The muffled words repeated.
“These are medical supplies, transported by the order of the king. How dare you–”
The voice interrupted her, the tone intense.
“You decrepit old toad, I will not–”
Someone shouted and the box fell. Gravity and water fought as the box and I dropped, and when the ground came, everything went sideways and then tumbled end over end. Landing finally with my fin above me and my back pressed hard to the wall, I lay there, wanting to scream and too terrified to make a sound.
Trembling, I pushed my shackled hands against the lid. Nothing moved. I could be on a cliff. Pressed against a wall. Anywhere.
I gasped, and then risked shoving harder.
Everything toppled.
I cried out, but the box just stopped, coming to rest right way up. Shaking hard, I shoved at the lid, but nothing changed.
Scraping sounded on the walls, followed by a shift in the pressure of the water, and then I heard a muffled voice above me.
“What the hell?”
The numbing hood vanished, and the ocean filled the void in a crescendo of pain. Every rock and current for hundreds of yards around appeared in my head, while bruises made themselves known so suddenly, it felt like I was being hit all over again. Shrieking at the sudden cacophony of sensation, I cringed tighter into a ball.
A hand reached down, wrapping around my shoulder and without even thinking, I fought against it, struggling away and managing to swim a few yards before pain made me falter and sink to the seafloor.
“Hey,” came a voice. “Hey now. Chloe, wait.”
I gasped, looking back.
Zeke’s grandfather hovered by the box, his expression a mix of incredulity and shock. In his hand, he held a torch, while a stone-like gun hung from the belt at his waist. We were on a rocky slope, with the water beyond the blue flames nearly black and the other dehaians nowhere to be seen.
Breathless, I stared at him, trying to form words though I didn’t know what I hoped to say.
He pushed away from the box and came toward me. I flinched back. He stopped.
“What were you doing in there?” he asked.
I shook my head and then winced, my ears ringing with the motion. My face took the opportunity to protest next, broadcasting the fact my left eyelid and cheek were rapidly swelling and couldn’t take many more attempts at expression.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he continued carefully.
I didn’t move, uncertain whether to trust the words. Zeke didn’t like him. From the sound of it, neither did anyone short of Ina. For that matter, he’d come close to threatening me the last time we met.
And now, inexplicably, he was here.
“How did you... why are you…”
He paused, watching me. “My son was killed.”
I stared at him, torn between horror that the king was dead and thoughts of Zeke and Ina. Of the looks on their faces, when I’d seen them in the hall. Of the pain they must be going through.
Of the fact the guards said Zeke wanted to speak to me, right before they’d arrested me.
I blinked, my gaze falling to the seafloor. Surely he hadn’t
actually
been the one to do that. It must have been Ren.
Although, now that I thought about it, I’d seen Ren. He’d been hurt too. He’d fallen over with me right there next to him, and if whatever had caused that had killed him too…
I felt sick.
“Do they… do they know who did it?” I asked, pushing the words past my nausea as I looked back up at the old man.
His brow drawing down, he regarded me for a moment, as if reading something in my expression. “Not yet. Rumor in the city is the guards are looking for the one who poisoned him, but so far, they haven’t found anyone.” He paused. “Some of the mercenary factions used to use this trick, though. Smuggling people around in boxes, though it’s pretty hard on the ones inside. And when I saw that group leaving the capital with a container of medical supplies, I thought perhaps they were trying to sneak the killer out.”
He looked me over again. “I didn’t expect to find you.”
Panic hit me, making me want to bolt. He couldn’t think I’d done this. He couldn’t…
“Chloe, it’s alright,” he told me. “Assassins aren’t typically given shackles and blindfolds and beaten to within an inch of being ground meat. Especially not successful ones.”
I shivered. I didn’t want to think about what I looked like. The fact that it hurt when I breathed and the left side of my face had swelled so much it was becoming hard to see was horrible enough.
Jirral moved away from the box, not taking his eyes from me. “How about we get those things off of you?”
I tensed, but didn’t retreat as he came close and then set the torch aside. Still watching me, he reached into the small satchel on his belt and drew out a metal clip that shimmered with blue light. Taking my hands, he turned them so the underside of the shackles came into view.
