by Starla Night
“You have passed the proper time!” Tibe snarled at King Kayo, who floated like a broad shield in front of Harmony. “You wrongly honor the exile.”
King Kayo squared his shoulders. He clearly wanted to argue. But he didn’t.
So Harmony did for him. “Um, how long is ‘the proper time’? Are you using a stopwatch? Or—”
“King Kayo.”
“Is deciding how long someone can honor the dead the job of the first lieutenant? Because the king should—”
“King Kayo!”
“Tibe.” King Kayo gestured for him to leave the body. “Now.”
Tibe’s face fell. “My king? What are you doing?”
King Kayo rested a hand on Tibe’s bicep. “I will explain. Drop the body.”
The warriors left the deceased on the pearls at the king’s orders.
Tibe shook his head, confusion yielding to anger. “No, my king. I am the one you trust.”
“I will call for you when I am ready.”
“She must stay in your castle.”
“I will talk to her.”
“Talk? Why are you so weak before this female? She is a stranger. She knows nothing. I am your faithful first lieutenant.”
“Just go, Tibe.”
“Perhaps she must go to the surface after all.”
King Kayo eyed him hard.
Harmony sniped at him, “When you ‘speak for the king,’ exactly how much is what he wanted you to say?”
“Everything.” Tibe straightened and lifted his noble chin. “I am a faithful warrior of Aiycaya. I will guard it with my last heartbeat. No one will stand against what is right.”
“Tibe. Go.”
Tibe narrowed his eyes on King Kayo. “No one.”
King Kayo hunched his shoulders, enduring his barb.
Tibe veered away. The other warrior left with him. Warlord Sao eyed her for a long moment before swimming after the first lieutenant.
King Kayo slumped and rubbed his nose, exhausted.
She vibrated urgently. “Stand up to him. Or else he will rule the city, not you.”
He eyed her from the side. “You are a stranger to our ways.”
“Coups are universal.”
“Tibe would never disrupt the hierarchy.” A cynical smile flashed across the king’s face. “That is one law he would not break. My position is safe.”
She wasn’t so sure.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Harmony hoped King Kayo’s position was safe from Tibe.
But her entire plan for coming to speak with him now depended on her convincing King Kayo that Tibe was unsafe so he would get rid of Tibe and release Faier.
King Kayo bounced across the pearls to the body.
She followed. “I’m sorry for your loss. He was a friend?”
King Kayo gazed on the fallen warrior. “Mawa drove that Trench Jack into the prison to kill you.”
She looked down.
But it was a mistake. Someone had slashed the dull, waterlogged body, and it seethed with lice. The head hung by a thin strip of skin. A bloody mess mutilated him between the legs.
Her stomach rolled. She looked away. “Why?”
“He approached us on our search for a sacred bride. I thought he wished to return to the city.” Bitter hurt seethed in his chest vibrations. “Not destroy us.”
“You were friends.”
“He was my first trainer. I looked up to him very much. He should have had a young fry long ago. But our sacred brides…” King Kayo looked into the white branches of the Life Tree as though staring into the past. “When Mawa left for Atlantis, I took it as a great betrayal. A challenge to my kingship. Mawa returned a different male. I wish I had not sent him away.”
“So you caught him and had to, uh, execute him.”
“Tibe caught him.”
“Oh. Right.”
“I wished to ask why. Why did he turn on us? Was there no way to reconcile? Now, I will never know.” His nose wrinkled in anger at the corpse. “And Tibe is right. Delaying his destruction only conveys an honor he does not deserve.”
“You never will know,” she pointed out. “Tibe stole that from you.”
His lips twisted in denial.
“Maybe it was an accident. Maybe Mawa got tricked. Maybe your first lieutenant is plotting against you.”
“Harmony.”
“The point is, maybe Mawa deserves your honors. So take the time. Honor him. You’re the king. Stop letting your first lieutenant rule for you.”
