Kloe!
Anger surged up from her gut like a rogue wave, and she instinctively reached out to the sea. She would drown them all before she’d allow them to harm her child. Strong hands grasped her arms and lifted her to her feet, but she barely felt them. The power built within her, and she wrapped it tightly around herself.
Come to me
, she urged.
“HOLD!” a voice boomed, impossibly loud over the roar of the crowd.
Cynthia blinked and turned. Behind them,
Resolute
bristled with soldiers. Hundreds of archers lined the rails, arrows nocked and ready. The gleaming heads of ballista bolts protruded from the triple row of ports, ready to fly into the crowd. As she realized what was going on, she allowed her power to drain away.
“Bloody hells, Cyn! Are you okay?” Feldrin was beside her then, one huge hand touching the wound on her head. “Yer bleedin’.”
“I’m all right,” she said, blinking away the dizziness and swallowing hard, appalled at how close she had been to drowning every person on the pier. Commodore Henkle’s voice boomed out again, unnaturally loud.
“Everyone stand back from the pier this instant, or we will open fire!”
His command was answered with an anatomically impossible epithet and a roar of other obscenities. A woman shrieked, “We want justice!” and a chant began: “Justice! Justice! Justice!”
“You will have justice!” Cynthia now saw Henkle. He was shouting into a large speaking trumpet from the quarterdeck of his ship. “You will have justice, but it will be served by the emperor’s hand, not yours! There will be no justice if we are forced to subdue this crowd! We have orders to take the seamage to the emperor. If you oppose us, there will be more deaths, and the blood will be on your hands, not ours.”
Cynthia felt the tension drain away from the crowd. There were still muttered curses, but no shouts and no flying objects. The marines jostled them forward and she stumbled, still shaky from her injury and the waning surge of panic and anger.
“You sure you’re okay, Cyn?” Feldrin asked. The marines allowed him to brace her arm, and he leaned close to her.
“Yes,” she said, turning to him and pitching her voice low. “But I almost did something very bad, Feldrin.”
“Yeah, I kinda thought you might.” He tried to smile and failed, his eyes dropping to the blanket. “How is he?”
“Scared.” Cynthia pulled aside the blanket and looked down at her son. Mouse, looking harried and bedraggled, was cuddled next to the baby, stroking his downy hair and cooing soothing nonsense into his ear. Kloe was wide-eyed and sniffling, but quiet.
“Well, he’s got company, then,” Feldrin said as they neared the head of the pier.
A large coach with the royal coat of arms emblazoned on the door awaited them. Six soldiers bearing loaded crossbows rode on the outside of the carriage, and a cordon of mounted soldiers surrounded it. Cynthia and Feldrin were helped aboard, and four more soldiers joined them inside. Dark curtains blocked their view out of the windows and dimmed the interior.
“Almost like bein’ back in the brig,” the Morrgrey muttered.
One of the soldiers seated beside Cynthia produced a handkerchief and a canteen. Wetting the cloth, he gingerly touched it to her head, saying, “Just hold still, please, ma’am. It won’t do for you to see His Majesty all bloody.”
The coach clattered into motion, and the guard wiped the dried blood from her face, and pressed against the wound until the bleeding stopped. Cynthia found the treatment oddly soothing, and when he finished she smiled and said, “Thank you.”
She and Feldrin had talked for days about facing the emperor’s justice, hoping that he would consider their explanations and not be too harsh. After seeing the mob at the pier, however, she didn’t hold much hope of a light judgment, and worry fluttered like a swarm of butterflies in her stomach.
≈
*This water smells like excrement,* Farsee signed to Shelly as they swam through the murky green haze of Tsing Harbor.
*Landwalker excrement,* she agreed, flapping her gill slits in disgust. *But we have to see what they do with the seamage.* Cautiously, she swam up and poked her head above the surface.
Her fins fluttered in shock as she looked around; there were more ships and boats than Shelly could count, some rowing, some sailing and dozens just swinging at anchor. Most of the harbor’s shoreline was edged with cut stone, save for one small beach where boats were dragged up onto the sand like dying whales. At one end was a vast shipyard, ten times the size of the one on the seamage’s island. And the city! The buildings glinted in the sun, so high they touched the sky. At the pier near the warship they had followed, landwalkers clustered thicker than sea lice on a fish carcass.
It was all so daunting that Shelly considered grabbing Farsee and flipping their flukes hard for home. Only her pride held her; she could detect the seamage by her magic, and the trident holder would want to know that she had been taken to this vast city of landwalkers.
*Odea! Look at them all!* signed Farsee as his head popped up beside hers.
