The King's Seal

by Amy Kuivalainen

  BY THE time Penelope got around to explaining the fall of Acre and the escaping priest, she and Elazar were back upstairs, making spritz in the kitchen.

  Elazar tipped the slices of orange he’d been cutting into a pitcher of ice. “You’ve done exceedingly well to get so far so quickly.”

  “There are benefits to living with immortals. They’ve all been involved in courts and wars over the years, and Alexis has investigated anything even remotely magic-related.”

  The kitchen door burst open, making them both jump.

  “What’s going on here?” Zo demanded, his arms laden with shopping bags. Penelope flinched at the anger in his gaze.

  “Penelope and I were discussing her hunt for the ring, Abba.”

  Zo dumped his bags on the counter. “I need to speak with you a moment,” he said, taking Penelope by the arm and dragging her out of the kitchen.

  “Hey! Let go,” Penelope snapped and shoved him off.

  “What do you think you’re doing? Elazar is meant to be in bed. He was shot and nearly burned alive two days ago, remember?”

  “Zo, you healed him. He’s fine.”

  “He’s an old man! Even with the healing magic, his body will take time to recover. You’ve lured him out to help you without thinking how it will hurt him.”

  Penelope had never seen Zo so angry and distraught, so she bit her tongue to keep from lashing out at him. “I didn’t lure him anywhere. Elazar wanted to see his books, and we got to talking. He says he feels fine, and you treating him like a little kid won’t help the situation.”

  “Don’t you dare tell me how to look after my son.”

  Penelope was about to lose her temper when the blue front door opened with an excited flourish and an unmistakeable bulk filled it.

  “Con?” Zo’s face turned from anger to shock in seconds. “What are you doing here?”

  Constantine dropped his bags onto the speckled marble floor and dragged Zo into a bear hug. “I came as soon as I heard what happened. It’s going to be okay, Zotikos.”

  Zo seemed to struggle against the embrace for a moment before bursting into tears, and sobbing into Constantine’s chest. “They almost killed my baby.”

  “I know. Don’t worry. We’ll get justice for what they did to him.” Constantine looked over Zo’s shoulder at Penelope. “I’ve got this, Doctor Bryne.” He dismissed her with a small wave, and Penelope backed away, relieved to no longer be the target of Zo’s anger anymore.

  “God, I need a drink.” She made for the kitchen, hoping Elazar had poured her a big enough cocktail.

  “Please don’t take his anger to heart, Penelope,” Elazar said as she sat down at the bench.

  “What’s all the noise about?” Aelia came into the kitchen through the back door. “Oh spritz! Good idea.” She kissed Elazar and helped herself to a glass.

  “Constantine is here,” Penelope said, bracing herself for the onslaught of abuse.

  Aelia lowered her glass. “I can’t say I’m surprised. With Thevetat coming after the things we love, it makes sense that Alexis would summon him. I should probably text Phaidros and warn him.”

  “You’re not mad? I thought after Badija…”

  “I was upset, and I’m not anymore. Con was right about a lot of things—not that I’ll ever admit that. You can assure Alexis that I won’t try to murder Con in his sleep.”

  Penelope bit her lip. “Alexis didn’t ask him to come here. I did. Actually, he made the decision for himself when I told him about the attack on Elazar. He was worried about Zo.”

  Aelia and Elazar shared devilish smiles, and Aelia looped an arm around Penelope’s shoulders. “I’m sure the Defender won’t stay mad at you for long. It’s good to see you aren’t waiting for his permission like an obedient little woman.”

  “What about me has ever given you the impression that I’m obedient?”

  Aelia’s phone beeped, and she took it out of her shorts. Roses bloomed in her golden cheeks as she typed back. “Phaidros and Lyca have arrived at the train station. They’ll be here soon,” she told them.

  “You seem pretty pleased by that, Aunty. Something you’re not telling me?”

  “It’s better that we are all together under one roof so we can protect each other, my little bird.”

  It was clear neither Penelope nor Elazar believed her. Alexis’s voice joined Constantine’s in the next room, and Penelope steeled herself for hot tempers. Instead, when Alexis came into the kitchen, he bent down and kissed her.

