by Jean Lee
His breath moves more swiftly—Charlotte senses it on her chin.
“Liam.” Her thumb brushes his lips. Too dry, too full—Gah, focus on survival, Charlie!—too still. “Liam, we’re in trouble.” Charlotte reaches over his head for his blood dagger and presses the hilt into his hand.
Embers flicker in the blade tip and travel toward the hilt and into his hand. His grey eyes flash open with lightning; he sucks back his breath. “Wha—" He whips the dagger out, stops it just shy of Charlotte’s throat. Liam crumples back and drops it, dizzy in the darkness. “Never do that again!” His head strikes the side of the tunnel. “Mac an donais! What is happening? Where are we?”
“In a tunnel by the lake. The Lady and Campion busted out of wherever you put them, and now they’re with the Incomplete in Rose House. Sounded like Devyn and the scouts got out okay. Ember said they’re crossing the lake. I don’t know where Arlen or Dorjan went.”
Liam vigorously scratches the dirt out of his curly hair. “Abandoned again…” he seems to hiss to himself, then shakes his head. “Well. Dorjan is an able fighter on two legs and four. We must hope Devyn will have news of them soon. Let us first find the scouts, then…” Liam trails off, his fingertips feeling the trap door. “Did you do this?”
“The House did it, like before.” Charlotte peers through the trap door. Liam joins her and studies the empty beach and smooth water that just keeps going and going—the land on the other side’s thin as a ribbon. “Can you fly us over?”
He balls his free hand into a fist and concentrates. Tongues of flame lick round his veins for a moment, then nothing. “Damnation, I’m just not strong enough to change.”
“Right, so we need a way to cross the lake, House. We need a way to cross.” Charlotte closes her eyes and presses her palms against the trap door. “Need a way to cross…”
“But Rose House is behind—”
“Shh! Need a way to cross, a way to cross…”
The Voice nudges Charlotte’s heart: Open your eyes.
Nothing in the trees. Nothing around the bend. But at the shore: “There’s a boat.”
“What?” Liam ignores the looming threat of death and pushes the trap door wide open. “That can’t happen.” He stands there, completely exposed, pointing with his blood dagger. “That, that can not happen. The magic within Rose House cannot possibly cross an elemental boundary.”
Charlotte whirls around, senses on high alert for any Incomplete hunters. “Would you get—oh fuck it, let’s go.” She jogs toward the white canoe bobbing in the water.
Liam staggers behind and helps Charlotte maneuver the canoe further into the shallows. “This can’t—”
“Can’t happen, blah blah.” Charlotte lets the cold sharpen her nerves to catch the change in the breeze, the hint of ashes in the air. “If you can’t swim, neither can they, which means water’s the best place for us right now. Get in before you collapse.” Liam looks too damn pale, like he’s down with flu.
“I did have one swimming lesson, if you recall,” Liam says as he tumbles into the canoe, breaths shallow again.
Cawing.
Branches crashing.
Push, Charlie, move, Charlie, get the fuck outta Dodge, Charlie.
Shrieking.
Heavy breathing.
Do not look back, Charlie, get in the boat, Charlie, grab a paddle, Charlie.
Hissing.
“Let me.” Liam holds a limp hand up toward the oar.
Charlotte smacks it back down. “Hold your blood dagger. I got this.” And she runs through her mind until she finds memories of canoeing with her father. She never went solo, but she remembers to row on both sides, one, two, just like counting breaths, one, two, steady and strong, one, two. “How far out are we?”
“Eight stone skips, maybe.” Liam’s voice levels and deepens. “More would be better.”
“Obviously.” The ash smell remains faint, but the crashing of branches doesn’t. Charlotte fixes her eyes upon Lake Aranina’s opposite shore, a mere ribbon of sand but there, away from the hisses and crashes. “How many?”
“HEY!” cries a familiar voice from the beach behind them.
Liam swallows. He has no desire to interrupt Charlotte’s impressive rhythmic command of the vessel’s navigation. “Enough.” He cannot believe what he sees—Campion, striped with blood and dust, laughing. For what, this hollow victory? None of the remaining Incomplete laugh with him. They merely stagger into view, blood-drunk and stupid.
