She—her warm body, her gentle laugh, the sweet sounds she made as he found those familiar places under her blouse and skirts and kissed them into life—provided plenty of distraction.
For the messenger would fly tomorrow, and then he would have but a month or two left for the Rosas of the world, for pleasure and purposelessness.
A lifetime ahead for duty.
ALARIK FELT UNEASY.
He couldn’t quite explain it. His wife slumbered in their bed, peaceful and sated. His children slept, little porcelain dolls in their cribs, in the neighbouring room. The guards were at watch, and the bay peaceful. The weather was calm.
There was nothing wrong, yet his mind wouldn’t rest.
Janez’s offer had taken him quite by surprise. Alarik’s father—also a Janez—had been a second son himself. He’d borne a great scar all along his face for Alarik’s whole life, a memory of an attempt on his life by Alarik’s uncle, his father’s younger brother. The third son of King Erik had coveted that throne and had attempted to slaughter both brothers that stood in his way. The eldest had succumbed to his wounds. The second had fought him off and killed him.
Alarik had been gripped by fear, even as a tiny child, upon staring at his baby brother in the crib on his naming day. The babe had survived the first year, which meant he earned a name and title, and became not a baby, but a threat. Surely, this child would come to loathe Alarik the way his uncle had loathed his father?
It had never come to pass.
Alarik had been groomed for the throne, and Janez had encouraged him. He had no interest in his duties as a prince, much less any duties whatsoever as a king. Oh, he was dutiful—he’d joined the navy in the royal tradition for younger sons. He’d been an image of perfection at every diplomatic function and developed an easy affinity and charm for the fairer sex that he unleashed with great success at balls. Alarik knew perfectly well his brother was a target for many kings with daughters that sought royal blood, healthy money, and trade opportunities.
But it had always been surface.
It was done from duty, not pleasure. Janez was pleasant and polite during such things, but it was not until the doors were closed and the perfumes and powders washed away that he came alive again. The man who crawled laughing upon the floor with Ingrid, or bellowed at the guns of a man-of-war, was the true face of the second son of Janez III.
To offer to be the tool, the gift, to another kingdom in order to secure an alliance…
It was duty.
Part of Alarik was proud, and determined to use the opportunity. Janez was a valuable asset, and Sigurd would certainly agree to such a match. It could end the war if Sigurd joined their effort.
And part of him—the part that was not a king, but a brother—wanted to find another way. Janez was…a spark. He was bright and effusive, but prone also to great dark swells, as if a tide had washed over him. He was the image of their grandfather in that respect: emotional under a layer of stoic cheer as thin as spring ice. If the match were not well made, if there were no love in it, then…he would be miserable. Truly miserable. There were men—and Alarik counted himself amongst them—who could be married to a pretty woman and never mind love. Alarik had been lucky enough to love a sensible match, completely and utterly.
Janez would suffer, with a merely sensible match. He needed life for life. He would need someone who could at least burn bright with him, someone to enrapture him and keep him stretched both in body and in mind. He needed some reason to dedicate himself to her, as husband and father of her sons, over and above duty.
Neither Alarik nor Janez had ever met Sigurd’s daughters. They were rarely invited to functions, shunned for their low-born mother by most royal families. He knew nothing of the wisdom of seeking one of them for Janez’s wife.
And Alarik did not like not knowing things.
He stared out over the dark sea, turning the matter over in his mind, knowing full well Janez would be somewhere making another bastard child in quiet attempts to be at peace with his decision. Alarik did not know where or with whom, but he knew it would be happening.
He could only hope Sigurd had at least one daughter prone to laughter, fond of dancing, and with a wit about her.
If not, he was about to make his brother quite miserable for the sake of the kingdom. While Alarik would make no other decision—could not, would not, sacrifice ten thousand lives and more for the sake of one man’s happiness—bitter regret sat heavy in his stomach like turned milk, and he scowled at the sea.
Would that the gods of ancient times had been real, and could spit him up a storm to drown his enemies in their hammocks.