  “Thank you for convincing him to come,” he said, stroking her cheek with his thumb.

  “I don’t know how much convincing I had to do.” Penelope looked up at him, her mouth dry. He smelled of sandalwood and cinnamon and burning power, and there was a glimmer on his skin that told Penelope he’d been doing magic. Whenever he looked like that, she struggled to keep a straight thought in her head.

  “I’ve warned Phaidros,” Aelia said.

  “Constantine has offered to stay in a hotel if it’s going to be a problem.”

  Aelia shook her head. “It won’t be.” She moved out the door with a small skip in her step.

  “Something’s going on. That response was too optimistic.” Alexis frowned.

  “Aunty is a woman of many secrets. It’s good for all of us if she’s happy,” Elazar said, then followed after her.

  Penelope eyed Alexis. “What have you been up to this afternoon? You’re…shimmering.”

  Alexis smiled as he reached for the half-empty pitcher. “I’ve finished Nereus’s funeral stele.”

  PENELOPE WATCHED AS the sun went down across the Grand Canal. Aelia interrupted the peaceful moment by pushing another bottle of wine into her hands. She had another three in her own, and Lyca was coming up behind her with even more.

  “Do you think we have enough wine?”

  “It’s going to have to last us a whole night, Penelope. It’s bad luck to pause the lamenting to go get more,” Aelia told her.

  With Alexis’s pronouncement about the finished stele, the palazzo had become a flurry of activity. Zo got himself together and had since been criticizing Alexis for dropping funeral food preparation on his hands. All worry and anger over Elazar’s attack seemed to have been pushed down in the face of Constantine’s arrival and the amount of cooking he needed to do. Penelope had a strong suspicion that Alexis knew his news would be the very thing to shove Zo toward recovery.

  When everyone else went to greet Phaidros and Lyca, Zo had taken Penelope’s hand and kept her in the kitchen. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ever spoken to you like that or grabbed you in anger. This whole business has driven me mad.”

  Penelope had wrapped her arms around his waist, pulling him into a hug. “I know, Zo. It’s okay. We’re okay.”

  Zo kissed her forehead. “We are. Well, for the moment at least. You, on the other hand, are about to be introduced to Atlantean funeral rites.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “Yes. Lyca and Aelia are going to keep you up all night drinking and singing and other mysterious rituals unknown to us menfolk.”

  “In my day, women used to rend their clothing in grief,” Constantine had said. He’d managed to sneak in behind her wearing a hopeful grin.

  “Yes, but in your day, women also used to curtsey whenever you entered a room, and that’s not about to happen either.” She’d yelped in surprise when Constantine hugged her from behind, Zo and all, and squeezed.

  “Oh, Doctor Bryne, I do enjoy that sharp tongue of yours. I can see why you love her so much, Zo.”

  “And I love to breathe,” squeaked Penelope, though she was woman enough to admit that being sandwiched between two very handsome, brawny men wasn’t the worst experience she’d ever had.

  “If you guys are going to have a threesome without inviting me, I’ll be so offended,” said Phaidros.

  Penelope reached out to him. “Help!”

  “All right, off the Archivist so a real man can hug her.�
�� Phaidros shooed at them. “Back off, you miscreants.”

  Penelope let out an exaggerated sigh as Zo and Constantine dropped her and Phaidros caught her up.

  “Nice to see you causing as much mischief as you can in my absence. Calling Constantine was particularly cheeky.”

  “She missed me. Poor girl is only human.” Constantine winked.

  Penelope rolled her eyes. “He wishes.”

  “Well, I hope you slept well last night, Pen,” said Phaidros, giving her back an encouraging slap. “Because you’re about to be more shit-faced than you’ve ever been in your life.”

  Phaidros’s ominous words came back to her as she eyed the bottles they carried through the gardens. Alexis had told them he placed the stele in Nereus’s favorite spot. This instruction must have made sense to Lyca and Aelia, leaving Penelope to follow them deeper into the gardens than she’d ever been before.

  Like the rest of the palazzo, the gardens and grounds seemed to change with the season and the palazzo’s whim. So little of it was seen from the Grand Canal side that Penelope had no way of judging where its solid perimeter lay.

