Copyright © 2022 K. Fournier. All rights reserved.

Songs of the Hunted
Realms of Glass and Blood, Book 1

1. The Prize of the Blu Seas
 
Anthia, Queen of the Blu Seas
 
One season before capture …
 
“What they say, is it true?”
“What do they say, your grace?” Anthia asked.
“That they hunt you,” came the reply that chilled her to the bone. Not because of the words the king used, but the way he said it. As if it were a challenge he might like to take up. “Your kind—the men—they hunt you down and take you in front of anyone who can see, and that is how they claim you as theirs. Is it true?”
How dare he?
The thought seared through Anthia’s thoughts like the bright star overhead that streaked through the purple sky as it fell from its otherworldly throne. How dare he ask me that? As if the bond between mates was nothing more than a hunt between a merman and his chosen female, instead of the unbreakable, life-lasting tether to another soul that it truly was for her people. The song between two souls that connected kin across seas and lands. A choice to irrevocably, in most all cases, leash oneself to another even if it meant a fight to the death for it.
He had no right to ask about that.
Of her thirty trips around the sun, seventeen of them spent sitting on the throne of sea glass that once belonged to her father, for a short time, and his before him for much longer, no one spoke to her the way the Bloodhurst King just did. In all the realms of the 9ine that she had visited or seen, never had another being spoken to her so abrasively, either. No king, or ordinary man, no fire breather or even a man of the seas.
None.
Those customs and traditions, their secrets, were not for those who could not experience them. Only sea people could speak on such things freely. But not this man.
Not this landwalker.
He had no concept of how much he just offended her, and if anything, the tap of his leather, laced boot against the glossy ship deck told her that he expected an answer. And probably sooner rather than later.
It took a heavy breath of sea air expelling from her mouth and neck gills, and the squawk of gull birds overhead to give Anthia something else to affix her stare upon, anything except King Misael. Only a few years on his throne and barely beyond his twenty-fifth year, if her sources could be trusted, she heard rumors that he shared a similar affliction to his now-dead father before him.
A taste for sea women.
They just didn’t like them free.
The way he appraised her every time he looked at her made Anthia think those rumors had a tad more than a touch of truth to them.
The king felt entirely too close to her in that moment for her to speak the way she wanted to when he had a broad sword hanging at his back. Not to mention, guards waiting beyond the gangway connecting their ship to the one at their left, another at their right, and her people were scattered between the seas and the jagged cliffs carved into the land surrounding them.
“You’re asking after things that are not of your place or people,” she tried to say kindly, even gently, adding that, “The ways of the people of the seas are coveted and protected from those who would try to use it against us.”
“How would I use that against you?” he asked back, seemingly unconcerned with her reasoning for not answering his inquiry. “People on land, we wed and bed. Your kind, well, you hunt and fuck. Say it.”
No, that was the most disrespectful and disgusting filth someone had ever had the indecency to say to her, and by all the seas and the stars, Anthia did not know how she lasted standing next to the king on the ship’s deck for so long. She bet the longer she spent there with him, even if they could benefit from the ships, the more he would take her silence and indifference to his behavior as acceptance.
How far might he take it?
Men like him were predictable.
“How about a question for a question instead?” she returned. “If you answer mine, I’ll reply in kind.”
“Depends on your question, Queen.”
Of course, it did.
The challenge didn’t scare her a bit.
“Is it true that your father died at the hands of a mermaid in his bedchambers and you had her burned in the square while they coronated you, King Bloodhurst? That you covered it up and buried him with a funeral pyre so no one would know that he got what he deserved?”
The king’s jaw tightened. “That was two questions.”
And neither needed answered, honestly.
Nonetheless, their time here, this entire charade between them, was just about over. Appealing to a man with known questionable honor was a losing game, and Anthia wasn’t the queen who could afford to fail her colony of people. Refusing to even let her brows knot with the frustration caused by the king and let him know he’d rattled her, she simply released a sigh.
“I’m bound by an oath I spoke to the gods and seas on the day they crowned me to give my life for my people to live how they always have for thousands of centuries. Not even a king with fancy ships set all out like gifts for me will change that,” she said, gesturing to the flags whipping above, each embroidered with a cursive B and the Bloodhurst crown. “I did not come here to speak with you about the ways of my people, your grace.”
Icey, blade-colored eyes turned on the queen of seas where she stood in the middle of the large ship’s upper deck to survey the peace offering made to her between two kings she couldn’t trust. That, above everything else, Anthia believed without a doubt. Well, that and the fact that King Misael Bloodhurst’s eyes on her felt like dirty hands reaching under the low-cut collar of her bodice to get a palmful of something that wasn’t his. And the landwalker wasn’t even touching her. His gaze remained affixed to the brand of her royal status on her throat for long enough that the intensity made her swallow. Every royal line to sit on the Blu Seas throne accepted the brand to denote and mark them. Her family’s had been on their throat, but the king of a now-dead line that came before her grandfather had his family branded on their palms. She was concerned with the level of interest the king showed in her brand, really.
“That there,” he said, gesturing to her throat. “Do you remember it—did it hurt?”
“Not particularly. And probably. We’re also not talking about that, your grace.”
“I wonder if that might make it easier to find you?”
Even knowing the Bloodhurst King watched her, bold and unashamed in the way he drank in what he could see the shape of her legs beneath her gown’s slit skirt, and bare feet, she pretended he wasn’t. Better not to give his blatant interest any time or mind, lest he think she want it. And she certainly would not be entertaining any talk of finding her. Whatever that meant.
Gods forbid it, she prayed silently to the beings above land and below the seas. Anyone who might be listening.
The last thing she needed was a landwalker king to think this meeting was anything but exactly what he and she agreed it would be. A small fleet of three ships from his Royal Naval Guard in exchange for the endless piles of sea glass he stole from their seas to sell to the King of the Red Seas two seasons before.
