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“Infected?” His lips twitched up at that. Ironic that she called his blood infected , when the infection kept him healthy and strong.

Her eyes flashed up to his then back down to his arm.

She’d tied a tourniquet while she spoke and tapped his veins.

He braced himself for the pain—the lower-ranked techs always did a better job of blood draws than the lead physicians.

“If one ignores the positive results, that’s exactly what it is.

An infection that’s only compatible with certain people’s blood. ”

He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Magic equals infections. Got it.”

Yes, he said it to make her wince. “I do wish you’d stop calling it magic.

That implies something beyond science. This isn’t—or won’t be forever.

It’s simply an ancient nanotechnology that bonds with certain blood and results in long life, strength, and resistance to normal human disease.

And, of course, opens the senses to fuller communication with the environment than most of us can boast.”

“Uh huh.” His words, if they could be called such, tangled with another laugh. “Bit of a mouthful. You should come up with a single word instead. Or perhaps use an existing word that gets at the same general meaning. Enoch, what’s a common word meaning power we can’t explain but can’t deny?”

The friar blinked. “I always rather liked the word magic , Your Majesty. Perhaps the good doctor ought to consider that word.”

Datlov shoved the needle into his arm with more determination than skill. He wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that her lack of gentleness was purposeful this time. “That word breeds superstition.”

“On the contrary,” Enoch retorted. “Once upon a time it did, perhaps, when it was thought to come from sources other than the Triada. But when it is clearly a gift from heaven that has combined with this ancient technology?”

The press of Datlov’s lips said what she didn’t dare. Thoughts of heaven didn’t interest her much, not when there was so much about their world and physiology begging to be understood. She’d said as much to him before…but not in the presence of a priest.

She filled her vials, took off the tourniquet, and offered another perfunctory smile as she pressed a piece of sterile gauze over the site. “Do you need a bandage to catch the blood until you can find some salt water?”

He plucked one from her kit and put it on himself to keep from dripping blood all over his room.

Another quirk of his “infected” blood—it wouldn’t clot in air, only in water.

Fresh water could eventually stop his bleeding, but salt was better.

Salt water not only allowed him to clot, it healed his wounds far more quickly than a normal person’s.

Dr. Datlov hadn’t yet found the explanation for it. None of her predecessors had either.

Swim. Salt water. He didn’t often give commands for his own personal benefit, but his yearning to feel the ocean close over him was as powerful as his need for air to breathe. So he turned to those still waiting. “Could the rest of you please return this afternoon?”

He didn’t offer a reason. One of the perks of the position. The question itself was enough to send everyone out, and though the tailor might be inclined to grumble, a discreet flash of Seidon’s bleeding arm toward the fellow softened his gaze. Blood on the suit he was to try on wouldn’t do.

Once everyone but Enoch had cleared the room, Seidon let out a long breath and grinned at his old friend.

“I’ll only be a minute.” He hurried into his bathing chamber to ease the crisp white tunic off and over his arm, avoiding the blood already soaking through the bandage, and changed into swimming clothes.

He cast only one look at the mer tail folded beside his other things in the armoire.

One of these days, he’d sneak it out and go for a real swim, faster than legs alone could ever propel him.

But not today. If he was seen as mer instead of man on his first day back in his capital city, it could cause an uprising.

Enoch had used the guest bath to defrock himself and now stood by the door in his own swim clothes with visible anticipation.

Seidon grinned. “Do you still dive? Or should we take the cliffside steps down to the beach?”

Enoch’s eyes positively glittered. “I’m old, Si, but I’m not feeble. I dive with the other brothers at least once a week. As you trained us to do.”

Though the training wasn’t exactly for happy reasons, it helped Seidon rest easier, knowing that if ever the kingdom was invaded again, the religious brothers would have an escape.

Plus, it meant more fun now.

He and Enoch strode out of the palace with more speed than one might expect of an aging priest, past the Elite Guard, who all snapped to attention.

Seidon wasn’t the slightest bit surprised when their commanding officer intercepted him at the edge of the palace grounds.

