Verse IX

  It was on an early tide that they arrived in the Mere Sangolia -- far earlier than Ardenne would have preferred. The light of the firmament was a bare glimmer above, and in the distance she could see the glints of the night feeders and their lures as they retreated to their dens for the day. The lines of her skin were alive and prickling, reading the currents in advance of anything big passing through. The worst threats did not need lures to catch their fill.

  Everyone else had been warned into silence upon waking to the darkness before the morning hour awoke, and not a word passed between them as they cleared the evening resting spot and entered the great flow for the last strokes of their journey. There were better hours of the day to swim the backwaters of the reef -- practically any hour of the day, in fact -- but the last thing they wanted right then was for some mer to witness their arrival.

  And no one did. They reached the little hollow in the reef, the one that she and her mother had used so often for long forays into the deep waters, and the only soul to see was the brown octopus that had taken up residence in one crevice. The little one gave up its hidey-hole quickly if begrudgingly, and they gave it room to move as it left. Sera in particular kept out of its way, pulling Rhiela back by the elbow when the princess tried to pet it.

  Diana was settled into the hole itself, with what padding they could provide. The twins anchored the float above it to form a shelter large enough for them all. It wouldn't be terribly comfortable, seven mers pressed together like that, but it did the job. Unpacking began in earnest once the morning hour was bright. The bundles that came with the float were filled with far more than she'd at first thought, which confirmed her suspicion that Sera had made arrangements to get away well before they made their attempt on the palace. Everything they had ordered from Baba Rill was there, as well as tightly wrapped rolls of tent material. Soon enough they had a tall band looped around, with a roof fluttering lightly in the currents.

  Rook and the princess took the task of unpacking the library of shells and sorting it between them. The sight of that made the hunter shake her head. The markings on the flat scallops were nothing more than the tracks of bore-worms to her, only straight and sharp instead of wriggling backwards and forwards. She and her mother had left the matter of letters to the elders and the rune-workers. The schools never signed their presence on the current, after all.

  Mother... Two days had come and gone, and still Diana was not responsive. Ardenne could not even look at her now, settled limp on the sand and receiving what ministrations Sera could manage. There was more silver in that brown hair than before, and lines were drawn more deeply upon her mother's face. Afterimages of violet force crackled across the darkness behind Ardenne's eyelids, and the ghosts of the grey mers haunted her dreams.

  Her blood flowed chill in the warmth of the morning firmament. This was no way to live, to swim, to hunt, but as long as her mother was unconscious she was trapped in this singular current which spun her round and round in circles.

  "I'm going to scout around," she announced loudly, surprising even herself with the volume of her words. Without further explanation, she grabbed her spear from where it lay stuck in the sand and pushed off into the morning waters. As she swam, she listed all the reasons why this was a good idea, hoping and praying to find one that was truer than the simple urge to escape.

  Verse X

  "What now?" Sera growled the question out. Ardenne's departure took them all by surprise, but her own words were the first to shake the waters clear of the green mer's wake. Depths take her, but Ardenne was acting like the most funge-brained, spoiled brat she'd every laid eyes on, and she'd met the princess!

  "Let her go for a bit." That came from one of the twins. Probably Jumella. "We can't blame her for how she feels, if we can even ken all of it. I don't doubt the two of us would be in a similar state if our mother was like this."

  Frankly, she couldn't, but her life had certainly been a different one from that of the hunter or the twins. "If you say so. Still damn annoying."

  Speaking of annoyances... She scowled in the general direction of the princess, who had returned to the now-deflated floot to root through its packed goods like they were her own property. The nerve of a royal, as Megael would put it. Act like you own the place, and somehow people started to believe that you did. Then you could loot it for all it was worth. That had certainly worked for the royal House of Brynduin, all these centuries.

  With a squeal of delight, the top-heavy idiot pulled a prize from the float. From where she sat, Sera could not be sure of what it was, but it looked like a large conch shell wrapped in some garishly colored clothes. Her scowl turned to a puzzled frown. That had not been among the items she'd bargained out of old Baba, had it? The outfits certainly had not.

  "Oh! She did it! She did it!" the royal chum burbled into the open water. "I wasn't sure she'd have the chance, but she did!"

  "What are you yapping about?" Sera yelled over to her.

