Dream Storm Sea (18 page)

Hovering between the mangroves felt perfectly natural to Hiresha. Salt crystals shivered on the underside of leaves. Bird fluff somersaulted through the air. A rent had opened between the trees, and the fish swimming in the forest pool looked as colorful as fire, ice, and lightning.

Each moment resonated with timelessness. Each bird call she savored as a unique story of pitch. Each leaf she counted, and their veins branched in a beauty of design. Hiresha was awake.

Tears glittered on her eyelashes. They gathered into droplets that spun and floated above Hiresha’s palm. She regarded the small sphere then gazed up at Emesea and Tethiel. Her eyes were wide while his crinkled around the edges with delight.

“My heart,” he said, “you’re not yourself at all today. You must feel marvelous.”

“I’m more myself than I’ve ever been,” Hiresha said.

“You’ve gone all featherweight.” Emesea peered at the enchantress swaying up and down in the air in time with the leaves. The warrior’s eyes flicked to the oilskin sack tied to a nearby tree. “You found a gem?”

That glance told Hiresha so much. Surprise flashed across Emesea’s face. Hints of a wince appeared in the pinching of one eye, a twitch of a lip. The redness at the base of her neck was embarrassment.

“You’ve hidden gems from me.” Hiresha sprang to the oilskin. Her memory was perfect. “When I asked what became of my diamonds, you evaded the question.”

The sack erupted when the enchantress Attracted its contents. Two gowns, panpipes, the remains of an obsidian block, and one ballast stone concealed in a pouch. Except this was no ordinary stone, Hiresha could sense that from the irregular shape, the density of it in her hand.

Rough fibers of cloth tore away. Hiresha reached out to touch the dusky crystal of her paragon diamond. The heart of blue ice that would never melt. The find of a lifetime. She had saved this diamond from a merchant's greed in the bazaar.
And it was nearly lost at sea.

Joy and fury burst together in the enchantress in hot spikes of pleasure. She allowed the intensity of the emotions to steam through her for a few gasps. Then she turned to stand over the sea pool.

Emesea said, “Inannis kept one gem and gave me the other. I— ”

“Quiet,” Hiresha said.

The rough diamond rotated between her hands until she saw the ideal cut. Angles of force aligned in her mind, pieces of gem to be sheared off, the shape of the inner jewel to be freed. A gem carver might have planned his first cut of a paragon for a year. Hiresha cherished her certainty for three long seconds.

Her fingers fluttered as she Attracted many places of the gem at once, cleaving it along its natural lines. The stone exploded in a storm of shards. They channeled and tinkled about her like a cloak of transparent thorns. Seventeen pebble-sized diamonds orbited her, and one paragon jewel was revealed in its full glory.

A pyramid, its four sides shimmered with daylight as it turned. The faces were not flat like mirrors but each faceted with thirty-nine triangles. The cuts captured light as an inner fire. Her fingers closed about the jewel, savoring the stippled feel of the thirteen smaller pyramids on each side. It filled her palm.

The jewel held the blue of the pristine sky above the world’s tallest mountain. Some facets reflected the purple of her dress. Hiresha did not care for the muddle of hues.

“It is time,” she said, “to wear a dress of a different color.”

She turned on one bare foot and lifted her arms. Her purple gown shot upward, Attracted to her cloud of diamonds. She waved a hand to the sari dress, and the sheet of silk flowed about her in an arc of blue. It wrapped her waist and folded across her chest. Creases flattened out. Tears were repaired by strands weaving back together. It intensified the color of her diamonds.

Hiresha completed her turn, facing Emesea. The paragon pyramid was held by magic against the enchantress’s upraised palm.

“Why?” Hiresha asked. “Had you given me this diamond, we could’ve reached shore days ago.”

“First, didn’t trust you with it. You locked us in the Stone of the Sleepless, remember? Then, I didn’t want us to reach land until the Dominion. Then, I forgot.”

Diamond shards whirred close to Emesea’s eyes. She blinked once, slow and deliberate, and she spoke in a voice that brooked no flying-jewel nonsense.

“Was thinking of giving it over just now. But the Murderfish stopped shaking the island like a tick-ridden blanket, and you woke up.”