Then, perhaps, he would sleep soundly.
Chapter Eleven
THE POTION BURNED, lancing hot agony from her lips right down into her stomach. It turned; she choked and then swallowed back the vomit. Dropped to the sand, the bottle dissolved into a pool of black ink. And as the last traces of darkness disappeared into the sea, claws seized her tail, her belly, her chest and neck, and dragged.
It was like orca teeth, ripping off her skin. She writhed and opened her mouth to scream, but her throat was blocked. Her gills hissed and shrivelled. She scrabbled at them, trying to wedge her fingers into the slits and hold them open, only for them to close. Her ribs heaved. Water. Water!
And then her chest opened. Space ballooned inside, and the rush of salt water down her throat was not cool comfort, but fiery fury. She coughed. Choked. It burst out of her in a rush of sickness and scoured her nose, her eyes, her lips—
Air. Air, she needed air, please, air—
Her hands scrabbled in yellow powder, and she dragged herself from sea to shore. Her entire body screamed with the effort. A crushing pain had seized her spine, and she opened her mouth to scream again. Air rushed in. Cold, delicious air. It filled her chest, and she gulped it desperately. Heaving. She shuddered with the effort. They turned to great sobs as her scales were scoured away. The skin rolled back, and blood gleamed smoky and red in the waves that washed up under her belly and crippled chest. There was water on her face again, but from leaking eyes. Salt burned at exposed muscle. She tried to crawl, but her tail spasmed, unable to move, and then—
Oh, and then.
The split. It split in two, from fins upwards, until she thought her very hips would be torn in two. Great hands of pain forced the splits apart. Her bones broke with terrible snaps inside—the blood, the blood—and then the agony of a thousand spiny barbs buried themselves in her flesh and danced, danced like crabs, until she begged the Witch to kill her, until she called for death itself, until she wished the skymen had been stories and Father had beaten her for her stupidity. She would die here; she would die here.
Her fins grew thick. They prickled. The crackle of bone forming from dead scales was obscene. She sobbed brokenly as her frill was plucked loose by the sea. It washed by her arm, and she threw up a stream of thin bile as part of her body, part of herself, drifted away into the water without her. When she reached for it, the webbing between her fingers frayed and cracked, breaking off in brittle flakes, and when she cried and tried to stop it, it only dissolved faster.
And then a red-hot spear, like lava from a crack in the seabed itself, lanced into her hips and belly. She yowled, impaled upon it, and felt it dragging almost backwards, as though something was being torn out of her. The heat and pain balled under her body, and she curled around it almost protectively, bringing—
Bringing—
She gasped, drunk with terror and pain, and fumbled. Her hands met—skin.
Skin.
Not scales. The bend was—was no tail. She had—bone. Skin. There was—hair, soft and fine and fair. On her l—
The pain ebbed. Slowly. Leaking away with every wash of an uncaring tide. And she lay in the light, shaking so hard she might break. Her chest felt bruised and tight. Her throat burned. Her hips shattered. And everything below—
Everything below. Oh. A great gap between her—
She gulped and stared valiantly at the great expanse of blue above her. Slowly, she brought a shaking hand to her neck. Nothing. No gills. She—she had no gills. She was breathing air.
She was cold.
Of course. She’d been bare. Royalty did not wear clothes. And now she was cold. Shivering on the sand. With painful, stiff movements, she dared to put her broken hands to the sand and pushed herself up.
With her eyes closed.
She had been mutilated, surely. The shift of her chest was all wrong. Had the sand scoured her very breasts away? Did skymaids look nothing like mermaids? Was she terribly bloodied? Oh, perhaps that had been the Witch’s plan all along. Turn her into a hideous skymaid, so the beautiful man would never kiss her, and Calla would be driven back to the sea with a broken heart and in debt to an all-powerful water spirit. How stupid had she been? How utterly foolish—and now she was like this, broken and horribly mutilated on the shore.
She took a breath.
Another.
And opened her eyes.