This meeting, and his offering to her along with the gold from the King of the Red Seas in the belly of each ship, was a long time coming.
But something about it also felt wrong.
Anthia couldn’t put her finger, or a fin, on what it was.
Thankfully, they no longer had to fight to protect that precious resource from the bastard on land. For now. She bet his mind was as fickle as the winds that rolled through their realms during the season storms, though, and like the winds, his decision could change faster than she would be able to prepare.
She would have to worry about keeping the mostly unbreakable, meltable and moldable clear stone from getting into the landwalkers’ hands another time. Besides, her High Master of the Army assured her they wouldn’t get even a pebble once the safety of the upcoming storm season passed and the landwalkers put their ships back at the ports and moors. But for her, an even more pressing matter was at hand.
Instead of sea glass only found in the Blu Seas that she was sure the landwalkers would pull from the seafloor until nothing was left, she worried the king had once again taken a liking to pilfering something else from her kingdom just as his father had done before him. Something far more precious and important.
The sheer fabric of her skirt billowed wildly around her legs with the next gust of wind, giving the king an even better view of her body. She regretted the choice in attire in that very instant, wishing she had ordered her maidens to put any other gown into the watertight trunks for their trip to land but the one she now wore. Well, what was done couldn’t be helped now. Anthia would deal with how the gown made her feel, and every other frustration, later. The very second she finished with this terrible idea of Zale’s, once her father’s truest and loyal friend, and now her most trusted advisor because of it, in fact. It was only his assurance that the gold, and even the ships, were paid for by the King of the Red Seas that dragged her from the seas on this day to face Misael. And with this nonsense with him out of the way, she could figure out another solution to her colony’s latest problem. The missing caravan of her people, that was.
A large part of the cause of those missing mermaids—and the goods and young they had been traveling with—she was sure stared her straight in the face when she finally turned to grace the young king with what he seemed to desperately want and need from her: her attention.
Apparently, wasn’t that exactly why they stood where they did on this day of all days? A king and queen with far better things to do, undoubtedly, but the landwalker went through a lot of trouble for this to happen.
Anthia wanted to know why.
“I could say the ships and gold are enough to make right your wrongs of seasons past,” Anthia said quietly, “but I fear accepting either thing from you or the King of the Red Seas will simply lead one, or both, of you into believing that you can do it to me—to us—again. At that point, will you wait so kindly and gallantly for me when I bring my army to your shores, King?”
“Is that a threat?”
“How many of my kind, and our things, have you pulled from the seas?” she returned just as hotly as he. “I don’t need to make threats, your grace, because that would mean I foolishly believed they could work on you and make you see reason.”
Clearly, King Misael Bloodhurst saw no reason that was not one of his own making.
“No, this isn’t a threat,” Anthia added, her tone leveling coolly, “it’s a promise.”
“If you think to—”
“Whose turn is it to speak, your grace? At my tables, I let the person needing the loudest voice hold a dagger of sea glass and only when it exchanges hands does another voice join the chorus. Shall we also do that here?”
The fire that flashed in the king’s eyes would have frightened a weaker woman, but Anthia simply tilted her chin up subtly to square her jaw the way he did with his. The two of them, as different as the land and seas around them, continued their silent battle of wills until he broke it first by glancing away with a boisterous laugh.
As if this was all in jest.
Just a big joke.
“Well,” the king muttered heavily, “It wasn’t as if you answered me in any other way that I’ve tried to get you to speak, mermaid queen.”
Was that what he wanted? Had he done all this just to speak with her? After menacing and terrorizing her kingdom and their colony since before he even took his throne, all this just to speak? Something smelled terribly foul, and it definitely was not the gathering, rising seafoam starting to fill up the bay where the ships took port.
Anthia didn’t give him a reaction to the pet name that his tone twisted to be something that made her stomach clench almost painfully.
No, she wouldn’t entertain a messenger sent from him time and time again, season after season, but the King of the Red Seas, a man who bled a different color than her but swam and changed in the seas as she did … Well, he was a separate matter altogether. Even if Nodan had made the purchase of their stolen resources, it was the respect of their kind to give another the opportunity to make things right.
When it could be done, of course.
The seas might run through their people’s veins, but it did not look fondly upon their blood staining the waters, either. They were the water. When possible, war should always be avoided. How they treated the land and seas, well, the gods would treat them in kind.
She chanced another look at the young king to find him watching her again, and thought, All of us, or none of us.
King Misael took his time dragging those cold, gray eyes of his back up her body to where they needed to be. The turn of her shoulders, and a flick of her wrists at the collar dropped the cloak at her back more around her front to give her exposed skin showing off a spattering of sparkling scales down the middle of her chest a bit more modesty. At least, he didn’t continue to let his attention linger longer than he already had when she finally made a physical show of her displeasure with it, but it was still too much for her.
All of this was too much.
It took but a few words from this man who called himself a king for her to understand—and well—that he did not see the crown of twisted, sharp pointed sea glass on her head as something that made her anything close to his equal. She was now glad she’d accepted the cloak of heavy fur-lined velvet from her maiden after their trip through the Blu Seas brought them to the bay carved into the south end of the continent named Atlas for its centered position to the circle of other realms across the 9ine. She tried not to let her gaze stay too long on any one crumbling structure on the face of the jagged cliffs above them but some she could name from memory alone because of the stories passed down to her by her father and grandfather. The latter of whom once ruled both these lands and seas from his palace that used to be seen from Atlas as if floating on the water’s surface.
But that time was long gone.
The kings before her were not ready to face the House of Bloodhurst, and their weakness had always been the land anyway. As it appeared, Anthia also wouldn’t get a choice in whether the man made a mess out of her reign like his father did to the kings of the seas before he was even born.
