Page 37 of Cruel Tides (Queen of Tridents #2)
37
Claira
T he tentacle enveloping my waist spun, and my stomach rolled along with it. Even reeling, it was impossible not to recognize the massive, vaulted entrance the cecaelia was dragging me toward.
It seemed my “trial” would happen in the one place Papa told me I would always be safe.
The palace.
Considering how I looked back on those walls as more of a prison than a safe haven, perhaps it was fitting that my life would end hopelessly trapped where it began.
“Either of you got orders back home soon?” the female cecaelia asked, not even bothering to take a breath and give the others a chance to respond. “I’d give anything to go back, take some leave, but no . They would rather waste my time out here, foraging through scraps those fish fuckers left behind.”
Her dramatic sigh chased any possibility of silence away. “If I have to uproot another coral colony, just one more, I think I’m going to lose it. Look at this. This right here, look. Look at these nails . Over corals . My hands can’t take the abuse!”
Did she ever stop talking? I had no clue why they needed three of them here anyway. Seeing as it only took the strength of one tentacle to subdue me, the twenty-four between them seemed a bit like overkill.
“Even if they send you back, you won’t be taking no leave,” the cecaelia who carried me grumbled as soon as the chatterbox took a breath. “Finding Malkeevo might be all the queen cares about, but I’m sick of those damn mirages messing with me, knocking my brains around, making me think my ass is up and my head is down!”
He bashed the side of his skull, then crumpled his hair in frustration. “If magic’s so damn important to her, she should be the one wandering out there ass-first, eyes crossed, searching for—”
He let out a violent gasp that I felt all the way at the end of his tentacle. A thunderous crack stopped all three of them dead in their tracks, leaving my body to smack down on the seafloor behind them. Straining my neck, I just barely saw the surge of inky darkness creeping through the quaking twists of their bodies.
“I will take her.” The smooth voice drifted through the water like liquid smoke, seeping into my ears and making my head buzz.
Oh no . Him again . I could tell his abrupt entrance startled them, but surely the guards wouldn’t just—
Everything spun as I was flung forward, dropping in a heap on the sand in front of my captors. Finding my voice for the first time since they’d laughed over my impending execution, I used all the breath left in me to hiss, “Cowards.”
Just as the rough tentacle around me unfurled, a new one approached, snaking up to my waist, brushing against me as lightly as if it were a delicate band of silk. Before I knew it, I was upright, shivering under the weight of a chilly, white gaze.
Okay, I could see why they feared him.
Magic from his arrival was still billowing off his shoulders and trailing down the inky ends of his swept-back hair, making him look every bit the dark sorcerer he claimed to be. A silken tip of a feeler teased over my bound wrists, reminiscent of the way his magic had slid against me, and my stomach betrayed me by fluttering. Ugh .
Looking me over, his pale lips parted in amusement. “You’re still bound.”
Of course I was still bound! His creepy magic was the reason my hands were useless, tied behind my back. Did he have anything better to do than provoke me? Staring back at him, my lips curled in disgust. “Don’t talk to me.”
I’d had enough of his teasing, his magic, all of him. I glanced back at the others, but they were long gone, not even an inch of their dark bodies visible in the maze of buildings lining the thoroughfare. Dammit . They really were cowards.
Water streamed over my shoulder, and when my head jerked back, pale lips hovered dangerously close to my ear. “I thought you were supposed to be good at solving riddles, little captive,” he whispered, provoking me yet again. “At least you had sense enough to hold tight to my gift .”
My palms pressed into the ribbed surface, feeling out the shape of the shell I held between them. He was right. I’d kept it, but only because I hadn’t had time to think about tossing it before being wound up and dragged through the streets. Limbs spun to life, and before I could try to figure out how to chuck the shell at him from behind my back, he swept us through the archway and into the palace.
We came into the hallway, and I failed to suppress a gasp. The floors and walls were dull, stripped of every bit of decadence I could recall from my childhood. My head spun around, desperately trying to pick out pieces from my memory, but everything looked so wrong .
Unhurried, the sea wizard chuckled as our bodies drifted through what was left of the once grand foyer. “I can’t do everything for you, you know.”