  "This conch," Rhiela explained, bringing it over for her inspection. The thick outer layer of the shell was covered in etched runes that glittered silver in the morning light. "It's part of a set that Marai was working on. If you speak into the mouth of one, then words come out of the other. Oooh!" the blithering mer squealed again. "I asked Marai to pick this up from our room if she could, and she did! We agreed to wait till the evening hours before we would try to call each other, but waiting is so hard!"

  "Sure is, for some of us," the red mer opined. "But the rest of us have more self control. So you're tellin' me that this shell's voice can reach all the way to Bryndoon?"

  "Maybe? Marai wasn't sure. Ministra Marhyd probably knows all the limits, but she was never one to share secrets, you know. This is probably one of the few working shells of its kind in all the seas, and nobody knows we have it."

  "Nobody but your Marai, and Mother of Pearl only knows who she's told."

  Her Wobbliness was suddenly up in Sera's face, eyes a-blazing. "Marai isn't lilke that! She's the kindest, sweetest, most trustworthy mer in all the seas, and you saw her face when we rescued Messra Diana! There is no way she would help h... the ministra. Not after that!"

  "Alright, alright." Sera pushed the princess away, and none too gently. The golden mer shrieked, though Sera doubted that it had hurt too much. Rhiela had all that padding, and so it flowed that she was well protected from frontal assaults. "See if you can get it working this evening, then. But not by yourself. I wanna listen in, maybe have a word or two myself. Might be we could learn something useful. But no telling her exactly where we are!" she warned. "What she doesn't know can't hurt us."

  "Understood," the princess said with a sour face.

  "Good. Now, if you'll excuse me, got more important things to do than jabber with you all morning."

  "As do I." Rhiela huffed and then returned to the stacked packages of shells.

  Sera shook her head as she stroked Messra Diana's hair. Beneath her hands, the older mer shifted like a dreamer in her sleep. It wasn't a remarkable thing at all, save that Diana had not so much as twitched since they'd removed her from that blasted circle of purple light. Sera traced out the healing runes upon another strip of kelpen bandages, muttered the syllables to bring forth the magic, and pressed it to Diana's forehead. It wasn't much, but every little bit helped, it seemed.

  Verse XI

  Ardenne had chosen this place to camp, this spot on the reef, because it was so rarely traveled. Except for her mother and herself, no one came this way to hunt or gather, and it showed. The broad swathes of rooted grass were unbroken by track or trace, and the currents sent waves of glimmering silver and green across their tops. Upon the body of the reef itself, coral blooms sent their little fingers into the open water, and sponges formed massive towers which shifted and swayed in the current.

  There were fishes of all colors, shells and clams of all sizes, and mobs of lobsters dueled for space in the sand and silt. But no mers, no patches of cultivated roots or kelp, no signs of the hunt. Ardenne could spin and dive and pretend that she was all alone in the sea.

  Was that what she wanted? A corner of her mind cried yes -- yes to the solitude, yes to the safety of being by herself. Other thoughts nagged at her, reminded her of friendships and duties in which she'd become entangled. But no, no no -- she could not go back just yet. Her flukes quivered and shook, and her nerves gripped her throat until she was choking on her own water.

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  Memories of red seeped through her mind, bloody like the bodies she had left in her wake. Where that strength came from, she did not know, but she could sorely use it now. She needed strength, needed purpose, needed...

  Her mother. She needed her mother, and that was not possible now.

  Of their own accord, her flukes propelled her forward, guiding her into more familiar waters. This entire region of the reef had been her playground, her refuge from the taunts of the other daughters of her age group. She knew its rolls and curves like her own, could tell how far she was from home by the taste of the currents and the feel of their sway against the lines of her tail. It was just that her brain was not concerning itself with such things at the moment, which was how she came to be lost.

  Perhaps 'misdirected' was the better word, as she realized after a few moments that she had gone the wrong way. Instead of back towards the camp, her flukes had taken her along the inner arc of the main reef, towards the sheltered shallows where many of the local crops were transplanted. The firmament hung low over her head, perhaps eight fathoms from the sand and silt, and with a warmth that tickled her skin.

  By this hour of the morning, the daily work of uprooting encroachments of sargo clumps had ended, and other nighttime arrivals were also dealt with. Most of the gatherers would be out on the tides, locating new stands of pod plants and root-grasses to bring back her for storage and food preparation. There was only one set of flukes in motion that Ardenne could see now, one mottled brown form darting around the managed plants. Lyrika was slicing long strips of kelp with a shell knife, readying them for their place between the grinding stones that would make them usable in weaving.

