“Castle housekeeper, Lady Daired,” Selwyn said. “Strange old bat, Madam Mòrag, but harmless. Pay her no mind.”
Alastair said something in response but I didn’t hear, at once mesmerized and disgusted by the sight of Cordelia’s meal. Beneath the cover, nestled on a bed of blood-soaked snow, was a raw fish. As if it was the most casual thing in the world, she decapitated the fish with her knife and pulled out the backbone. One by one she tore the ribs from the spine, sucked the flesh from the bones, and left them in a neat pile by her napkin.
“How was your journey?” she asked in between bites.
I swallowed, then swallowed again. “It was, um, memorable.”
“They say those not born to the blood of the Riders find the sky an unpleasant place,” Cordelia said.
“Aye, that’s what made it memorable.”
She picked the scales from the remnants of her fish, piling a tiny midden of bones and fins in the puddle of melting snow. “Did you fly the entire way?”
“We did.”
“You didn’t come through Rushless Wood, I hope,” Rhys interjected. His smile faded when he saw my face. “Great gods, you did?”
“We flew over the marshes.”
“Over the Widdermere? Lord Daired, you’re a braver man than I thought,” he said in a louder voice. “You couldn’t get me to fly over that accursed swamp for all the dragons in the world. Unnatural things live there.”
Selwyn laughed. The sound echoed around the Hall, loud yet somehow hollow. “Yes, we’ve all heard these bedtime tales. Beware the monsters that lurk between the Wood and the Widdermere! Children’s fantasies and ballad fodder for half-trill tavern bards. Really, is there nothing to talk about but monsters tonight?” he asked. “We’ve had enough of that for one day. I’d hoped—yes, Mòrag?”
I stopped myself from jumping this time, but only just. The housekeeper stood at the end of the table again.
“A matter has arisen in the wheelworks that requires your attention, sir,” she said.
“What is it now?”
“Fyri didn’t tell me, sir. She merely asked that you join her in the pump house.”
Selwyn sipped his wine.
“It’s a matter of some urgency, my lord.”
Cordelia pushed back her chair.
“No, no, darling. Don’t trouble yourself,” Selwyn said as he stood. “Forgive me, friends, but it seems I must attend to this. Enjoy the rest of your meal. Madam Mòrag will show you to the guest chambers when you’re finished. Lord Daired, we’ll finalize the details of your contract tomorrow morning. We’ll no more talk of death until then. Goodnight.” He excused himself with a bow.
No one but me seemed to notice the way Cordelia twisted her napkin in her lap as she watched her husband leave. Her other hand traced, over and over, the smooth contours and shifting colors of her pearl-handled knife.
Chapter 16
Merfolk and Strange Magic
It was a relief to leave the Lake Hall after dinner, and not only to escape the sight of the fish carcass. The undercurrent running beneath the surface of the meal left me on edge. It had danced around the fringes of our conversation, weaving through Selwyn’s every word and hiding in every shadow, but I couldn’t place it.
A tight-lipped Mòrag led us to the guest wing. “These will be your chambers while you’re with us.” She paused in front of a door decorated with the wheel-and-trident crest and cast a cold eye over my attire. “The chambermaids will collect any clothes you would like laundered. If you don’t require anything else, I’ll bid you goodnight.”
She left before we had a chance to answer.
“Odd woman,” Alastair said.
“Oh, never mind her. Alastair, look!”
The chamber occupied one entire tower overlooking the quayside of the lake. Pillars carved to look like tree branches supported the upper balconies, their beams twining and delicate. Our panniers sat by the side of a canopied bed large enough to fit a family of four, but those features paled before the magnificent bath in the center of the room. A series of complicated copper tubes, the like of which I’d only ever seen in mechanical drawings in Uncle Gregory’s library, hung over the far side. Plumbing, he’d called it, and he’d cited the bathhouses in Edonarle as some of the finest in the kingdom. I guessed he’d never been to Lake Meera. Steam hovered over the surface of the water. Alastair and I looked at each other.
Never before had so many layers been shed so fast.