His aura glowed with the same anger that flashed in his eyes. He turned his shoulder on her and stared at Mawa hard, honoring the fallen warrior with his attention until his muddy aura cleared.
Then he knelt, arranged the body, and ululated a short song. She didn’t know the words but it seemed like he conveyed sadness, confusion, and a sense of loss too soon.
Finally, he rose again and vibrated with calm. “Warrior Luin. Tell Warlord Sao he may take the body away. In the trench, the same jacks Mawa herded to attack our city may eat him.”
The warriors returned and hauled the body from the Life Tree dais. The water cleared of its metallic tang.
“Feel better?” she asked.
“Yes. Thank you, Harmony. So.” King Kayo turned to her. “We sent that food. I trust you are not hungry?”
“Er…actually…”
“Come.” He hooked her arm with his.
“Oh. Can we eat by the Life Tree?”
His eyebrows furrowed. “You will be safe. I will eat with you.”
“The Life Tree is more calming.” Plus she’d be disobeying Tibe. “Is there a problem?”
“No. Kings often ruled from the Life Tree.” He ordered Warrior Poro to the castle, and the warrior returned with a spread of legumes and meats.
While they shared a meal, Elder Bawa flew to the Life Tree. He harrumphed importantly. “My king, you must prepare for the All-Council.”
He stopped midbite and packed up. “Patrols have sighted them?”
“No, my king, but you must prepare.” He eyed Harmony and curled his lip. “Return your female to your castle.”
King Kayo closed up his box.
She crunched a legume extra-hard. “Huh. That’s funny. I thought you said you were preparing for their arrival.”
“A king has many duties you do not understand, female.”
“Yeah, but at the prison, you said he should go hunting, and now he can’t eat a sandwich in peace. I guess you aren’t that capable.”
Elder Bawa drew up, stiff. “I am exceedingly capable. He can eat the ‘sandwich.’ I have prepared everything!”
“So then what’s King Kayo supposed to prepare?”
Elder Bawa’s mouth twisted, but no words vibrated in his chest.
King Kayo stopped. “Elder Bawa?”
The elder gestured angrily at the castle. “My king, she should not be in public viewing! Sacred brides belong in castles. Not in prisons, not in forests, and not at the Life Tree like an honored warrior!”
King Kayo lowered to the dais once more and reopened his food box. “Thank you for your advice, Elder Bawa. Inform me when you sight the All-Council at our borders.”
“My king!”
“What is your and Tibe’s obsession with getting me into the king’s castle?” she asked. “Seriously. It’s a little scary. It’s like, what are you plotting?”
“It is tradition!” he almost shrieked.
King Kayo fixed him with a long look. “Elder Bawa. I expect you to focus on our petition. Not my sacred bride. If you cannot do this, I will ask another elder to take your place. Understand?”
The elder stiffened. “My king.”
“Go.”
The elder turned and kicked away. Harmony and King Kayo continued their peaceful picnic.
“You have no problem ordering him around,” she noted.
He grimaced and selected another piece of meat. “He has more tattoos on one arm than I have on my whole body.”
“That can change.”
“Hmm. You have reminded me…”
King Kayo finished his food, flew to the Life Tree’s biggest roots, and removed a curved dagger. He pruned a small twig, notched an end, and embedded a metal shard at the tip like a pencil.
Returning to his seat, he pressed the tip to a big tattoo swirling across his bicep in a Caribbean pattern.
“What did I remind you?”
“I must record my recent deeds.” He scratched a swirling line in sync with the existing tattoos, adding dots and lightning bolt crashes. A thatched pattern.
“So, the designs have a meaning?”
“This is the meeting of myself and my sacred bride. These lines mean we fought a great battle and defeated our foe.”
“Yours look so unique.”
“The markings may be unique, but we all record major events in our lives.”