  She should have turned tail and left, should have fled before the questions inevitably came, but Ardenne's body was as stiff and still as a coral spar. The green mer floated in place, neither approaching nor retreating, until the young gatherer noticed her floating there stupidly.

  "Ardenne?" The mer's voice was a whisper on the waters. "Ardenne!" And then it cracked as Lyrika's excitement sent it into a high squeak. The name had barely passed the hunter's ears when the brown mer barreled into her. Skinny arms held her close, and a freckled face pressed against her flat chest. The next few words barely made it into the water. Ardenne heard them more through her own skin: "They said you were dead, that the orcs got you. Gran'mama ordered a memorial song."

  "She did? I'm sorry to have missed it." There was a hiccup from her chest that might have been a laugh. "I... I needed them to think I was dead, before they could get around to doing it themselves. Mother's... we got her out, but she's hurt bad."

  "We?" Lyrika pulled her face away just enough to give the hunter a questioning look.

  "Yeah, I made some friends along the way. Sort of." In truth, she was not sure how to describe the likes of Sera, the twins, or Rook -- much less the princess. Things had just happened. "You'd like them, I think."

  "So you're coming home now, for real?"

  She bit her lip, wishing she did not have to answer that one. "Not yet, I..."

  "What!" The smaller mer pushed herself away, looking Ardenne straight in the face now. "Why not? No one's cleared your grotto yet, so you're free to move right back in."

  How to explain, how to explain... "It's not that simple. I can't, I mean, it's not, I... A lot of things happened in Bryndoon. Good things, bad things, I don't know how to explain things. There are a lot of mers right now who are very angry with me, most likely, and they have some idea of where I live. If I'm there when they arrive, it'll be bad for everyone. Depths. It might be bad for everyone even if I'm not there." Loose green hair whipped as she tried to shake sense into her own words. "Just... just warn your grandmother, please? And, and give her my apologies. I never intended... I needed Mother too much not to..."

  The brown mer grabbed Ardenne by the ears and kissed her until the words ceased to sputter into the open water. Then she kissed her for many beats after that. Lyrika's tail curled around hers, and her nimble fingers buried deep into Ardenne's mass of green hair.

  The hunter's heart thumped hard enough to shake the firmament, and her veins scalded with their heat. A spasm clenched her guts so hard that she winced from the pain, and that brought them both back to the present waters. With no small amount of regret on her face, Lyrika broke off the kiss.

  "What's the matter?" she asked.

  "I'm not sure," said Ardenne. "Something feels wrong."

  "Oh, it's not me, is it? I've never, er, never tried to, um..."

  "Kiss someone like that?"

  "Yeah." A light blush spread behind Lyrika's freckles.

  "No, you didn't do anything wrong. It... it almost felt too right. Like, too much, too good. I felt like I was going to burst." She still did, in fact. The way Ardenne's innards quaked in that moment, even the slightest caress might kill her with sensation. She could barely endure the motion of the currents upon her skin... Depths. She'd gone swimming off to cool her nerves, and she had never been less calm than now.

  "I, I really need to go," she said. "I need to be there when Mother wakes up."

  "But you'll be back? Soon?" Lyrika did not look as though she would ever release her grip on Ardenne without some sort of assurance.

  "Yes."

  "You'd better." Lyrika retrieved her basket from where it had fallen in the sand. "I don't want to wait another two weeks for a kiss like that."

  Neither did Ardenne. She wished she dared, but she was doing well just to keep afloat right then. They somehow made their goodbyes without touching again, though her skin remained hot against the waters. Only the thought of Mother, still lying unconscious back at camp, kept Ardenne from grabbing the little gatherer and doing... what? She wasn't sure. Romance had never been a thing she had imagined herself trying.

  Now, as the silt-grass fields passed beneath her flukes, she could hardly think of anything else.

  Verse XII

  Ministra Marhyd's personal workshop was of a piece with its mistress: round, expansive, with all the appearance of comfort and welcome but none of the substance. Its nacreous walls were shaded to a different hue from the rest of the structures on the cliff, though Aysmin did not know how that might be possible. All the shell-works came from the same source, so it had to be some trick of the ministra's. The rotund mer was full of them.

