It had all been a lie. A lie I couldn’t bear to accept. A lie I’d hold on to like it was the truth, because I couldn’t stand to have my world suddenly sinking into the unknown. All my life, I’d known what I was, who I was, and now, I couldn’t even claim that.
Sighing, I got up and swam past the bathing room door. I needed to go into the closet and find something to wear. Granted, every scrap of clothing in this room was Odele’s, and I wondered if she’d be infuriated at me for wearing what belonged to her. But I stopped in my tracks right before I passed the bathing room door, I heard muffled sounds coming from inside.
Loathing doing it, but not being able to resist, I pressed my ear up against the door and listened.
Listened to the sounds of Odele sobbing.
First kills are hard, she’d said with certainty.
I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d said it more for my benefit, or for hers?
~~
I DIDN’T COMMENT on Odele’s puffy, swollen eyes when she exited the bathing room, and she feigned confidence as she sauntered over to pull out an outfit. I quietly went in to bathe myself, nervous that if I turned my back for even a moment, Odele would disappear.
So I hurried through the process, dunking my head into sand, and scrubbing it and my skin raw. I quickly donned a robe, and swam out into the room, nearly out of breath.
But Odele was there, lounging across the plush cushions of her ivory scallop bed. One hand was propping her head up, and she admired me with amusement.
“Still here, O.”
I tried to compose myself, assuming a cool demeanor as I went to grab the nightdress I’d laid out. My hands paused, hovering over the material.
“I hope you don’t mind me wearing your stuff…”
She just shrugged. “You’ve been using them for months now. Doesn’t matter.”
Not what I was expecting. What had I been expecting? Not this… friendliness… if that’s what this could be called.
I changed, pulling on the nightdress and hovered just at the edge of the bed. I felt suddenly out of place, and chastised myself. This room had never been mine to begin with, and I’d gotten too comfortable. Now, Odele was back, and there was no place for me here.
Not that there ever had been.
But I hadn’t really planned this far ahead. I didn’t know what to do, where to go from here. Would I be kicked out of the palace? Or would the Queen have my head for my disobedience? The future was a dark, blurry thing, and I didn’t know what mysteries waited for me inside it.
I started to turn from the bed I’d grown used to for these past few months. I could always fashion a hammock out of a sheet. It’s not like I wasn’t used to sleeping in discomforts. That had been my life. The only life I knew and accepted it.
“There’s plenty of room on the bed for the both of us,” Odele quietly offered, as if she sensed where my thoughts were taking me.
I stopped, turned to look at her. “I don’t want to impose.”
She scoffed, waving my words away with her delicate fingers. “Nonsense, we’re family.” She patted the empty space next to her in invitation.
My teeth grinded together in annoyance, but I loosed a breath before slowly trudging over and sliding into the spot next to her. I kept distance between us, afraid to get too close. She had no such qualms about me, and obviously no concept of personal space, because she scooted closer until our arms touched. The contact jolted me, but I fought to keep very still.
“You need to relax,” she commented. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I know.”
She didn’t seem the murderous type. Not like her step-mother, anyway. The mer in the alleyway didn’t really count. After that initial shock, after hearing her sob endlessly in the bathing room, I’d understood. It had been about revenge, and it had been about justice. The moment her sword had pierced the mercenary’s heart, the lines between the two terms had blurred. It had been about saving her mother’s honor. It had been about saving me, even if I couldn’t accept the possible connection lying between the two of us.
She had saved me regardless.
“Where have you been all this time?” I asked.
Odele’s fingers started plucking at the cushions beneath us, the only sign she was even remotely nervous, even when her voice was calm and confident. “It’s a long story…”
“We have all night.”
She sighed. “I guess the whole thing started months ago. I—” She gave pause, and I didn’t turn to look at her but I imagined she was chewing her lip, debating how much truth to tell, and how many lies. “I really enjoy reading, and I enjoy listening to conches. Don’t tell anyone I told you that.” Her nails dug into my arm in threat.
“Alright.”
She loosened her hold and continued, “I spend a lot of time in the royal library. I’ve read through almost every parchment and listened to nearly every conch there. The selections here aren’t quite as extensive as they are in other kingdoms…” Her tone grew wistful and I almost groaned.
She was getting off track, and the grand library that wasn’t extensive to her had been quite impressive to me. That comment only served to remind me how different we truly were.
“So I started poking around in the Royal Records room. Out of boredom, you see. No one usually goes in there except the Queen and my father, or their closest advisors. The conches were really quite boring. Just a bunch of stuff on our long dead ancestors…” She paused, and her fingers slid down my arm. I wondered if it was a nervous gesture, or if she was seeking comfort in me. “I came across the conch on my sister—I hadn’t even known I’d had a sister—and the conches on aunty Odessa and my mom.” She sucked in a breath, shuddering and painful. I couldn’t help but to take her hand then, to loan her my strength. The way I wished, so many times before, that someone would’ve loaned me their strength, so I didn’t have to battle harsh truths alone.