Had I heard him right? Shaken back to the present, irritation tensed my jaw. “You expect me to swim to my execution?” I scoffed, imagining bashing his skull in with his stupid gift . “Scumbag. You can carry me. Or better yet, just let me go if you’re so lazy.”
“Let you go.” A smooth roll of laughter hummed through his chest as he dipped, spinning us around in a dizzying dance. My tail swung out beside me, billowing like the end of a flowing gown as his eyes swept down the line of my hips. “I think both of us know you won’t get very far. Not with that tail.”
What?
By the time we came out of another elegant turn, my head was spinning and my mouth had fallen completely slack. He’d discovered my night vision easily enough, but how could he possibly know about my tail?
Pulling me along beside him, he led me to the end of the foyer. When we arrived at the doors to the throne room, he paused. “I suppose I can offer one more morsel of advice.”
“Do you really think I’d take advice from the creep who bound me in the first place?”
The tentacle holding his trident pushed forward, and the doors parted. “Suit yourself.”
His lips were still cocked in amusement as we slid into King Eamon’s throne room.
Only there was no throne to be seen. Sitting in the very center of the grand platform where the coral-laced chair used to reside was a blob of a cecaelia, his belly rolling over his tentacles like pastry dough rising in an oven. A thin circlet sat among the knots in the bushy gray hair floating above him, its sleek elegance nearly lost in the mass of tangles. Looking at least a couple hundred years old, it was clear he’d never come across a comb nor scissors in all that time.
Before I could wonder who the cecaelia was, the sea wizard’s smoky voice was answering in my ear. “The Rook.”
The Rook . Was that title supposed to mean something to me? Well, I knew for sure the creature before me wasn’t a bird, so that ruled out crows. Chess was the only other thing that came to mind, but even Gram would admit I was never any good at it.
My mind went in panicky circles as we ascended the platform steps. I barely even registered when my eyes slid over the smooth rod of metal tucked underneath the Rook’s great mass. Even without being able to see the golden hue of the metal, I recognized it at once.
King Eamon’s trident.
I took back what I said before. Perched atop a polished weapon, perhaps he was somewhat like a crow.
That thought was quickly forgotten as the delicate touch of the tentacle carrying me became increasingly aggressive until the sea wizard practically hurled me across the room. I yelped as I touched down on the platform, bouncing a good three times before landing where the tail of the throne had once been.
Leftover coral frags, the only remains of King Eamon’s throne, bit into the side of my cheek, but the pain barely registered. Terror had me trembling. This was it. I glanced up and immediately regretted it.
The Rook was huge. Even bigger than King Eamon. Dark eyes glazed with a milky film squinted down at me, focusing intently on the side of my face not pressed against the platform. Movement drew my attention down just as the trident slid from underneath him, rising with the help of a dark tendril. The last thing I saw was the Rook’s devious grin before the ocean spun out, my body suddenly caught in a violent whirlpool that shot me up in the water.
The resistance of the water stung every inch of me, skin and scales alike, until a tendril caught me by the hair and ripped me straight out of the spiraling vortex.
Pain shocked through me. My vision blurred, and my neck twisted in agony as the Rook brought me to eye level.
“You say this mermaid slayed one of my knights?”
There was a thoughtful pause before a smooth voice came from just beside me. “So the reports say.”
Through the vortex, I hadn’t even realized the sea wizard had moved up the platform. Damn creep . I swung my bound arms out behind me, hoping to whack him with his damned gift, but my hands were met with only water and a dark chuckle of amusement as he leaned just out of my reach.
“That’s enough,” the Rook boomed, instantly bringing my focus back to him. Milky eyes slid to the sea wizard beside me. “Be gone, puppet.”
Puppet . I struggled to glance over at him, wondering if he would take such an order. Sure, he didn’t have a circlet on his head, but he had a trident. From what I knew about trident wielders, they thought they were above everyone and everything else.
Maybe that was why I felt so confused when I found the sea wizard’s gaze already on me. One of his dark eyebrows arched subtly in question, as if he were seeking my permission to leave. But why?
A stretch of silence passed between us before his head bent forward, dipping into a low bow. “As you wish.”