  One was right before her eye now. "And what am I looking at?" the duchess asked. The shimmery... item floated freely in the middle of the chamber, rotating slowly in her wake as she circled around it. The item was roughly triangular, but with curved edges that reminded her more of certain shells from the Mere Hetropa. Little else about it resembled anything she knew, however, except perhaps for ice. It was smooth like ice, but neither chill nor warm. Little traces of light followed her fingers as they traced along its surface, but a sudden nudge spun in its wake cavities of brightness that hurt the eyes to witness.

  "I would give plenty pearl to have the answer to that question," said the ministra. "I seem to recall something in the records of my foremothers that might have some relevance... or not; it has been a long time since I read through those shells. I should away to the family estate in the Mere Tessra? soon, to check. But not now." The fat mer clapped her hands with barely contained glee. "Not when there are so many exciting things to do here still."

  "Yes, about those..." It should not have surprised Aysmin how quickly the runic weapons project was coming along now that it had official approval from the council. It would be just like the ministra to have conducted illicit research in private and while the mer confessed to nothing, it was obvious that some of the equipment coming from her inner labs had been years in the making.

  The council was satisfied now that something was being done, even if they did not understand most of it. The other duchesses were ecstatic over anything that would help against the abominable menace. Mitera Yesca was often seen grinding her teeth in barely repressed, seething fury. As for herself, Aysmin was not sure how to feel. Knowing the ministra as well as she did, disquiet and worry were good places to start.

  "How goes the training?" she asked, finally. Instruction in these new weapons had been left to the ministra, as she was the only mer who understood them, but while Marhyd was many things, a patient teacher and diligent instructor she was not.

  "It goes. The din Hillia girls are making progress in their studies. I adapted the methods I use to instruct my assistants, and the new regimen has done wonders."

  A miracle, rather. The duchess did not ask for details; she did not have the stomach for it. Some things were better left unknown. In times like these, where the seas had turned dangerous and crowded with things which ought not to exist, it was the result that mattered most. They could worry later over the means Marhyd used to accomplish it. "So when shall we see these wonders in action?" she managed to inquire.

  "Soon enough. Perhaps even by the end of the week, though I cannot say for sure. My pretty little dolls may need more work before they are presentable. So it goes, so it goes." Marhyd punctuated the sentence with a burst of her usual staccato chuckle. "And how fare you with the matter of the princess?"

  Aysmin idly twirled the strangely lit item into a tight whirl as she sighed. "No sightings, no word. No sign of where these mers might have gone with her. The Guard is kept busy with the security of the Mere Le?na and of the Temple's upcoming pilgrimage, and the trackers by themselves are beset by things that cannot be described by dead mers. We need those weapons."

  "I know. They will be ready soon. But if you need to track Her Highness, why not ask the mitera for help?" Marhyde chuckled to a joke only she understood. "Ask for an augury or somesuch. The Temple has its ways."

  "They can vouch that Rhiela is alive," the duchess admitted. "But not much else."

  A dismissive snort from the ministra. "Oh, they can do better than that, if they dare. But they won't. Ah, well. In my purely mundane and unenlightened opinion, you should send a pod out to the obvious destination: the Mere Sangolia. They can ride the greater flows and be there in a day or two, yes? And no scary monsters lurk therein, so I imagine that Grett or another like her would not turn down the assignment. It's not that difficult, really. Whatever has happened with Her Highness, the main incident was all about Messra Diana and her daughter, Ardenne."

  The waters rang with the force of a punch, slamming through the ears and across the waters of the mind with flickers of light trailing darkness in their wake. Aysmin dropped to the floor of the chamber with her hands over her ears, for all the good that it did her. The ministra stayed floating, or rather drifting in place with not a muscle twitching. The sound came and went in a beat, but it was almost a full verse before Aysmin could bring herself to rise again, or for Marhyd to come out of her strange fugue.

  "What. Was. That." The words somehow survived the trip through a jaw locked in phantom pain.

  The ministra stared at the floating item. "I would give everything to know the answer to that question..." she murmured.

  Duchess Aysmin had faced down pods of orcs, hunted the narwhal of the farthest north, and had even once fought a kraken that had arisen from the depths on the edge of the Mere Tessra?. Somehow, the ministra's simple assertion chilled her blood more than anything had. Her exit from the chambers was polite, but quick.