Dilys sent Ari, Ryll, and the rest of his fleet after four of the fleeing ships, blasted a call along the seaways ordering the Calbernan navy to intercept the southern-bound fifth vessel, while he and his crew pursued the Reaper.
They were close enough now to use their seagifts against their quarry, pulling strong currents into the paths of the fleeing ships to slow them down. None of the five new ships had magic on their side, so by the end of the day, Ari, Ryll, and the rest of the fleet had captured their prey, all of which turned out to be decoys. There was no sign of the Seasons on any vessel, and even when Commanded with susirena to answer his questions truthfully, none of their crews knew anything about kidnapped princesses. They were merely local Frasian fishermen, making a little profit on the side by meeting the Reaper by the Vargan Banks to trade a few barrels of Allodyne brandy for several crates of lace and fine fabrics from the silk mills of Sheen.
That left the Reaper, whose magic-born speed was no match for the full force of Dilys’s seagifts.
Dilys and his men boarded the pirate ship on a cresting wave, leaping from the foaming froth onto the deck, swords and tridents in hand, ready to rend. Their claws were out, their battle fangs down as they roared and attacked.
The fight was short, bloody, and merciless. No quarter given to the scum who had invaded Konumarr and stolen away Gabriella Coruscate and her two sisters.
The pirate’s captain was still alive at the end of it. Pierced by Dilys’s trident, sword hand hacked off at the wrist, and passed out from the pain, but still clinging to life.
“Bind that wrist,” Dilys ordered one of his men. “I don’t want him dying yet. The rest of you, get down below and start searching. Tear this ship apart if you must, but find them. I’ll search the cabin of our fine captain here, myself.” He lifted the corner of his lip, baring his fangs in a savage sneer.
Leaving the White Guards and his own men to search belowdecks, he leapt up the quarterdeck stairs and threw open the door to the captain’s quarters. None of the Seasons were within, but as he ransacked the place, looking for clues, he discovered a strand of long, curling red hair and flecks of dried blood on the corner of a hanging lantern. His blood ran cold, then colder still when he found another hair of the same length and shade on the sheets of the captain’s bunk.
Boiling with fear and fury, Dilys slammed out of the cabin and crossed the deck in long, ground-eating strides. The pirates had strewn sand across the planking to keep it from getting too slippery, and the grit clung to the bottoms of his feet, making raw, scraping sounds with each step.
He slapped the pinioned captain back to consciousness, then grabbed him by the throat, battle claws digging into the flesh on either side of the man’s windpipe.
“Where are they?” he demanded, filling his voice with Command. “Where are the Seasons of Summerlea? Where is my liana, the princess Summer? ”
The pirate, pale and clammy and dazed from his wounds, stared up at Dilys with dull eyes. Before he could answer, one of the Calbernans who’d gone to search belowdecks poked his head up through the hatch and waved.
“Myerielua! Down here!”
With a snarl, Dilys released the pirate captain and went below. The warrior who’d summoned him led him through the artillery deck, past the rows of ballistas tied into place, loaded and ready to fire. They hadn’t gotten a single shot off. Dilys had battered the already wounded pirate vessel with a barrage of furious waves—several of which had carried he and his men aboard the Reaper. The Kracken had moved in for boarding after that, and Wynter Atrialan’s White Guards had finished off any pirates that had escaped Dilys’s men.
At the far end of the artillery deck were the officers’ quarters. Small, private compartments built into the stern of the ship.
One of the rooms held a cloth-covered cage. Commander Friis was there, his golden skin and white hair spattered with blood, his pale blue eyes icy cold.
“There’s another cage like this one the starboard side,” Friis said. “One of my men is Snow Wolf clan. The scent is weak, but his nose tells him they were definitely here. Princess Summer in this one”—he gestured to the cage—“Princess Spring in the other. No sign of Princess Autumn.”
“The captain of this floating shoto hole kept Myerialanna Autumn in his cabin,” Dilys said in a low voice.
