Coda nodded curtly, his eyes drawn back toward the palace, and with that he flicked his tail and started past me–not the response I expected in the wake of what had just occurred.
It caught me off-guard, the objection I wanted to voice on behalf of the offenders faltering in my throat. I wasn’t sure what I expected, exactly, but it had involved a little more concern, possibly him fawning over me a bit more than necessary–just…not this cold closing of the matter.
Was it just that he was in cold, calculating regent mode, a necessary alter-ego for those times when you had to apprehend and sentence criminals? Simply the no-nonsense, all-business side of Codexious? Or was it something more, his way of disconnecting or snubbing me in light of the fact that we’d eliminated the bad apples from the pool of queenly candidates and, by my own recent words, cleared him to proceed with choosing a bride?
I almost let him go, not knowing how to engage his indifferent façade, totally over-analyzing every micro-aspect of his body language. But this might be my only chance.
“Coda,” I called after him, and he wafted around to acknowledge me again. “You’re not really going to execute them, are you?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
My mouth worked, no words coming out. Why wouldn’t he? If that was the way of things, here–an eye for an eye–as it probably always had been, how was I to convince him there was a better way? What reason could I give him not to exact what justice meant to them here? “Surely you know something of mercy.”
He stared at me, waiting for more.
“Like you showed to me, after I was imprisoned on my first day.”
He blinked. “Did you try to kill anyone in my city?”
I faltered. “No–of course not.”
“Then letting you go free was no act of mercy. You were a harmless lost soul, and I had no reason to hold you.”
“Is there no other form of punishment you even consider?”
“I could exile them. But as I said Atlantis is only our seldom-visited capital, so unless I exile them from the entire ocean, any of us are liable to encounter them when we leave this hub and return to wandering the sea at large. So, a pointless sentence.”
“Surely there are…outskirts or some sector of the ocean you could restrict them to.”
“In theory. There are zones that would qualify. But the likelihood that they would heed such a sentence much past the point their escorts are out of sight… I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Do you really think they would ever attempt to harm me again?” I tried to reason with him. “They have no motive left. Not now that you would never consider them as candidates for queen again.”
Codexious considered me with an unwavering blankness that told me he was humoring my objection, but nothing I said carried much weight in the grand scheme of things. “The fact that you do not recognize revenge as a motive means you are more naïve than I thought.”
That stung, but I had to keep my objective on track. And hadn’t Coda been the one to tell me I had more to bargain with than I knew? He had a soft spot for me. I could play on that.
“Please, Coda. Don’t kill anyone on my account. No harm came to me. I don’t… I can’t bear to have that on my conscience.”
“What justice I choose to exact on my degenerate citizens is not on you, and should have no effect on your conscience.”
“Be that as it may… It will. Please. This isn’t what I came here for. This is the last thing I could want my presence to inflict.”
He glanced down and away in a small show of irritation, and when his eyes returned to me the silver sheen was dull with resignation. “You really wish no harm to come to them?”
A clatter of relief tripped through me, seeing I had some sway with him after all. “Please. For me.”
Looking less than enthused but willing to make an exception, he officially relented. “As you wish.”
And with that he continued on his way, pulling off his eel skin as he went, the deed done–and I was left to process everything that had just taken place with only my tentacled minion to comfort me.
* * *
In spite of my inclination to disregard the majority of Inaja’s little intervention dialogue, I found myself revisiting some of the things he had said.
Particularly that bit about Coda being drawn to extremes. It had been extreme for him to jump right to a sentence of executing half a dozen mermaids guilty of various degrees of co-conspiring against me…hadn’t it? No trial or anything?
Was there more to Inaja’s claims than I had given credit?
Had I just been a new flavor to the regent’s jaded senses? Just his latest ‘extreme’?
Or I was over-thinking it, and it really came down to a mere matter of cultural variance. In my world people were offered a fair trial by an unbiased judge or assortment of peers in a civilized manner, and down here…things were just a little more archaic.
Either way–whether the regent was an off-balance, troubled soul or I just wasn’t in Kansas anymore, my illusion of belonging in this place with these people was unraveling, coming up against some serious soul-searching.
What was there for me here, anyway? The Deep refused to speak to me, leaving me at a loss and disillusioned as to what all the fuss had been about, and I’d already decided I’d done nothing but kick the hornet’s nest and cause a great deal of unnecessary drama and unrest since my arrival. I’d realized the only solution once in the thick of it was to be proactive in immobilizing those that had turned a little stir into an outright war of terror, but now that the scandal was averted…
Was it time I take my leave?
When was the last time I had even given Axel and Tara a second thought?
My mother, who’d hardly heard from me since I left for Egypt?
Was I losing myself down here? And for what?
For a flimsy, foolish dalliance with a man I could never have, and some silly, conceited dreamer’s belief that destiny was a thing and had a special plan for me.
I was just like everyone else.
Except that I had gills, but hey. That was just an extension of the bane that had subjected me to biracial slurs all my life. I’d been silly to think it could ever amount to anything more glorious than that.
