Mervidia (48 page)

Zane and Cassondra
approached the head table, which had been set up at the end of the long room. It was the most lavishly decorated with a red kelp tablecloth and topped with the largest portions of meat and other foods. Zane pulled out Cassondra’s chair, made of fanning blue coral edged in white. Once she was seated, he pushed her in towards the table.

As he sat, Cassondra saw that Captain Raygo and his
soldiers had swum in behind Zane, with Aness and her other two handmaidens trailing behind the Serfin. The Coral Assembly entered next and was followed by the remainder of the attending guests. Captain Raygo floated beside the King’s chair and Aness waited behind Cassondra, ready to attend her mistress as everyone took their seats. It was not long before the merwin were all settled, and the ballroom filled with the sounds of feasting, excited chatter, and merrymaking.

Cassondra ate her fill, savoring the flavor of fresh uklod flesh along with her husband, who smiled at her as they heartily partook of the sumptuous meal.
The tender meat melted in the ethyrie’s mouth, making her hunger for more. Zane seemed to be enjoying his meal as well by the way he was continuously shoveling it into his mouth, either that or he was using the food to keep his mouth occupied and therefore unable to converse with his new wife.

I wouldn’t have
expected him to be shy
, Cassondra thought,
but he hasn’t said a word to me since our vows.
When she managed to catch his eye, he kept looking away as if ashamed. The ethyrie was not really in the mood to talk yet anyway. They would be alone soon enough in the royal bedchamber, where there would be plenty of time for awkward conversation before they consummated their marriage. Cassondra finished eating and beckoned Aness forward.

“The blade and the spear, if you please,” she said to her head handmaiden.

“Yes, Lady Consort,” Aness replied and signaled to one of the other ladies-in-waiting, who came forward with two bundles in her hands, wrapped in shark skin and bound with eel gut cording. Cassondra rose and received the items, her ascension causing King Zane to get up as well in a gentlemanly fashion. Seeing the king and his consort rise, the guests nearest them quieted. As the rest of the assembled merwin noticed the silence, the room’s conversation quickly died down to hushed whispers with all eyes on the royal pair.

“My Liege, my husband,” Cassondra said, holding out the smaller bundle to Zane, who gently received it.
“I offer you a gift of my own making. It is a spell-crafted coral dagger. I assure you that the blade will always remain sharp, and it will never break.” Zane pulled on the strings, freeing the blade from the skin. He grasped the sharkskin grip and drew out the refined crimson blade, twice the length of his hand, from its sheath. “It is made of fire coral from King’s Reef and will sting the skin, so be careful only to hold it by the handle.”
The King gazed at it in awe; a weapon finely-crafted and magically enhanced alone was a rarity. One made from the monarchs of Mervidia’s burial reef was priceless.

“I will treasure it always,” Zane said, placing the dagger back in its sheath
and affixing it to his belt. “Thank you.” He took her free hand, squeezing it gently. Cassondra smiled, in way of reply.

“And for your brave captain,” Cassondra said turning to Raygo.
“I have something that, while I came to rightfully own, should belong to you.” The ethyrie captain swam forward, as Aness handed her mistress the second item. As soon as the royal consort handed over the long bundle, the captain’s eyes widened. His enthusiastic smile indicated that he knew right away what it was she was giving him. Cassondra guessed that the weight of the weapon is what gave it away, so used to it as he had become in his cycles of wielding it. Setting decorum aside, Raygo tore at the straps, eagerly ripping the skin away. The yellow spell-hardened spear tip was exposed first, followed by a haft of polished white bone. “My uncle gave you the weapon. Who am I to defy his wishes? I return it to you. Take it and let there be peace between us once more.”

“My Lady Consort,” Raygo said with bated breath, bowing before her and careful to keep the spear inoffensively upright.
“You have my sincere thanks.” He floated next to her for a moment, as if he wanted to say more but could not find the right words. “Thank you,” he simply said and backed away, bowing again as he withdrew, giving the royal pair some semblance of privacy as they sat once more. The attendees burst into approving clapping and cheers. After the praise faded, they returned to their feasting.

“That was very kind of you,” King Zane said softly.
“I am not sure how you came to have the spear, but you honor him
and me
with your kindness.”

Cassondra smiled, “I have much to make amends for, and my hope is to be able to do more.”
Zane squeezed her hand once again.

The night passed with much celebration but event
ually the royal pair grew weary of the loud noise and boisterous behavior.  After a time, Zane regarded their dinner guests, who were paying them no mind, continuing to feast until their bellies swelled and threatened to burst. “If my lady wife is done eating, would you care to retire?” the king asked. A nervous grin played on his lips.

“Yes, I would,” Cassondra replied, more quickly than she had intended.
Her heart began to beat faster, as anxiety took hold of her body, knowing all too well what was expected of her once they entered their bedchamber. Zane nodded and took her hand.