A growl rumbled in the chests of the two Wintermen standing beside Friis.
“There’s a bigger problem,” the Wintercraig White Guard captain continued grimly. “My man says the Seasons haven’t been on this ship in a while. Possibly not since a few days after they were taken. We’ve been tracking the wrong ship.”
“What?” Dilys could feel himself shaking. He wanted to rip this ship to splinters. He wanted to slice its captain to ribbons, one tiny piece at a time, and drink the man’s scream for days.
But first, he was going to get answers.
He returned to the main deck and hunkered down before the ship’s wounded captain.
“We all came from the sea,” Dilys told him in a pleasant voice. “Did you know that? And in us all, the sea remains. It’s the water and salt in our flesh. It’s the blood in our veins. And I am a prince of the sea. Of all seas.” His eyes went cold and he seized the man’s head in both hands. “Your blood answers to me.”
The pirate grabbed Dilys’s wrists. His pathetic, frightened whimpers turned to screams as his body started to convulse. The vessels in his eyes began to burst, turning the whites into pools of bloody red. And from his nose and ears, wet, glistening trails of scarlet trickled out.
“You will tell me, now,” Dilys crooned. “You will tell me everything you did to her. You will tell me where she is, and who has her. You will tell me who hired you. You will tell me everything I want to know, and when you obey”—he smiled again, his fangs sharp as a shark’s—“I will give you the death you’ll be begging me for.”
Fifteen minutes later, his body bathed in the remnants of a hot, scarlet mist, Dilys stalked to the stern of the ship to question the rest of the pirate ship crew. Commander Friis, pale beneath his scarlet-painted golden skin and wearing globs of bone and brain matter in his hair, followed close behind. The rest of the Wintermen who had been with Dilys while he questioned the pirate captain were still leaning over the side of the ship, puking their guts up.
He supposed it wasn’t every day they saw a man’s head literally explode.
But then, it wasn’t every day Dilys Commanded every ounce of blood in a man’s body to go rushing into his brain either.
The interrogation hadn’t gone well.
The captain had possessed no useful information about what had happened to the Seasons. He remembered the Seasons being on board. He remembered keeping them drugged and compliant. As to Gabriella’s fate, that was a blank.
The interrogation of the rest of the crew didn’t go any better. No one—not one single man aboard the ship—remembered what had happened to the Seasons or how they had gotten off the ship.
“Gather your men,” Dilys commanded Friis as he finished questioning the last of the pirates, a foul-mouthed bastard who’d tried to push Dilys into giving him a quick death by taunting him with all the depraved atrocities he and the crew had supposedly perpetrated upon the Seasons. “Get everyone back aboard the Kracken. We sail within the hour.” He just had to find out where they would be sailing.
“And the Reaper?”
Dilys stood and, with one savage swipe of his clawed hand, ripped out the foul-mouthed pirate’s throat, taking the lower half of his jaw with it.
“Leave her,” he spat. He threw the bloody lump of flesh, cartilage, and bone over the side of the ship to the sharks circling below. “She’ll sink soon enough. These worthless krillos can feed the fish—at least that will be one useful thing they’ve done with their miserable lives.”
Friis glanced at the spurting arteries of the dying pirate’s eviscerated throat, and he swallowed hard, visibly shaken by Dilys’s savagery. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“I am not Your Grace,” Dilys corrected him brusquely. Stalking back to the mainmast, where the body of the pirate captain was still pinned, Dilys yanked his trident free. “I am Myerielua. Prince of the Sea.” His men parted before him as he strode to the side of the Reaper. Trident in hand, he leapt to the top of the railing and dove into the waves below.
He swam down into the water until the cooling ocean depths drained the worst of the hot rage from his soul. He’d been duped from the start. Duped into taking all his men out of Konumarr and leaving Gabriella unprotected. Duped into following the Reaper long after the princesses had been taken off it. Duped again into wasting countless precious days and diverting his fleet from the Carmines to pursue decoy vessels and a ship full of pirates whose minds had been wiped of almost all useful information.