I slid into the water. The shock of the heat was no less pleasant than it was bracing and I welcomed the sting as it worked through my muscles and loosened knots in my neck and shoulders. I shook my hair free from its pinnings and sat on the stone bench that ran along the inside of the bath. The steam had the faint tang of old eggs, but compared with the stink of the marshes and the clinging stench of sweat-soaked leather, old eggs were an improvement.
Alastair sank onto the bench next to me with a sigh. “So, khera, we made it to the castle.”
“Aye, we did.”
“Is it what you expected?”
I gave him a sideways glance. There was no hint of sarcasm in his tone, no shadow of accusation or of our prior arguments on the topic. Still, I moved carefully, as much aware of my own latent anger as his disapproval. Safe for the first time in a week, with a full stomach and the prospect of sleeping in a real bed tonight, I had no intention of spoiling this moment of hard-won calm. “I don’t know what I expected.”
He let that pass without comment, to my relief. “What do you make of the Selwyns?”
“Honestly? I’m not sure yet.” I said. “But did you notice how nervous he was on the beach?”
“I did. It was the first time he’d seen a dead body.”
I turned to face him fully. “Are you sure?”
“I know the look.”
But it wasn’t the body he’d been looking at. I tucked that thought away and leaned back against the rim of the bath. There’d be time enough to parse out Lord Selwyn’s motivations in the next few days. “Well, whatever it was, one thing’s certain: I’ll never be able to look at fish the same way again.”
He smiled. “You should have dinner with the magistrate of Clawmouth.”
“He likes raw fish too?”
“Eels. And he has the table manners of a troll.” A faint gurgle came from the pipes and a few drops of water fell into the bath, the plinking sound they made loud in the stillness of the room. Alastair watched the ripples as he rubbed his shoulder. “I’m worried about Theold, Aliza. Master Gorecrow,” he said at my puzzled look. “He should have been here days ago. Selwyn can’t think what would’ve delayed him.”
“Have you ever known him to be late to a contract before?”
“Never.”
“And you’ve known him a long time?”
“We met on a contract near Selkie’s Keep many years ago. Me, Theold, his beoryn Chirrorim, and . . . Charis.”
He didn’t offer any other details. I didn’t ask, simply entwined my fingers with his under the water, and for a long while we sat in silence, immersed in our own thoughts. Isolde’s bloated face swam to the forefront of my mind, overlaid with Madam Mòrag’s muttered warnings and Cordelia’s haunting stare.
The water lapped the wall at my back as Alastair shifted.
“You know, khera, Selwyn was right,” he said in a soft voice.
“Hm?”
“We’ve had enough death for one day.”
“Aye.” We’ve had enough death for a lifetime.
“So let’s not think of it. Not tonight. Let tonight be for living.”
His lips brushed my shoulder, and I smiled. Fears and worries and anger had its place, but he was right. Not here and not tonight. Despite my teasing on the road, I wondered if he knew how much I’d missed his touch. “Did you have anything particular in mind?”
He slipped an arm around my waist and lifted me onto his lap in an easy motion. “I should think that would be obvious.”
; “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be quite specific, Lord Alastair.”
“Tey iskaros, my lady.”
He rested his forehead against mine, a sensuous growl in the back of his throat as I brushed my fingers over the scars along his shoulder blades. Crescent and crosshatch, talon gash and old burns and gods is he beautiful when he looks at me like that.
He drew back, though his grip remained firm on my hips. “Aliza?”
“Hm?”
Need burned in those dark eyes, and not just physical need, though there was plenty of that. This was desire that went deeper than mere lovemaking, a plea that had nothing to do with our bodies. Whatever monsters we face here, it whispered, whatever madness we stumble upon tomorrow—tell me you trust me.
But he only said, “I’m glad you came with me.”
“Me too,” I whispered, and kissed him.
I’d lost something important. Blindly I groped through mist and fog and the smoke of a pyre that was consuming the countryside. Faces grinned out at me from the smoke, monstrous, bloated faces I knew but wished I didn’t. I fell to my knees, feeling the ground. Rina? Rina, sweetheart, where are you? Stones cut my fingers, but there was no blood as the gashes peeled back, revealing bone and shriveled muscle. Black water dripped from my hands, her hands, whose hands? I looked down.