  “Should we be getting drunk so soon after an attack? What if something happens?” She couldn’t help thinking that a night off to drink, even in memory of a friend, was an extravagance and a risk they shouldn’t take.

  “Nereus’s shade has waited long enough to be honored,” Lyca said sharply. “If we stop respecting our dead, drinking, making love, celebrating life, then Thevetat and his horrid followers have already defeated us.”

  “What Lyca means is, think of tonight as lifting the middle finger in Thevetat’s direction,” Aelia said. “Besides, the men aren’t allowed to get drunk, so if another attack happens, they’ll be able to go and save the day without us.”

  “Oh, please. It would hardly be the first time I’ve gone into battle drunk.” Lyca snorted. “‘Leave the men to save us!’ Ten thousand years, and I’ve still not managed to break you from thinking that bullshit.”

  Aelia stuck her tongue out at Lyca’s back. “We’ll be fine, Pen. Lyca knows what I mean, and she’s also full of shit. She barely talked to me for the first four thousand years.”

  “It took that long for you to become interesting. Ah, there is the stele. Well done, Defender.” Lyca stopped walking and pointed.

  In a small grove of blooming orange trees was a marble stele that stood three meters tall. Sitting on the ledge of the marble base was a goblet, flowers, a bowl, and a glass, pyramid-shaped incense burner. Penelope almost dropped the wine she was holding when Lyca stepped out of her line of sight and she saw the details of the carving. Nereus was depicted sitting on a bench and passing a handful of flames to Penelope.

  “But…that’s me! Why am I on her stele?”

  Aelia and Lyca both looked at her like she was an idiot.

  “You’re her heir. She is passing the flame of her knowledge, magic, and authority onto you,” Aelia explained. “Usually, funeral steles show the dead with their relatives, but magicians are always with their apprentices.”

  Penelope stared at her face depicted in stone. The expression of calm as she accepted the flame was something she’d never felt in life. There were other objects carved around Nereus: an open astrolabe, books, a globe, a small statue of Poseidon, candles, and a pair of curved daggers that must’ve been her weapon of choice.

  “It looks so real, like she’s going to stand up from her stone seat and ask me for some wine.” Penelope’s fingers itched to touch the stone.

  “Alexis has always done excellent work.” Lyca popped the cork on a bottle of wine and filled the goblet that sat on the altar. “There you go, you grumpy old bitch.” Lyca took a swing from the bottle and passed it to Penelope.

  “It’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead.”

  “It’s worse luck to lie. Nereus was a grumpy old bitch, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her all the same.”

  “I can’t really blame her after living with you magicians for ten thousand years.” Penelope took a big mouthful of the wine. There was no label on the bottle, and it left a weird taste in her mouth. There were familiar flavors—dark grapes and honey—but also the bitter aftertaste of salt and ashes.

  Aelia seemed to read Penelope’s expression. “Funeral wine. Zo made it for the occasion.” She filled the bowl on the altar with grain, then arranged fruit and shells on top of it. She passed Penelope a box of matches and pointed to the incense.

  Penelope drew out a match and hesitated. “The last time I lit magical incense, I ended up falling out of time and having a chat with Poseidon.”

  Lyca and Aelia both were nonplussed.

  “If you see Nereus, tell her she left behind a damn mess.” Aelia took the bottle of wine from Penelope and pointed to the burner. “Go on. It’s not going to light itself.”

  Taking a deep breath, Penelope lit the match and held it to the incense. It was almost disappointing when nothing happened. “Well, that was anticlimactic,” she said as it began to smoke.

  “I could’ve told you Alexis made this batch of incense,” Lyca said. “He wouldn’t have trusted any of the stuff Nereus left behind.”

  Out of the bags they’d brought along came a blanket and pillows for them to sit on. It wasn’t until Aelia started pulling out hummus, olives, freshly baked flatbread, honey figs, pomegranates, and more that Penelope realized one of them must have enchanted the bag somehow. No way could it have held so much otherwise.

  “Why aren’t the guys allowed to be involved in this?” she asked.