And he said “almost all” instead of “all,” because everything about this kidnapping—the magical fog, the erasing of minds, and the fact that his sea-dwelling spies had reported no other vessels in the vicinity of the Reaper except the five decoys—were powerful clues on their own. He just hadn’t been looking at them properly until now.
He’d been reacting. He’d been thinking with his heart, with his fear and his guilt. He’d been a boy again, shocked and shaken by devastating loss. Terrified of losing another person he loved—the one person who mattered even more than all the others. Terrified that he would fail her. That she would be taken from him like his father and Nyamialine and Fyerin.
This time, he set fear and guilt aside. He set all emotion—so strong a part of every Calbernan—aside. This time, when he sent out his call to his eyes in the water, he asked not for what they had seen, but what they had not seen.
Gabriella’s kidnappers—or rather, the individuals who had hired the crew of the Reaper to abduct the Seasons—were masking themselves and had been from the start. Just as the crew of the Reaper had used magical fog to hide their presence in the Llaskroner Fjord, the real perpetrators of this crime had been hiding their presence as well, making themselves utterly invisible even to the creatures of the sea.
This time, when calling upon his ocean-borne spies, instead of asking about ships, Dilys asked about water displacement. Places where, in the absence of a tangible ship, the ocean should have been, but wasn’t. Because he was now absolutely certain there was another ship. And even masked, that ship wasn’t sailing on air.
As expected, the denizens of the sea came back with a barrage of information. He filtered through the memories and pieced together a tracking map. He’d been on the wrong track since leaving Konumarr. While he’d been heading west towards Frasia, the “invisible” ship had been heading southwest, towards the Carmines and the Olemas Ocean. And now, thanks to Dilys’s rerouting Calberna’s fleets to cut off the southern-bound decoy, the “invisible” ship had slipped past them and was well west of the Calbernan fleet, with nothing but open sea between it and a clean escape into the Olemas.
Dilys blasted a new order along the seaways, sending the coordinates of his quarry to the captains of the Calbernan fleet, and ordering every ship within five hundred miles to pursue them at the fastest possible speed. He and his four-vessel fleet did the same.
Dilys wasn’t surprised when, within a few hours of his giving that order, the “invisible” ship sped up to a shocking—and very telling—twenty knots.
And that was when a possibility he’d begun to suspect solidified into near certainty.
The initial fog used to mask the kidnapping, the interference with the eyes of the sea, the control and erasing of oulani minds, the obvious interception of the message he’d sent to the Calbernan navy, and the incredible speed of the escaping ship: taken altogether, the clues led Dilys to believe that whoever was on that ship—whoever had orchestrated the abduction of the Seasons of Summerlea—wasn’t using a series of expensive but purchasable magic spells, but rather a Calbernan seagift.
A royal Calbernan seagift.
As to who that person could be . . . well, the list was short enough to count on one hand. Someone had drawn Dilys and all the Calbernans out of Konumarr so the pirates could sail in, undetected, to steal the princesses. And by disposing of Dilys’s men at the bottom of the deep fjord—a place no Winterfolk would ever have found them—the kidnappers had specifically intended to cast suspicion on House Merimydion—and Dilys, in particular, since it was his potential lianas who had been taken. Couple the clues together with a personal grudge against Dilys and an extraordinarily strong seagift, and one name, in particular, leapt to mind.
Inside his mind, Dilys’s hand curled around that name like a fist, grinding its bones, crushing it to dust.
Nemuan.
The name of Gabriella’s new captor was Solish Utua, and he was a purveyor of human treasures for the warlord king Minush Oroto. Solish, who was a eunuch, made it clear that his only interest in Summer was in training her to become the Most Favored Jewel in Minush’s cashima—his pleasure palace—so that Solish could advance to a much more powerful position in his master’s court.
“For the time being, you will be confined to this cabin. Once you have proven that you will not try anything foolish, you will be allowed to join me on deck to enjoy the fresh sea air while we continue your studies.”