There!
The mist rolled away from Rina’s body. She sat up, her throat hanging open like a demented second smile. There were funeral bells in her voice. Aliza? Where were you?
This wasn’t right. I’d found her, hadn’t I? But too late. Always too late. Tears choked me. Dearest, I’m sorry.
I don’t want your apologies. You were supposed to watch me, but you forgot. You forgot, and you let me die.
No!
I drew my hands up to claw away that horrible expression from her face, because that wasn’t my sister and she was wrong and I couldn’t bear it—
I woke in a cold sweat, my heart racing, a terrible pressure on my chest. Seeing the unfamiliar canopy above only made it worse, and for one wild moment I was truly lost. I squeezed my eyes shut. Just a dream. Janna preserve me, it’s just a dream. It took all my will to focus on the litany, to calm my galloping heart and force my mind back into the waking world. Breathe. Quietly in, quietly out, just as I had seen Alastair doing during his morning exercises. It’s all right. Breathe. Slowly reality crept back in and the nightmare crawled back to its place in the dark corner of my mind where it knew I would not follow. Breathe. There were horrors enough here already; I need add none of mine.
A minute later I opened my eyes. A bar of sunlight fell like a gallows’ lash across the pillow. Next to me the mattress dipped and the light grew brighter as Alastair pushed back the curtain around the bed. I squinted in the sudden brightness.
“Do you hear that?” he said.
“What?”
“Listen.”
“’S bells. Come back to bed.”
“Those aren’t bells.”
I propped myself up on my elbow. The sunlight drove the last terrors of the nightmare from my mind and the pressure on my chest eased. “Sounds like bells to me.”
“There’s something else. Voices.” He leapt up and threw on a tunic. “From the lake.” A door opposite the bathing pool led to a balcony overlooking Lake Meera. He pushed it open.
I bolted upright. It had always puzzled me why bards so often wrote verses in praise of Mermish choirs, knowing the danger it took to get close enough to hear them. Now I understood. It was not music that spilled from the lake. It was the love and sorrow and laughter and pain of a hundred souls, breaking like waves over some eternal stone and cresting together to greet the rising sun, and what was danger compared to all of that? I was on my feet and at Alastair’s side before my conscious mind had given up its place in bed.
Lake Meera spread before us. Mountain slopes walled the valley in on either side, black and bare, rising upward into snowy peaks. Far below the stony spear of the castle quay shone white against the dark waves. Akarra sat at the end of the quay. The water around her frothed with movement, accenting the Mermish song with the occasional splash. Alastair and I dressed in a hurry.
My breath came in white clouds as we made our way to the cliff path. Mist pooled in the hollows of the hills beyond the castle walls, little puddles of cloud pouring down the mountainside toward the cliff, arrested here and there by piles of fallen stone and what looked like the ruins of an old abbey. The path to the quay wasn’t so treacherous in the daylight, but we still had to mind our steps. Through a gap in the cliff wall near the ruins I could see the black waves breaking over the rocks almost a hundred feet below. The lake steamed in the cold air.
“Good morning!” Akarra called when she saw us. The quay was high and narrow, only three or four strides across, and her perch looked precarious. She had to extend her wings for balance as she crouched at the end. The Mermish song dissolved into splashes as the merfolk who’d been speaking with her dove beneath the water. “I hoped you’d be up. They’ll be back. They’re not fond of humans, but they’re curious about you.”
I leaned over the edge of the quay. It was a fair drop to the surface of the lake, and even close to shore the water was deep. The stone pilings beneath us sank straight down and out of sight, lost in murky darkness.
“Did you learn anything?” Alastair asked Akarra.
“Not from the merfolk. This is the first I’ve been able to call them, but I did speak with some of the townsfolk again. That cantor said that last night was the first time anyone from Morianton had seen Selwyn since the slain Idar were found. They thought he’d already holed himself up in his castle for the winter.”
“Is that unusual?” Alastair asked.