The blunt end of the black trident tapped down on the platform, and magic washed over the room in a dark sheet. He hadn’t even fully disappeared before I’d turned my attention back to the Rook.
“Who are you that you can command—?” My words stalled mid-thought as a soft pressure stroked over my wrists. They flexed on reflex, but the feeling was already gone. As the last bit of magic evaporated with the sea wizard’s retreat, so did the tension around my wrists. The binding had dissolved away.
“Who am I? ” the Rook roared, and I felt all the blood drain from my face.
My hands… they were free.
Had the sea wizard freed me because he knew I was about to die? Because even with my hands, without a weapon, there was no way I could survive? Ah—he’d noticed my tail. That must have been it. What good were hands to a mermaid who couldn’t even swim?
“ I am royalty, chosen by Queen Sagari to rule alongside her until the day Poseidon returns to swallow up the seas. That thing is nothing more than a cursed puppet. A pawn for my dear queen to move as she pleases.”
Eyes rounding, his fat fingers seized my chin. He leaned in closer, dragging a gray tongue over his lips, and my stomach coiled. “Now that I’ve got a good look at you,” he said, his body shifting and chest broadening in a way that seemed almost predatory, “you do favor my dear queen. Not in the face, no, but your hair. It feels so similar wrapped up, wound around me.”
He eased back on the platform, his thick tendrils parting wide in leisure, and the tentacle in my hair jerked, tugging me forward.
“It has been lonely here, so far away from my beloved.” He sighed over the sound of coral frags crunching under the weight of his oversized back.
“Play with me, mermaid,” he rumbled, attempting a seductive purr that sounded more like a crackling cough. Before my mouth could open, he was already dragging me on top of his great belly. “Show me all your pretty tricks, and I might just—”
Whatever it was he was going to say, I would never know, because when my tail touched down between his parted tentacles, I threw the fist clutching the bulky seashell forward, delivering a punch aimed at the bridge of his nose.
Only—last time I checked—punches weren’t supposed to slice. They weren’t supposed to bring about clouds of blood that spread so fast and tasted so thick, either, but here we were.
What. The. Heck.
The weight I’d put into the punch was still on him, cutting a gash far past his nose, down through his cheek, sinking deep enough I could feel the sickening vibration of his teeth grinding against the surface of the seashell.
An otherworldly howl of pain erupted along with the blood pouring from his mouth, but I kept my weight on him, too shocked to do anything else. The shell finally caught on the hinge of his jaw bones, and my hand slipped, throwing me off him.
Tentacles thrashed, but I bounced between them, landing back down on the platform. Panicked, I scrambled to get upright. Magic shimmered through the dark haze of blood as the shell landed between me and the Rook’s writhing mass of tentacles.
I reached for the shell before thinking, snatching it up like I hadn’t just seen it shred through flesh. My hand closed around it, but nothing about it felt sharp.
Astonished, I turned it around in my hand, and dark lines of magic glimmered, but my amazement was short-lived. A tentacle hooked under the end of my tail, and suddenly I was upside down, pulled back into the bloody haze.
Deep rumbles crackled up his throat, and I knew his face had to be just on the other side of the thickened water. He must have been too upset to attempt magic, because the pointed tips of King Eamon’s trident broke through the cloud, spearing at me blindly, slashing and hacking. I writhed and wiggled in the tentacle’s grip, rocking out of the way as the tips rushed past me like a trio of arrows.
Then his strategy changed, and the trident sank further, narrowly missing my side but giving me a clear shot at the tentacle wound around it.
I knew Poseidon had reinforced mer-tails with magic, so it was only logical to think that he would construct cecaelia tentacles similarly. But damn, did my shell make quick work of it, hacking through the thick appendage with little resistance. I was feeling pretty pleased with my weapon until the shell struck the trident on its way down and sparks of magic lit up the throne room.
The cecaelia and I shrieked, blinded by the burst, and the pressure around my tail let go, sending me falling to the seafloor.
Underneath me, the disembodied tentacle I’d hacked off writhed, flexing and curling around the trident, but even that wasn’t enough to satisfy my rage.
Clutching the shell, I drew an arm over my eyes and lashed out at the trident, striking it over and over, hoping to inflict more pain, to cut more of his disgusting tentacle away, to sear him with even more light.