*There must be more landwalkers here than all the mer in all the oceans of the world!* Shelly signed back. *How do they live like this?*
*Trident Holder Broadtail will not like this.* Farsee tugged her underwater and signed, *There are too many landwalkers to find the seamage, and I cannot stand this stench in my gills for long.*
Shelly agreed, but she tugged his hand and led him back toward the vast hull of the warship that had held Seamage Flaxal Brelak. It had been pushed by a dozen smaller craft against a wide stone pier that swarmed with landwalkers. *I can feel her magic moving away; she is no longer on the water.* She surfaced again to scan the crowd on the pier. They were milling about, many moving away.
*Not too close, Shelly,* her cousin signed. *I don’t want to be shot full of arrows if they see us. Perhaps we should go home and tell the trident holder.*
*No!* she signed, flaring her fins. *We must stay here to follow in case they take her away in another ship. My father knows we have gone north. He will send someone to find us. But for now, we can go outside the harbor where the water is clean and we can breathe again.*
*Good.* Farsee grasped her hand and pulled her away.
Shelly looked back, reluctant to go too far, but eager to be out of the stench. She clutched Farsee’s hand tightly, lest they become separated in this murk, and flipped her tail for the open sea.
≈
By the time the coach rattled to a halt, Cynthia’s butterflies had evolved into a seething nest of snakes. Her anxiety redoubled when the door of the coach opened onto a scene only slightly less daunting than the crowd on the pier.
High above their heads, the golden spires of the Imperial Palace glistened in the sun. Cynthia remembered seeing them from afar on her first trip to Tsing, and imagining what it might be like to visit the palace. She hadn’t imagined visiting in chains. She swallowed her panic and descended from the carriage, struggling with the cumbersome leg irons. The huge courtyard was crowded with rows of imperial guards, resplendent in full regalia, their gleaming halberds held at the ready. A contingent of guards escorted them past towering doors into the palace, and Cynthia suppressed the feeling of being swallowed whole.
The entrance hall proved no less crowded than the courtyard. Courtiers and nobles lined up for the spectacle, their whispers rushing like water around the clatter of Cynthia and Feldrin’s chains as they passed. Cynthia fought to keep her eyes forward. She clutched Kloe close, thankful again to Mouse for comforting the child. She didn’t know if she could have endured it if the babe was crying.
Their twisting track led past innumerable chambers and halls, a maze of brilliantly painted walls, gilded columns, and glittering chandeliers. Cynthia barely noticed it. They walked until she was disoriented and leg-weary, her knees shaking from fatigue or nerves—she couldn’t tell.
Finally, their guards ushered them through yet another pair of gilded doors into a small audience chamber. Cynthia caught her breath at the beautiful gardens beyond the room’s back wall, which was made entirely of windows. Hibiscus and heliconia bloomed in eye-popping colors, with a backdrop of cascading bougainvillea and lemons ripening from green to yellow hanging heavy on the trees. She felt a twinge of homesickness, remembering her gardens in Southaven. Would she ever see her home again?
Only after a long moment did she realize that a man sat at a broad desk before the windows. A tall, broad-shouldered woman in simple black clothes stood at his left elbow, and a young man of perhaps fifteen stood to his right. His son, she surmised, noting the resemblance. She recognized Master Upton standing at one end of the desk. At the other end stood a man with the look of a secretary holding a ledger. Though they all looked at her and Feldrin, she got the distinct feeling that their attention was actually focused on the seated man. Then she noticed the thin circlet of gold on his brow; Emperor Tynean Tsing.
“Your Majesty.” Cynthia tried to drop to one knee, but the leg irons nearly tripped her, so she settled for a curtsey. She glanced over and saw that Feldrin had chosen to bow low, rather than struggle to one knee with his peg leg. Upton stepped forward with a bow.
“Your Majesty, may I present to you Cynth—”
“Sire!”
Steel sang free from a scabbard, and Cynthia had only time enough to gasp before the woman in black held a blade an inch from her throat. She swallowed and stared at the sword, her own terrified reflection blinking back at her from the lustrous surface. She had never seen its like before: single-edged and slightly curved, longer than a cutlass but narrower, the metal glistening black with a wavy design that was either etched or intrinsic to the metal itself.
“She is hiding something in the blanket. A creature,” the woman said, her voice emotionless.
Cynthia opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted by the emperor’s master of security.
“I’m sorry, Your Majesty. I should have predicted this difficulty. There is no danger.” He stepped forward, but the dark blade did not move at his assurance. “The seamage has a familiar, a seasprite. My people have researched these creatures, and they are deemed harmless, though often a nuisance.”
“Bring it out,” the woman commanded without a glance toward either Master Upton or the emperor. The sovereign remained silent, his mouth pursed in calm interest, evidently trusting his bodyguard’s judgment in this. “Make it show itself.”