The warrior had risked the enchantress’s life, and saved it. Rescued her to abduct her. Hiresha balanced the two and decided not to shred Emesea to pieces. The warrior could idle a few years imprisoned on a floating island for all Hiresha cared.
I’ll not waste another thought on her.

“Tethiel,” Hiresha said, “let us leave this sea.”

He extended an arm. “Never leave anywhere. Only begin a new arrival.”

“I prefer to leave never’s behind and begin new anywhere’s.” She pressed a diamond into his hand. “Hold this.”

He did not have to. The diamond stuck to his palm. It shone blue light on his chipped nail as he traced a finger around it.

Hiresha leaped between the branches. Flocks of birds parted in tunnels around her and her dazzle of jewels.

“My heart—”

Tethiel lofted after her, towed by the diamond. She caught his arm midair. Her voice had to be loud for anyone to hear over the squawking.

“How certain were you that I could accomplish this?”

“About that….” Tethiel’s eyes dropped to the mangrove island far below them. The muscles in his throat worked.

“Because you ought not to have been more certain than an elder enchantress,” she said. “I thought it less likely than a red diamond.”

“I’ve always known that among diamonds you’re a rarity, my heart. But it was as I said. I only told you what I did about Feasters out of fear the insight would die with me. The mortality of knowledge is the true tragedy of this world.”

“That cannot have been your purpose.” Wind chilled Hiresha’s calves, running up her skirt. She let go of Tethiel, and the two drifted apart. Whitish yellow droppings would have splattered them, but Hiresha could Repulse such trivialities. “You said you speak to your Feaster stooges in your sleep. You could’ve told them anytime and likely already have.”

He bent his head as if starting to bow, but he must have thought better of it when his legs floated upward. “My time is always well spent with you, even when it’s wasted.”

“But your intention was to teach me. You think I’m to become a Feaster, a leech, a slave to your magic.” Frigid anger clawed and scraped within her. She had learned that he knew of the entity within her, the Jeweled Feaster who had wormed her way into Hiresha’s consciousness.

“I’ve lost the knack of youth. The next Lord of the Feast must have willpower to match the lands’ ignorance.”

“I told you I’d never partake in your magic,” Hiresha said.

“The only one who can be trusted to rule is she who wants no crown.”

“I told you we may meet as equals. I said I wanted no more of your help, but it’s clear you disdain my words. Very well. I’ll pay yours as little heed.”

A bird swerved around them in a tilt of black wings. A tail of two feather spines flitted away.

“My heart…Hiresha!”

She left him there, in the air. Among the wings. She intended to let him down, to drag him back to land. Eventually.

Does clarity of mind make every friend intolerable?
Emesea and Tethiel both cared less for Hiresha than her place in their agendas.
They had proven that to Hiresha’s dissatisfaction. Her gem shards churned in an angry buzz around her, and she felt desolate even with her paragon diamond pressed against her chest.

She glided back to the mangroves. A barge had caught her attention. She had heard an anomaly in the sound of the sea and seen the craft surface, bottom up. A long arm dotted by trios of suckers had righted the boat. The Murderfish’s camouflage matched the tones and patterns of the grey barnacles, the brown seaweed, and the ebony of what little boat planking remained visible beneath the sea overgrowth.

Hiresha could see the kraken’s outline, its every movement. Now that she had the power to fly over the Murderfish, she felt no urge to kill it.
Yet, maybe I ought to.
She could only estimate how many people it had ripped apart.

A wave solidified under her toes. Her magic Attracted the water to itself, increasing its surface tension, and she leaped over three hundred feet onto the boat. A halibut flopped across the deck. A sucker sealed around the fish, and the kraken drew it back into the sea.

Both eyes of the Murderfish peeked above the waterline, though only one could face her at a time. The contour of its orb shifted.
Is its lens changing to see better in air?
She met the Murderfish’s gaze.

Hiresha did not flinch. She no longer had reason to. Her diamonds pulsed with frost light as she enchanted them with implosion spells.

Not even Emesea’s blast of a laugh startled the enchantress. The dripping warrior padded across the barge’s deck. “She’s fetched us a new boat. The ol’ girl even had the sweets to bring us our sail.”