“Are the ships and the King’s gold not to your favor?” the king asked.
A lot of things were not particularly to her liking, but Anthia didn’t think it would benefit either of them for her to go about naming her list. Besides, it was quite a long one.
“No,” she settled on saying, “they are not, I’m afraid.”
“Pardon me?” King Misael all but spat her way.
That was either not the answer he expected to hear, or worse, not the one he wanted if the sudden and severe pinch of his broad brow was any indication. As handsome as any other king still in his best years from a good bloodline with enough ambition to get themselves onto the throne, she was sure he didn’t lack companionship. His seeming fascination with her made no sense to Anthia.
Hadn’t her advisor even said he had a wife—the closet thing a landwalker could get to a mate?
Anthia had gone along with this meeting as much as she could, but there wasn’t a single part of her that cared to stand there and do it for one second longer. All this day had done was prove to her that the King of Atlas would never bend or break, and certainly, not in a way that would change him for the better.
People were who they were.
She believed this man was a monster.
Her heart—owned by her people and the seas so much so that she had refused for all of her many turns around the sun to mate lest it break the bond she’d already made—told her so. Misael Bloodhurst, King of Atlas, wanted nothing good from her. Whatever it was he did want, she would make good and sure he didn’t get it.
“Send the gold back to the Red Seas,” she said then, turning away from the Atlas king without the proper respect of a goodbye, “and tell the king there that he can choke on the betrothal he offered me to protect the Blu Seas from you.”
She wouldn’t sacrifice herself to one man for another. Not her crown, her kingdom, and not even her body. None of these men would get anything from her.
“Where are you going?” the king thundered behind her. “We’re not done talking, mermaid queen!”
“Oh, aren’t we?” she asked back, scoffing.
She was certainly done.
“Queen Anthia?” came the call from a familiar voice somewhere down on the rocky shore of the portion of bay that remained ledgeless. She didn’t bother to look Zale’s way. The advisor would figure out soon enough that this meeting had not exactly gone according to plan, but he should have known that from the start. She’d not kept her feelings hidden before they’d even arrived.
“And what of my fleet?” Misael shouted at her back. “Do you know the trouble I went through to deliver these to you?”
“I’ll take them if only to show the people of my kingdom what sails to look for when we burn them to the seafloor, King.”
“You’ll regret this, mermaid!”
Anthia didn’t think so.
She also didn’t take the gangplank down to the waiting rowboat that should have ferried her back to the shoreline where her maidens waited to help her change into something more suitable for underwater travel. It didn’t seem like a bright idea considering the way Misael’s armored guards turned on her with hands ready to unsheathe their swords when she first walked away from their king.
Instead, she took the rear steps of the ship’s deck to the captain’s port until her feet found the railing ledge and the bay waited down below to greet her.
“Find another realm to line your kingdom and house’s pockets, Misael,” Anthia told the fuming king, “because it will no longer be mine.”
The murder in his eyes told her that the sea glass, ships, and all the rest was probably nothing compared to the vision of her walking away from him because he wasn’t worth it.
“I’ll get what I want,” he returned through clenched teeth. “One way or another.”
She would let him think as much.
So be it.
The water did greet her sweetly, like a nuzzle from a mother, when she dived from the ship’s stern. The currents called her home; the very second the water filled her lungs and her legs and feet changed. From flesh and bone to a tail of blue-green scales, and an elongated, delicate tail fin of blue and black markings. Bone melded to bone; muscles expanded with the life of their seas; skin melted to sparkling scales. What the land exposed, the seas protected. The last thing Misael would have seen had he been looking before all of Anthia disappeared under the surface of the bay. She wouldn’t break the surface until she was back in the safe waters of her Blu Seas, but those waiting under the surface found her before she had even made it out of the bay completely.
She could already hear the tsks of her maidens for ruining a gown and cloak that could have been used again, but she made no apologies about ripping the garments away from her lithe form because they slowed her down as she cut through the water.
“Your majesty?” came the chirp of one guard. “Is everything all right?”
In the water, their mother tongue traveled like the calls of other underwater mammals. Noises from clicks, whistles, chirps, and hisses that made up words she didn’t want to waste time hearing from the people calling for her. No, the more space she put between her and the Atlas king, the better she would feel.
Surely.
So, why didn’t she believe it?
“My Queen?” the guard asked again.
“I don’t trust him,” was all she managed to say at first. It should be all that needed said, frankly. Tak, the youngest of all her personal guards but also her favorite because of his length of time serving her family from his youngest years, barely ten then, was still a young merman even if he had already reached adult age. His youth did not stop her from posting him at the end of her chamber of suites in the palace more often than anyone else. She liked his conversation, his ideas, and frankly, his company at times.
Not that the guard had ever stepped out of line with her.
“He wants something from me, I don’t know what it is other than me.” But he can’t have that, she didn’t say out loud. “I can’t trust him not to be plotting against me while I stand there beside him and give him the opportunity to do it. No, I don’t trust him at all, and we’ll accept nothing from him. Not even one of his godforsaken ships.”
She let that statement be her final one on the matter—whoever needed to carry it on to the rest of her gaggle of advisors and guards would do so. It seemed to be enough for the guard. Tak slowed his swimming pace to fall in line behind her. She didn’t wait for the rest of the royal caravan made up of her maidens, guards, and advisors to catch up before she slipped into the stream carrying water back out into the seas from the bay.
It was in moments like these that Anthia sometimes wondered what it would be like to forget the crown on her head and the duty in her heart, but alas, somethings were just not possible. The same way the gods had doomed their kind to need both the land and sea to survive, she was also hopelessly devoted in her duty as queen—the very last of her bloodline, in fact, and her kingdom, no matter how much they loved and adored her, knew it.
Worse yet, what if the land king knew it, too?
 