Oaks and pines older than the Wall snap and crash onto the sand as thousands of snake-like shadows slither along their trunks. Liam grits his teeth. Too like those worms that poisoned Charlotte’s mind. Orna, where do these black talents come from?
And there she is: Orna, the Lady of the Pits, above ground yet again. Liam knows he cast her into the lowest realm of tunnels. He knows he did, yet there she slinks, half snake, half woman. Hands clawed, hair knotted, tongue lolling between bare breasts, drooling, her face… He had sliced off her face. She sewed it back on. Crookedly.
Campion balances on top of two of the felled trees. “Well lookie-loo at what Miss Pretty Tricks has come up with now!” He waves a hand at the water. “You’re gonna wish you accepted the Lady’s bargain, girl!”
Liam commands his belly to stop lurching and grips either side of the boat for balance. Charlotte breaks rhythm for but a moment to turn and shout, “Piss off, tree rat!” She drives the oar back into the water, jaw clenched, the lights in her eyes fierce to behold. Their canoe glides on the surface without a sound. It will not be long before they reach Lake Aranina’s center, where no Velidevour has ever dared venture.
Orna slaps the lake’s edge with her tail and cackles, yellow bile dribbling down the corners of her mouth. “Beeluuuuhved.” She digs her claws into the sand and grunts at the Incomplete to roll the remaining trunks together on either side of Campion, whose grin shines despite the blood on his teeth.
“You really think you can outrun us, Princeborn?” Campion’s voice volleys across the distance. “If you can enter the water, then so can we.” The slithering shadows tie the trunks together like long, oily cords. The Incomplete now have a raft, and they are pushing it into the water.
Orna slithers onto the raft as it begins to slide away from the beach, tongue lolling as she laughs, her chest bared to the sun. She claws the wood and hisses to the Incomplete to board. Their perverted paw-hands make weak work of paddling, but still, they are moving, and they will kill Charlotte the first chance they have.
Yet what does the Lady Charlotte do? She laughs. “Bitch, please.” The water churns fiercely round her oar. The skin on her hands and neck glows with her determination. She, a mere human, battles against magic no human has ever withstood to protect him.
Him.
Liam’s inner wings unfold. His heart’s fire surges. He stands with sure feet and holds his blood dagger high. “I swear that as long as my heart’s fire burns, Orna, you will never have me or taste freedom beyond the Wall. And if your followers are wise they will flee before they find themselves your prey!”
Campion pushes a half-hare aside to kneel at the bow of the raft. “Say that to the Lady’s face, Princeborn. You don’t dare, you coward!”
Feathers of fire begin to form on Liam’s shoulders. “I. Am. No. Coward.”
Campion throws his arms wide. “Then come back here and say it to my commoner face!” He laughs and kicks the water fiercely. Suddenly the raft shakes, knocking Campion and several others off balance. Liam can see Campion’s sneer shrink as those mad eyes stare at the water, back to Liam, back to the water. He looks to the Lady Orna and dares to ask, “What was that?”
Steam erupts around the raft, and the black cords shriek into nothingness. The logs float apart, leaving Orna, Campion, and Incomplete suddenly waist-deep in the lake. Orna wriggles her way to the sand first, full of coughs and loose teeth, the water hissing wherever her black, oily spit falls. Campion leaps out of the water and lands c
lose by, barking Mawdre at the Incomplete. “Get out of there or die!”
But it is too late—the Incomplete now fight something under the water, growling and screaming as their legs become entangled in ropes.
“Liam, what’s bumping the boat?”
“Get out of there or die…” Liam silently thanks Aether Charlotte’s not looking at him, or she would see Liam’s body shake with the echo of Campion’s dire words and the sight of a ripple moving towards their canoe.
Orna takes a stray branch, sand, oil from her wounds, and runs her claws through them, smearing them, painting them. “Geeet beeluuuhved.” Orna holds a lump that beats like a heart in her hands. She releases it: a creature with wings of oiled leaves. Eyeless. Mouth full of teeth-like thorns. A vine lolls like a tongue as it pants in flight past the soaked logs, its wingspan vast, too bloody vast for such a small body...
