Beneath Cruel Fathoms (The Bitter Sea Trilogy Book 1) Page 2

  Leonel reigned in his focus. Politics didn’t matter now, only speed. As he went, he whistled warnings in every tongue of the Fathoms—Danger to the north. Stay away. They heeded his command. Dolphin pods, eelpouts and iridescent mackerel charged in the opposite direction. He pivoted sharply to avoid a bloom of jellyfish gathered above Silver Basin and sprinted onward. The cool waters streamed over his chest and arms as he speared through them, his short, dark hair slicked back with his momentum. It was night in the world above, though his eyes did not need the sun to see. Swaying anemones and carpets of algae made the seabed glow with living light.

  More than a dozen landweller ships had been scuttled over the past three moons. Too many to be a coincidence. Only a smattering of debris, the torn ocean floor, and the rapidly dissolving tingle of magic remained. Had it not been for the that, he’d have assumed the storms were naturally occurring. Instead, the water tasted polluted, fouled by some magic he didn’t recognize. Only a few in Aegirheim could summon the destructive force behind these tempests, and the traces left behind was nothing like theirs. Someone else was doing this. He’d brought these concerns to court and they’d mocked him until his ears burned.

  “You fuss over waves and wind, son of my wife?” King Ægir had asked, his smile slight, his silver eyes hard beneath his coral crown. “Do you not have enough to do as the guardian of our sea?”

  He’d ignored the bait. “The squalls are fueled by neither weather nor gods, my king. I cannot find the source of their magic. The threat merits your attention.”

  “Threat?” Ægir repeated, amused. He tilted his head toward Leonel’s mother seated beside him. “Your mortal merchild brings us dire reports indeed. Shall we prepare for imminent attack?”

  The court tittered, laughter shielded behind limpet shells and seagrass fans. Leonel spared only a glance at his mother where she sat on her amber throne of polished aragonite, her fair face wreathed in a cascade of blue-green hair and indifference. As he’d expected. The goddess Ran had never defended him as a child and he shouldn’t expect her to start now. It certainly shouldn’t anger him anymore.

  It shouldn’t, but it did.

  “Your Majesty knows there are some who would attack, if given the chance,” he’d answered tightly. “The gods are immortal, not invulnerable, and hubris has felled the powerful before.”

  He’d recognized his mistake as soon as the words left his mouth. As usual, anger made him stupid. The court deadened with silence and Ægir grew as still as a petrified reef. The king’s spear, twice as long as Leonel was tall, glittered in the light of the hall’s bioluminescent pools. Faint disapproval replaced the impassive expression on his mother’s face, though she didn’t speak.

  “Is this how you would persuade us of your wisdom? With insults?” Ægir stood, his cape of indigo sea silk and pearl pooling around him. “Think you, mortal minnow, that you know more of that ancient enemy you allude to than us? We who lived before there was salt in the sea?”

  This time, Leonel was smart enough to shut up. The question housed only traps anyway.

  “Evidence,” the king demanded then. “Proof of a true threat is required before the gods will intervene in something so trivial as a few drowned humans.”

  It was not the dead humans Leonel worried for, but the creatures harmed by the devastation left behind—creatures he had sworn an oath to protect when he won the trident. But it was difficult to persuade gods to care about mortal lives that were destined to die at some point anyway, and his idiotic remark had ruined any chance of convincing them by that point. This was typical of the court. The truth didn’t matter as much the appearance of it. The king wanted evidence? This time, Leonel swore he would find it.

  Tailfin sour with fatigue, lungs calling for air, he pulled hard on the trident’s magic to replace breath and rest, and doggedly pushed on. The first sign of the storm came with a deadened taste to the sea, a bitter wrongness he recognized as the same unfamiliar magic he’d encountered before. Only more intense. The currents still churned with uproar. Grim hope surged in his chest. He might actually catch it this time, and if whoever conjured this abomination lingered nearby, Leonel had already contemplated a variety of ways to make them regret underestimating him.

  He caught his first glimpse of the initial damage; long, jagged scars across the ocean floor. It was all he saw before a riptide smashed the current he traveled through. It punched him out of the stream, hurling him end over end down another lane. In the wrong direction.