*
 
Mattue Bloodhurst, Bastard Prince of Atlas and Advisor and Sword to the King
 
There was something to be said about the gleam in his older half-brother’s eye as King Misael was brought from the ships to the bay’s shore where their gathered group waited for him. Anyone with any sense would know that look in Misael’s cold eyes and what it meant.
Unfortunately, none of them, but especially not Mattue, could get out of the way as they usually might when Misael seemed fit to murder the first person within his reach. The king stomped his way off the boat as soon as it hit the rocky bottom, likely ruining his leather boots as he trampled through water to reach Mattue who knew better than to speak first.
History taught him that wouldn’t work out well.
“She’s a beautiful bitch, but a bitch, nonetheless,” the king muttered once he stood in front of his brother, still affixing his attention to the mouth of the bay where the mermaid queen had taken her leave. “And like every bitch before her, she’ll learn, too.”
“One might think you would need to keep her standing in one spot for more than a handful of minutes to get her to listen to anything you have to say, but she did not seem very willing, your grace.”
Misael’s anger turned on Mattue in a blink. “And what exactly is that supposed to mean, brother?”
Mattue tipped his head down, lowering his gaze from Misael to soothe his sudden outburst. Nothing new with his brother, of course.
“I only meant,” he clarified quietly, “that you put forth all this effort today, and many days before it with the Red King, to get her here in front of you, and for what? You produced ships and gold before her as if it was a dowry and expected her to react pleasantly? I highly doubt that is how a woman of her kind is courted, my lord.”
The king sighed heavily, clearly annoyed, but he brightened slightly as his favorite white stallion was led down the path from the rim of the bay by a stable boy in faded, drab blue. Their conversation stalled as the caravan of horses were delivered, and those who would lead the trip back to the Stable Estate began the journey while Misael and Mattue waited at the rear with four knights, members of the Bloodhurst King’s personal Guard of Swords.
“The ships are a minor inconvenience,” Mattue said in an effort to please his brother somehow. “They’ll be returned to the ports, and we won’t be out any ships. Tis not a bad thing that she didn’t want them, King.”
Misael scowled. “Fair enough. And the gold in the bow’s bellies?”
Mattue laughed loudly, drawing in the attention of the guards waiting for them to heel into the horses they had mounted. “We take it, of course. Tell the King of the Red Seas that she accepted his apology—what difference does it make? He won’t know any better.”
“He might in a few seasons’ time, should the two of them … Oh, I don’t know, meet?”
“Will she last that long, brother?”
He didn’t call Misael king that time.
Not even my Grace or my lord as he often allowed Mattue in private. No, this time he treated Misael as an equal—even if the king wasn’t—because he wanted to tell his older brother something important. The very fact that there were people surrounding Misael who knew him even better than he did himself.
Mattue included.
Misael stayed quiet atop his horse, but his stare once again followed the same path that the mermaid had taken to leave the king behind.
“How long will you be able to keep it in check, do you think?” Mattue pressed.
He was good at that, see.
Pressing in the right places.
Even sore ones.
His brother was no better than their father before him. Mattue was proof of their dead father’s sins just like Misael’s inability to control even his stare was proof of his own. Misael did not need to speak the truth into existence for it to be fact, but Mattue would let his brother believe as much if that’s what it took to get him to just admit what he wanted.
What was obvious.
“Is it true what I heard about their mates?” the king asked suddenly, seemingly changing directions in their conversation altogether. Without warning, too. Except Mattue did not think the change was all that different from the initial topic between them.
“Was that what you were talking to her about on the ship’s deck?”
Misael shrugged his wide shoulders, but he wouldn’t look his brother in the eye. “Perhaps, but what I discussed with her is of no true importance to you. And now I am asking you the question, brother, and out of the two of us, you would know about the mermaids better than me, I suppose. No?”
At that, Mattue bowed his head to his brother. A silent offer of apology and respect that he didn’t think Misael cared for but demanded all the same.
Before he could properly answer the king, a chirp from the bay, a shriek from the seas, and a hiss he knew his brother couldn’t hear signaled the last of the mermaids to find the mouth of the sea. The shriek, he did hear, and Misael recognized it, too, if the way his gaze swung back to his brother and landed on the throat Mattue rarely kept covered.
The indents of his sealed gills were barely even visible. Closed shortly after his birth with needle and spun steel, and never spoken of again.
It had taken him many years of hearing the sea people’s language to begin to understand it, and even speak it back in some cases, but he felt no attachment to the half of him that didn’t really feel like his.
“Well, you tell me, brother,” the king said, his hands tightening around the leather reins of his waiting horse. “How should I court that mermaid when she won’t even grace me with her voice for more than a handful of moments? How do they find their mates?”
“They hunt them,” Mattue replied. “They make them bleed.”
Or, that was what he knew of it.
“Then, she would be mine?”
“I don’t know, would she be? If she births you boys like my mother did for Father, will you name them a bastard like he did me?”
Misael didn’t answer that.
Honestly, he didn’t have to because the two children already birthed to him by mermaids, and not his wife, answered the question considering they were now in line to the throne. Pushing the bastard, Mattue, even further down the line of succession. Although, if this wife was anything like Misael’s last, she wouldn’t last longer than her former counterpart before she, too, was discovered drowned in a lake.
“I want that mermaid, Mattue.”
“Clearly,” he mumbled in reply.
As if Misael’s constant, obsessive focus on the Queen of the Blu Seas wasn’t a new thing, when in truth, his brother had been seeking the woman out for more than a handful of years. She had only recently become aware of it, mostly because Misael stopped playing coy with the cunt.
Her interest, however … Well, that was another thing.
Misael’s sharp expression turned on him again. “She is, by far, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen crawl out of that sea. I want her.”
Did he expect Mattue to jump into the sea and chase the beautiful queen to bring him back to the king himself?
Not likely.
“And the harem of slaves you already keep to fuck when you please, my King?” Mattue asked back just as fast. Not to mention, the laws his brother put in place on the lands of Atlas so that he could carry on their father’s legacy of catching and bleeding or breeding mermaids, and also hunting them to sell to the pleasure houses in the cities stretched across the realm. It made relations with other realms of the sea in the 9ine a bit difficult, but nothing they hadn’t worked out thus far.
“Those were Father’s. I only kept them because they have nothing. Perhaps, we could sell them all—I hear they fetch a good price.”
Right.
Mattue rolled his eyes, but out of his brother’s line of sight. Whatever lie Misael needed to tell himself to sleep through each long night. He might very well sell their father’s old slaves, but that mattered little to him.
If only Mattue cared, but no. He gave no regard to his brother’s morals, dealings, or the sanctity of Misael’s soul. Those were not his problems. Unless the king decided to go ahead and make it so.
Like he had with this.
“Perhaps,” his brother said then, like he was making a deal with Mattue, “she will be the one that starts my own collection. Doesn’t she make the perfect piece? The greatest prize of the Blu Seas. I’m due a good hunt and sail, too.”
This time, Mattue opted not to reply.
It would do no good.
It surely wouldn’t save the mermaid queen from an inevitable fate because that had already been decided. He bet his brother made the choice long before this day ever came to pass, in fact.
“The next orchard season,” the king stated then, making it final just like that. “After the storms—we hunt her, brother.”
“And you’re not at all concerned that taking their queen, who, as I understand it, they love dearly, won’t cause Atlas or the crown any trouble?”
“Well, that’s for you to figure out, isn’t it?”
The king spoke, and so shall it be.
Mattue nodded once. “I will make it so.”
At that, Misael spurred on his horse with a swift kick of his heels into the beast, leaving Mattue in the billowing dust kicked up by his brother climbing the steep hill to the ridge of the bay. Without as much as a goodbye.
Nothing unusual to see here.
Mattue had long become accustomed to being his brother’s shadow, and in it, and he couldn’t care less if Misael bothered to say goodbye. Besides, now he had planning to do.
And he rather liked doing that.