“This is something I picked up in the Prijoran Zone,” he explained as he stuck the clip into the lock. Studying his own work intently, he pulled the small bit of metal around, twisting it first one way then the other and watching while it shifted from pale to darker blue. “Folks there don’t take too kindly to chains. They like to have ways of getting their friends out, if the need arises.”
The clip became deep blue and something clicked. The shackles popped open.
“There we go,” he said, tossing the restraints away and then retrieving his torch.
I rubbed my forearms. “Thank you.”
He nodded. “Come on.” He motioned to the slope. “The cold’s going to start getting to you if you stay down here too long.”
I pushed up from the ground and then gasped as pain lanced through my side. He reached out to take my arm as I sank again. I flinched back.
“Hey,” he urged, holding his hands up. “I promise, I won’t hurt you. But you need help.”
Trembling, I watched him, and then gave a small nod.
“Just keep breathing and take it slow,” he said. Gently, he pulled me away from the rocky seafloor, pausing every time I tensed.
At a pace that would have been dwarfed by a sloth, we swam up the slope.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“The ones who had you in there?”
I nodded.
“Two of them swam off. The ones holding onto the box…” He paused. “They’re down below us. They won’t be coming back.”
A breath escaped me as my eyes flicked to the weapon on his belt.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.
“I think they were Sylphaen,” I told him, my voice small.
“Seems a safe guess, given what Zeke said.”
I managed another nod. “They came to my cell–”
“Cell?” he repeated, slowing to a stop. “Why were you in a cell?”
Fear rose. He was going to think I’d done something to deserve this. He was going to–
“Chloe?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” I pled, tears rising at the thought that, like his son and grandson, he’d decide I was in Nyciena to hurt people. “I’m not a spy. I
swear
I’m not. Ren locked me up. His soldiers did. They thought I was, but I’m not. I just came here to get the neiphian… the neiphi…”
My head spun and I drifted sideways, sinking to the ground.
“Hey!” He grabbed me. “Breathe, Chloe. Please. It’s okay. Breathe.”
I tried to do as he said.
“So neiphiandine,” he prompted. “That’s what you were trying to say?”
“I’m not a spy,” I whispered.
“Okay,” he agreed.
I nodded, clinging to the word. “The Sylphaen gave it to me. They made me change, but I got away from them. Zeke brought me here. He said the doctors could fix it. But Ren…”
“He locked you up?”
“I think so. I don’t know. When their dad… I thought he was just sick. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t think… and then guards came to my room and told me Zeke wanted to talk, but…”
Jirral’s mouth tightened.
“They put me in a cell. And later, those other people came.”
“And they did this to you?”
“I tried to fight them.”
He let out a breath. A moment passed, and then he drew me away from the seafloor again. “Come on.”
The darkness lessened as we continued upward, and when we crested the top of the slope, I could feel a jumble of rocks in the distance, the shape roughly like a line. Stone spires twisted up from the seafloor beyond the array, and through the twilit water, I could just sense the ghostly form of a mountain.
But they were all lifeless. Motionless amid the ocean’s current.
“Is that Nyciena?”
He gave me a curious look.
“I didn’t see it,” I tried to explain. “Ren had me blindfolded.”
Jirral paused. “Yes, that’s Nyciena. From the other side of the veil, anyway.”
He looked to the ocean behind us, his face tightening as though he was wrestling with a decision. “This way,” he said finally.
Drawing me with him, he swam out across the valley and away from the invisible veil.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To my camp. They’ll learn you’re gone eventually, and given how things have been so far, it’d be better if you weren’t in the city when that happens.”
I hesitated. “You have a camp out here? What about your house?”
“That was just a place I rented. I’m not too popular with the family, as I’m sure you noticed, and sometimes courtiers or guards think they’ll take advantage of that. Gain favor with Torvias by confiscating my things and throwing me out of town. I’ve found it’s useful to have somewhere to go if that happens.” He paused, regret furrowing his brow. “Or at least they used to. Maybe with Ren, things will be different.”