Sorry, to any who had been counting on me to reverse the stigma.
I wasn’t anything special. I was just a ‘harmless, lost soul’, according to Codexious, and whether or not ‘harmless’ meant anything to my detriment, ‘lost’ was seemingly right on the money.
Though it sounded likely that anyone who could be described as ‘harmless’ probably never would amount to anything. You didn’t get anywhere by being the harmless type.
Now you’re just being ridiculous and wallowing, I told myself, disgusted. Whether or not I would amount to anything by being harmless, I would never get anywhere wallowing.
If the Deep wasn’t going to speak to me, then I had a life to get back to. I had no interest in being strung along.
Or watching Codexious get back in the game and choose a bride.
Chapter 29
I looked up at the face of the Atlantean palace, marveling that such a legendary fortress had become somewhat of a regular haunt for me. How could I ever denounce this unprecedented opportunity and decide it would be my last day feasting my eyes on this sight?
How did you decide it was time to cut short the greatest adventure of your life?
All right, that’s enough unimaginable splendor for one lifetime. Bye, legendary awesomeness, I think I’ve had my fill.
Said no one ever.
And yet, there I was. Readying to be on my way.
It was one of those things that it secretly kills you to do, that you scream at yourself not to go through with, but for some confounded reason you put one foot in front of the other, refusing to listen to yourself.
And soon you’re watching the doors to the underwater palace open at your presence for the last time, and you’re being escorted down t
he beautiful, lavish halls by the bodyguard who started you thinking along these lines, and you’re waiting outside the quarters of the man you both long to see and are terrified to face.
And then you’re in, and he’s there, and you’re trying to decide whether to look at him because you’ll never get to look upon his anguishing beauty again or to not look at him because you’re afraid you won’t say what you came to say if you do, and then he’s fiddling with some frothily-fronded-freakish plant and completely distracts you when you do look at him, and what comes out is,
“Are you gardening?” Because his quarters are overflowing with an unexpected deluge of potted plants–succulents, ferns, curious flowers…all crowded and clustered and somehow not at all what you expected of the regent’s secretive lair.
“The botanical arts are soothing to me,” he replied, dumping a handful of glittering soil around the roots of the plant from a sack beneath his arm. A puff of the finer sediment eddied out into the water, but the coarser grains settled in the pot.
Coda observed me through the explosion of crazed foliage tentacles. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”
I was still stuck on the plethora of plantlife turning the room into a jungle incarnate. The ocean prince always had some new surprise up his sleeve, didn’t he?
Or the absence of sleeves, as it were.
Ink it, now I was distracted by his bare-muscled arms.
Focus, Phibby-girl!
I expelled a mouthful of water that mimicked my ‘overbite huff’, blowing an inopportune veil of hair out of my face. But it gave me a moment to collect my thoughts.
And to procrastinate just a tiny bit longer.
“I, um…” I began, suddenly forgetting everything I’d ever learned about forming coherent sentences. “I’ve actually decided…” To stay here forever and have adorable little amphibian mer-babies with you and–
I flinched from a mental slap in the face.
So not what I’d come here to profess.
Let’s try that again…
“I’ve decided to go home,” I outed all at once, feeling a rush of adrenaline and then a strange, melancholy emptiness.
“Home,” Coda mused, a glop of soil leaking from the sack as he forgot about it under his arm. “You mean, to the Surface?”
I pursed my lips and gave a tight nod, feeling sick. “Yes.”
It would have been impossible to miss the dismay that worked its way across his face. He glanced down, trying to process the announcement. “I see.” The sack began to slip from the crook of his arm, and he tensed to catch it before it could drift away. Very purposefully, he drew the drawstrings and set the sack aside, reaching to caress the length of a speckled leaf as if to feign indifference.
Or perhaps just to give himself something to do, lest he have an alternate adverse reaction.
It was torture, dropping that bomb and waiting for his reaction. I couldn’t pretend we hadn’t grown close, even if it was on mutual grounds of denial as we danced around the eventuality of him choosing an Atlantean bride. We’d both known it was coming, had never pretended otherwise–had simply created a parallel dimension where we let that moment come to us, replete in the stance that Coda wasn’t married yet.
Only as I stood there before him in his sanctuary of plants, having officially announced my impending exodus, did I realize what a mistake it all had been. The fantasy of it had made it easy to forget reality was a thing–a thing that would come crashing in, kicking the door off its hinges, like it always did.
But even in the magical throes of Atlantis, a version of reality existed. And it blew out the spell of our summery romance like a candle in one dousing instant, rudely immersing us in darkness.
Rudely immersing us in the unpleasantries of emotional rebellion and an instant mood swing of pheromone withdrawals, anyway.
“Did you…get what you came for, then?” Coda asked, lashes flicking back up to pin me in his sights.
My heart sank. He’d landed on the one question that still haunted me enough to give me pause. I searched for the right response, not knowing what to say.