  Growling, he fought to right himself, tidal forces bearing down on him like a fist. He didn’t have time to be delayed like this. Trident clenched in his hand, he beckoned its power forward, channeling the magic to unlock the undertow sweeping him farther and farther away from the storm. Nausea swamped him. Using this much magic would cost him later, but it would be worth it if he could just—

  Another crosscurrent slammed into him, tangling him in a knot of intersecting streams. They wrenched him in multiple directions. His bones shuddered under the pressure. Muscles screamed in protest while whirlpools of trapped fish spiraled along with him. They clung to him instinctually, terrified and helpless. He watched a seahorse torn apart before his eyes. With a roar and a mighty flex of his tailfin, he burst free of the vortex. Only a few creatures escaped with him. The rest remained pinned. He sensed them calling for his help.

  Guardian! Guardian!

  Leonel turned away and reached for the indifference of the gods. There was still a chance he could reach the storm before it vanished. These creatures would perish but the sacrifice was worth it if he found what he needed. To stay for such little lives was ridiculous. That would be a mortal choice. Weak and short-sighted. The court already expected him to fail as guardian, regardless of winning the tournament. Ægir and his half-sisters. His mother. They expected him to act small, to choose wrong, to think in terms of years instead of millennia. Choosing to stay would prove them right. He was so sick of proving them right.

  Guardian! Guardian!

  And yet, he couldn’t make himself abandon them. With a resigned groan, he turned back. One by one, he set his will and power against the labyrinth of snarled currents, redirecting their courses to their proper place, cursing himself all the while. The captured lives swam free, tiny starbursts of grateful joy as they passed him. He smiled for it. The scar bisecting the right side of his mouth pulled taut, as ever an intruding reminder of that long ago lesson: Dwell not on victory.

  When at last Leonel returned to the initial marks of the tempest’s path, the pale glimmer of sunlight played across the surface. He came up for a breath and to confirm what he already knew. The storm had passed, the skies clear and the winds gentle. He was too late.

  He refused to give up. He’d never arrived so quickly behind one. There might be something more he could learn than the previous times. If he had to spend a season scouring the seabed for clues, he would. Whatever force was behind this couldn’t hide forever.

  Submerging once more, Leonel slowed his pace to carefully survey the damage. It was worse than he’d ever seen it. The tears in the seabed went deep as if a spearhead had sliced at the ocean floor itself. The waters left in its wake were cloudy with sediment, tattered kelp trees, and severed fins. And yes, the fibrous remnants of a landweller ship too. Leonel made a swiping motion with his hand to push away the sands obscuring his view, using a minor enchantment rather than the trident’s power. The selkies had taught him a few of these smaller magics when he was young and it spared him the toll the trident took on his body.

  The water cleared, revealing the decimated vessel resting among the ravaged seabed. A much larger ship compared to the others the storms had devoured, rent down the middle like a mollusk shell cracked open. Human bodies floated among the wreckage in breathless suspension, limbs flared at their sides, hair undulating around slack faces. As had been the case at the other sites, there were no predators come to pick at the easy meal. Another unnatural detail, though perhaps the linger
ing fetid taste of the strange magic kept them away. Even as it dissipated, swimming through it was almost unbearable. Still, it was a clue he shouldn’t ignore. Never before had he arrived when the stain of it was still this pure. If he subdued the way his body instinctually repelled it and let it seep into his skin, he might be able to figure out its origins.

  Risky to test this on himself. It could be poisonous. Then again, if he sickened, maybe that would be enough evidence for his mother and Ægir to deign the problem worthy of their vaulted attentions—however, he doubted he’d be granted an audience before he was scheduled to deliver his usual report. Anew, Leonel regretted letting their antics get to him. He should’ve made a game of it, a puzzle to entertain the court, for they dearly loved a game involving him. If only his pride allowed him to use their desire to humiliate him to his own advantage. Why did he cleave to his pride like a shiny gem only he valued? It made him prone to challenge instead of deference. It revealed his battered heart. It lost him every battle of wits.