“Mouse,” Cynthia whispered, tearing her eyes away from the blade and pulling back the swaddling blanket. “Mouse, come out very slowly, and no nonsense.”
The little sprite peeked out, and his eyes nearly popped from their sockets at the sight of the blade. He struggled out of the covers and climbed up onto her shoulder, disheveled from his confinement within the blanket. His wings were crumpled, and he fluttered them briefly to straighten them out, his eyes never leaving the sword.
“Sire,
I have no experience with such a creature,” the sword-wielding woman said, seeming to dismiss Upton’s claims as irrelevant. “I cannot say whether it is a threat or not.”
“Please, Your Majesty.” Cynthia knew she should not have spoken without being asked, but she could not stay mute with Mouse’s life in the balance. “Mouse is harmless. He’s not a familiar. Seasprites are just drawn to sea magic. He’s been with my family for generations.”
“We will trust Master Upton’s assessment on this for now,” the emperor said. His voice was bereft of emotion; not cold, exactly, but utterly calm, relaxed. Cynthia hoped that was a good sign. “Lower your sword, Lady von Camwynn, but remain where you are. Your…services will be necessary in a moment. If the sprite makes a threatening move or takes flight, kill it.”
“Yes, Sire.” The woman lowered her sword, but did not step back or change her stance.
Cynthia wondered what services the woman might provide other than cutting, slashing or impaling. She looked down at Mouse and whispered, “You hear that, Mouse? No nonsense!”
Mouse nodded and made a face, but tucked in close to her neck, eyeing the sword contemptuously. Though the sprite was normally more than a match for any swordsman, this particular swordswoman, and this particular sword, seemed different. They frightened her.
“As I was saying, Your Majesty,” Upton continued as he glanced toward the emperor’s bodyguard in seeming amusement, “may I present Cynthia Flaxal Brelak, Seamage of the Shattered Isles, and her husband, Feldrin Brelak, captain of the merchant schooner
Orin’s Pride
.” He bowed to the emperor and backed away.
The emperor looked at Cynthia and Feldrin for a long moment. Beside him, the young man—
the crown prince,
Cynthia realized—fidgeted minutely, though he remained attentive. Finally, the emperor broke the silence.
“We have received many missives, both from you and on your behalf, Mistress Flaxal Brelak. Frankly, We find much of it difficult to believe.” He paused, and his eyes bored into hers. “We are greatly troubled by the loss of our flagship and the
Fire Drake
, and as you have seen, so is the populace of this city. Whether intentionally treasonous or not, the actions of you or those in your charge resulted in the loss of those ships and the deaths of all aboard. The populace of Tsing demands retribution for those deaths, and We agree. Speak now, and defend yourself if you can.”
Cynthia tried to speak, but found her mouth too dry to form words. She cleared her throat, looked down, then back up into the emperor’s eyes; they were as blank as his tone. “I don’t deny my failure to predict the actions of the young man, Edan, Your Majesty. Perhaps I shouldn’t have agreed to help him become a pyromage in the first place. Elemental mages usually ascend to their powers as children and receive careful training. Edan was older, and, I assumed, more mature. I was wrong, and he panicked.” She swallowed, took a deep breath and continued. “I also failed to predict the actions of the merfolk. I tried to stop their attack, and was knocked unconscious. I now know that the entire thing was a ploy by a few rogue mer to steal my baby. It was all a plot from the beginning, and I didn’t see it. I failed, and people died, more than just those on the
Clairissa
and
Fire Drake
. But, Your Majesty, I have
never
acted to subvert or oppose the Tsing Empire.”
“So We have read in your letters, but We have been unable to determine the truth of your claims. Until now.” The emperor of Tsing shifted in his seat and narrowed his eyes, then stared into the eyes of each person present. “What is about to transpire in this room will not be spoken of anywhere to anyone, not even amongst yourselves, under penalty of death. That applies to
everyone
.” He cast a quick glance to the prince, and the young man bowed stiffly, averting his eyes from his father’s. The emperor turned back to his bodyguard. “Lady von Camwynn, please proceed.”
“Yes, Sire.” The bodyguard fixed Cynthia with her eyes and said, “Hold perfectly still.”
The dark blade rose slowly toward Cynthia’s face, and she flinched, despite the warning. But the edge of the blade was turned away, and only the smooth metal touched her neck. She froze with the shock of it. Expecting cold metal, the warm caress was startling enough, but the true alarm came from the sudden presence she felt, as if someone called her name inside her head. The call echoed, reverberating until her very thoughts buzzed with it.
“Cynthia Flaxal Brelak. Do you swear that all you have said today, and that all you have sent to the emperor in account of your actions, is the truth?”
For a moment Cynthia was unsure who had spoken. The voice was feminine, but she realized that von Camwynn’s lips had not moved. The
sword
had spoken in her mind.