 
2. The Crown of a Queen
 
175 days later; a sunset before capture …
 
Tak, High Guard of the Blu Seas
 
“Your majesty, the maidens are ready whenever you are,” Tak spoke at the cracked doors of his queen’s throne room. From her seat of twisted sea glass on a platform of bright pink coral she nodded in his direction to say she had heard him. It was the relieved roll of her eyes which her advisor speaking from down below didn’t see that made Tak chuckle.
“Okay, the rest will have to wait, Zale,” Anthia said then, interrupting whatever the older merman was about to say when she stood up from her chair. Plucking her crown from where it hung for safe keeping on one point of the large throne arms, she winked Tak’s way when the advisor finally noticed that there had, in fact, been an interruption.
“Well, just a moment,” Zale said quickly.
“The ladies have been waiting all day for us to get a start on this trip to the Isle of Broken Islands. What could possibly need to be said that we haven’t already discussed all day, Zale?” Anthia sighed, giving the advisor a sharp arch of her brow as she placed her crown neatly on her head, around the large ball of her braided, black hair. “If this is about the landwalker king again, I’ve already told you—the Broken Islands off the coast of Atlas is ours, and furthermore, our women need what we forage there. Before the oncoming storm season rolling in, ends, the High Guard will be posted across the islands for all of north and west Atlas to see. Let Misael Bloodhurst come into the seas, then, Zale.”
“I’m am very aware how you feel on that matter.”
“Good, then there won’t be another meeting with the landwalker king and my council to discuss said issues, will there?”
“No, my Queen.”
From the moment Anthia started to speak as if she meant for her advisor to listen, the merman did. Wisely, too. A gentle woman, and loving enough to feel like anyone’s mother if they got close enough to the queen, she also accepted nothing less than utmost respect from everyone. In return, she offered her subjects the same.
“Lift your head, Zale,” Anthia muttered low.
He did, but only to watch her swim toward Tak still waiting at the entry to the throne room in the cracked open doors.
“That other thing, Queen,” Zale called after her.
“What is it?”
She never turned around.
“Your named successor, actually.”
That did freeze her trek, but she spun around too fast for Tak to decipher the look that crossed her face. He could tell by the movement of Anthia’s arms that she crossed them over her chest as she asked Zale, “And what about that?”
He shuffled a bit on his tail fin and played with rolling his hands together, mumbling something about, “Perhaps it’s better Tak is here—a witness to this and all.”
The guard at the door cleared his throat, but no one paid him any mind. That was fine. Tak had become accustomed to being privy to conversations of merpeople—most usually women, but occasionally those closest to the queen, regardless of sex—and pretending as if he wasn’t. Tak had heard and seen things since his tenth year when the royal palace adopted the orphaned children of the last war; a lot of things. Things that he would never repeat or speak again because he owed the souls that called this palace home his very life.
He owed them everything.
Anthia, and her long dead kin.
“If I may be frank?” the advisor finally asked.
“Go on about it, Zale. Just get it out.”
“You’ve gone through your list of suitors, madame. You’ve made it clear from your fourteenth year that you would never settle into a mating pair or companionship, but you also have not had any children. I don’t say that for us to discuss your reasoning for private choices. I say it because we are in treacherous years, and now is the time to make these things clear.”
Anthia’s head bobbed slowly. “And what isn’t clear?”
“I beg your pardon … my Queen?”
“I thought we were being frank,” Anthia returned edgily.
“Well, we are, but—”
“I’ll answer my own question, Zale. Laws of the Four Seas dictate that the crown be passed onto the oldest and highest advisor to the late monarch when there are no proven blood heirs. In my case, that would be you. Again, what isn’t clear?”
Tak heard the queen’s point just fine, but he couldn’t say whether or not the advisor did. Or maybe the man did understand that he had started to walk a very fine line with Anthia. Who would be the next ruler of the Blu Seas kingdom after her leave from the throne had always been clear to anyone that knew their laws. And all of them did.
Bowing in her direction, Zale murmured, “As I said, Tak had come and now was a good time with a witness to these things. Formalities, Anthia.”
“Mmhmm, well … The time for being frank is over, Zale.”
“Right, my Queen.” The advisor bowed again. “Have a good night away with the ladies on the Isle of Broken Islands and safe trip both ways.”
Tak understood exactly why the advisor decided to clear up the issue when the queen turned fast on her tail and cut through the water for the door after their exchange, but the fury in her eyes kept Tak from trailing the queen as she exited the throne room. He did turn, readying to follow and do his duty, but something stopped him.
A flash of movement from the side of his vision had Tak looking back as he moved away from the doors and back into the hallway. There, he found Zale turning to stare at the shadowy throne of molted and twisted sea glass that Anthia had left behind.
He could not imagine what it felt like to know you would become the next king, or how the weight of that duty would sit on a person. So, he gave the advisor privacy and headed after the queen. It didn’t take Tak long to catch up with Anthia, but instead of the queen turning right at the end of high-walled corridor where her caravan of maidens waited to begin the trip to the islands, she went left. Straight into the side courtyard of a coral maze. By the time he slipped out behind her, she had already moved sideways, out of view of the doorway where she could press her back against the wall.
She gulped in three breaths, and each came out a little shakier than the last.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “just t-tell the ladies I need a m-mom—”