The Paragon
’s torn sail of priest robes hung sodden. The Murderfish held the broken mast up with a tentacle. The barge’s original sail must have washed away long ago. Sponges concealed hieroglyphs carved into the beams. Snails with carnival-colored shells crawled over the railing. Hermit crabs scuttled.

The enchantress said, “The Murderfish likely wanted this boat to lure us off the island.”

“Then count us baited.” Emesea brandished her black-stone weapons. “I’d fight over a barge half this seaworthy and full of lepers besides.”

Hiresha hurled her jewels out in a long orbit. She would reel them back with devastating force once the Murderfish reached for her.
Emesea can fend for herself.

Tentacles snaked out of waves, but not for violence as the enchantress had expected. The pigments of one displayed the brilliant violet and teal circle patterns she had seen before. On the other, an image of Hiresha lay in a boat. A pearl of light rolled off her fingers to fall in the water and be gobbled up. The enchantress recognized the scene of herself extracting wild magic from fish. Her dress morphed from purple to sea blue.

Hiresha thought it an odd decoy. Then she was intrigued. The Murderfish never attempted to seize her, and the diamonds completed their arc back to spiral about her hands.

“She’s dancing with us, the beauty.” Emesea gyrated her hips and shook her weapons. The warrior pointed to the tentacles. “The only way she can.”

“This shell-less mollusk is more practical than you.” The enchantress peered at the pattern of eye spots on the rightmost arm. “You’re dancing. It’s trying to communicate.”

An undercurrent of purpose ran through Hiresha, the same as experienced in dreams of great moment. She would have never considered it possible to speak with a kraken, but with the confidence of a dreamer she knew it was within her grasp.

A sense of indulgent contentment had settled over Hiresha, with her diamonds and her wakefulness. She felt no urgency to kill the Murderfish. Doing so would hardly endear herself to her empire, not when enchantresses were valued for their docility and their ability to move pyramid blocks.
Beasts of burden, that’s what they think of us.

She said, “What would a man-killing monster have to say to me?”

She could not resist the puzzle of it, not when she wanted to test the limits of her waking mind. The enchantress balanced on the barge’s railing. Her diamond shards spun in circles mirroring the designs on the Murderfish’s arm.

The eyespots remained the same on the right tentacle. On the left, the pigments changed to the light-cascade of a dream storm. Then the coloration transformed for a third time, to display a great platehead with its eerie armor.

“This sign means ‘wild magic.’” Hiresha nodded to the pattern of three eyespots touching. “That is the commonality between the scenes.”

The Murderfish’s pupil did not change in size, and she saw no other hint of acknowledgement from the kraken.
It can neither hear nor understand me.
Hiresha would prove her comprehension with action. She leaped, touched an albatross on his white belly. The bird’s wings were slender and each longer than a person. The albatross did not even have time to screech in surprise before Hiresha pulled a mote of wild magic from it.

She dropped the bead of light into the sea. The Murderfish’s eye slit yawned wider and moved downward to regard it.

The blue circles on the tentacles shifted, a few moving up and apart. Two more touched and overlapped. The other arm displayed a stinger of a sea scorpion, then in the next blink, an orange squiggle of a snake swimming across the water. Third, the arm pigments mirrored a snail with a tiger-pattern shell.

“All three must be venomous.” Hiresha signaled that she understood the meaning by arranging her diamond dust to copy the ring pattern.

A tentacle rose toward Hiresha. This one was visible to all in its vibrant blue-on-orange patterning. Its deliberate slowness reassured the enchantress. She kept a firm mental hold on her jewels and did not lash out as the tip of the arm uncoiled. The red suckers at the end were no larger than buttons.

The Murderfish reached toward the ship railing, where a tiger snail crawled. From its shell a striped trunk appendage was stretching toward Hiresha’s bare foot. The enchantress had no cause to think the venomous snail would hurt her. She had no plans to provoke it. With her body now charged with a dreamer’s magic, the most toxic bite would be less of a nuisance than a bee sting. Nonetheless, she appreciated the gesture when the kraken pried the venomous snail from the railing and pulled it into the sea.

