Dhravan rose finally. So much had happened since the evening he encountered the woman. She was dead, but she had done damage before he managed to kill her. The song had started, and he felt the urge to stop breathing. He felt the urge to walk off his balcony. It hadn’t been easy to break the spell.

  Pain was a distraction. Pain tuned out all other senses, and he had a knife wound to prove that it worked. It wasn’t the first time had been stabbed, but it was the first time in over a decade, and it was the first wound he had inflicted on himself. Pain was the reason he was still alive. Dhravan thought the palace at least was safe from attack. He had spent years making it so, for Raval and Eshal.

  He was grateful to the woman who tried to murder him. She had at least chosen to go after him instead of Eshal. He’d placed guards at every corners. He’d noticed that the housemaids tended to sing as they worked, and he had banned music from his wing of the palace. It would be a long while before music caused anything but fear.

  Eshal slept in his quarters now. The child was recovering from Raval’s death, but he had started attending to some of his duties as king. It was a valiant effort, but no one found the child sitting on the throne with his toy to be an inspiring sight. It did not instill confidence in the nation. Instead, his presence only brought to focus the difference between him and the adults around him.

  But Dhravan could not afford to focus on protecting Eshal from branches of the family who wanted to rise to power. He had to think bigger, on how to protect his grandson along with the whole of Noumin from a far more terrible, unbelievable enemy. The woman’s body was in the dungeons, being tested by the royal physicians and scholars. He already knew what she was, but he needed confirmation that he was not going mad. She was a creature from his childhood stories, the kind of beast that his mother told him about to scare him into obedience. When sailors went missing from the coast, she was one of the beasts that was blamed.

  He should have kept her alive. If he had been better and younger, it would not have been such a close fight. He could have cut off her tongue and found out more about her and her kind. If she was real, then it was possible that everything else was as well. Some people believed in gods and magic, but he never had. He prayed to the gods because there was no harm in it, but he always thought the world was too ugly for magic to exist in it. He had never realized that magic could be just as ugly.

  At his desk, he had a pile of scrolls ready to be read. The outside world and most of Noumin still thought he was ill and on the verge of death. He preferred it that way. Their defenses were down, and the rats were coming out of the sewers. He now knew who was loyal and who were just good at acting. Soon, once his plans were in place, he would clean through the ranks.

  There was no news from Daivia, other than the formal wishes for his recovery. The emperor was keeping his plans close to his chest, and Dhravan was mildly concerned. Noumin could fend off attacks from the inside and from surrounding smaller nations, but Daivia was another thing. There was no reason for Vayu to show them any loyalty. He couldn’t expect a girl exiled and then traded to another kingdom to have any degree of fondness for her so-called family, or show mercy to a child who had usurped her position.

  For the moment though, there was silence, and that was not the worst news. Perhaps they were content with their end of the deal. They had access to Noumin’s ports, which was what they wanted in the first place. Vayu was a pretty girl, and she would make a good queen. The little that he knew of Vayu, she was not a vengeful girl. Then again, vengeance was a luxury many couldn’t afford. As a novice she held no power, but as crown princess of a massive empire she could find more than a thousand ways to trouble them if she only wished it.

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  Dhravan browsed through the scrolls from his spies to take his mind off of the possible plots against him. There was nothing gained by needless worry. Until he knew more, there was nothing he could do. His time was better served solving more immediate problems, like the one waiting for him beneath the palace.

  Slowly, Dhravan made his way to the dungeons. He never liked going into the dungeons, and the smell of rotting flesh only worsened the experience. The previous occupants of the dungeons had been sent to the city jail instead, and the floor now only had one occupant. Golden light emanated from the cell furthest away from the stairs, and Dhravan walked towards it. The cell’s sole window, a small triangle a few feet above his head, offered little light. To compensate, there were candles and lanterns lining every inch of the room. He had invited scholars from the university to come and examine her body, and those curious and brave enough had taken up residence in the palace.

  The scholars wore cloth masks doused in scented oils as they stood over the body. The woman was just a collection of parts now, sliced open for their understanding. They were examining the structure of her throat, picking apart the fibers of muscle that was falling apart there. Dhravan was uninterested in that part of her anatomy. Instead, he made his way to the lower half of her body. Seconds after her death, her legs had morphed into a fish’s tail. They had stayed that way since, and there was no sign of her ever possessing anything other than the scales and tail.

  “What do we know?” Dhravan asked. It was a question he asked each day, and the scholars were finally giving him some answers.

  “We’ve found one thing, my lord,” one of the scholars said. In front of him, there was a thin sliver of flesh on a glass plate. Dhravan tried not to dwell on whether the flesh looked more human or fish. The scholar placed a candle against the flesh, and it ignited. It burned brighter than oil, quicker than gunpowder, until there was nothing left but a line of ash.

  “So they will burn,” Dhravan said. It made sense that creatures of the water would be weak against fire.

  “Yes, my lord,” the scholar said. He was a younger man, and he looked towards the elder men in the room for assurance. When he got it, he continued. “As they are weak against fire, similarly they are stronger in water. We kept some parts of the body in water, and it has stayed much the same instead of decomposing. We think they might heal faster or be stronger when they’re in water.”

  If only they had stayed in the water, Dhravan thought. If the beasts had stayed in their territory, there would have been no deaths. The woman’s torso was on one of the tables, her arms spread out wide and pinned in place with deep nails. She was beautiful, even in death. It was an uncanny kind of beauty, too symmetrical. There were no scars on her face, no pocks from illness, no freckles from sunshine. Her hair was flat and lifeless, but it was a beautiful shade of dark brown. In death, her face reminded him more of a marble statue than a piece of meat. Even without her voice, she might have been able to enchant her way into creating mischief.

  The stories about them had existed for centuries. Sirens, mer people, dragons, unicorns, trolls, elves, vampires, gnomes, orcs, and so many others. They had stayed away forever, and now one of them had come out, immediately targeting the power structure of his country. Years of experience in war told Dhravan that the siren was just the beginning. She was only a foot soldier, the infantry.

  The scholars had told him what they could, and he did not see the body in front of him yielding much more information. For the decisions he had to make, he needed the help of his soldiers. For eons, all of them thought magic was dead. It was so far removed from their reality by time that they doubted it ever existed. Now, they were back in the world, wreaking havoc. They wanted a war, but Dhravan would not be so obliging. One did not battle beasts, one hunted them.

  “Keep at the work, gentlemen,” Dhravan said. “I shall go and try to find you more specimens.”