  A song interrupted the troubled drift of his thoughts. Low ragged notes of grief he recognized even before he turned to see the family of blue whales. Two younger females and an older male trailed behind the wake of their matron. It was she who cried, a long, wrenching song of despair that wrapped around his soul and squeezed. He went to them immediately, fearing her injured. What he saw made him jerk to a horrified stop.

  Along the bow of her nose, she carried the body of a newborn calf. He was dead, the pale underbelly ripped open, the small tailfin limp. They must have been separated when the storm appeared. Had the calf been caught in one of those violent crosscurrents, trapped and torn apart? His little body slipped off his mother’s nose and she adjusted to catch him again. She seemed unable to let him go, all the while singing her agony while her family followed in its chorus of silence.

  Leonel swam alongside her. He pressed a hand to her and offered a melody of sympathy and regret. Her eye, ancient and sorrowful, met his gaze. It held no blame. Ever had these great creatures shown him kindness. She sang something else then. Whalesong did not speak in words. Like the sea, it made itself understood with tone and inflection. She asked a question, formless, yet clear. Why did her child smell wrong?

  He frowned and went to the body. She slowed to allow him to glide along her broad nose to her infant. Even newborn, the calf was four times his height, making the savage wound down his abdomen all the more heinous. When Leonel came within arm’s reach, the sense of the foul magic nearly punched the breath out of him. Unlike landwellers, all sea creatures had immunity to magic that repelled it from their flesh, but the young were vulnerable for a time and required their mother’s protection. The power used here must have overwhelmed the calf’s fragile immunity. If the wound hadn’t killed him outright, the magic would’ve poisoned him to death. And Leonel was fortunate indeed that he had hesitated before doing the same.

  He forced himself to edge closer. The residual stains of the storm’s power seeped out of the wound like a trail of oil. He still didn’t recognize it but there was a familiar note that he hadn’t noticed before, or that had been too diluted by the time he arrived. It almost reminded him of—

  He drew back in shock. Dirt. Sand mixed with soil and air. The taste of land. This couldn’t be. Landwellers had no magic. They were borne from clay and sunlight and earth. They could not wield it or touch it without being unmade. It was illness to them. Madness and death.

  And yet…the sense of rock and root was undeniable. He swiped a hand over his face, unable to form an explanation. Almost, he thought to bring this revelation to Ægir and his mother. The king’s demand thundered in his memory.

  “Evidence. Proof is required.”

  If he went now with only his word to back up such an implausible discovery, it’d be a wasted effort and he didn’t have time to drag his tailfin through their political sludge. He was on his own with this. At least now, he finally had a definitive clue: The land and the sea were somehow connected to these unnatural storms. But which land? The great landmasses had been submerged by the Eldingar a thousand years ago in their bid to spread the sea over the entire world. Seven large isles remained and a smattering of smaller islets. One of the latter was closet to this area. Black Pebble Coast. If the magic had been poured into the sea from that place, there had to be a trail.

  He bid farewell to the whale family with a song that shared their grief and promised to find the answer to what was happening in the Fathoms. With more hope than certainty, he followed the clearest trail left behind; the debris field. It was large but looked much like the others had, offering no more secrets and diminishing with every passing moment. When he reached its end, he went back and retraced the path. Already the magic had dispersed, leaving behind wreckage and death, but no proof that it was anything more than the caprice of the sea.

  Leonel paused when he reached the end of the debris field again, both to calm his frustration and to draw power from his trident. There’d been an echo of something here, so faint, he thought he might’ve imagined it. He called on the trident’s magic to amplify what he’d sensed, and immediately doubled over. His body protested fiercely the use of so much power today, an irritating reminder that Ægir hadn’t intended a mortal to win the trident.

  Yet, remembering his triumph gave him the strength to endure the cost. And there, he hadn’t imagined it. One last remnant of the ship had been separated from the rest. Distant now, the waves pushing it farther and farther away. He hurried after it.