The
king and his royal consort rose from their chairs. The ballroom’s inhabitants mirrored their movement, floating upwards and grinning as the pair moved away from the high table. Zane led Cassondra through a side door to a winding ramp, which would take them up the palace’s main tower to their private rooms. She looked forward to being away from the rowdy shouts of their guests, who were loudly
encouraging
them in their bedchamber endeavors. Cassondra’s white skin flushed the color of her pink hair at some of the bawdier remarks shouted after them.

Chapter Forty-T
hree

The royal consort lay in bed next to her husband, listening to his deep rhythmic breathing, feeling cool water wash across her bare skin as it exited the gills along his sides. Zane was on his back, and his hips were tucked in under the red kelp sheet. Cassondra lay on her side watching him, her head propped up in her hand. Drawn by the room’s subtle current, small tendrils of his red hair snaked up around his still face. The king slept deeply, as she had expected he would, after the life changing events of the day.

Zane had been so nervous when they had first entered the bedchamber.
Though, he had still performed his duty as husband well, even after admitting that his heart had belonged to Marin of House Chimaera the previous day.

That was a strange revelation
, Cassondra thought.
Marin is a merwin I’ll have to keep an eye on in the future. It seems that our fates are intertwined, since I had a vision that saved her life.
Her mind drifted, feeling at peace and thinking over the events of the last few days all the way up to the present.

The
ethyrie’s earlier uneasiness had been caused more so by the room itself. The bedchamber hadn’t been used after Beryl’s assassination. Since then, Iago had slept in the adjoining rooms, not wanting to be reminded of his wife’s death. Cassondra didn’t blame him; the space still maintained a strange feeling of dread, still potent to her machi senses. Death left an imprint of sorts, a dimming in the room’s light or an area of intense cold, which was detectable by merwin with magical talents for days and sometimes cycles afterwards in cases of murder. Having grown up with her empathic gifts and constant exposure to those types of evocative places, the feeling didn’t bother Cassondra too much.

The
ethyrie glanced up yet again at the elongated edges of the giant clam that served as the royal bed, rising up like the Fangs upon a merwin’s brow except for the ends spiraling as they approached the opening in the top of the canopy. It was there that Beryl’s body had been found by Iago, her ethyrie tendrils and hair a tangled mess that garishly bound her to the canopy’s spires.

At least the blue mattress and sheet have been replaced since the assassination
, Cassondra thought.
If I do things right, the bed won’t have to be changed again.
She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with fresh water.
Enough procrastination. It is time.

Cassondra leaned over her
neondra husband, reached through the space between the bed’s tines to the nightstand, and slid her wedding gift to Zane from its sheath. He had left the weapon there when they had undressed. Being made of coral, the dagger was light and easy for her to wield. She held him down, one hand on his chest and her hips pressed against his. The king began to stir, his eyes groggily starting to open.

With the necessary speed yet careful precision, Cassondra deftly cut across her husband’s neck, slitting Zane’s throat
from gill to gill. It was a fast cut with a straight blade, so the wound was not as neat as she would have liked. However, it had accomplished her intended purpose; the injury was mortal.

Zane opened his eyes wide.
His hands clasping around his opened neck, watching in horror as the water filled with his blood. The ethyrie pinned him down as he tried to buck her off of him, pushing his tail into the mattress in an attempt to arch upwards, but he didn’t have the power to do so, the wound at his throat was rapidly sapping his strength. His gills flared uselessly, drawing in water only to have it flow out the gaping rent in his flesh. Before he died, Zane fixed Cassondra with a confused betrayed look, and then the light faded from his eyes, leaving them lifeless and staring.

Waiting a few moments more to ensure he was truly dead, Cassondra began to mend his neck.
Her free hand glowed yellow, as she gently held it over her dreadful handiwork. She felt the tingling of power flow through her body as she willed the dead flesh to close and envisioned sewing tiny stitches to bind the severed skin back together. The invocation was somewhat easier than she had expected. Cassondra wasn’t trying to bring him back to life, but closing such a large cut, so that not even a scar remained, was no paltry task.

“Return to how you were, whole and unblemished, yet without your life returned,” the
ethyrie said lowly, feeling morose and drained by the spell she had cast. “Sleep, my king.” The wound at Zane’s neck closed, and the skin became flawless once more, as if nothing had happened at all. Cassondra ran her fingertips over his eyes, closing them with a sigh.

He would have been a good king
, Cassondra thought, pondering Zane’s handsome face and tracing his lips that she had recently kissed with her finger. She quickly dismissed the notion.
He was not a member of the Divine Family. He wasn’t even an ethyrie.

