There was an advantage, though—Kapitän rode an even larger beast that kept an easy pace with Janez’s new white creature. Now, Held could enjoy the view of Janez’s hair streaming out behind him, and the bright flush of cold high in his cheeks. He looked oddly delicate, gentle and refined, and Held was struck with a fierce urge to bite and break him.
He did doze on that second stretch, missing the mountains as they fell away, until he blinked a second time and found the air had gone dark once more. Dwelling lights peered out of the gloom, yet they didn’t stop. Some of the other riders had fallen behind, exhausted, but Kapitän and Janez pressed on. Held’s body ached. His eyes were blurry. His hands were frozen, and his backside numb. Yet they rode on and on and on, and never stopped.
IT WAS THE sound of the sea that woke him. There was salt in the air, and the animal’s gait changed, and Held was awake all at once, clinging to Kapitän in a flash of terror.
A warm laugh and a single word—“Vorsichtig”—was his reply, and then the darkness parted to warm lights down on the harbour front, and the cry and call of skymen in the clouds.
They had come back.
And the harbour was heaving.
Men ran about every which way. The clouds had been lashed to the stone walkways, and skymen swarmed them with crates and the great, grey beasts that had tried to drown Janez. Despite the night, lamps glowed all about the place like anglerfish.
And Janez leapt right amongst the fray.
He simply jumped down from the beast and waded into the crowd, barking orders. Kapitän lingered only long enough to help Held down before he, too, walked into the chaos, his loud voice booming above the hubbub.
Held stood lost amongst the noise, and stared.
They were preparing to steer the clouds again, he decided. One had drifted free, hanging low in the water, and a hundred men or more were climbing its great white tops. Why? Where were they going? And why had Janez ridden with such urgency to join them?
Janez.
Held looked wildly about and then followed the flash of red-gold along the stone arm that jutted out into the sea. He hung back, uncertain, as Janez engaged a man in a blue coat in a vicious argument, which was quickly broken by the arrival of a great fat man in a large hat. Was Held supposed to follow Janez aboard the cloud? Or was Janez staying ashore? He was to be married—why would he be allowed to take a cloud to sea if he was to be married?
Colour caught Held’s eye.
He twisted about to stare, and a line of bright blue—like the river, and like that strange plea in the mountains—slithered away around the corner at the very end of the walkway.
There was a low wall, beyond which lay jagged rocks and rotting seaweed, dusted white by the icy foam drifting down from the steel-grey air. Held leaned over the stone, and watched the blue line dive away into the deep. The water swelled. Something stirred.
There was something down there.
Held glanced over his shoulder. The men were busy. None looked his way. They wouldn’t miss him for the moment.
He clambered over the wall and scrambled down the rocks to the water’s edge. They were slippery with seawater and ice, but they weren’t what made him stumble.
It was the moment the water swelled a second time, and bodies broke the surface.
Twenty-two hands in length, with great pale eyes and fashionably bare chests. Hair the bright, brilliant colour of coral.
Mermaids.
Chapter Thirty-Six
THE RAVEN HAD come in the night. Their spies had spoken. The enemy fleet had sailed and was intent on one final battle, one last attempt at taking the kingdom before winter froze the war.
It had been a miracle that the pass hadn’t already been closed—as it was, they’d left at once and still struggled through heavy snowfall. He ought to have left Held sleeping, safe in the Winter Palace with Mother, but—
But a part of Janez had selfishly wanted Held with him, should—should this be the end.
This was war. And Held had saved him once before from a death at sea. Perhaps he would do so again. Perhaps death would be an adequate solution.
Janez brutally cut the thought as they finally entered the city boundaries. It wasn’t the time. As the harbour’s mayhem closed about him, the weight of his station rolled down his back and dissipated, and his rank sat close about his shoulders like a cloak.
He was a lieutenant.
And his ship prepared for war.
He swung down from the horse and waded in, heading straight for the Vogel. She’d been stripped for repairs after their last engagement but now floated near-ready, her hull low in the water from the weight of her guns. The crew were hauling her powder barrels aboard, and Janez made for her ropes to get aboard and join them.
“Your Highness!”
The rusty scratch of Lieutenant Bauer’s voice was an unpleasant noise, like the scrape of a knife upon a plate. Janez winced and stepped back.
“Your Highness, you ought to be at the palace.”
An entire day and most of the night riding, and now this insolent little—
Janez paused. Breathed out and said, “I am the lieutenant of a ship about to launch, Bauer. I ought to be here.”
“The king gave orders—”
“Unless the captain himself releases me from my duty to this ship,” Janez said stiffly, “any hearsay about the king does not move me.”
Bauer’s eyes bulged. “Hearsay!”
“Yes, Bauer, hearsay. Unless you have a royal seal?”
“How dare you, sir!” came the raspy indignation, his eyes bulging like a squashed frog’s. Janez fixed him with an utterly cold look.
“You forget yourself, Bauer.”
The bulging bulged further still—and then the deep rumble of the captain’s voice came between them, followed by his form.
“You both forget yourselves.”