He noticed–how could he not?–and slowly he came around the plant to face me with nothing between us. At first I didn’t look up at him, but he hovered at a height that placed my gaze at his collarbone, and rather than let my attention drift down to his chest I forced myself to find his face.
“Sayler. Please. You don’t have to take your leave so hastily. Please tell me it doesn’t have anything to do with the hostiles who are now behind bars.”
Here it came. The resistance. “Not just them, no. But since I’ve arrived, I’ve been imprisoned, assaulted, caused an uproar throughout the city, driven all of your prospects to desperate measures that have compromised a crucial negotiation in deep-sea proceedings, created tension between you and your most loyal ally, and had to watch half a dozen mermaids get led away toward their execution knowing it was because of me.”
“You are not responsible for what those mermaids did to you.”
“Even so, if I’d never come–”
“You can’t play that game, Sayler.”
“Maybe not. But I can control whether or not I prolong the controversy causing this riot.”
“So you would have me blindly devote my life and the ocean in all of its desperation to one who might have joined the murderous motion pitted against you.”
“No, but I–”
“I am grateful you flushed those miscreants out of the woodwork. You have done me a great service.”
“Then I am glad my trauma and abuse served some purpose.”
He sobered, hearing me put it like that. I saw some of the resistance braced throughout his body deflate from his shoulders. “I am sorry that you experienced what you did. Of course I understand if you desire to leave. But I believe there is something for you here.”
I humored him, albeit without much confidence. “What, then? What is there for me here, Coda?”
A conflicted hesitation passed across his face, his chest rippling with a wave of nervous energy, but then he sank down to level his spidery turquoise-fringed gaze on mine. He reached for my arms, gliding his touch down to my hands, raising my fingers to his snakeskin lips. They were smooth against my knuckles, resting first on one hand, then the other.
“Be my bride,” Codexious beseeched me, his eyes shining like I’d never seen.
My heart stopped, stuttering in my chest before finding its rhythm again. My body went rigid. “What?” My hands felt suddenly very hot in his grasp.
“I was losing hope of ever landing on anyone worth choosing before you showed up. And I have found myself less inclined to choose any of them since. I have fought it, because of the controversy, but Sayler… Why are we fighting this, when you have shown more compassion and integrity and regard for the ocean and its wonders than any of them possess in the trailing ends of their fin membranes?”
“I never said I was fighting anything,” I denounced evenly, mind racing at the turn of events. Was the regent of Atlantis proposing? I had not come prepared to deal with this.
“Come on, Stargazer. What happened between us in the Deep? Our song? The way of things between us at the ball?”
“That was for show,” I deflected, referencing the latter example and conveniently ignoring the other two examples of the dalliance we’d been enjoying. Inking Abyss, he was serious.
And of course he was. I recalled with dismaying explicitness his spiel regarding mermaids mating for life, and how you didn’t go around seducing someone unless you planned to stick with her forever.
Perhaps that should have been my first clue.
“When I took you to the pit, showed you the reason for Amphitrite’s broken heart,” Coda continued, and I floated there speechlessly, helpless to do anything but let him lay it all on me, “I saw how deeply it affected you. You felt the ocean’s plight. It reached you. Moved you. Broke your own heart. And I think it was at that point that I knew. You a
re exactly what the ocean needs. Exactly what none of its current inhabitants possess because they take it for granted.”
I found my voice then, ironically moved to interrupt based on a small spark of hurt that only confirmed I believed there was something between us. “So this is just about me meeting some criteria that fulfills your civic obligations.”
His face fell–and somehow tightened at the same time. “No. Do you think I kissed you in the Deep like that because you ‘fulfill my civic needs’?”
What was I supposed to say? “I can’t be your bride, Coda.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not even–I’m from the Surface. And you what, want a Surface-dweller to rule the Deep? How am I even remotely qualified for that?”
“You care.”
“I don’t…have the necessary abilities to even survive in the open sea, much less rule it. That’s why my mother left me on a beach to begin with.”
“You speak as if you have to have a fin, be a mermaid, to take Amphitrite’s place. But you forget the birth of mermaids came when Amphitrite bequeathed fins to humans. She was never one herself. She took many forms. Sometimes finned, sometimes not, sometimes a tentacled giant and sometimes not even substantial at all.”
“Because she was a goddess, Coda. I am not.”
“But upon accepting the position and merging with the sea, you would be. Something more than human, anyway, granted the powers of the Deep. Who needs to outswim a shark when they bow to you?”
He was determined, but I had already made up my mind to leave. I had to check in with my old life; I’d never be able to live with a decision to simply abandon everyone I loved without explanation and disappear down a rabbit hole of mystery for the rest of time. “I’m not the right one for this,” I maintained, willing him to see that. As much as I’d gotten hung up on his loveliness and charm, it had always been fitting that he should end up with some exotic, experienced sea-girl.
“Were you not the one who pointed out that when I choose a bride, the sea will meet my choice halfway and bestow upon her the necessary knowledge and power?”
Pillars of the Deep Page 24