Two white limbs floated in the water in front of her. The sea was pink. And when she bent her tail—or thought she did—they rose.
Oh.
Oh.
Like—like elbows, they bent in the middle. Strange, clubbed hands below them.
Legs.
She had legs.
A delirious laugh burst from her chest, and she hugged the strange elbows to herself. Legs! She was human! She was—
Flat-chested.
And—
Endowed.
With a reeling gasp, Calla dragged herself from the water, and—although it looked quite different—knew very well what had formed beneath her now. She had seen indiscreet couples intertwined before. She knew what this was.
She was—he.
This was—
She clutched at her empty chest. Flat. Hard. Her shoulders were wider. Her hips had been crushed together. And this—this—
He.
Shouts rose up from somewhere far away, as Calla drew her—his—her—his?—feet in. Attempted to stand.
He would walk on water. He would. He w—
Was seized in iron and rough, burning hands, and dragged to stand on clumsy leg-hands. Buckled. Fell. Dragged up again, with a cry of pain, by the hair. Cried out her—his?—name, and asked for help, asked for that man s—h—she?—had saved.
And a torrent of angry sounds, jagged noise and nonsense, was returned.
And the terrible truth dawned.
The Witch had turned a mermaid into a human—but the tongue remained the same.
Chapter Twelve
“CAPTAIN KÜHE TO see you, Your Majesty.”
Alarik gave the guard a sour look.
“I believe I said that I was not to be disturbed.”
“I—yes, Your Majesty, but he—ah—says—”
“A captain’s word is greater than a king’s now, is it?”
The guard coloured. The king was in a waspish mood, and Janez, tiring of the sport, swung his booted feet to the floor and rose from his chair.
“I will speak with the captain, if it please Your Majesty?”
Alarik grunted, already consumed once more in his letters—one of which, no doubt, was bound for King Sigurd—and Janez took his leave.
Captain Kühe waited just beyond the door: a vast man, both tall and fat, and made larger by his insistence on wearing his full uniform, breastplate and all, irrespective of need. In a predominantly naval city, this army captain was obvious and unpleasantly so. Janez rather disliked him—paranoid, sycophantic, and with delusions of adequacy, never mind grandeur. But for what the captain lacked in any other arena of his existence, he made up for in perspective. If he was moved to disturb the king, then there was good reason for it.
“Your Highness,” he said, clicking his heels. “A spy has been captured.”
Janez raised his eyebrows. Or perhaps not. “A spy? Well then, interrogate him. You know your duties.”
“That’s the problem, Your Highness. The guard won’t have it, Your Highness. Says he don’t speak the right foreign, Your Highness.”
“Then find an interpreter.”
“Not the guard, Your Highness. The spy.”
“The spy doesn’t speak the right language?”
“No, Your Highness. The guard says he’s never heard anything like it, Your Highness. And he speaks just about six foreigns, Your Highness.”
“Foreign languages, Captain,” Janez corrected. “And you don’t have to address me by title with every breath.”
“Yes, Your Highness. Like I said, Your Highness, six foreigns.”
Janez sighed and shrugged. “All right. Let’s see this spy of yours. Where was he found?”
“On the beach, Your Highness.”
“On the beach?” Janez echoed. What kind of a spy came in from the beach? It was far too close to the castle. No wonder he’d been caught.
“Yes, Your Highness. Stark naked and like he’d swum in off a boat, Your Highness. Babbled complete nonsense at us, Your Highness, and this shock of great long hair like a woman, right down to his a—ah, well. Ahem. Looks mighty foreign to me, Your Highness.”
As they passed from the great hall and out of the palace, Janez frowned and said, “Indeed, Captain, but there are many different kingdoms, and I’m sure some of them have long-haired men.”
The harbour cells had, of course, no access to the palace. Far too dangerous. But in this case…what kind of spy turned up naked on a beach within a half mile of the harbour walls? It seemed far more likely someone washed up from a sea battle. But the last one had been his own, two days past now. Was it possible to survive two days, swimming naked in this sea? The cold could kill in a matter of hours—minutes, even, with winter so close.
