Kingdom of Salt and Sirens

by J. A. Armitage

  About the Author

  Laura is a USA Today Bestselling Author of paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary romance. When she's not writing, she can be found drinking ridiculous amounts of tea, trying to resist French Macaroons, and watching the Pitch Perfect trilogy for the hundredth time (at least!)

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  Nervous Water by Tracy Korn

  Nervous Water | First Bloods Prequel 2

  Copyright © 2019 by Tracy Korn. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

  Cover Design Copyright © 2019 by James Korn

  www.jkornphoto.com

  Created with Vellum

  From the Book of Metatron

  In the beginning, the Lord saw nothingness, and in it, He placed a seed.

  From the seed grew the Tree of Life, and from this tree sprang the fruit of the Gnomes, who were of the earth.

  They were to bring forth the plants and animals that would populate the great landscape, but alas, the Gnomes lacked a vital spirit.

  The Lord saw this and created the Undines, who were of the water. They were to nourish the earth so life would spring forth, but alas, the Undines, too, lacked a vital spirit.

  The Lord then created the Sylphs, who were of the air. They were to gather the water into the skies and deliver it unto the earth, but this would not come to pass, for even they lacked a vital spirit.

  At last, the Lord created the Salamanders, who were of the great fire. The Lord said unto the Salamanders, change the water into air so it will rise high enough to penetrate the earth. The Salamanders obeyed, and life sprang forth. The Lord saw this and said that it was good.

  The Gnomes, Undines, Sylphs, and the Salamanders had become united as one vital spirit called The Elementals. The world was theirs during the unrecorded time, and for a while, there was peace.

  1

  Three halfling girls swam toward me in the distance, too young to be this close to the boundary, but too old, apparently, to be scared by dragnet and harpoon stories.

  They stopped abruptly and clutched something to their chests, each of them darting in a different direction when they saw me. One of them was heading toward the winding southeast reef, which meant she’d have nowhere to go if I could catch the end of her wake.

  And of course I could. Halflings were fast, but they weren’t agile. She soon found herself cornered in the tall coral, too close to the surface for an Undine under fifteen years old to jump over without the last rays of sunlight turning her skin to stone. At least, that was what we told them. It kept them from attacking the human boats that passed through our waters.

  "I’m sorry, Your Highness!" she echoed. "Here, take it!" She extended her arms to me, but I couldn’t make out what they held at this distance. Her silver hair started to blacken as it fanned behind her like an explosion of ink. She was even younger than I thought, still bare-chested and yellow-gilled instead of the blue-green of a mature Undine.

  "Cora! There you are,” Reed, another lieutenant in the Queen’s Guard, called to me over my shoulder. His silver hair was falling out of its binding, suggesting he’d come through rough waters. He swam to my side, then noticed the halfling. "Oh…what’s in your arms, little one?" he asked her sweetly. I forced myself to let this fatherly approach play out only because I promised myself I would rake Reed’s scales the second she was out of sight.

  "Just tithings from the ship…" she squeaked, extending her arms to us and offering Reed a little smile.

  "What ship?" I asked, studying the items in her grasp. A chain of gold and two of silver, one of these attached to a watch. "Who gave you these?"

  "The men who fell from the ship near the sandbar, Your Highness—only…they didn’t exactly give them to me. But they weren’t going to use them anymore," she insisted, her yellow eyes widening and darkening like her hair. "Mara told us they were tithings. The humans are in our world. It’s the least they can do!"

  Of course it was Mara, I thought, shaking my head. "Is that what she told you? What’s your name?"

  "Opal, Your Highness."

  "You don’t need to call me that. Do you understand what happens to Undine who attack ships, Opal? Who disobey the queen’s explicit instructions to stay away from humans?"

  "But Mara—"

  "Mara will get you gutted on a ship deck or worse! And that’s if you manage to keep from turning to stone first…you’re not old enough to be this close to the surface!"