The reprimand was swift, simple, and striking. Bauer coloured. Janez cooled. How easy rank made it to forget a slight, instead of station. How simple, to yield to the captain’s authority—yet how that, too, won Janez the argument, when the captain ordered Bauer aboard and Janez to the harbourmaster to muster any hands that could be spared.
“Five sick from the whorehouses, and two more rotting in the gaols for rape. Perhaps a touch of royal blood can open the master’s fist when it comes to his landsmen.”
Janez privately doubted it, as he was ill remembered there for releasing their foreign prisoner. But an order meant that the captain either hadn’t heard of any such command from the king, or had chosen to ignore it.
So Janez inclined his head and hurried away.
Pressing was Janez’s most loathed duty in the navy. A wooden crate of angry, stupid fellows with no wish to be there cried out for trouble, and in any case, Janez could privately admit he was something of a romantic when it came to the liberty of men. He would have liked at his side only those who wished to sail with him.
But then the pragmatist—the administrator, the diplomat, the heir apparent for that brief period between the death of his father and the birth of his nephew—made himself known once more. This was war. The allure of adventure and prize money was snuffed out in such times. Zeal for king and country fuelled many, to be sure, but in such bitter conflicts, with the protective cloak of winter almost about them, there was only so much that zeal could do. And Janez was not so well known by sight as to fuel a little more.
Still, he collared a handful of men from the builders’ yard, and a fishing boat returning at quite the inopportune moment delivered them up to the ship without much fuss. They swore and grumbled, of course, but seemed to know that if he didn’t press them, another ship would.
And so Janez came aboard to report to the first lieutenant these new hands, and felt the roll of a deck under his feet for the first time since that fateful day a blessed stranger had dragged him from the water. Oh, but it felt like home.
It was comforting, that gentle sway, even muted as it was by t
he moorings. Janez had been ranked since he was thirteen years old, a princeling of a midshipman, and much as he feared what each straying from a safe harbour might mean, there was a part of him that would always find home upon the sea.
How fitting, then, that his love had arisen from it.
The first lieutenant looked harried and pursed his lips in disapproval at Janez’s report. “It’s not enough,” he said. “We need two dozen more, at least. The enemy could be with us at any time, but we barely have the men to—”
And then, of course, it happened.
Dawn was barely breaking to the east, and under the first slivers of grey morning light, the first cry from a lookout on a sister ship arose.
“Sails!”
The harbour froze as one, barely breathing.
“Sails!” came the cry again. “Sails on the horizon!”
An explosion of noise. Of movement. Of activity, driven now by the desperation of hours, not days. They were almost here. The crews flocked to their ships with their last things. The ropes slithered and snaked away from their mooring posts. The anchor chains squealed, and sails were unfurled and began to swell.
And Janez’s heart clutched tight in his chest.
Held.
Where the devil was Held?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“BALTA,” HELD WHISPERED. “Meri.”
They stared back at him with great, sad eyes, their skin a mottled green in the icy shallows, and Held thought, out of nowhere, that they seemed so very strange. Had he been so, in that form?
Balta opened her mouth, but a harsh gurgle emerged, and she ducked her head beneath the sea again, ghostly pale and out of focus.
And then—clearly shouting, yet barely audible to Held—she said, “Calla?”
The name sounded as though it belonged to another, as though they spoke of someone from long ago, entirely apart from Held.
It sounded—
Oh, but it sounded as foreign as Janez’s tongue. And so much less pleasant to behold.
“It’s Held now,” he said in their own speech, the hard edges of the name jarring and difficult in such a flowing language.
“Halda,” Balta attempted. Then: “Held.”
Garbled and odd, it was his name all the same, and Held couldn’t help smiling and reaching for her. His sisters had come. His family.
But—no. Not. Because he was no longer Father’s child, and they were.
“Why are you here?”
“The Witch. She—we went to her. To save you.”
“Save me?” Held flared up at once. “There is nothing to save me from but Father! He would have seen me drown! He would have—”
“They killed Mother. You cannot blame him for his shock. He—”
“Janez didn’t. And neither did I. But Father would have killed me.”
Meri spoke up, sharp as ever. “They are barbaric. Cruel. They kill, and—”
“And so do we,” Held retorted. “I’m not a little mermaid anymore, Meri! We drive the dying from our nests, and we have wars, too, and—and Father killed the Witch’s husband. And skymen are the same! They have—they are flawed, but they are beautiful, too, as we are, and I am one of them now. I’m one of them!”
“You asked for help.”
Balta’s imploring words struck home. Held paused, the anger cooling.
And that terrible pain returning. They’d come back to Janez’s home, not run away. So, Janez was still to be married. And Held—
“If he falls in love with someone else, I’ll turn to sea foam, and die,” Held whispered. “And he’s getting married.”
Meri’s eyes dropped. Balta’s widened.
“He’ll love her if he marries her.”
Of course he would. Janez was so passionate and bright, so devoted and intent, that if he married, he would lavish attention and devotion upon his new bride until he fell in love with her. He’d be enraptured in no time. And Held would—
“We went to the Witch,” Balta said and held up a package wrapped in seaweed. Bright blue water trickled from it, the same iridescent, magical colour at the ripple that had rolled away from Held’s fingertips. “We’ve been waiting days. She said if you called for help, it would guide you here.”