“Anthia,” Tak murmured softly, “tis okay to take a moment, your majesty. They would not even want to go if they were not going with you.”
She nodded at his soft assurance, and her head dropped a bit to take those violet eyes of hers—the same color as his—out of his view completely.
“That shouldn’t have upset me, he was right,” she admitted quietly.
One couldn’t see anything from tears when someone cried in the water except for the trickle of a shimmer. Without thinking, Tak reached out and brushed away the proof of the queen’s sadness with the side of his knuckle. Just the way she had for him as an orphaned merboy who so desperately missed his own mother.
“Cry to be happy again, we have time,” he told her.
He wasn’t exactly sure what about the advisor’s discussion of succession put Anthia into tears, but Tak wouldn’t ask unless she offered the information, either. He still knew his place even after all these years.
Even now, as her friend.
Anthia cried it out.
Tak guarded the door silently all the while.
Eventually, he heard her sniffle and the scrub of her palms against her face before she told him, “You are more than welcome to take your leave of post to start your own hunting trip early, you know? I’m sure the caravan has more than enough guards for a single night. The trip isn’t even as long as the one we took to the Beaches of Sand Pearls during the last storm.”
“Exactly. During a storm, your majesty.”
The random bursts of bad weather that came before the long-term, regular season of storms that stretched on and on was bad for the landwalkers, but a life-saver for the people of the sea that had never been scared of the violent weather changes.
Anthia nodded to his point as she came to stand beside him again. “I do think you could afford a bit of time away. You’re always in the palace, Tak. Have you even started working on your own home?”
He grinned down at her. “I have, in fact.”
“Have you slept in it?”
Tak laughed loudly. “I have not.”
“Well, you should fix that.”
“Sure, after this trip to the islands,” he returned, shrugging one bare shoulder. “Because under no circumstances would I allow my queen to travel with anyone but me to hold the sword at her back.”
“Allow me, huh?”
He chuckled. “Poor choice of words, perhaps.”
She tipped her chin down, not meeting his gaze as she asked, “Did you know I had a sitting with a lovely merwoman last week—on your behalf?”
That news sent Tak’s brows lifting high. “Oh?”
“Missa, my maiden.”
Ah.
All at once, he figured out what the queen had been trying to tell him.
“She is lovely,” he said.
“And would be a good mate for you which is what she asked for, should you find yourself at all curious. The two of you would make a good match and since you're both of adult-age, we don’t have to discuss why she’s coming to me to ask, but I assume you’ve spent some time together.”
“She is lovely,” Tak repeated, “but I needn’t take a mate to be happy, my Queen.”
Anthia nodded once. “Sure, but is that it?”
“Is what it?”
“Your reason—is it only that or something else? Not because you’re holding out or waiting for someone else, say?”
Now it was Tak’s turn to ask for clarity.
“Are we being frank?” he asked, wanting to drop the pretenses of policy and procedure in their conversation altogether.
Anthia smiled up at him, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes like it usually did. “Please.”
“If you’re asking if I pine after you,” Tak said, not wasting time or breath with anything that would ease them into this, “then the answer is no. If I had a mother after they killed mine, it was you. Like a lot of young men and women in this colony. We were never going to be like that, and neither of us needed to say it to know it was true, Anthia. The state of me needn’t be a worry for you, especially in that regard. I assure you.”
“Fair enough,” she replied under her breath.
“However,” he added.
That made her cock an eyebrow again. “What?”
“My duty to you is far more important to me than bonding myself to someone I may not be able to give myself to completely because my heart is split. Half with them, half here. I need all of it or none of it to be where it should be, your majesty.”
His declaration made Anthia let out a heavy breath as she shook her head and glanced away from him.
“You may not be my lover, Tak, but you still know how to say all the right things, exactly as you should.”
“My duty will remain with you, if it pleases you.”
“I know,” she said only a little sadly, “but I do wish for you to find someone. It doesn’t have to be today.”
“Perhaps. Someday. Shall we find the maidens?”
At that question, Anthia nodded. “Yes, please. Are you helping us pick sea lilies this year, Tak, or will you be staying in the seas again?”
“I think we both know the answer to that as one of us has to be watching things and not picking flowers, hmm?” he returned, smirking.
Sea lilies were a coveted resource made up of long fire-red stems and blue teardrop shaped petals. The plant was not necessarily easy to find in the 9ine, but it did grow wild and well in the wetlands beyond the beaches of the Isle of Broken Islands. Boiled petals in sea water and imbibed still warm would abort a merwoman’s pregnancy within the month without ill effects, but chewed raw or packed along the gum, and then the petals soothed the achy mouths of their young as they teethed. Tak only knew these things because he had spent so much time with the palace maidens as a young boy, and now man, that they allowed him that privilege. However, not all mermen were lucky enough to know the secrets of the sea lily, or many other numerous things he did because of his place, and his deep respect for Anthia and the other palace maidens kept those ways of the merwomen safe with him.
As it always would.
“You’re no fun at all, Tak,” the queen scolded him halfheartedly as they exited the coral maze together. He didn’t mind. Mostly, because she was smiling again. That was far better than when she cried.
“One of us can be fun,” he returned, “and the other has to wield a sword.”
“Well, let’s hope not, anyway.”
Gods, please, Tak prayed.
Let it be a safe trip for them all.
 