“You can imagine what a shock it was to me… to hear that my aunt had been poisoned after giving birth. And who would have known? The Queen didn’t like me meddling in that room, said I’d break important records with my foolery…” She scoffed. “Anyway, everything after that kind of just… fell into my lap. I started digging. I discovered that this room…” She gestured with her free hand. “...Had belonged to aunty Odessa. I found sketches of blueprints of the palace, old and new, and realized some sections had been cut off. I found the secret cove only days later.”
So the cove had not only been Odele’s, but Odessa’s as well.
“It’s a good place to hide things you don’t want others to see…”
I imagined her hundreds of conches littering the floors.
“The more I dug, the more I found out and started to put things together myself. I found a discarded marriage contract, then a conch with your parents getting married and it opened my eyes to everything. I had a cousin out there, somewhere. Not just distant cousins, like Jessinda, but an actual cousin. My mother’s twin’s daughter.” Her hand squeezed mine, as if that simple motion could implant the words into me, and make me believe them.
“I knew I had to find him… or her. To discover all I could. That’s when the attempts on my life started. Someone knew what I was looking for, and was trying to keep me quiet. At first, my goal had been only to find my cousin—to find you—but with the life attempts, I looked deeper.
“I knew there’d always been something suspicious about my mother’s death. She’d been healthy, so how was it she died of a supposed attack or sickness? Odessa had been killed with poison, so I took a trip to the morgue. The merman there was obviously following someone’s orders. The more I dug, the more vicious the attempts got.
“It was all kept quiet, of course, and I had to pretend like nothing was happening. Like I hadn’t accidentally been thrown off my hippocampus. Like I hadn’t noticed the shadows following me with the glint of steel shining beneath the glow of lava globes. Like someone wasn’t trying to murder me for what I k
new.” A shuddering breath racked through her body. “No one would have believed me. So I kept it to myself.”
My heart constricted at her words so sure they weren’t true. “Captain Saber—”
Odele scoffed. “Tiberius would have smothered me, had he known, and that would have been worse.”
Tiberius. Even I rarely called him that, despite what we had shared, what intimacies lay between us. And here Odele was, using his first name as if it meant nothing. Like it was so easy. The jealousy that seared inside me came unbidden, and I tried to expel it before she could glimpse it.
“So I came up with a plan. I started sneaking out of the palace, dressed as a commoner. I learned what I could on the streets of Eramaea, and from what few members of the staff I could trust. I learned about the Black Blade. So I gathered what information I’d collected, names of nurses and doctors who had worked for our grandparents, the names of those who had died the same day as aunty Odessa, and I took them to the Black Blade.”
Just the mention of Elias warmed my heart. He’d been telling me the truth. Not that I’d ever doubted him.
“I knew some of them had already died, but I wanted to make sure, to see if anyone of them was still alive. Anyone who could tell me what had happened to you. Where you were. By then, I’d already decided to flee. I couldn’t risk the attacks getting more aggressive. Not before I found you. So I escaped through the cove, and went to search for the names on the list.
“Most of them were old, and had died. There was only one, one name on that entire list that had survived. And the old merwoman was in a nursing home here in Thalassar. The doctors let me see her—they didn’t recognize me, of course—but told me to be gentle, because she was out of her mind.”
I vaguely remembered Elias saying that everyone on the list Odele had given him was dead, save for one. This old mer. Had he spoken to her, or deemed it hopeless?
“But she was as sane as you or me. She saw me, and recognized me right away. I asked her if she had been there that day my aunt had given birth. She said yes, she’d been head nurse at the time.
“‘She’d been locked in the hospital for months, away from the public eye,’ she told me. ‘It was improper for someone of her station to have a baby out of wedlock, but I knew she had to be married.’”
“Why did she think that?” I asked, speaking for the first time.
“I asked the same thing. She said she wore a ring on her finger like two-leggers do when they get married. And that the first few days of her lock up, a merman kept trying to get in to see her, but was never allowed.”
King Dorian. Had he gone to find her? Begged to see his pregnant wife before he’d been brutally chased from the hospital, the kingdom?
“The nurse said that the day you were born, a merman barged into the hospital, claiming he had royal business to see to. She wasn’t there at the time; she’d gone to get medicine or something. When she came back, the nurses were dead, and she thought aunty Odessa was too. She said she went to check her pulse and it was weak. She thought she could save her, but that all Odessa could manage to say was, ‘Odalaea’ over and over again before she died.”
I hadn’t realized the tears were pouring from my eyes until it was too late. Until a sob lodged tightly in my chest and rose, coming out of me in a strangled sound. I muffled it, yanking my hand away from Odele’s to bite down on my skin. Maybe the pain of a physical injury would make me forget this story, and all it implied. Make me forget the sadness of my origins.
“Why are you telling me this?” My voice came out as a whisper as I tried holding back the sobs that trembled my body.
“You wanted the truth. This is it. The nurse said she swam to look for you, but it had been too late. And after everything was cleaned up, those who knew of Odessa’s stay at the hospital had started disappearing. She knew she would have been killed eventually, so she hid in that nursing home, all those years, keeping this secret with her.”
What must have it been like for this old mer? To hold one of the greatest secrets in Thalassar, hiding because of what she knew, unable to tell anyone what had happened that day, that somewhere out there, a criminal had stolen a baby. A princess. Me.