“Claira.” A voice forced into my head, and my whole body seized up.
“Barren?” I whispered, my lips trembling as the Rook wailed somewhere behind me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to believe he could really be nearby.
“Keep going. It’s the only way we can see you.”
My fingers tremored as I struck the trident with the shell again and again, feeling the tingle of magic sparks warming my palms.
We can see you, he’d said . We.
My heart swelled to bursting, the comfort of that one thought simultaneously unraveling me and winding me back together, making me whole.
Kai . He was alive.
A pop burst against my back, and then another, and suddenly two bodies were wrapped around my shoulders.
I drew the shell up to strike the trident again, but a hand came over my arm, easing it back down. “You did so well,” a rough voice praised, sounding nearly breathless in my ear. Leander . His firm jaw nuzzled against my neck. “Let us take it from here.”
Leander’s body strained, every inch of him shaking against my back, and I knew he was reaching for his father’s trident.
Barren’s grip on my shoulder tightened as Leander pulled the weapon upright.
Dropping my elbow from over my eyes, I looked around. Everything was still so blurry. “Wh-where’s Kai?” My voice was shaking so much. “Barren, is he…?”
“Safe,” Barren said with an air of unshakable certainty. I eased out a salty breath but somehow didn’t feel much better.
Safe? I couldn’t believe it. Not until I saw him for myself.
A thick gush of blood mixed with the water in my mouth, and the taste was so heavy on my tongue that I shuddered. The water was eerily still, and it suddenly seemed like an eternity since the Rook’s last wail. Lee and Barren hadn’t even attempted to attack him after they’d transformed. “Is the cecaelia…?”
“Dead?” Barren offered, and I felt his massive shoulders shrug behind me.
Leander leaned away, stretching closer to where I’d last heard the Rook’s moans, careful to keep a hand anchored on me. “Well, he’s not moving. Fuck . It looks like something tried to eat his face. What exactly did you do to him, Claira?”
Was what I did really enough to kill him?
“I…” My fingers curled around the shell, and I brought it close, unsure of what to say. That I answered a sea wizard’s riddle, and he gave me a magic shell capable of slicing cecaelia into sashimi? None of it made any sense.
“Wait—how did you guys make it into the throne room? You can’t see in the dark.”
“It’s all so hazy,” Leander muttered, and he shifted uneasily against my back. “Last thing I remember is trying to get the bag of pearls to light. I got dizzy, and then the next thing I know, Barren was beside me. It was too fucking dark to see much of anything, but we heard your voice, and when everything lit up, we were here. In the throne room somehow. It was almost like…”
“Magic,” the three of us said together, and I couldn’t keep from shuddering again.
Maybe there was a certain shadow puppet behind all this, pulling strings, bringing us back together. But why?
My night vision popped back just as Leander scraped up a handful of coral frags. “Close your eyes,” he said gently, and as soon as their tails started moving, I knew he’d made light.
“There are guards hidden all over. They pop up out of nowhere,” I whispered, trying to find a position where the dead weight of my tail wasn’t knocking into one of theirs.
“No need to worry. Not now that we have this .” Leander scooped my tail up with a chuckle, letting Barren’s arm take over my waist, and my eyes opened as he raised the trident triumphantly in the air.
It suddenly hit me—we actually had King Eamon’s trident.
“We did it?” I gasped, hardly able to believe it. Just a few minutes ago, I was preparing myself for my execution, but now…
“No, we didn’t do anything,” Leander corrected, pride swelling in his voice. “You did it, Claira.”
Me?
My stomach plunged, and my lips sealed instantly. He was wrong. I’d done nothing at all. Well, except for landing one punch. But the tool that had sliced into the Rook had been delivered to me by the same hands—err, tentacles—that’d bound and delivered me to the crusty slimeball in the first place. But those tentacles had also released me, and now I wasn’t so sure they hadn’t done it on purpose.
The sea wizard knew I had the shell in my hands. He’d commented on it right before taking me into the throne room, after he seemed amused by me still being bound.
Wait.
Had he expected me to cut myself free? Could the shell have even sliced through his magic bindings if I’d tried?
