside the sea are my cities. Valonikos. Iantiporos. Brizos.” She lapsed into a brooding quiet. “Valonikos never belonged to him.”

  “Is that why Akhaia keeps losing pieces of its empire?” A fish was trying to swim into my hair. I resisted the urge to swat it. “Because its god sleeps?”

  “Akhaia was once strong,” she agreed. “It is lesser now. He licks his wounds and speaks to no one. He chooses no warriors. He cannot protect it.”

  “He needs six hundred years to lick his wounds?”

  “It is but a moment to him.”

  “Do you?” I realized my question didn’t make sense, and added, “Choose warriors?”

  “Laughter,” was all the heron said. I thought she winked, but it might have been a mote drifting through the cloudy water.

  I wondered if she would ask me to make a bargain, like Nemros the Marauder. I wasn’t certain I trusted her, or her bargains.

  “Trust.” She tilted her feathered head. “It matters not. You will serve me nonetheless.”

  “You got no call to be hearing the things in my head,” I said. “The thoughts in my head are mine.”

  “They are mine, because you are mine,” she said.

  The thoughts in my head weren’t particularly flattering at that moment. “Laughter. Always the humans think they can fight it. You can’t.” Her words were eerily like the pig man’s. “It comes for you, slithering through the deep like my drakon. It always comes for you.”

  “What does?”

  “Your fate.”

  Time stopped, or changed. The heron was gone. The city was gone. Alone I floated. Minutes went by, or days, or years, as I bobbed in endless blue nothing.

  Something appeared above me. A pattern I almost remembered, though I had seen it long ago, time out of mind.

  Sunlight, moving and shifting on the surface of the water. I cupped my hands and pulled toward it, my lungs burning. Bubbles rushed past me. Instincts taking over, every part of my body strove up, up, up—

  My head burst through.

  Much to my relief, the first thing I spotted was a beach. Sun sparkled on a line of breakers crashing on colorful, rounded pebbles, and there, on the horizon beyond, was a red-roofed city. I understood now how Jacari Bollard must have felt when he laid eyes on Ndanna.

  The city was Valonikos.

  I waded ashore, trousers clinging to my legs and shirt stained light pink where I’d been shot. My left foot squelched in a sand-filled boot. The other boot had gone missing. I was sure I looked like the most disreputable sailor ever to be washed up on Valonikos beach.

  I shot the sea a sour look. “You might’ve left me a bit closer to civilization. And with both shoes.”

  Wet sand sucking at my bare foot, I limped toward the distant city. I made it about thirty feet before a breaker tumbled over and crashed on the beach, a brown speck visible in the churning foam. The wave receded, spitting out my right boot.

  I stared at it.

  The undertow seized the boot, which flopped over and began to slide down the sand.

  Apparently this was the kind of thing that was going to happen now that a god was interfering in my life. I let out a whoop and chased my boot down the beach.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  Vix looked pretty tied up at the dock, but it wasn’t the same as coming around the corner and seeing Cormorant. I didn’t love her the way I’d described to Markos—she wasn’t home. Even lying tamely in the harbor with her canvas strapped down, she was intimidating. I still hadn’t forgotten all the times when the sight of her terrified me to the bones.

  It was funny—her painted lettering still read “Victorianos,” as it always had, but I thought of her only as Vix now.

  I limped up the plank, pausing to slide my hand along her polished rail. “All right, Vix,” I whispered. “So here we are.”

  A hatch slammed shut. I was unarmed, but both my hands flew to my waist out of instinct.

  It was Markos.

  He stood alone on deck, hand resting on the hilt of his sword. When he saw me, he froze. His eyes were sunken, reddened.

  “Who are you?” he said flatly. “You aren’t her. I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t care.” I stepped down, battered boots rubbing the raw blisters on my heels. “I’ve been walking for miles, and I’m sunburned. I have sand everywhere a person could possibly have sand on her body, and, yes, I do mean everywhere. And I’m starving.”

  He blocked me. “What did Caro do the first time I tried to kiss her?”

  “You know what I did. We were both there,” I exclaimed in exasperation. “Oh, I see. This is a test.” I rolled my eyes. “I slapped you. And dumped a bucket of cold water on you.”

  He felt my salt-stiffened shirt. I hated how haunted his eyes looked. “You were shot. You went into the water. The drakon surely swallowed you up.”

  “She would never eat me.”

  “Then you drowned.”

  I whispered, “She would never let me drown.”

  Roughly he shoved aside the neckline of my shirt. Fingers splayed, he felt his way across my skin.

  “What are you—?” Then I realized. Seizing his hand in mine, I brought it an inch lower, to the frayed hole in the right side of my shirt, under my collarbone. The sea had washed the matted blood away.

  I stuck my finger
through the rip in the fabric and waggled it. “All right?”

  He let out a ragged breath. “Caro. I don’t even—there’s a scar. But—it’s all healed.” The look he gave me was so intense it took me by surprise.

  I rolled up my sleeve. “And here’s where the Black Dogs shot me. The very night we met. As you ought to remember.” I pushed past him. “Now, if you’re finished manhandling me, can I come on my own ship? Need I mention I was recently shot?”

  I fixed my shirt, wondering if he could hear how fast my heart raced. My ears burned. I had to put space between him and me, to restore things to their normal state. I swung through the hatch and onto the ladder.

  “I thought you might be a shadowman. An assassin from the Theucinians.” He pelted me with questions. “Where have you been? Why weren’t you eaten by the drakon? And how did you get to Valonikos?”

  I hopped down the last two rungs. The remnants of a meal were laid out on the table. “Don’t know.” I grabbed a block of cheese and bit right into it. I’d never been so hungry. “This is where I walked out of the sea,” I said around a mouthful of cheese. “Just south of the city.”

  Markos stared at me, dazed. Or maybe he was just appalled by my table manners. “What do you mean, walked out of the sea? Not from under it?”

  “Markos, I’m fine. She would never let harm come to me.” I swallowed. It seemed strange to be speaking of such magical, personal things in conversation. We might as well be talking about the weather.

  “You spoke to her.”

  I picked up a hunk of bread. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You really spoke to a god.”

  “Markos.”

  “Are you alive or dead right now?” He looked at me as if I was not quite human.

  “I feel alive. I’d rather not think any harder about it. Where is everyone?” I sucked in a sharp breath. “Nereus is still here, isn’t he?” The terrible thought occurred to me that maybe his task was finished and the god in the sea had taken him back. I hadn’t gotten to say good-bye.

  “He took Daria to see the fish market. The Bollards have rooms above their offices here. That’s where your parents are staying. And Kenté.”

  I dropped the butter knife with a clatter. “Markos, how stupid are you? You shouldn’t be alone here!”