*
 
Anthia
 
The queen slipped her bare feet into the wet, grassy muck that came all the way up to her knees just so that she could reach the largest of the sea lilies in a pod of several. As was their way, she only took one from a bunch, leaving the rest on the stem to fall and produce even more the next year. Harvesting the lilies that way took longer but also left behind more than enough for someone else or the land. Not that anyone else came to the Broken Islands except for them.
And perhaps, the landwalkers.
She couldn’t be sure.
The ways of those on land—even the women of their kind—was an enigma to Anthia, and most of the mermaids in her close circles. A complete unknown, and in a way, that bothered her because there was a part of her that knew even though the seas and land divided them, her people and theirs were more alike than any of them probably knew.
Under the skin, where it counted, how different could they really be?
“Are we going deeper into this pond, do you think?” the maiden to Anthia’s left asked.
Missa, actually.
“I think we have just about enough between us and the others, actually.”
“Oh, good. I love doing this, but the smell.”
Anthia laughed. “Wetlands always smell.”
Thankfully, the sweet merwoman didn’t take the news of Tak’s refusal to mate with her too harshly. It seemed it was an answer she already knew, because she asked the source herself before coming to the queen, but she had thought that perhaps Anthia’s voice might help sway Tak’s decision.
Clearly, the man knew what he was doing.
They ought to let him do it, then.
Anthia had just turned to leave the muck and smelly wetness behind when the first whistle cut through the chilly night air. The stillness of the winds helped the warning to travel from one side of the islands to the other, but they would have heard it regardless of how hard the wind blew. A second followed the first, and that one, she recognized.
Tak’s confirmation of spotted ships sent every mermaid running for the seas whether their arms were full or not.
“Hurry, hurry, they’re coming in from both sides of the Isle—they’re painted black!”
Oh, gods.
How would they have seen them?
How would her guards have even known?
“What?” Anthia heard Missa hiss at her left. “What did they just say?”
“The ships,” Anthia replied as the satchel of lilies she had filled spilled to the ground, and she trampled every single one on her way into the sea.
“What of the ships, your majesty? What about them?”
“They’re black.”
Ghosts of the sea.
Ghosts on the sea.
Anthia’s blood, warm in her body despite the shockingly cold water that filled her lungs when she got that first breath, ran entirely cold. The implication thudded painfully in her chest with every racing beat of her heart as she searched in the darkness of the water for the one thing she knew would protect her above all else.
He’d been holding her dagger from her pack, too.
“Run! Run!” shouted those from the sea to those still on land.
“Under the islands, out of reach of the nets!”
Someone else called for her, specifically. The merman she needed to find.
Tak.
“Queen!”
“I’m here! Tak, I’m here!”
He came up fast behind her before she even understood it was him, in fact. Her dagger of sea glass found its way from his palm to hers, and then his hand found her upper arm to yank her deeper into the waters. Like everyone else, they dived for the underside of the many wetland islands broken into scattered pieces that stretched in two separate jagged lines off the north-western coast of Atlas. Their noise in the water quieted the longer the gathered mermaids huddled together until no chirp, click, or hiss passed anyone’s lips. She could barely breathe but for the fact their huddle kept her in the very middle with Tak holding the heel of his sword in both hands, the tip pointed down at the ledge of the broken island’s underwater shelf where they currently hid.
“Shall we send the guards to scout?” she asked.
“And confirm the four ships we already spotted at each end of the isle?” he returned. “If we don’t send them to their deaths, then it is for useless information because I already know what they’re trying to do.”
“Which is what?”
“Covering both ends. They think we’re all going one way or another because underneath the islands, no one knows the caves between the Broken Islands well enough to get from one side to another. They change every fucking year.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Her muffled noise of horror didn’t go unnoticed by her favorite guard. Tak glanced back at her, his brow pinching a bit in concern. “It’ll be okay, Anthia.”
“Will it? Will it, really?”
“Why do you ask me like that? As long as we stay here,” he told her, “then we’re all safe.”
“I ask you like that because for the first time, the ships are black, and somehow, those black ships are at either end of the Broken Islands as if they somehow knew we would be here, too. Tak, I only planned this with the maidens recently.”
Too recently. They did that on purpose because it kept their traveling caravans safer.
He seemed to understand her implication that someone would have needed to help the ghost ships along with the information about their trip. Worse yet, what neither of them said, was that they both knew exactly who had been to the land recently.
“I was trying to calm you,” he murmured.
“Don’t calm me, Tak. Help me save my people.”
A nod answered her back. “Of course.”
“How long can we stay here?”
“Days, but not many.”
Right.
“Long enough for the palace to send someone else to look for us when we don’t arrive back tomorrow evening, I suppose? What, then? The ships catch a fleet of my guards, and we still lose.”
“No, they do,” he replied. “You’d still be in the seas where you belong.”
She heard what he didn’t say.
With us.
The situation unfolding before Anthia left her numb and still as she closed her eyes and tried to find the composure she so badly needed in those moments. She wished she could still hear the voice of her father and grandfather—their words of love and wisdom kept her going as queen when she was all alone to do it. She couldn’t remember her mother, a chosen companion of her father who had died during birth, but she fingered the pearl ring belonging to her on Anthia’s middle finger, circling it around and around until finally, she just knew.
“Do you think they came for a whole catch of us or just one, Tak?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer.
“I know you heard me.”
“Stop it.”
“Do you think it’s the land king?”
All at once, Tak turned on her. With the lack of room, how he managed to keep his blade tight to his own body and not cut anyone else around them, she wasn’t sure. The fire in his gaze rooted her to the spot, but the silence from them all continued to echo. No one else would lift their heads or turn their gaze to look at the queen and her guard in those seconds.
“I said stop it—don’t even think what you’re thinking,” he snapped at her.
“Do you think it is him or not?”
Tak’s jaw worked with the struggle of the words he tried to keep inside, but the battle of his duty eventually won. “Who else would it be?”
“Right,” she said quietly.
“Anthia …”
“Who else would he want but me? I can save us all from being captured—”
“It’s not us if there’s no you, Queen.”
Fair enough.
But it changed nothing.
“I will swim to his nets alone,” she told him, “and you are to let me.”
His mouth opened to speak.
She beat him to it when she took her mother’s ring from her finger and placed it into Tak’s hand, closing his fingers around it so that her decision was clear.
And final.
“You will let me.”
 