  The night sky returned to the world above by the time he found it. Disappointment jabbed him in the chest. A boat, as small and insignificant as a lump of seaweed, bobbed on the surface. It sat low in the water thanks to a little hole in the bottom that spilled water into its shell.

  Leonel watched from below, unsure of his next course. He’d wasted an entire cycle of the sun chasing nothing more than a bit of detritus caught by the currents.

  Then the boat capsized and a body tumbled into the sea in a billow of yellow hair and layered garments. Another dead landweller. What a shame they could tell no tales. Finding a witness would have been of immense help, especially since the origin of the storms somehow began in their world. Perhaps he should search along their harbors.

  He started to turn away. A flicker of movement made him stop. He could’ve sworn…Had that arm moved? Yes, there the legs gave a weak flutter. Silver seas, the human was still alive. A survivor of the storm who could answer all his questions—It was almost too good to be true.

  Until he realized it was. The Blue Laws, the rules of the sea and Ægir’s commands that Leonel himself enforced, forbade the rescue of any landweller. Once within the realm of the Fathoms, unless able to rescue themselves, the human forfeited their life to the sea. It was a core dictum of the Blue Laws.

  The landweller—the woman, for he recognized the cumbersome garments as those worn by their females—struggled to push herself to the surface. Her limbs, stiff and uncooperative, did not give her the momentum she needed. She sank, fingers splayed, reaching toward air she couldn’t touch. Her body convulsed, agony written into the lines of her body. Leonel had never seen a human drown before. It was awful.

  Awful because of what he’d lose with her death. Did not the king demand evidence? By letting this human die, it would defy that command, wouldn’t it? Even if he broke one law, by saving her he’d be obeying another. Right? Sympathy didn’t motivate the act, but practicality. Surely, that was forgivable. He would have the witness he needed, a resource on land to help him search for the one wielding the storm magic. A greater good to balance out the wrong.

  And if no one found out about it, so much the better.

  Chapter Three

  When Isaura discovered the leak in the boat, she was almost relieved. Thirst had become the focal point of her existence. A full day without water and her tongue had turned into a heavy piece of dried flesh in her mouth, her throat a hot wasteland of need and pain. Not that her voice served any us
e. There was no one to hear her cry for help and any movement sent fire through her muscles.

  Isaura lay still and silent and dying. Alone. Weren’t the beloved dead supposed to comfort their kin as they passed on? She would have dearly liked to see her mother again. The details of her face had faded in the years since Isaura was a child, but she remembered her long, black hair and warm sepia skin. She remembered the way her own lighter skin darkened in the hot summers they’d shared in Sparna, the southern great isle of her mother’s homeland. She remembered the love in her mother’s brown eyes as she counted the freckles first on Isaura’s nose, then on her father’s.

  “Stars on your skin,” she’d say. “I’ll make wishes of them.”

  Her poor father. Now he’d lost them both. At least he had Auntie Erla there with him. And Jurek too. He would watch out for them. Isaura had no moisture to give to tears, too weak to do more than shudder. She hadn’t thought it possible to feel more alone than when Jan left her. This wasn’t the end she’d envisioned for herself. No husband. No children. Her practice as a healer barely begun. And now a lonely death. Gods, her life had become a tragic spectacle, hadn’t it?

  The hard, blue sky seemed to agree. As the hours passed, it shimmered in her vision, blurry along the edges. A dire sign of dehydration. Another day to endure, less if the gods were merciful. A breath that would’ve been a laugh if she’d had the strength whispered through her cracked lips. The sea gods had offered mercy when the ship went down. She’d been the one to reject it by climbing in this boat.

  That was when she noticed the leak. Cold water seeped up from the bottom to press around her body in a cool skin. She shivered violently, wincing at the lightning sharp aches in her body. She searched for it with hands caked in dried sea salt and found the split board just under her hip through which the sea gobbled up her wedge of dry land. Isaura didn’t try to shore it up, even if she’d had something with which to do so. It was better this way. Faster to drown than to die of thirst. Painful still, but lesser, and the freezing water might numb the worst moments. Perhaps she’d fall asleep before the boat gave way beneath her and she wouldn’t feel it at all.