“You want to know what else she said?” Odele asked, breaking a silence that had seemed to stretch out for leagues. I didn’t answer before she continued, “She said she knew, in her heart, that someone was caring for the baby. That she had always hoped the baby would be found and that she would retake the throne that was rightfully hers, putting an end to the corruption of the crown.” Odele reached over and squeezed my wrist. “She’s right, you know. You’re a royal, and you’re ready.”
She let the weight of all she’d said settle on to me. I wanted to reply, to say something, ask more questions, but I couldn’t bring myself to say a thing. Having royal blood didn’t make me one. Odele was wrong, so, so wrong.
It was hours before I finally replied, my voice the mere caress of a whisper, “I’m not ready. I’ll never be.”
But Odele didn’t hear me.
She was already fast asleep.
~~
THE THUNDEROUS pounding on the door jolted me from a dreamless sleep. It took a moment for the grogginess to clear, for me to get my bearings and remember everything that happened to me the previous night.
Odele was sprawled beside me, occupying most of the space on the bed, keeping me confined to the very edge, where the only things preventing me from toppling to the floor were the soft balancing brushes of the anemones.
The thundering continued, followed by the voice of Captain Saber. “Princess! Is everything alright?”
I groaned and rubbed my eyes before I was fully awake.
Silt. Captain Saber was at the door. I couldn’t very well open it, could I?
I glanced down at Odele. She slept with her mouth wide open, and hugging at the pillows. It was odd to see her so discomposed and vulnerable, but also refreshing to see her look so… normal.
“Odele,” I shook her shoulder. “Wake up.”
She groaned and batted my hand away, turning away from me.
Annoyance flared through me, and the pounding at the door just became more insistent. I reached out and shook her shoulder again. “Odele,” I said a little louder, “wake up.”
She pushed me away. “What do you want?” she complained, her voice muffled as she buried her face into her pillow. “It’s early. Go sink in the abyss somewhere.”
So we were back to hostility? Gone was last night’s sliver of kindness she’d displayed, and once again she was an arrogant Princess. Fine. I shouldn’t have expected otherwise.
“Wake up.” I shook her, hard. She didn’t even stir. I groaned to myself and contemplated my next move. She was a princess, and the future ruler of Thalassar and it was hardly wise for me to do what I was about to do, but I couldn’t help it. I was annoyed, and she needed to wake up, now.
I pinched her.
She yowled and jumped up, rubbing the tender spot at her side as she turned to glare at me. “What the—Odalaea, you may have been raised in the freshwaters, but royals are allowed to sleep in.”
I ignored every word she said, and pointed at the door to her room. “Captain Saber is at the door.” The knocking continued.
“So?” She dropped herself back onto the bed, hiked a blanket over her shoulders and turned away. “Who cares?”
I sighed with deep annoyance. “Then do you want to answer it?” I almost loathed the idea. If Captain Saber knew she was here, everything that had happened between us would fall apart. He’d escort me home, and would be free to live life as though he’d never met me in the first place. The idea sent my heart thundering in my chest.
“Gods, no,” Odele replied. “Let him knock.”
The knocking continued.
I looked from the door to Odele, and she must have felt my gaze heavily on her, because she finally turned and arched a brow. We stared, like we were silently communicating, and I won. She groaned and sat
up.
“Fine,” she grumbled. “Open the door. But please, for the love of gods, keep it short. I want to rest.” She got up and swayed—like a drunken mer—over to the bathing room. “And don’t tell him about me,” she called over her shoulder.
I waited until she was in the bathing room, the door closing behind her, before I scrambled to answer the door. Captain Saber floated impatiently on the other side.
“Princess,” he greeted, offering up a bow.
Before, I’d thought nothing of the title I was thrust into. It was just pretend, after all. It didn’t mean anything. But now, as he said it, there was a weight on the word that hadn’t been there before. Something about it was mocking me, a shadow looming over my consciousness. One I didn’t want to acknowledge as truth.
Something I only hoped not to spill in his presence, even if everything inside me begged to confide in someone.
CHAPTER TWO
Tiberius
“MAY I come in?” I asked, fighting back the twitch of amusement that threatened to pull at my mouth.
Maisie was floating there, her hair in loose and wild tendrils. She was staring at me with wide eyes, and I could just make out the tightness in her jaw, as if there was something she wanted to say, but was physically holding herself back from saying it. I wondered on it, before she took a stroke to the side to allow me entry.
I went gratefully inside, and my eyes scanned the room for danger, an instinct that was hard to fight. I did a sweep along the floor, coming to a stop at the discarded pile of dark clothing in the middle of the room. They looked like commoner’s clothes and a cloak. Another sweep showed me Maisie’s black blade leaning against a wall.
My eyes narrowed.
“What’s going on?” Maisie asked casually after she closed the door. She swam around to face me, the smile pulling at her lips, obviously forced.
I’d come in here this morning because all I could think of last night was her. Everything I’d wanted to say and confess to her had me tossing and turning. I’d braved it enough that I decided on telling her my feelings, even if she didn’t reciprocate them, I’d tell her.
Death Beyond the Waves Page 2