She turned her attention to the fire coral dagger and gathered power for another spell.
“Vapoura!” she said pointedly at the weapon, which she had created with Ambrose’s help. The word was spoken with determination and bombarded the coral in her hand with shadowy purple tendrils of kalku sorcery. The dagger, and the sheath on the nightstand, disintegrated, reduced to powder. Rubbing her hands together, the chalky remnants of the blade further clouded the befouled water, mixing with the blood of her mate into a sticky amalgamation.

Letting go of Zane’s chest, Cassondra rose up and swam
to the bedchamber’s balcony, passing over the kelp rugs and her wedding gown which had been laid over one of the room’s bone-crafted chairs. Lifting the locking bar, she cast open the doors and sucked in fresh seawater, purging her lungs of Zane’s lifeblood.

Cassondra turned so that her back was propped against the jamb.
She calmed her racing heart, feeling both exalted and terrified at what she had just done. Now she would wait, letting the room clear of magical energies and blood alike. In the morning, the royal consort would awake to a dead husband, who everyone would assume had passed naturally in his sleep. There was no wound and no weapon as evidence of foul play.

I’ve done it Beryl
, Cassondra thought, looking across the tiny orihalcyon sigils and lamps marking Mervidia’s houses, dots of civilization in a consuming blackness.
You envisioned it all.

The
ethyrie remembered her cousin’s words as if Beryl still swam next to her.

“The Divine Family must sit on the throne,” Beryl had said, holding her cousin’s hands as they floated at Cassondra’s bedchamber door, saying their goodbyes.
“We cannot live simply beside it, if Mervidia is to survive. Our line grows weak and my mother’s infertility has been passed on to me. But, there are still some of us who are fit to rule. I will allow what I have seen to come to pass. I will give my life, Cass, to ensure that our city lives on. You must be brave and meticulously follow my instructions. You mustn’t tell anyone or our plan will fail. Not even your mother. I love you. Make House Lumen proud, Cass.” Those last words had stuck with Cassondra, and they continued to haunt her even now. She was troubled about what she had had to do in the last few days, of what she had become, even though she had done it all for the sake of Mervidia’s future.

Machi, kalku, and now assassin
, the ethyrie thought.
I am jellod, octolaide and faera all in one. And now, I embody a seifeira with the child I will bear, my body a field of rich kelp growing Mervidia’s next king.

Cassondra put a hand to her abdomen and felt the life already beginning to develop there.
She closed her eyes, sensing Zane’s seed taking root in her egg. Suddenly dizzy, an image formed in her head of a merwin with long red hair sitting on Mervidia’s throne, the Fangs resting on his brow.
Zane’s hair, but the shape of my eyes,
Cassondra smiled.
I shall rule in your stead, my son, until you come of age.

She opened her eyes, shaking her mind away from the vision, and looked back at Zane’s limp body in the bed.
The blood had mostly dispersed out the open patio door, and it appeared to the casual eye as if he merely continued to slumber. Her eyes were drawn to her manta ray wedding gown, as the bioluminescent spots of light faded and blinked out, the final life of the animals following their spirits. The ethyrie tried not to take the timing of their expiration as in ill omen but as fitting closure.

A stab of regret pierced her heart, but Cassondra knew that in time that feeling would lessen and finally fade away, especially as she witnessed the city recovering from the travesties of late.

I am a grogstack in that I resemble a monster, at least on the inside, for what I have done. I exemplify their beliefs by devouring Zane’s spirit to feed a higher purpose,
Cassondra added to her earlier line of thought, the underlying message of her contemplations coming together and forming a link between the races that she did not realize had existed, until right then.
I am also as strong as a neondra, exerting myself in ways I never dreamed,
Cassondra thought. Her time in the Deep Mines had been brutal, using her own fin and flukes to flee the two murderous grogstack
.

She looked out over the city and floated away from the jamb, moving further out onto the balcony and feeling the open-water current flow through her unbound pink locks and across her bare body.
She did not shiver; she embraced the cold.

Finally, I am
, of course, an ethyrie
,
Cassondra concluded.
I bear the burden on my people’s future, guiding their lives through my visions. I carry all the races within me, and I will lead them. Our city will now flourish. Mervidia has paid the price with blood and sacrifice.

Cassondra thought of all the merwin who had perished recently.
She could taste the tinge of blood on the water, belonging to merwin, uklod, and shark alike. There was also a trace of burnt flesh, still lingering from the colossal squid’s demise at Kopawe. Despite her soured palate, the ethyrie’s mind had reached a peaceful transcendence.

The blood of one monarch
began this time of turmoil, and now the blood of another ends it.
The irony of that rumination was not lost on House Lumen’s daughter. The circular pattern of events, rotating back to its starting point, was strangely fitting and left the merwin with a feeling of wholeness.

“With your deaths, Mervidia will find new life… and thrive,” Cassondra said, staring defiantly at the Deeps beyond the city.