Liam sheathes his dagger, eager to fly, to protect, to conquer. Charlotte will not die this day, I swear by Aether’s Forge she won’t.
“Liam…” Charlotte’s voice quivers. The boat rocks gently, then harder, harder.
Water explodes between the canoe and the shore with such a sound, a cry like that of a whale and elephant and lion and dragon swollen to tidal heights. Light shivers as the sound wave travels through the air at Orna’s creature and obliterates it. Not one oily drop is left to fall into the water.
Waves crest on either side of the sound. One wave drives the mob off the sand but not out of sight. The other must be ten feet high, easily capable of toppling their canoe—
Green luminescence spirals from the water and wraps around Liam’s shoulders, head, body, legs. The glowing net jerks him off the boat, into the air.
Charlotte’s eyes catch his just before water engulfs his head.
3
Screaming Magic
“LIAM!” Charlotte screams over the side. The wave churns back on itself and leaves the canoe untouched.
Campion laughs on the shore. The Lady’s hissing like someone cut her tail off. The green net glows in the water like jellyfish tentacles, and it’s shrinking. Surrounding Liam, trapping him, and—
Liam’s going down.
Liam’s going to drown.
A speck of orange shoots from the treetops over the Incomplete and high above the water toward Charlotte. Ember? But there’s no time, and what can she do?
Charlotte clutches her chest, counts her breaths, one, two, three, takes a final gulp of air—dives.
Lake Aranina doesn’t feel like lake water, doesn’t look like lake water. Charlotte knows lakes are full of sand and fish, little bugs, turtles, ducks, plants, the lot.
But this lake is stark blue, bugless and fishless. A prairie of seaweed waves at her from the distant lake floor, like she’s swimming through a North Dakota sky—
Two tailfins fly alongside the net. Two heads of kelp-like hair bob steadily on the journey downward, blurring and merging with the darkening lake water. Charlotte trains her eyes on the one carrying a spear white as bone, her beacon in her descent through the deep dark blue.
Liam squirms, fights to break his arms from his sides, but the net sparks like static lightning, sending Liam’s screams bubbling into the water.
Charlotte feels his pain in the bubbles as they run along her chest, strike her in the face. She wrenches her arms to swim deeper, faster.
The Voice in her heart sets the bellows to the forge inside, and she is white-hot, surging, closing distance. We will know sky and grass again. We will not die helpless in the water—
She kicks harder. Paddles faster. She nears the net. She’s close, spitting close—
Liam’s eyes flash open after another scream. The storms swirl, break—his mouth cries, “Go!”
Charlotte shakes her head and mouths back, “Like hell!” She will not listen to her lungs, she will not let their need for air keep her from the net and Liam, now only a foot out of grabbing distance.
Liam bends his head, struggles to lift his shoulder blades up. To bring the sheath within reach. The blood dagger’s hilt peeks through the net.
Clicking, like a dolphin—a mermaid turns its head. Oval eyes blink double eyelids—the outer set moves up and down, the inner side to side. Nose slits twitch as kelp hair hovers. Neck gills breathe. A mouth… thing… shaped like a six-pointed star…
Don’t make her open that, The Voice warns.
But Charlotte’s not thinking about some stupid mouth thing. She sees the bone spear across the mermaid’s chain-mailed chest and knows the blood dagger could destroy it, destroy them—
—them—
Dammit where’s the other one?
The second creature, a merman if his bare chest is any indication, swims in front of the spear-bearer and the net. His eyes go from ovals to slits as his inner eyelids close and gills flutter, sparkle. The star-lipped mouth opens—
Screams.
The force rockets Charlotte down, spiraling, starry-eyed and lost in a water tornado of painful sound, the breath in her gone, the world is gone she is gone gone gone—
CRACK.
Charlotte sprawls on a rock surrounded by quiet, lifeless sand. She blinks at the sapphire world, at the two swimmers circling above them like sharks, closing in.
Liam lands next to her. Too few bubbles leave his nose and mouth. No wow eyes evident as he still struggles in that net, too weak to scream as the sparks fly from foot to head, everywhere the net touches him.