That made sense for a warrior culture that didn’t have books, cameras, or archives to record their history. Her years in Haiti had blended together, and she had no documentation. Tattoos would have helped her to remember how skeptical Fab had been that she would last a week in the slums, how they had grown to be friends, and how cute Evens had been as a little boy. How he was just growing into a skinny, responsible, serious young man when Lifet’s gang took him.
And if she didn’t free him, he would die too young. She would cry over him like King Kayo cried over Mawa, a senseless victim of inexplicable violence.
Or Faier…
No. She needed to convince King Kayo to pardon Faier. If she could find commonalities with the king, she could reach him.
King Kayo was ambidextrous. He touched up older tattoos where the scar tissue had erased little bits.
“You are repairing them,” she noted.
“I cannot lose my memories.”
Faier had so many scars. He must have lost many memories.
“That is one reason an exile has such a difficult time,” King Kayo said as if he were reading her mind. “His Life Tree no longer heals ordinary injuries, and scars erode his tattoos.”
And others didn’t see a kind, honest, capable warrior. They saw only the monster she had seen the first time she’d looked at him.
She had been so cruel.
“Can I use that tool?” she asked.
“Sacred brides do not use it.”
“But could I?”
“The adamantium shard will not mark human skin.”
“Well, how does that work?”
He held up the tool. “This rare metal cauterizes the Life Tree so cuts on it do not allow in the ocean water, which is poison. It also keeps the sap liquid. As I score my skin, a tiny drop of Life Tree sap enters my scratch.”
“That’s how human tattoos work too,” she insisted. “We inject ink instead of tree sap.”
“The Life Tree sap is not ink. It is colorless.”
“Your tattoos are hot pink.”
“The sap activates the existing color of mer skin. That is why you cannot mark a sacred bride. Do you think you are the first to ask for such a memento? Coloration passes from father to son. You are, despite your transformation, still a human.”
Oh. He had thought she meant to use it on herself. “Can you tattoo another mer?”
“Yes. Look here.” He showed her a swirly tattoo on his calf that had a distinctive style different from the rest on his body. “This is when I succeeded my father. A rampaging spearnose flounder stabbed through his heart. I was too distraught from grief. Elder Wida inked this tattoo.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You also… Many were sorry I succeeded.”
“No! I’m sorry your father was killed so suddenly. And you still go hunting?”
“He was unwell.” King Kayo neatened one line. “A strange headache had dulled his senses. Healer Hobin requested he stay behind. But my father had been a hunter before he was king. He always supported his hunters.”
“That is so sad.”
“Yes. I miss his counsel.” He looked up at the Life Tree. “There are many things I should have asked.”
“I know what you mean.” She chewed a creamy legume. “I’d give anything to hear my mother scold me one more time. ‘Get your head out of the clouds, Harmony. The earth is fine.’ She always said things like that.”
“You knew your mother?”
“She raised me.”
“No mer has memories with his mother.” He rested his tattoo pen across his knee. “My father was a good, strong male. I envy humans for knowing both parents.”
“Oh, I didn’t know my father.”
“Surface dwellers do not know both parents?”
“Most people know their fathers, but single-parent households are super common.”
He mulled that.
“And my mother died in an accident too.”
“A hunting accident?”
“No.” She laughed shortly. “No, she was in a car accident and got a nasty concussion. She was in the hospital for a few days with a bad headache. They were waiting for the swelling to go down when she had a heart attack.”
One moment her mother had been commenting on the blue Jell-O for the third time—repeating herself was a problem due to the fuzzy thinking of the concussion—and the next, she had gasped and clutched at her chest.
“That is an interesting coincidence,” he murmured. “My father and your mother both suffered head pain and then heart trauma.”
It was an odd link, but probably that kind of coincidence happened all the time.
“The panic of being alone almost numbed me to the sadness,” she said.
He commiserated. “I also was not ready to be alone in this world.”