And winter was close. A fine mist hung over the city, and beads of water formed bright on Janez’s hair and coat. If not for Captain Kühe’s grating voice, and the puzzling task at hand, it would have been pleasant to enjoy the bracing air and that chill right before the bite of true cold set in. It was certainly preferable to stuffy rooms, stuffier letters, and Doktor Hauser hounding him about rest.
The cells were little more than the cellar rooms below the old harbourmaster’s house, which now served essentially as offices. They stank of damp and decay, and the alarmed look of the guard on duty said it all: what madness had possessed the captain to bring a member of the royal family into this dank, reeking hole?
“I ain’t touched ‘im yet, sah.” The guard fumbled and was clouted by the captain with a roar to use the appropriate title.
Janez drew back from the flash of temper and muttered an assurance, letting his cold disapproval stop the captain’s tirade more effectively than an argument would have done.
“Sorry, Your Hahness,” the guard mumbled. “Sorry, sorry. It’s jus’, with them no clothes and being in the water, s—Your Hahness, I thought ’e might be one of them foreign sailors off our ships, like, not like them foreign sailors off them foreign ships, like.”
The heavy cell door groaned open, and a slim form, huddled in the corner, stared up at Janez and the captain with wide, pale eyes.
Those eyes.
“You fool,” Janez breathed, staring right back. Those long fingers—not webbed, of course not webbed, they had never been webbed—and that hair so fair it was almost the bright white of sea foam crashing on the shore.
This was no spy, no spider. “Get those chains off him. Now! This is no spy, you absolute fools!”
The guard jumped violently; the captain began to babble.
“But he speaks foreign, Your Highness. Speaks—”
“And how would you know any language not your own from another?” Janez demanded hotly and wrenched the great ring of keys from the guard’s limp fingers. “This is the man who dragged me from drowning, and likely a great many others as well. Lord knows how long he’s been out there. He requires a doctor, not a dungeon!”
“Are you hurt?” Janez asked but was only met with a blank, uncomprehending stare. Perhaps he really did speak nothing of their tongue—although Janez suspected were he to tell the sailor to reef a topsail, he would be instantly and competently obeyed. “Come,” he said instead, tucking a hand under one slender elbow and tugged. “Up.”
The man still didn’t move, and Janez removed his overcoat and crouched again to tuck it around the man’s naked form. That sparked a flicker of response—if only that a hand clutched the warm fabric and tugged it a little closer.
“Where are his clothes?”
“I said, Your Highness, he didn’t have any—”
“And you didn’t think to provide them?”
The captain fell silent.
“Are you in the habit of capturing naked spies on beaches, Captain?”
“I—no, Your Highness—”
“If you find more, in future may I suggest a doctor?”
“I—I’ll find a physician, Your High—”
“No,” Janez said. He cupped both elbows and lifted. The man rose with him this time, on shaking legs. But they gave way, seemingly unable to bear his frame, and he collapsed against Janez’s chest, fingers grasping at the shirt. “Captain, go and find Doktor Hauser, and ask him to attend in his sickroom if he is not already there. I will bring your so-called spy.”
Lifting the man was not easy. He seemed alarmed by the action, and although thin and light, he was still tall enough to stand perhaps a head shorter and no less than Janez. But he settled after the first few steps and then ignored the bustle of the gawping harbour—princes carrying naked sailors from the cells were not, after all, commonplace sights—in favour of staring quite fixedly at Janez’s face. Did the sailor remember him as well, or had he been only one of a number that he’d saved?
A dungeon, indeed. The man was a hero.
The guards eyed him in barely muted surprise. A servant nearly dropped her linen basket at the sight. Janez rolled his eyes, certain he would receive a scolding from the queen about decorum. He’d done worse. Captain Kühe, looking understandably green about the gills, was emerging from the sickroom as Janez approached. He held the door, and Janez entered the realm not of kings and admirals, but of Hauser.
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