  "Yes, Your High—I mean, Cora."

  "Do you even know what this is?" I grabbed the chain with the attached silver casing. "The humans call it a watch. Do you know why? Because it watches everything you do and everywhere you go. That’s how they know where to find you."

  "Mara didn’t say—"

  "Go home, Opal," Reed cooed at her, smoothing her hair, which was pulsing the spectrum of silver to black like a cuttlefish. I took the other trinkets from her, but she didn’t even seem to notice as she smiled up at Reed and reached to touch the two swirled lines of his shoulder rank tattoo.

  I swatted her hand away and gripped her chin. "Opal, if I see you out past the boundary again, I’ll lock you in the hole myself, do you understand?"

  She nodded quickly, turning completely black as she sped past me toward the cove like an eel in the night. I rounded on Reed.

  He held his hands up, like that would keep me from gutting him. "Hey, hey! A princess shouldn’t be violent…"

  "Then I guess it’s a good thing I’m also a soldier! Did I ask for your help? Because I don’t recall echoing for you to pardon her."

  "Listen, you should be thanking me! I came out here because—wait, pardon her? You were actually going to charge her? She’s just a halfling, Cora.” Reed leveled his green eyes at me and cocked his head to the side. "I mean, come on. You were making her shadow over having some human trash."

  "How do you think she’d feel if one of those monsters pulled her up in a dragnet? Do you think cooing at her would save her then?" I swam past him to find Mara, making a point to knock into him.

  "Cora, wait!"

  "They need to fear the boundary waters, Reed!" I echoed back to him without turning around. "We have no power there!"

  I gripped the chain trinkets in my hand so tightly, they bit into my skin. The pain propelled me out of the coral field and back to the open water, but there was no sign of Mara or any of the other Lawless Undine. In fact, there was nothing but floating debris in every direction. I swam toward the horizon, the direction ships normally came from, and finally saw the barge wreckage. A pair of human legs was kicking frantically in the water while one of the Lawless from Mara’s clan was circling them, darting in to slash at the man’s body with her razor-edged fins. On the last swipe, she wrapped her tail around his legs and tried to pull him under the surface.

  I darted to her as fast as I could and pulled her from his back. She saw me and shadowed, disappearing into the dark water below just as a stabbing pain shot through my forearm. I pulled away instinctively, which only seemed to make the pain worse until I stopped, realizing the man was actually biting me. I slapped his back with my tail and was free, the flesh on my arm ragged and bleeding as I scanned for anyone else from Mara’s clan, and especially for any other halflings.

  In the shafts of set
ting sunlight that shot through the water, it seemed only wooden planks and the bodies of human men who had been stripped nearly bare of their coverings were falling into the dark waters below. The only other Undines weren’t far in the distance—a school of them swimming away from the wreckage, some of them halflings like Opal.

  But not all of them.

  "Dynah!" I echoed through the water to Mara’s friend, another Lawless Undine from the northern depths. She whipped around when the sound reached her, and a smile peeled across her thin, silver face.

  "Your Highness?” She didn’t bother to retract her needle-like hunting teeth as she glanced at the wound on my arm. Her grin widened. “My, what happened there? Did one of the beasts bite you?"

  "Did you forget the law, Dynah? The treaty with the Gnome Queen? Undines are not to attack the ships!"

  "Well, I suppose that depends on what you mean by attack…" She lifted a finger to her chin in mock contemplation, her silver hair disappearing, then reappearing in the play of fading light this close to the surface.

  I put the trinkets in my hand around my neck and darted behind her to bind her arms with her hair. "Forget it. You can explain it to the queen."

  Dynah laughed. "How many more of our kind have to die, Cora? How many more ships should we hide from in fear?"

  "Ask the queen," I echoed through my teeth as I steered her through the water.

  "I see. No more thinking for yourself now that you’re about to become captain of her ridiculous guard?"

  Oh no…the ceremony… Panic welled in my chest.