“What is it?” Held asked. “How can it stop—”
He opened it and paused. Inside lay a knife. Deadly sharp, perhaps a hand-length at the blade, and the hilt that same violent, violet-blue.
“We traded our motherhood for it,” Balta whispered. “If you use it as she said, you’ll be turned back and can come home.”
The two halves of her words caught in Held’s mind. They had traded their motherhood? Their fertility? So they would never have merlings, never continue Father’s line, and the nest would dissolve and be destroyed by the inevitable infighting for power that would follow Father’s death?
That, Held realised with a shock, was the Witch’s revenge. All of Father’s children—one of the sky, two struck barren—would never produce merlings. Heirs. His line was ended. That was what the Witch had meant by his sisters’ sacrifice. She had known they would bargain for him, and this was the only thing they had that the Witch wanted. She had known all along.
But then, why offer Held a way back?
Unless—
Unless the Witch knew he would not take it.
And thus the second half sunk in. Go back, and not die? He ought to have seized the chance. Ought to have severed his life’s dependence upon a skyman’s—any skyman’s—love. Ought to have agreed eagerly, and ask what he needed to do.
But—go back? To that form, to that terrible entrapment? To lose this body, its angles and lines, and regain the curves and sweeps that had tormented him? For his voice to rise into the heavens again and be too terrible to use, and for the great frills about his waist to touch his arms and remind him of being her again, all of the time, until the end of his days?
To compound the agony that would be losing Janez with the torment of becoming Calla once more?
“How—how would this save me? How could this possibly save me?”
He didn’t mean to hear an answer, yet one came regardless.
“If you strike this skyman in the heart,” Balta said, “and allow his blood to touch your feet, then you will be turned back, and you can come home.”
Strike—
Kill him? Kill Janez?
Held recoiled, dropping the knife onto the rocks. “No!” The word rang out, and he stared in horror at them. “No!” He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Who would kill their lover, for losing them? How would this prevent it? It was no saviour. It was no solution.
“If you don’t, you will die!” Meri proclaimed, and Held turned on her in an instant.
“I would have drowned below if not for Balta!” he raged. “Father would have had me drown! So would you! Why would I—”
And the wrenching pain at his father’s look of disgust was consumed in a fire of anger. Pure, unadulterated anger.
Why would he go back to those who had rejected him? Why would he welcome reconciliation with those who had stood by as he suffocated? Why return now that he knew the truth of their love and its conditions and its falsehoods?
When here, above the sky, he had Janez?
Even if he were destined to lose him again—along with his life—had Held not found a truer love here? They could barely speak to one another, yet Janez laughed with him, loved with him, had been so unfailingly kind and patient, and had adored him, even if this princess was to end Held’s world.
The anger sealed the wound into a savage scar, and Held rose, stepping back from Balta’s grasping hands.
“I would rather die in the sky, with one who has truly loved me, than drown in the deep under the weight of those who do not.”
A great cry rose—both from Balta and from beyond the harbour wall—and Held made his choice.
He turned his back upon the sea and walked back into the sky.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“HELD!”
Ah!
A flash of white-blond hair caught Janez’s eye. Held was scrambling over the harbour wall and running full pelt towards the ship. Janez leaned down from the railing as Held clambered up the webbing, seized the collar of his coat when it came into reach, and hauled him up and onto the deck.
“Stay close,” he said. As the ship lurched free of her moorings, a little of the melancholy eased. The enemy lay on the horizon. His captain had the command. And his kingdom was falling away behind him. But if he died here, at least Held was with him.
The Vogel was a bloated ship, lethal at close range but a slow sailor. She lurched free of the dock with clumsy determination, startling a yelp from Held which made Janez laugh. He then found the man a short sword and pressed the hilt into his hand.
“Stay here,” he ordered, dragging him to a hollow by the foot of the quarterdeck stairs. “Here.” He repeated it until Held echoed him, and then turned and left for the gunners.
In truth, Vogel’s slowness would help protect her. Her sister ships flocked together ahead, to meet the sails creeping over the horizon. Vogel would be a little later to the action, despite the skilled rush of her crew and the great roll of the guns being brought to their stations, far earlier than their need. She was a heavy gunner and would fare well if the enemy were already too occupied to rake her upon her approach.
And approach they did. Creeping ever closer over a vast sea.
As they passed out of the harbour’s shelter and into open water, the enemy grew larger upon the horizon, blurred by the oddly gentle snowfall obscuring the air. Janez squared his shoulders and scraped together his courage.
They would meet.
Then, one would yield. And die.
THE FIRST SHOT came some two hours after they had sailed. The king’s ships had come together again, forming a great line between their home and their aggressors. The enemy had echoed the action, their iceberg banners now visible and clear to the naked eye—yet still too far. Naval warfare was a close thing, acted out in bloody clashes and bursts of action separated by thousand-yard threats and endless waiting.
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