Arrival

Jane threw Ria a desperate glance.

  So Ria did the only thing she could think of, she began to sing. Not a real song, just notes that fitted together and made music of her own.

  As she sang louder, the men faltered and turn to look at her, but it was not long before they turned back to the ship’s gunwale and began to climb again. The Sirens heard Ria’s voice competing with them, and enhanced their own song, making it even more enchanting.

  But the song was hers.

  She pushed out the notes, made them soar, louder and stronger, and far more alluring than any she had sung before.

  Slowly and hesitantly the men turned back to Ria, her song ringing in their ears.

  They walked across the decks towards her, mesmerised, and the Sirens ceased their song, vanishing behind the waves and rocks.

  Luca was last, and when he turned to her, his eyes were still hazy. Ria gave one final note, full of whatever it was she felt for him, and at last his eyes seemed to clear. He shook his head so as to look at her properly.

  Letting out a breath, Ria sank to the deck.

  The men in the water were hauled on board, but some were missing, taken to the depths of the sea by their lust.

  Luca approached Ria and knelt next to her.

  “What was that?”

  “They were Sirens, creatures that call men to their doom,” Ria replied.

  Luca was looking embarrassed, so she added, “No man can resist them. They’re very powerful.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked her and she nodded.

  “How did you do it?” Jane asked.

  She shook her head. “I just sang, and hoped it would be enough.”

  “I think you need some rest. Come on,” Luca said and helped her back to her room.

  Chapter 29

  Satine sighed and stood, painting her face, then pulled on elegant slippers to match her crimson gown.

  She made her way through the corridors and stairwells to a door and knocked lightly. The door opened of its own accord. Leostrial was sitting on a low velvet couch, looking up at her with dark eyes. Satine entered and shivered as she stood in front of him. He was below her, but as always he gave her the feeling that she was being overpowered.

  “Sit please, Satine,” he ordered her.

  She placed a cushion on the floor and sat at his feet. She could feel him staring, but she didn’t look up. She couldn’t bear what she knew would be in his eyes.

  “Tell me why you sent your child away?” The sting in those words was painful.

  “It was my mother,” she whispered. “Liessen was ashamed for her daughter to bear a bastard. And she didn’t know what would happen under the new reign.”

  “Why did you not marry?”

  “Because you came, and the father of the child was forced to flee,” she replied slowly, trying to leave the bitterness from her voice.

  It was a moment before he said anything. “Who is the father?”

  “You do not know? I am surprised, since you seem to know everything else,” she snapped and then schooled herself to calm down. “Accolon. High Prince of Uns Lapodis. He lived here, when he was younger. We shared ... much.”

  “Evidently,” he murmured. There was a long silence.

  “How did you know? About the child?” she croaked after a moment.

  His next words were much sadder. “I thought you knew. I thought ... There is a connection between us, Satine. I am attuned to you. I know you. It is ... the one uncertain thing in my life. The one thing I have not forged for myself. I know not from where it comes, this connection.”

  Satine tried very hard not to cry then.

  “I want you to find your son and bring him here. I will be his father. He will be raised with a family as he should have been all along.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment and felt something shift inside her. Satine looked at him, and thought about the words he’d just spoken. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I had wanted to bring him back myself.”

  “I know you did,” he said.

  “Why did you never have a child of your own?”

  “A true son would be too dangerous to me. I can perhaps give your son what a child of my own would have claimed. What he deserves. A home, power ... I will need him by my side. Go now.”

  Satine went back to her room and locked the door. She would die before letting harm come to this child.

  ***

  The next morning Satine sat opposite Leostrial at the small breakfast table in his room.

  “I have come to speak of the war.”

  He raised his eyebrows, “I see. And which war is this?”

  “The war you are waging on the star of Elendial.”

  Leostrial stared at her with narrowed eyes.

  She ignored him and took a breath. “Paragor is readying an army to fight you. I told them I could only hold you off for a month, and that they should come when that month was over.”

  “Hold me off?” he repeated slowly. “How did they think you would do that?”

  She shrugged tiredly and shook her head.

  He smiled slowly and looked away from her. “Tell me everything you know.”

  “It will be another two weeks before they are ready to fight. They won’t land at the harbour, but will instead sail around to the other side of the country and surprise you—crossing the whole of Lapis Matyr to get to Burmia will be what slows them down.”

  “And they plan to besiege the city?”

  She nodded and told him everything. She even told him what she knew about the Bright Ones, as much as it pained her.

  “How did they work it out?” Leostrial asked her.

  “The young Queen of Uns Lapodis.”

  “How could she know so much about the star?” he asked.

  “She has been there,” Satine replied.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “That’s what she said,” Satine said with a shrug.

  Leostrial looked thoughtful. Then his frown deepened.

  “It’s the princess from Cynis Witron, is it not?” he murmured. “Elixia. A child.”

  Satine looked at his face and suddenly panic struck her. “You aren’t going to do anything to her are you?” she asked him.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Please, she is so young.”