*
 
Tak
 
If the two moons overhead could be seen through the clouds, the landwalkers on the ship just a swim stroke away from Tak might have seen the way his eyes glowed at the surface of the water. Alas, the dark night that had worked to the land king’s favor to hide his ships now slanted to Tak’s benefit as his hand finally skimmed the rough edge of wet wood along the bow.
Overhead, he listened for what was important.
Down below, he did what he fucking had to.
I’m sorry, Anthia.
She could punish him for going against her wishes later. He’d accept whatever she dealt him with a smile.
Even if it hurt.
“Well, brother, are you satisfied? I told you the price for the hunter’s ships and time would be worth it.”
“You’re very lucky that I am in a good mood at the moment, Mattue,” came a familiar voice from overhead. “Otherwise, I’d wipe that smirk off your face.”
Tak clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached to keep from hissing at the very sound of the land king’s voice. But it was what the man told the queen overhead next, still being hoisted higher in a net, that made him wish he already had the blade at his back against the king’s throat. 9ine hells, even the dagger Anthia made him take would do.
“I’ve fucked them in that form, too, darling,” the king said, the smug satisfaction coating his every word. “Hold onto that last bit of the sea. It’ll never taste the same again.”
“What was that?”
“Torches to the side!” came the order.
“Down,” Tak hissed to the mermaids currently surrounding the ship. Would she punish them all for this? She had to know they’d try.
They loved her.
They needed her.
Under the surface of the rocking waves, Tak peered back up to see the distorted glow of fire that brightened the water for the sailors overhead. He waited what felt like an eternity, long after the torches disappeared, before he gave the order for everyone to rise.
Of course, he came up and heard the worst thing of all.
“Oh, there are her legs.” Misael Bloodhurst laughed darkly, adding to someone that Tak couldn’t see, “It always amuses me the way we keep catching them with so little clothes. If not for the fact she can still swim away, I wouldn’t even wait until I got her back and safe to get a taste.”
“Well, unless you’re going to fuck her in the cage in front of everyone,” came the voice of the man who called the king his brother, “you’re going to have to wait until we get back to the shore, at least.”
“Can we clip her there, Mattue, do you think?”
Clip her?
What did that mean?
The landwalker named Mattue, the brother, sighed noisily. Irritated. “I wouldn’t—it’s still early enough for there to be some activity in the port, you see. You have her, Misael, she’s here. Look at her, brother. You have her. Let it go for a moment. Just a little.”
This time, it was the king whose air rushed out in a breath of loud relief.
“Yes, tis true, I do,” he replied. “She is finally mine. Property of the king.”
“I’m not yours, and I’ll never be,” Anthia hissed viciously, not that her fight earned her a reply from the king.
“Get up and walk, bitch,” someone else, a new voice, ordered. “In the cage with you.”
And with those words, with her fight, Tak took that dagger given to him by his queen and stabbed it high into the bow. As high as he could reach. Another mermaid at his back handed him another as he used the one already stuck in to hang from before he jammed in another blade higher than the first. It took two more before he finally pulled himself up onto the railing of the ship, expelling the sea to find his legs, and the very first thing he laid eyes on was a landwalker standing up from where he had bent down to tie the sail ropes.
Today is the day I collect another skull that I'll send to the seafloor, Tak thought, and unfortunately, it is to be yours.
The man didn’t even see Tak coming for his throat until it was too late. He barely had time to stand straight all the way before the merman’s hands found the wet, warmth of the innards that tried to vibrate with a scream. Too late. He crushed the cords, muscles, and everything else from inside the man’s throat and then yanked it all the way out. Hot, red spurts of the man’s blood spattered Tak, the ship deck, and the landwalker trying to run away from the next mermaid to come over the railing.
He let the dead landwalker hit the railing of the ship before the corpse flipped over the side, and Tak then grabbed the sword at his back, the screech of the sea glass blade hitting the first broadsword to come upon him with the force of the man’s swing. He hadn’t expected Tak’s block, and his face suffered the fate for it with the next swing of the long sea glass blade. Another three landwalkers found their fates at the end of his blade in quick succession.
Finally, with a stride of room to move on every side of him, Tak searched for the only thing on the ship that he really needed to find. The struggle and screams of the landwalkers from bow to stern was music to his ears. The song of the seas. But the next scream to cut across the deck of the ship stopped every mermaid, even him, in their tracks. Now, he didn’t need to try to find his queen.
He’d never unsee her.
The next crack of the braided, black leather whip a little more than the length of him in the king’s hand hit Anthia across her chest and face, splitting her skin savagely. Her purple blood misted the air and speckled the deck. The essence of her life in the air could be tasted on the next breath every one of her kind on that ship took after that moment. Their blood could change the very air around them, but in that moment, time just stood still.
Sea air wouldn’t taste the same.
“Tell them, tell them who you belong to!” he snarled at her. He didn’t relent, even as her hands came up and she turned her back to him, begging to be spared another strike, he didn’t.
He hit her again and again.
And again.
The speed was dizzying.
He showed no mercy.
No care.
Even as Anthia stopped trying to protect herself, simply falling to her knees with her body bloodstained and full of broken welts, trembling and sobbing on a gag of pain, he didn’t stop whipping her.
Not until she finally croaked out a painful, “Leave me, I am …”
The whip raised again, but it didn’t fly yet. “Say. It.”
“I am property of the king.”
“Queen,” Tak tried to say.
Another strike of the whip came.
Anthia screamed again.
Tak just wanted to die. Every crack of the leather against her erased a part of him, ripping the human side of his nature, his happiness and joy, and even every fond memory out of his mind so that the only thing it would replay for the rest of his life was the sight of his queen on her knees.
Bloody, abused.
Unprotected.
“Tell them again—tell them until they know it!”
“S-stop, please,” she pleaded softly.
The king finally did, but he loomed over her with his chest still heaving, and his fury burning brightly as he turned to the rest of the ship.
“Tell them,” he ordered her.
“L-leave,” Anthia spoke in their language.
Even the landwalkers, or those left alive, around them had come to a standstill to watch the horror of the king’s treatment of the broken queen.
Tak answered her back, clicking to her, “Please, Anthia, please …”
“I will pull every mermaid from these seas and let you watch them burn one by one, my little queen. And when I am done, I will release you back to the nothingness that will be left for you to find in these seas. If you can still swim.”
“Tak, it’s okay,” she told him, still in their tongues. But her head remained bent down so all he had to judge of her words was the shudder of her bloody spine.
It wasn’t okay.
It wasn’t.
“Give her that ring from me. When you find her.”
The king couldn’t know what words the shaking mermaid spoke, but it didn’t matter. His cruelty continued with another brutal strike of the whip that sent Anthia flying up so that when she screamed, her eyes landed directly on Tak.
“Please,” she whispered.
His blade still raised and bloody, his head shaking to deny what his heart screamed for him to do, he took that first step back. He couldn’t see her get hit again.
“Worry not, brother,” said the man named Mattue who wore a similar fur cloak to that of the king. “Her kind doesn’t scar easily. That’ll all heal up nicely. Mostly.”
“I’m sorry,” Tak told the queen, then.
For everything.
All of this.
He called those words to her for as far as he could swim and still see the ships.
At the surface of the seas, he watched the ghost ships disappear as the heads of his kind began bobbing back under the choppy water one by one, and he was finally alone.
Tak made a promise, then.
No matter what, this wasn’t over.
No matter what, he would find his queen.
Or he would die trying.
 
*
 
“Back from the Broken Islands so soon?” Zale asked as a quiet Tak entered the darkened throne room.
He wasn’t at all surprised to see the advisor had taken up residence of the space over the course of the evening and long day of travel back. He always did head the kingdom when Anthia took short and long leaves from the palace, but Tak didn’t believe for a second that was the reason for the man’s apparent comfort sitting there. Not now.
Zale didn’t even look surprised at the item Tak held before him.
Anthia’s crown.
“The queen has been captured,” Tak said. “I’ll be taking the army inland before day breaks. They already have a head start and—”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Zale interjected calmly.
“The queen—”
“Is not here,” replied the advisor simply. As if it really was that simple. “And in her absence, the word of law is mine. I say you won’t take the guard to Atlas, and so you won’t, my lord.”
Tak’s brow knotted. “Don’t call me that, I’m not a man of status beyond my guardship.”
“Tomorrow, you will be High Master of the Guard, in fact.” Zale lifted his hands from his lap and opened his arms wide, adding, “You’ll be a bit busy there in that position—guarding a kingdom, and all. There won’t be time for taking the army to the land for a single merwoman, Tak.”
“A single—do you hear yourself?” the guard asked sharply. “We are talking about the queen!”
“I have talked about the queen far more than I wanted to in these past handful of days. I need not hear you start on it, too.”
He couldn’t ignore it anymore. He’d thought … maybe he was wrong.
But no. Zale’s betrayal stared Tak blatantly in the face.
“It was you,” he accused. “You did this. You helped them.”
“I did what I had to for this kingdom. He wouldn’t have stopped. The land king—”
“You didn’t see what he did to her!” Tak roared back so loudly that the stained sea glass windows of the throne room overlooking the coral maze courtyard shook.
Instantly, Zale lifted from the sea glass throne and cut down the stairs faster than Tak could blink. The advisor straightened to his full height just a foot away from the guard, and he snatched the crown from Tak’s hands without grace or care to the way it cut the merman’s fingers and palms.
That pain was nothing. After that ship, he could feel nothing.
Zale placed the crown atop his head, squared his shoulders and jaw against the taller form of the guard standing in front of him, and repeated, “I did what I had to. Now, you will do what you have to—protecting these people. Bowing to me.”
His insides ached. Standing there, he felt like he could rot away.
Tak just nodded, and he did fall to his tail, bending for the King of the Blu Seas because he had no other choice.
He didn’t lie to the new king, though.
“On my life, I will never raise a blade to protect or defend you,” Tak told him.
“So be it,” Zale returned, looking down at the guard, unfettered, “but they still need you.”