“You too,” she said with feeling. “And then a few months later, my citizenship got challenged. The certificate I’d always used went missing and apparently my birth was never registered or it went into the system wrong. Nobody could find me. It was like a nightmare. You called Faier the exile, but I’m the one without a home. It was horrible.”
He returned the tattoo stick to the base of the Life Tree.
Warrior Zaka flew to the edge of the dais. His face burned so redly that his tattoos almost melted. He shouted, “King Kayo! Return your f-female to the c-castle at once or I will lose all respect for you as a king!”
King Kayo rotated, hand reaching for the dagger at his bicep, aura darkening. “What did you say?”
Warrior Zaka’s chest shook. “K-King Kayo! Return your female—”
“Did Elder Bawa tell you to say that?” Harmony munched the last crunchy strip of beans. “Or was it Tibe?”
Warrior Zaka sagged with relief. “Elder Bawa, Sacred Bride Harmony.”
“Okay, thanks. Can you get me more of these bean things? They’re delicious.”
He bowed deeply to both, whirled on his fins, and flew to the castle as if an entire school of Trench Jacks chased him.
Harmony packed up her food.
King Kayo turned to her, a question on his face. “How did you know…? That Warrior Zaka—”
“That the shyest warrior in Aiycaya wasn’t insulting you to your face?” She tilted her head at him. “Really?”
He stared after the warrior. “It was a surprise. But if even Warrior Zaka shared Tibe’s and Elder Bawa’s feelings, then perhaps I must reconsider.”
“He doesn’t. He’s just obeying.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Warrior Zaka worries more about how to fit your hunted meat into your pantry than he does about me. Anyway, he used the same intonation both times. He clearly rehearsed.”
“He might have rehearsed his true feelings.”
“Then he’d wait for a private moment.”
King Kayo frowned at her. “You are preparing to visit the prisoner.”
She rested her hands on her neatly stacked boxes. “You know that he didn’t mean to trespass. He was saving me. He shouldn’t be punished for non-crimes.”
&nbs
p; “I have no choice.” His frown deepened. “Go to my castle.”
“No.”
“I forbid you from disobeying me.”
“Then you will be very sad when I visit him anyway.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Why do you disobey me?”
“Because you let Tibe disobey you all the time.”
King Kayo dropped his hand, glared at her, and stared up into the boughs of the Life Tree. “I have no choice but to accept Tibe’s… I am trapped. Understand?”
“You’re the king.”
“Yes, I am the king, but I am more imprisoned than your rebel. He, at least, knows respect from two cities. Whereas I cannot rule. No warriors will follow my leadership. Tibe keeps the warriors and elders in line.”
She bounced to her feet. “He keeps them in line by lying about your orders.”
“Because they obey. If not for him, Xarin would be king and I would be an exile.”
“Xarin obeys you.”
He wheeled on her with sharp fury. “So, you like Xarin and wish he were king also?”
“This again?” She tutted her tongue, making a clicking noise. “When they want to kill the dog, they say it’s crazy.”
He blinked. “Dog? What?”
“My cousin Fab used to say that. People will lie about a faithful companion when they want to get rid of him. You hate Xarin no matter how loyal he is to you.”
“He is not loyal.” King Kayo hugged his elbows. “He calls me a milk-fry.”
“Milk-fry?”
“A male who cannot make wise decisions. He cannot see because he holds his face to his mother’s breast.” King Kayo darkened as he gazed at the dais. “In my case, it is more true. I was born too small. My mother remained a long time. Many extra human months. And even after she left, I was too small to compete with the other warriors.”
“That’s not a problem now.”
“I worked hard. Now I am a great hunter.” He raised his fist. “Strong and fearless like my father. Xarin sees only the weak trainee.”
“I think he regrets what he said.”
King Kayo shook his head, dropping his fist. “He often tells me what I am doing wrong.”
“But he obeys you explicitly. Give him another chance.”
“He has all the chances. He is my second lieutenant. What more to do you want?”