  “Why would I hurt her?”

  Satine stared at him. “You hurt lots of people.”

  He blinked and stared back at her. After a moment, his voice was soft. “Are they not the ones coming to attack me?”

  “Yes, but they think there’s a need. You announced your reign with a bloody conquering, so they think you will always be violent and seek to conquer them like you did Burmia. You could let them know that you aren’t going to do that. You could spare their lives.” She was pleading with him now. “This has all occurred because you did not seek to communicate with the other countries when you arrived here. Your initial attack and the fact that you reached out to no one has isolated you from the rest of the world. If they knew, like I did, that you mean harm to no one, then they might not be trying to attack you!”

  She saw the shadow fall across his face as she said this and dread crept into her heart.

  “You don’t mean to hurt them, do you?” she asked him.

  “I thought you less of a fool, Satine,” he said harshly.

  “Why am I foolish? It seems to me that it’s quite possible you intend to hurt them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can see the hate in you!” she yelled at him and stopped. There was a silence as they both tried to process what she had said. Why was she hurting so much?

  “There is hate in everyone,” he said softly.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But none so deep as in you, my lord.” Satine stared into his eyes and knew the truth of her words, as did he. But it was all too hard—this conversation, this relationship, this life—and there was something inside her, in the deep dark corners of her soul, where no light coul
d possibly penetrate.

  “Except,” he whispered, taking her chin in his hand and gently pulling her face up to stare into his, “in you, my dear.”

  And there was so, so much grief in those words, in that voice, and now she knew what was inside her, and his words to be true. It was hate. Hate, bitterness, jealousy, resentment, and most of all anger.

  Satine pulled away from his touch and dropped her head so as not to look at his eyes. There was no witty remark in her now, no dry comment that would take them away from this sorrow. A tear fell, and she watched it, as if it were her heart. Falling, falling, falling, to be shattered as it finally hit the bottom.

  “It makes us the same,” he said and she knew that he was tormenting her, wanting to hurt her because she’d betrayed him. “You have no love inside you.”

  “I love my child,” she whispered defiantly and he tensed. She saw his face harden and he turned away from her. “You don’t love anything the way I love him.”

  “There is so much you have yet to understand,” he murmured.

  “Then stop hiding. Explain it to me,” she replied. “Tell me where you came from, Leostrial. Tell me why you are here.” She paused and walked over to where he stood, his back to her. “Tell me,” she implored, “where your power comes from.”

  Slowly he turned to face her, and his expression was blank. She thought he would refuse, but after a very long moment he began to speak in a dry, dull monotone.

  “There are lands over the sea, very far away, wreathed in mist and darkness. I was born in those lands.” He paused and walked back to the table where he sat down. She followed him and did the same.

  “Artemis, goddess of the hunt,” he continued, “fell in love with me when I was a young man. She offered me everything, and I wanted to take it all. But she grew tired of me. The gods always tire of mortals. They are fickle creatures.” He paused and ran a hand through his hair, stopping at the point on one of his temples where the silver shone through. “But something happens to me when I fall in love. It goes too deep, and isn’t so easily discarded. She gave me power, and hers was a power of death and of the land. But when she left, my anger grew and I became ... more than I had been before. I began to learn of power and dark magic, arts that aren’t known here in Paragor.”

  There was a silence as she tried to take in the words. Never had she expected him to say anything like this. But it fitted. It all fitted. The pieces were falling into place.

  “Arts,” he went on, even more softly, “which are fuelled by human emotion. Power that can grow if you know how to fuel it, if you learn to channel everything you feel. There is a language, and if you can learn to speak this language, you can wield the greatest power in the world.”

  Satine took a breath and made herself speak. “Why did you come to Paragor?” she asked, her voice strained.

  He shrugged. “I had heard about it once, when I was a boy. Heard that it was a paradise, a place where men were not ruled by greedy gods and jealous goddesses. I wanted to see it. I wanted it to be my own. And...”

  he turned to look at her. “I knew that here I would be most powerful—powerful enough to exact what I have always thought was justice. What I found, when I got here, was a world ruled by the same failings and beliefs as the place from which I had come.”

  “You did not think...” she cleared her throat quickly, “You did not think your plight was a little too personal to be changing a world with?”

  “From that smallest of personal occurrences—the breaking of my heart—I somehow knew what had to be done,” he explained. “It began as revenge—seeking to destroy the goddess who tore my heart apart—but has become so much more. I am not the only living man that has cause to intimately understand the evil that can be inside the gods. Listen to the stories—they will tell you. Every time a mortal has ever come across a god, destruction has ensued. They are dangerous. All they do is take, and meddle for their own amusement. No one understands that I am trying to give them freedom.” Leostrial paused and looked at Satine. His frown deepened. “And if I have learnt anything in this life, it is that freedom can only be achieved through strength.”

  She bit her lip. “There is a difference between strength and brutality, my lord.”

  Leostrial met her eyes and her heart raced.