No. Charlotte shoves her hand through a gap in the net. Sparks shower her arm, flood her vision. The Voice screams inside her chest, but she shoves her other hand in, lighting up the very veins inside her, pressing her soul into her feet. But she will stay with Liam, she will give him her final breath—
Water pulls back from their bodies, lifting above them like a tent’s canvas. Air, dry and sweet and pure. They can breathe.
The net slithers away, taking all the sparks with it. Charlotte collapses on Liam’s chest, and he, too, is coughing up water and gulping air. The water hovers maybe a dozen feet above their heads and just outside the perimeter of the rock they lie on.
Charlotte lifts her head, leaving her hand on Liam’s chest. His heartbeat is erratic, but not weak. His body shudders with the aftershock of the net.
“Hey hey, ease up. We’re not dead yet. Here.” She brings his hand to her own chest. “Stick with me. Calm it down; I need you.” She uncurls his fingers so that his hand spreads out across her heart. “Stay with me, Liam.”
His fingertips press through the soaked linen of her pajama shirt. His eyes stop rolling and find her face. Charlotte sighs, relieved. There they are, his clouds sweet with summer rain. Might be the last skies I see.
His gasps, swallows air to speak, “Ch-Charlotte…”
Her whole body warms. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And Liam’s mouth slightly, ever so slightly, smiles. “Neither am I.”
The merpeople circle down to the rock floor, and begin to click, back and forth, talking. Choosing? Planning? Not calling for help, that’s for sure. This patch of Lake Aranina’s floor looks too derelict, too deserted for life: a small collection of ramshackle huts with gutted windows and doors all overgrown with black-green weeds. Maybe Aranina is to merpeople what the Las Vegas desert is to the mob—an easy dump site.
The clicking slows.
The spear-wielding mermaid stops swimming just outside their air bubble’s surface. Her scales begin to swirl in small, translucent whirlpools until the tailfin itself splits in half. The split runs through the scales, and the whirlpools cascade upward, leaving human-like legs behind. The human-ish torso glows bright and fades into a chest covered with scales luminescent as a bubble in sunshine. The chainmail shifts to wrap around her hips and thighs. Magic’s light coarses down the mermaid’s arms and leaves long, silvery-thin fins behind. One fin still holds the spear poised for a strike.
She steps through the water-air interface and onto their rock. The fin arms turn all but invi
sible without water. The green kelp hair clings to her head, neck, and chest. Her eyes double-blink, and Charlotte can’t help but think of skipping stones—there is a heavy strength polished smooth by time and water. The star-shaped mouth swims into a long, thin line that opens for a voice light and musical, like a breeze passing through a wind chime: “At last, a mighty princeborn comes to us.” Ting! goes the bone spear on the stone near Liam’s head—and Charlotte’s hand sneaking toward the blood dagger.
“Don’t bother with your weapon. Magic’s not keen on the elements crossing.”
Charlotte’s hand wavers. The spearhead’s as long and thin as her forearm, but her forearm isn’t serrated on both sides like a giant shark’s tooth. Damn, that would have been handy. “Look, Blinkey, we ain’t gonna eat your fishy friends…” Charlotte’s ready to do some sort of dramatic sweep towards, well, anyone else, but no one is there except Blinkey and her comrade still outside the bubble. “Jeez, not even one catfish with a tommy gun? Damn, the Velidevour sent, like, a giant monster and an angry mob after me. I feel like I should be insulted.”
A tired hand slaps her leg. “Manners, please.” Liam’s voice has enough strength to register his annoyance.
“I don’t care. We just want to cross the damn lake and be gone. C’mon, Blinkey, cut us a break?”
Blinkey’s nose slits twitch. She turns to click and buzz at the merman. He breaks off a length of the green net-rope to give her before wrapping the rest around his torso and swimming back in the direction they came from. Her fin hitches the new coil to her chainmail. “I think not. The Queen shall have her answers.”
“Answers to what?”
The eyes narrow again, but the mouth remains the same, “To kidnapping.” She runs a fin along her spearhead’s side. “To mutilation.”
Liam manages to stand despite the yellow welts on his feet, hands, neck—everywhere. Something sways behind the mermaid that sets his inner talons scratching against his bones. “Kidnapping?”