A wide hand flattened underneath my shoulder blades, supporting my back, and I winced, guarding the shell with my arms. If it had been enchanted to hack through more than just cecaelia flesh, I didn’t want to risk cutting either of them with it. It felt wrong to keep it but even worse to leave it now that its strange magic had saved me.
“Here we go.” Leander inhaled, and his chest broadened as he raised the trident even higher. We slipped through the throne room’s doors, and water whizzed past my ears. Screams followed in the distance, and Leander let out a grunt of concentration. Every part of him was growing warmer, his skin buzzing with magic against my tail.
At least a dozen whirlpools kicked up in a flash, the watery vortexes taking off, flying through the foyer. Chaos erupted as they veered around in erratic patterns, ricocheting off the high walls and tossing around tangles of cecaelia that had been lurking in the recesses of the foyer and connecting hallways.
Had he used trident magic before? The Rook had only summoned one, but Leander was controlling an army of mini tempests. Leander’s wide eyes darted, tracking the storms as they rushed about, wrecking into the walls, tossing more bodies up to the grand ceiling, looking just as stunned by the damage they caused as I was.
Barren’s tail steered us as we ducked and dodged, swerving through the chaos, until I felt the rush of the current as we passed through the palace archway back into the open ocean. A black cloud flickered in front of us, and my whole body jolted. Two bursts of white eyes burned in its center, locked right on to me, but the lithe specter swung around us, passing us in an instant. He was there and gone so fast; it was like he’d been nothing more than an illusion of smoke.
“Did you see that?” I whipped my head around to follow his trail but could barely see a thinning wisp of black magic from around the bulk of Barren’s side. If it really was the sea wizard, he was heading back into the palace. Right where the vortexes were still raging.
“Yeah,” Leander panted, his eyebrows pinched in concentration. “I didn’t know it would be this hard.” Muscles flexed around the trident, his expression turning desperate. He let out a strained growl. “Fuck, I can feel them getting bigger, but now that I can’t see them, I don’t know if… if I can stop it.”
More screams reverberated behind us, the roar of the water steadily growing, and Barren’s tail lashed out, taking over completely. We barreled through the thoroughfare while Leander shook against the trident.
“You can stop it,” Barren yelled, his tail beating through the water in impossibly long stretches that had us torpedoing through the water. “You control the trident. It doesn’t control you.”
Forcing my eyes away from the scene behind us, I stared up at the stubble lining Barren’s jaw, realizing then how exhausted he looked. Chest heaving, his muscles were drawn like he was still recovering from being a fish for so long. My gaze swept down the cords of his neck and fell into the crater of scars below it. His brace was gone, likely lost to the bottom of the ocean.
“Gah!” Leander gasped, and I reached out, steading the trident before he lost his hold on it. Magic flowed into me with a startling whoosh , and I jerked away like it had electrocuted me.
Shocked, I checked my fingertips to see if they looked as charred as they felt, but it was suddenly so hard to see.
I gasped. “Leander, the coral!” But the frags were already working out of his hand, the tiny pieces falling through his fingers, drifting in our wake like glowing fireflies.
He let out a shaky breath, his eyes closing tight like he wasn’t even listening, too consumed by the magic working through him.
I yelped as Barren’s arm came up from underneath me, effortlessly yanking the trident out of Leander’s hand with one quick motion.
Leander’s body thrashed against me, a furious burst of rage flashing in his eyes even in the darkness.
“Barren,” he growled, wild and dangerous, but Barren was already passing the trident to me. When a quick touch yielded no more magic shocks, I took it, nestling it next to the shell against my chest.
“You would rather destroy your own kingdom?”
Leander recoiled at that, looking down at the trident in my arms like Barren’s words had snapped him out of his rage. “No, but— fuck —for a second, I thought you were trying to take it from me.” His voice dropped lower. “That you might keep it.”
Barren’s jaw hardened. “Mmh.” I knew he didn’t like magic, but he for sure didn’t look amused by the thought of keeping King Eamon’s trident.
My night vision flickered on just as the last bit of coral left Leander’s hand. Looking down at the shell and the trident, I pinched my eyes shut as I knocked them together. A spark of magic flashed behind my eyelids. “I wonder why they do that?” I asked, mystified. Hopefully, the sparks would be enough to light the ocean and blind any cecaelia hidden nearby.