  “Not in my world,” he said heavily, and in his voice there was pure and simple regret.

  ***

  Jane had never seen men act the way they had when the Sirens sang. Fern was no exception—as soon as he heard the alluring notes float into the room, he shouted, “Jane, quickly bind my wrists with rope, as tight as you can! No matter what I do or how badly I struggle, do not untie them. Don’t ask questions, just do it now!”

  She quickly took up some rope and tied him to the bedpost.

  Then he began to struggle. His back arched and his body convulsed with the effort of trying to break free of the ropes. When she couldn’t bear to watch him any longer she ran up onto the deck.

  Men leapt from the gunwale into the waves. The Amazonians fought to hold them back, knocking some unconscious. Above the Siren song, Jane heard Ria lift her voice, powerful and enchanting. The spell was beginning to break.

  The men curled up below deck with their fingers in their ears were able to relax. Fern was unconscious, having struggled so hard that he hit his head on the bedpost. There was blood on his wrists where the ropes had cut, but he had not torn his stitches.

  The captain was found unconscious next to the ship’s wheel and the ship’s doctor was called. The old man bent down and examined the captain, finally turning to the others. “He has been poisoned.”

  ***

  “Who do you think did this?” Fern asked Jane the next day when they had begun to row again.

  “I have no idea,” she replied.

  “Often you need to follow your instincts, and not your mind,” he said gently.

  “When have you ever had to solve a murder case?” she asked him.

  He just shrugged and said that it was the way in most things in life.

  “At first I thought it would have to be a woman, but there were many men who had known to stop their ears,” Jane said, staring thoughtfully at the wall.

  Fern nodded. “I wish I could get out of bed to inspect what’s going on.” He sighed and then folded his arms across his chest. “A few things need to be done, Jane. Can you organise it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Firstly, I don’t want you talking about this to anyone but Luca and Harry. Not another soul. We have to assume that everyone is a suspect.”

  “Even Blaise? And Ria!”

  Fern shrugged. “I hope to the gods that it isn’t so, but we can’t be too cautious. There is a killer loose aboard the ship.”

  Jane stared at him and shivered. “Everyone’s terrified,” she murmured. “The whole ship is abuzz with talk of the murder.”

  “Then you need to set an example to keep them all calm. The next thing you need to do is ask the doctor what kind of poison was used and how it was administered. Any clues will help us.”

  Jane nodded. “Okay. I can do that. Anything else?”

  Fern frowned and spread his hands wide. “We need to ponder why someone would want the captain dead.”

  “So that we would sail into Siren territory without warning?” Jane hazarded.

  Fern nodded. “Therefore, this person wanted the whole ship destroyed and pointed off course. They want the mission to fail.”

  “Could Leostrial have a man aboard?”

  He met her eyes. “Anything’s possible.”

  Jane sighed and slumped onto the bed. “We’ve certainly gotten ourselves into a pickle here.”

  He looked at her for a moment and then said, “You say some very strange things, Jane.”

  “I could say the same about you,” she laughed. Then she stopped and looked at him. There was a very long silence. Jane scratched her arm and looked away from him. “Fern ... Did you mean what you said be
fore you...?”

  He grinned. “I was wondering when you would ask me about that. It’s nice to know you have such faith in me.”

  “Oh, Fern, get off your high horse. Of course I’m going to ask. You might have died. Everyone likes to be dramatic in their last moments. I would understand if you wanted to take it back.”

  Like hell she would.

  “Jane,” he laughed, rolling his eyes. “I’m not going to take it back. But don’t let on that you care.”

  She spread her hands wide, unable to keep the smile from her face.

  “Truly, Jane. I would never say such a thing lightly. I want you to be mine,” he said soberly.

  Jane clasped his hand in hers. “Okay,” she said softly, uncertainly. “But nothing can happen between us until you break up with your fiancée. And don’t think that I’m going to want to jump into marriage or anything—I’m still in high school!”

  “Agreed,” he grinned.

  They looked at each other for a moment, and the energy was so intense that Jane babbled, “You know I don’t really know anything about Paragor. Why don’t any of the countries speak different languages?”

  He looked quizzically at her. “The Elves speak Elvish, because they’re a different race. The Kabduh speak their own language, but the three treaty countries and Frescana find it easier to speak the same language.”

  “What about religion?” she asked.

  “There was the one god—The Great One, which you know about. You saw him with the mermaid. He was the god of everything, the creator. But then he was split into tiny pieces, and each piece became a new god. These were spread over the world—each god to govern a realm.

  “When this happened, the countries were truly divided. Each worshipped different gods, gods that best suited their culture.

  “The Elves believe in the mother goddess. She has no name as such. The people of Uns Lapodis, Cynis Witron, and Lapis Matyr as the three treaty countries, believe in the same gods: Actaeon and Danae, the king and queen of the gods; Freyja, the love goddess born from the sea; Odin, the god of war; Artemis, goddess of the hunt; and Ares, the god of the underworld and death.”

  “What about the other countries?”