The possibility of earning a measure of freedom was too great a temptation to pass up, so Gabriella willingly donned the mask of a docile, obedient slave and dedicated herself to learning all Solish Utua could teach her about becoming Minush the Red’s Most Favored Jewel.
The part wasn’t too difficult to play, and Gabriella soon came to the conclusion that being bought by Solish Utua was probably the best stroke of luck of this entire ordeal. He didn’t maul or molest her. He didn’t starve or mistreat her. He didn’t loose a magic eater on her several times a day. He even gave her real clothes—soft, loose-fitting gowns, and luxurious robes. So long as she remained docile and compliant, he treated her with an almost courtly courtesy, including answering the questions she asked about his acquaintance with Mur Balat (he’d known him ten years), the price he’d paid to purchase her (her weight in gold and diamonds, plus an ancient book reputed to be the grimoire of a famous, long-dead enchantress), and what he knew of Balat’s plans for her sisters (nothing, although given the expense and risk of their kidnapping, he assumed Balat had extremely wealthy and powerful buyers lined up to purchase them).
Best of all, he made no attempt to block the strong, bright, sunlight that streamed through the large windows that lined the back of the cabin, utterly confident in the efficacy of Balat’s inhibiting collar. Gabriella imagined that under most circumstances, that confidence would be well deserved, but as the ship sailed closer to Mystral’s equator, Summer began to notice a familiar warmth gathering inside her. A warmth that grew stronger and more palpable with each passing day.
Magic—her magic—was coming back.
Elated, she made a point of sitting in direct sunlight as often as possible, trying to fan that warmth into hot flame. It was slow going. The collar prevented her from wielding her magic, but it also prevented her from actively calling the sun’s energy to fill her magical stores. They were, however, filling. And without the Shark there to constantly drain her dry, there was soon a bright, hot pool of sun-fed power smoldering beneath her skin.
She also discovered that although the collar prevented her from accessing her power and wielding it, it didn’t stop her emotions from affecting that power. Including—or rather, especially—that fierce, volatile fire at her core, that power she’d locked up so firmly that even Mur Balat and the Shark hadn’t been able to reach it.
The one thing Solish Utua did not do was give Gabriella much time alone. He or one of his guards was at her side every hour of the day, and he slept in the same cabin, only a few scant feet away from the cot to which she was chained each night. A guard stood near the door, watching over her as Solish slept.
In those quiet hours each night, as Solish slept, Gabriella saturated her mind with th
oughts of vengeance, rage, and violence. The more she did, the more she could feel the fiery inferno of the monster boiling madly inside her, trying to get out. The pressure inside her built and built and built until she passed out from the pain. And when she woke the next day, she soaked up as much sunlight as she could, so that each night, as Solish slept, she could push herself harder, and stoke the fires of her rage higher.
Chapter 22
“He’s headed for the Kuinana,” Kame, Dilys’s first mate, pronounced grimly as Dilys and the Calbernan fleet closed in on the rapidly fleeing invisible ship.
“I know it.” The Kuinana was a series of massive reef systems, riddled with caves, that surrounded the northeastern tip of the Ardullan continent. A narrow, twisting channel though a forest of razor-sharp coral was the only navigable passage through the ocean-facing side of the reef.
For three days now, Dilys and the Calbernans had pursued the invisible ship across the Varyan into the warm, turquoise waters of the Sargassi Sea, closing the distance so rapidly that their prey had dropped their cloak of invisibility and concentrated all their magic on outrunning their pursuers. To sail that fast required tremendous magic, a fact that further solidified Dilys’s suspicions that the Shark was his cousin Nemuan. But no matter how strong the Shark’s magic, Dilys had the power gifted to him by both Gabriella and Khamsin of the Storms, and every ship in his fleet was speeding along on swift currents of both sea and air, all but flying across the ocean’s surface.
The Shark’s ship was clearly visible now, perhaps thirty miles ahead of the fleet.
“If he makes the Kuinana we lose him.”