The images that appeared next on the Murderfish fascinated the enchantress further. She saw herself and the others in
The Paragon
being rescued from the rogue fish by tentacles. Following that scene, fishermen hauled a net on their boat. An octopus with blue eyespots squeezed from between the ropes. The fisherman stabbed at the octopus, but it camouflaged itself with the wood grain. It bit one fisherman, a bright venom spreading into the man’s veins. The octopus clambered up the other person’s back then strangled him. Tentacle arms unwrapped the netting and threw the gasping fish back into the sea.

Despite the killing, Hiresha understood the meaning as “to help” or “to rescue.” She had to wonder if the octopus could have been a smaller and younger version of the Murderfish.
Very young. A memory vision like those of my mirrors?

She thought aloud. “Do you see yourself as a savior then? You protect the sea, yet why did you rescue us?”

The Murderfish had made its vast body visible. Its head was a vibrantly painted dome rippling beneath the waves. Without any facial expression, the kraken gave an impression of serenity.

The enchantress had not wanted an answer from the warrior, but Emesea spoke all the same. “My dragon didn’t say too much about this spotted beauty. But I did learn her name. It’s Skyheart.”

A sense of unreality rippled through Hiresha.
A kraken named Skyheart just plucked a venomous snail from my foot, and I’m learning to communicate with rings of diamonds suspended in the air.  
She wondered if this was a dream, and a sickness pierced Hiresha as if all the gems she had absorbed in her laboratory were trying to rip from her body. Colors in her vision smeared.

This could be real,
she told herself,
reality is impertinently remarkable as well.

Her unease subsided, and her eyesight refocused. A taste of fear remained in her throat like an uncooked fish, cold and slimy.
The dream inversion may not be as stable as I hoped.

“Skyheart.” Hiresha tested the word on her tongue. “For the color of its blood, I presume?”

The warrior had no ready answer. She tried to learn the kraken’s language with Hiresha, but the enchantress could grasp the meaning of each trio of images instantly. The warrior soon busied herself around the once-sunken barge, repairing the rigging and patching the canopy with mangrove branches for shade. She glanced at the kraken and Hiresha with weary admiration.

Learning the language did not take the enchantress long. After two hours and over two thousand words, Hiresha shifted her diamond dust in a series of interlocking designs that meant, “I understand you, Skyheart.”

Eyespots bobbed together and apart along the kraken. Hiresha saw that each arm had its own meaning. The words were, “Human, communicate, it, intelligence, first, and sufficient.” The message was clear when Hiresha read the eyespots starting on the kraken’s crown and moving to its front-most pair of arms and alternating backward.

“It’s the first human smart enough to communicate.”

“We speak amongst ourselves.” Hiresha signaled back, and she used the pattern for the whale’s water-vibrating song for “speak.”

“I have seen many land creatures.” Images of goats, camels, and dogs crossed over Skyheart’s arms. “None are smarter than dolphins. Their songs are weak, and their skins are dead.”

On the last word, the blue rings on the tentacle flared to a violet hue. Hiresha waved to Skyheart’s vivid pigmentation. “Humans should not be judged by their skin colors but by what we build.”

The paragon diamond spun on her fingertip, the pyramid balanced on one point.

The eyespots rearranged themselves, and between them the kraken’s skin darkened to red. “I judge a human by its hunger.”

The kraken referred to people as if they were objects. Hiresha could not say she was surprised. She did the same for it.

Emesea asked, “What’s she saying?”

Hiresha ignored the warrior to signal back. “Your hatred of humans was clear after the umpteenth dismemberment. Why, then, would you try to speak with me?”

“It can handle wild magic. And its blue skin signaled it wanted to communicate.”

The kraken thinks my dress is my skin. Ah, misperceptions, how they turn the world.
The inaccuracy reassured Hiresha that this could be reality.
Unless the Jeweled Feaster added the kraken’s misinterpretation to trick me. She is cunning enough.

Skyheart curled its arms into seashell spirals. When they uncoiled, they read, “I want its help.”

“Before I learn why a kraken needs a human, tell me this. Why do you murder us?”

Except Hiresha knew no pattern for “murder.” Instead she had to describe the tales of how Skyheart dragged out human deaths, how it plucked off limbs, how it tried to juggle Hiresha and the others. What she did not tell was that Skyheart’s life depended on its answer. Her jewels were enchanted to kill.