  “Because men only get in the way. Women are the gatekeepers of life and death; we’re there when you are born, and we are the only ones strong enough to be there at death. Dying can often be a messy, heartbreaking business, and most men don’t have the strength to guide people compassionately to the next life.” Lyca lay down on the pillows, stretched out on her side, and opened another bottle of wine. “Aelia will sing the lament at dusk and the life at dawn, and hopefully, Nereus will be at rest and not haunt the palazzo. She deserves to move on and find her love.”

  “Does everyone have a bottle of wine?” Aelia asked, and Penelope sat down next to Lyca on the big blanket. Once they were settled and the sun began to dip down into the lagoon, Aelia started to sing. Penelope, who was determined to pace herself, found that within thirty seconds of the song, every heartache she’d ever had bubbled to the surface. She didn’t worry about getting too drunk after that.

  The strange funeral wine was becoming better with every mouthful, especially as the hidden traumas of her life rose up and assaulted her: the barbed comments from her father, the way her mother never defended her, how other academics had treated her when she told them she was going to find Atlantis. She relived the crushing fear of drowning and the panic attacks that had crippled her. The few men she’d allowed space in her life had all gone once they saw the real her, all of them growing frustrated and intimidated by her and her ambition.

  Penelope wanted Aelia to stop, but she kept singing. In the song, she heard Thevetat’s taunts and Abaddon’s laughter, Tim’s cries as the fear and madness ate away at who he was. Worst of all was Carolyn’s accusation: You knew they were coming for him!

  Penelope wasn’t aware that Aelia had stopped singing—only that by the time she came out of the horrors inside her, the sun was down and torches had been lit around the orange grove. Her face was damp with tears, and the bottle in her hand was empty. She placed it on the growing pile of empty bottles and reached for another.

  She sniffed. “You could have warned me.”

  “No point. It wouldn’t have made it easier,” said Lyca. She pointed to where Aelia sat. Her eyes were glazed as her tears continued to fall. “It’s hardest for her. The song and the magic take a big toll. You’ve only got thirty years of pain to deal with—you’re blessed.”

  “You seem to be holding up well despite your age.”

  “I don’t love easily or as hard as Aelia. Great love, great g
rief. All of my pain at the moment is caught up in losing Nereus, and that’s why we are here tonight.”

  Minutes later, Aelia escaped her stupor. “Gods, I hate doing that.” She wiped her face and nose on a handkerchief and spat next to a tree. “Damn grief magic in my mouth. I’ll be tasting it for days. How did you go, Pen?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Aelia laughed. “Eat something. You’ll be fine. In a few days, when the hangover has worn off, you’re going to feel more unburdened than you have in your life.”

  Penelope reached for a block of dark chocolate and stuffed a piece in her mouth. “I’ll take your word for it, because right now, I want to push your perfect ass into a canal.”

  Still laughing, Aelia sat down next to her and kissed her cheek. “I’m glad you’re sharing this moment with us. Nereus would’ve known who you were as soon as Alexis dragged you out of the canal, but she never let on. It makes me wonder about all the other secrets she kept.”

  “Like who was the favorite child?”

  “Alexis,” Lyca and Aelia said at the same time.

  “Doesn’t surprise me. He’s my favorite too.”

  Lyca scowled. “You two are so disgustingly in love. It still bothers me to see the Defender so soft.”

  Aelia took two big mouthfuls of wine. “I slept with Phaidros.”

  Penelope choked on the chocolate she was chewing, and Lyca sat up. “What did you just say?”

  “I. Slept. With. Phaidros.”

  Lyca’s eyes widened. “I honestly don’t know what to say.”

  Penelope went with: “Finally?” Aelia turned as red as their wine. “When did this happen?”

  “A few nights ago, when I went out. It kind of just…happened.”

  Penelope doubted that. She’d been waiting for some kind of reaction after Badija, like fireballs and black eyes—not sex. “And how have things been between you since then?” Penelope gestured to Lyca for a fresh bottle of wine.

  “Fine. Nice,” Aelia replied shyly.

  “And are you two together?”

  “I don’t know. It’s weird. I don’t know how to do this with him. He’s not some random one-night stand. It meant something, but neither of us knows what.” Aelia sighed and collapsed backward onto her pillows. “I don’t know what to do.”