Master Lee planted herself in his path and saluted. “Your Majesty.”

“Lee.” She and her team traveled with him wherever he went, so to say they were familiar was an understatement. “Going for a swim.”

Her role wasn’t to question him, per se, but she always did, as Jericho Bleu had done before her. Their willingness to do so had earned them their position.

Her current frown was one example. “Where? We haven’t had time yet to scout the waters.”

Of course they hadn’t. They’d only arrived in Daryatla an hour ago. Was it the risk that encouraged the anticipation sizzling in his veins?

No. It was simply the call of the sea. He’d been away from it for too long.

He pointed north, toward the promontory that ended in a ragged, concave cliff.

It was his usual place to dive, but she might not remember that.

When last they were in the capital city, she’d been little more than a centa, and Rico had probably had her stationed elsewhere on the grounds.

“That’s my favorite location, largely for security reasons.

There are shoals a half mile north that continue to the end of the Banks, making it incredibly difficult for mer to cross into the sound.

They’d have to enter at the southern tip of the banks and swim through the sound undetected for twenty miles in order to reach this location. ”

“Highly unlikely. Which is why the palace was built here.” Lee nodded her approval. Her eyes sparked. “Is that the cliff-dive, then? The one that leads to the lagoon?”

Another reason his blood sparked and hummed. He nodded. “If you don’t see us surface, that’s why.”

She drew in a corner of her mouth. “I don’t like that I can’t verify your safe arrival at the lagoon.”

Neither had Jericho. Or Atlas, before him.

Or Josephina, before him. He nodded too.

“There’s a signal. In addition to the seawater that reaches the lagoon from the caverns, it’s fed by freshwater too.

The same subterranean stream runs along the western edge of the palace grounds.

We’ve rigged a well in your barracks. When I reach the lagoon, I initiate a pulse of water that will continue for five minutes.

From your end, it looks like a geyser about a foot high that rises and falls every ten seconds. ”

For a second, her face went blank. Then she laughed. “That’s what that is? I must not have been a high enough rank to need to know that twenty years ago. We all just thought it was some crazy water. So crazy that we had to report it up the chain of command the moment it started acting up.”

Seidon chuckled. “Exactly that crazy. I assume all the Guards still have those instructions?”

“Of course.”

“Then you’ll know it within a minute of my arrival.”

“In that case.” She saluted again. “Happy swimming, Your Majesty.”

He and Enoch continued through the mother-of-pearl gates and made their way along the rocky cliffside path. No one else was out here, aside from the Guards stationed at regular intervals and patrolling between them.

For a few minutes, they walked in silence. After sixty years of friendship, though, the silence was familiar, comfortable…and telling. He could almost track the course of Enoch’s thoughts, he was pretty sure.

Absolutely sure, when his friend sighed. “So then. Two hundred seventy-five tomorrow.”

“Indeed.” He felt it, in one way. Mentally.

He remembered back well beyond all his friends’ great-grandparents’ days.

That had been strange, when his first friends began aging so fast—or so it had seemed to him.

When their children grew up and became his friends, when they died, and he still remembered those years as if they were yesterday.

He’d spent the equivalent of their lifetimes learning and reaching and growing and studying.

In another way, in his body, he didn’t feel a day over thirty, if that.

But eventually, it would catch up with him. Eventually, he would begin to slowly age, like Mother had done. Eventually, he would breathe his last. Mother had died two years ago, at the age of four hundred and twelve. Father had lived to three hundred fifty.

If he didn’t have a child to take his place—one who had been raised to understand the responsibility, to love the Triada with all his or her heart, one strong enough to bear the burden of an empire that spanned the entire Atla coast and now stretched inland across half a continent…

what then? What would happen to his people?

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He knew what would happen.

The floods would come, and the droughts.

The hurricanes and typhoons would batter them again.

The gangs and thugs would take over the government, as they’d done fifteen hundred years ago before the first Sea King had wrested power from them and been crowned for his efforts.