Their facets reflected crimson from the kraken’s skin. Its eyespots darkened to so deep a shade of purple they looked black. “Humans cut out the intestines of fish and throw them to their dogs. They chop off our heads, flay scales, tear out bones, and pack us in ice. I watched. I learned.”

“I admit, the perspective of a cold-blooded octopus is not one I had considered.” She had to simplify her phrasing into the patterns,
I see this now through your eyes.
“So you hunt humans because we hunted you first?”

“I eat only a little human. There’s no strength in them. No wild magic. And its people are stupid. I try to warn them. I kill. And still it sets sail.”

“The intelligence of humans should always be called into question,” Hiresha replied. “Yet there’s a mortal logic to fishermen. They fear the certainty of starving more than the chance of death in your arms.”

“More of them hunt in the Far and Near Sea. Many more fish die on hooks. You pull us from safety so we gag on air venoms.”

Hiresha asked, “Is this the Far and Near Sea?”

“No. Why would it travel here? It doesn’t even know the sea’s name.”

“Then do you mean the sea beyond the desert, to the north?”
The Sea of Fangs.
Hiresha tried to imagine the Murderfish crawling across the scorching dunes.
Unlikely.
“How do you know of it?”

“Whales travel far. Twice I made the journey, but this sea is my home.” Rather than gesturing at the waters as a person might have, the kraken revolved, its arms spinning like curving spokes on a carriage.

So, it speaks with whales.
Hiresha thought that might explain how the kraken had found them on this floating grove.

“What’s she saying?” Emesea punched at the air in her excitement. “Look at her! She’d make any bird jealous with that color, any princess even.”

Hiresha considered the kraken. It treated humans cruelly, and knowing it did so in defense of other fish was not enough to make Hiresha share the warrior’s glee. The enchantress could understand Skyheart’s horror at seeing fishermen butcher their catch. The kraken did seem a creature of thought and feeling. It was enough to brighten Hiresha’s interest.

If this is a dream,
it is a most diverting one.

The enchantress spoke aloud for Emesea. “The kraken may be sensible enough to negotiate. It wants something from me. Perhaps I might come to be the empire’s emissary to the sea.”

She beckoned to the sky, pulling on the blue diamond she had left on Tethiel’s palm. He descended to the barge. Tethiel said nothing of the kraken or the droppings splattered across the remains of his coat.

“My heart, I believe this must be the best and most elegant boat that ever sank. What will we name it?”

Hiresha nodded toward the hieroglyph on the mast visible between mussels and draping seaweed. “The barge is called
Pharaoh’s Wisdom
. That might explain its grim fate.”

Hiresha enchanted four of her diamonds with Attraction spells that could pull her to safety. With these orbiting around her, she leaped above Skyheart. She wished to distance herself from those on the barge. The kraken did not take the sudden movement well. It blended in with the sea and shot to the side in the water.

She made quick to apologize. “I shouldn’t have moved into your blind spot.”

The skittish gargantuan reappeared to normal sight once Hiresha started signaling again with her diamond dust.

“After you saved us from the rogue fish, you asked who we were, what we were doing at sea.” The enchantress could read the eyespot patterns in hindsight. “This is Emesea—”

Skyheart interrupted. “The dragon child. I knew what it was after it cut me.”

“—and that is the Lord of the Feast. He prefers cannibalism to sea food, if that is a reassurance. I am the Lady of Gems. I only wished to cross over this sea to escape the prejudices of my fellow man.”

The Murderfish tilted its body to the side to gaze up at her with an eye. “Lady of Gems, the sea is your journey. It is our home. My name is Skyheart.”

“Most exceptional to meet you, Skyheart. Understand that any agreement we make must include safe passage for myself and my associates.” She knew the sign for “friend” or “partner” but used instead the pattern that suggested that they were less close, only members of her fish school.

Skyheart’s eyespots took on hues of cyan. Its tentacles made flicking motions toward Hiresha. “Might I still juggle it? It would be most safe. I never miss a catch. Except on purpose.”

“No.” Hiresha wondered if the green tint to its markings indicated a jest. “You may now tell me of your request.”