“Before the Worm came he’d been helping the miller build a pump house like the one under the castle. Something about using the hot springs to run the mill. Since the slayings and Isolde’s disappearance, he hasn’t visited once. They’ve had to abandon it. What did you learn last night?”
We told her about our dinner in the Lake Hall. Halfway through my description of Cordelia’s meal the water stirred beneath the quay and Akarra stopped me.
“Shh. Watch.”
Faces rose out of the depths, blubberous, alien faces with all-black eyes and fringes of waterweed trailing from their necks. Two mermen clutched tridents of jagged flint, dark against the silvery-green of their skin, and with these they gestured first to Akarra, then to us, as if debating whether we were worth the trouble of surfacing.
“Can you hear what they’re saying?” I asked Akarra.
She tilted her head toward the water. “Something about ‘on the honor of my . . .’ either ‘roe-bearer’ or ‘shoalmother.’ Shoalmother, I think. The other one’s questioning it. My Mermish is a bit rusty.”
The arguing mermen drew back as a third drifted up between them, larger than both. This one bore no trident, but through the waving waterweed on his head I glimpsed the spikes of a crown. Without a ripple he surfaced, the gills along his neck sealing as nostril slits opened above his mouth. Milky lids closed over his eyes as he raised one hand: webbed, pale green, and bloodless. He nodded first to Akarra, then to Alastair. “Those of the deep greet those of the heights,” he said. The words were Arlean, but behind them I felt the weight of unfathomable waters, dark and cold and mysterious.
Alastair knelt beside me. “Those of the heights greet those of the deep.”
“I know of no cause of war between us, dragonrider. We welcome you to our shores.”
“Nor do I. Thank you, sire.”
The king turned unblinking eyes on me. “Roe-bearer of the Daired, I presume?”
“My wife,” Alastair said.
I wondered if I’d forever be known to Idar by some variation of dragonrider’s mate. “Aliza Daired, sire.”
“Hm.” The waterweed that formed his beard trembled. “She is weak and thin. She’ll not last the winter. You’d best take others if you want a healthy spawning.�
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My cheeks burned, but Akarra intervened before I could say something we’d all regret. “Your waters are still clear, Your Deepness. When do you expect the ice this year?”
“Not for several weeks. Winter will come late to the north this year, but it will be a hard one. What brings you to Ommeera so close to the snows?”
“Lord Selwyn invited us,” Akarra said. “He wants us to find whatever it was that killed that girl.”
“Where did your people find her body, sire?” Alastair asked.
“My seneschal’s roe-bearers found it drifting near the uroo beds by the western wall.” He waved a hand toward the opposite shore. “It had been in the water a long time. We could not allow it to pollute the uroo.”
Akarra spoke a phrase in Mermish and the king shook his head.
“It’s been more than forty tides since I’ve spoken with the land-folk of the castle, and this is the first I have heard of a monster hunting Idar along our shores. The lord sentinel should have summoned us from the first. It troubles me that he did not.” One of the guards beneath him extended his trident and the king ducked beneath the water. A moment later he resurfaced. “I must take counsel on this matter. May you ride on swift currents, Family Daired, and may the waters of Ourobauro ever break on your enemies’ shoals,” he said and dove into the darkness. The two guards followed, keeping well apart from each other.
“Interesting,” Akarra said.
Alastair sat back on his heels. “I like these merfolk.”
I smacked his shoulder. “He told you to get another wife!”
“Compared to the merfolk at Selkie’s Keep, that’s genteel. They just drown you.”
“The merfolk of the lakes aren’t fighting off drakens and other sea monsters every day,” Akarra said. “They can afford to be nicer.” She raised her head. “We’ll talk more on this later, khela. We have company.”
We turned to see a maid hurrying down the quay. “So—sorry,” she panted. “Lord Selwyn is asking for you, Lord Daired. He has your contract ready in his study. And breakfast is laid out in the Lake Hall, milady.”
Akarra spread her wings. “Alastair, Aliza, I’m going to visit the village on the western shore. Maybe someone on land saw something,” she said. With a sweep of her wings she was airborne.
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