“I don’t know, but keep it coming,” Leander said, sounding suddenly exhausted. Even Barren’s tail had slowed down, and although his chest was still heaving from exertion, we seemed to move through the water at a much more manageable speed. Light must have really helped them feel more at ease.
“Where’s Kai?” I asked. Now that the immediate danger had passed, now seemed like a good time to regroup. “Is he really safe? Shouldn’t we go get him?”
“Laverne is with him,” Barren said simply. “She knows to take him back to shore.”
Laverne had him? No wonder Barren seemed so certain. She would keep him safe.
I let out a long sigh, feeling relieved. “That’s great.”
Even shut, my eyes burned as I knocked the two items together, but I kept it up, keeping the ocean nice and bright for them, all the while wondering what it was about my eyes that made them so sensitive to light.
By the time we closed in on the shore, pain throbbed across my forehead, and my arms ached from striking the shell against the trident.
Uneven tides rolled over us as we approached the surface. “We’re back already?”
Leander didn’t say a word, but I felt a series of shivers run through him, his palms opening and closing on my tail like he was more than ready to be out of the water.
Barren grunted as he fought against the pull of the tides, pushing us closer to the shore with the strength of his tail until we reached the surface and Leander took over. We washed up, little by little, as Leander raked through the wet sand, dragging us behind him. As soon as we were close enough, I tossed the shell to dry land, followed by the trident, and pulled myself onto the shore.
Light from the lanterns lining the pier dotted the sky above us. Could it really still be the middle of the night? It felt like hours had passed in the dungeons, as well as the entire swim to the palace and back. My eyes landed on where I’d left my clothes, and I let out a gasp. There was someone lying underneath the pier. “Kai!”
Could it really be him? There was someone else, another body hunched over him. Laverne, maybe?
I bounded forward, slipping between Leander and Barren without even thinking.
Pop .
Too focused on the body sprawled out under the pier, I fought through the sand, dragging my tail behind me. My muscles were screaming, protesting the movement until— pop .
I was up on my feet as soon as my legs formed, stumbling through the first few steps before taking off at a sprint. Laverne’s head popped up, and my heart clenched. “Guys, they’re here!”
I glanced back at Leander and Barren and nearly tripped over my feet. Where had they gone?
Realization hit me just as they both popped back in two brilliant explosions of naked bodies and sand.
“Sorry,” I choked out, feeling guilty for leaving them behind. I would have to make it up to them later, because right now, I needed to know if Kai was okay. If he was still breathing.
Sliding under the pier, I dropped to my knees and scanned over his body. Our clothes were pulled on top of him, covering him from his legs to his chest, the edge of Barren’s shirt still hanging from Laverne’s mouth. She looked at me, whiskers sagging. A deep sadness rounded her eyes as she lifted her head off his stomach.
My ear went flat against his chest, listening for his pulse and feeling the soft swell of air entering his lungs. He was alive.
“Thank you,” I choked out. “Thank you for keeping him safe, Laverne.”
I skimmed a hand over his arm. Even with all our clothes covering him, he still felt so cold. We needed to get him inside. Back into the hotel.
“Barren,” I called, and I lifted my head, unprepared for the scene waiting for me across the sand.
Barren was already on his feet, but something was wrong. His stance was wide, and he looked like he was about to lunge at Leander. “Stop!” Barren barked. Desperation amplified his voice, making it carry down the shore.
“He can’t have it, Barren,” Leander called back. The trident was back in his hand, and he lifted it high, spreading his arms wide. “He doesn’t deserve it! If I go back, he’ll take it from me and… and then…” Wet hair lashed as his head shook fiercely. “No, I won’t let him have it!”
From across the beach, Leander’s eyes found mine. He looked at me, the picture of a completely broken man, and his lips trembled as he mouthed the words he couldn’t find the strength to say out loud.
I’m sorry.
“Leander, NO!” Barren’s voice boomed, echoing down the beach, but it was too late.
Lamp light flashed off the pointed tips of King Eamon’s trident as Leander drew it even higher still. Then his hold on the trident shifted, and he turned the weapon on himself, plunging it straight into his chest.