“Ren’s alive?”
He nodded. “Sick but alive, yes.”
I didn’t say anything, relieved that Zeke maybe hadn’t been the one to order me into a cell after all. We continued on until the hills I’d felt when I’d first approached Nyciena came into view.
“Up here,” he said, leading me around the hill and up toward a cave I could sense high on the side.
The pale blue light of the torch caught on the outline of the cave opening when we came close, and inside, nothing was waiting but a small bag of supplies and a pile of dark green seaweed I could only assume was a bed. Jagged bits of quartz formed much of the ceiling and reflected the torchlight, brightening the space.
As we came through the opening, Jirral set the torch aside and then helped me toward the bed. The seaweed gave beneath me like a soft mattress, and I could feel exhaustion drag me deeper into it as I sat down. Leaving me for a moment, he swam back to the bag by the opposite wall.
“I’m going to give you some sieranchine,” he told me. “It should help heal what they did to you.”
My brow twitched down at the word. It sounded familiar, like the same thing Zeke had used on me a million years and one week ago when I’d been in the hospital.
I shivered, not wanting to remember the other times the Sylphaen had attacked me.
Jirral took out a container and then returned to the bedside, removing the top as he went. With a bit of the seaweed torn from the leaves below me, he scooped out a handful of shimmering clear gel.
“This won’t hurt,” he assured me.
He reached out, gently putting the gel to the side of my face. I gasped as tingles spread through my skin.
But then they faded. And so did the pain.
I looked up at him as the vision in my left eye began to clear.
“Here,” he said, extending the seaweed and medicine to me. “Put this where it hurts on the rest of you, okay?”
Nodding, I took the container and then carefully scooped out some of the medicine. The gel glittered like particles of light were trapped within it. Gingerly, I pressed it to my side. More tingles rushed through my chest, bringing a surge of energy with them and driving my exhaustion back. The gel seemed to absorb almost instantly into my scales, as if soaked up by a sponge, and as it did, the pain that had stabbed me with every deep breath just melted into a faint throb.
Another application did the same to my aching midsection, where the dehaians had punched me over and over again.
“Not too much,” he cautioned as I went to remove another dose from the jar.
I hesitated, and then handed the container to him. He returned the lid to its top, and then swam back to his bag.
“What was that? The see…” I faltered, unsure how to pronounce the word, and then regrouped, “the stuff you just gave me.”
His brow furrowed as he looked at me again. “Sieranchine? It’s medical gel infused with magic by physician’s alchemy.”
I tensed at the curiosity in his tone. Like any dehaian would have known that, and he couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t. “Oh.”
Jirral paused, his questioning expression deepening. “Chloe, why are the Sylphaen after you?”
I dropped my gaze from his. I didn’t know what to say to him. How much to trust him. Zeke hadn’t told him hardly anything when last they’d met, and there had to be a reason.
But he’d also saved me. Maybe not intentionally, but he could have just left me out there once he’d discovered I was the one in that box. And instead, he’d helped me and treated what those people had done.
That had to be worth something.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
Annoyance tinged his face.
“I’m not,” I insisted. “At least, not about all of their reasons. But I think I know why they hate me.”
His brow drew down.
“I’m… I’m not fully dehaian. I’m half landwalker.”
His curiosity turned to surprise as his brow climbed. “Half landwalker.”
I nodded. “My mom. She died when I was born.”
Jirral’s gaze moved over me like he couldn’t believe what he saw. “I didn’t think landwalkers existed anymore. If they ever had at all.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“And the legends of their children with dehaians… How did your father help you survive?”
“My father didn’t raise me. I’ve never met him. I grew up in Kansas. It’s one of the–”
“One of the middle states. I know.”
He sounded shocked. Distracted. Like he was still working to process what he was hearing.
I took a breath. “I’d never come near the ocean in my life. My parents – I mean, they’re not really. I-I found out I was adopted just… just yesterday.” I struggled to regroup, trying not to think about the whirlwind my life had become. “But they’re landwalkers. Both of them. They kept me away from everything to do with the ocean.”