  "Her ridiculous guard keeps us all safe," Reed echoed, appearing in the murky water just ahead of us. "Unlike you, who would send the halflings to their deaths with your uprisings." Reed shot a green glare at me. "And as I was trying to say earlier, Lieutenant, if you’d ever like to be captain, may I suggest we go now!?"

  "I forgot… I forgot about the ceremony," I stammered, and then lost all the outrage he’d made me feel. "Reed, your promotion?"

  "We’ll both be fashionably late," he echoed, still glaring at me.

  Dynah laughed again until I tightened the twist of hair around her arms, and we swam as fast as we could back to the Ring of Fire, a circle of smokestacks that surrounded the Royal Cavern.

  Two of the queen’s personal guards greeted us, each of them half the size of an orca, complete with winding, spiraling rank tattoos over their silver chests and shoulders.

  "Your Highness?" Enoch, the guard on the right bowed.

  "Lieutenant, please, Enoch,” I echoed impatiently, gesturing for him to straighten.

  He glanced at Reed and me. "Aren’t you supposed to be at the promotion ceremony…right now?"

  "I know. I just saw three halflings too close to the boundary waters, then discovered they were carrying human goods," I explained. The guards exchanged glances as I held up the chains I’d seized. "Dynah brought the humans’ boat down. I’m taking her to the queen."

  "I did not sabotage the boat!" Dynah jerked against her restraints as I pushed her forward, the guards moving to either side.

  "Oh, let me guess, it sunk itself?" I shoved her again.

  "Yes! That barge belonged to the Gnome Queen, Your Highness. And if you think I’m the worst of your problems…"

  I spun her around to face me. "That was the Luna Bay? Mama Luz’s barge?"

  "That’s what I’m telling you!" Dynah’s eyes widened, even shadowed for a second at the sound of the Gnome Queen’s name.

  "At what point did you think it would be a good idea to strip her dead sailors and attack the ones still trying to stay afloat in the water?" I raised my forearm in front of her face. "One of them bit me when I pulled your minion from his back!"

  "We didn’t know it was the Luna Bay when we started scavenging. The barge just…collapsed."

  "Barges don’t just collapse, especially not that close to shore, Dynah. Why am I even listening to this? Explain it to the queen."

  "Could you hold her until after the ceremony?" Reed asked sheepishly. Enoch rolled his eyes.

  "Go." Shoal, the other enormous guard nodded as he took Dynah by the wrists and led her away.

  2

  "You had one job today, Cora! One job! And it wasn’t boundary water patrol!" Reed’s muffled echo was entirely too close to my ear as we sped into the corridor that opened to the Royal Cavern. I appreciated that he talked to me like we’d been friends since infancy and not like I was the princess. But he did tend to be a little dramatic.

  "I told you I was sorry! And for the record, I didn’t ask you to come for me."

  "Really? You’re welcome, by the way. You’re right, I didn’t have to come for you. You could have missed your own Captain of the Guard promotion instead!"

  Reed’s long, silver hair came loose from its binding as he darted ahead of me toward the back entrance of the cavern. He cracked the door with his tail and peeked in, refastening his hair at the nape of his neck with his hands.

  "I’m sorry… You’re right," I echoed, reluctantly. "Thank you."

  He smirked at me, but it didn’t displace the scowl on his face. "Thank the Mother… They’re still announcing the new second lieutenants. Do you even understand how lucky you are?" He didn’t wait for my reply. "Come on."

  We swam quickly to the front of the colosseum style rows, weaving our way through the first and second lieutenants. Reed found our squadron, and I took my position at the end.

  Dorcus, the queen’s herald stood at the edge of the drop stage. Her long, silver body was draped in woven sashes and strings of iridescent shells. The queen herself sat on a throne of whale bones and flowering sea cacti, her pearl breastplate shifting color in the shadow of the royal inker’s smokestack. The inker, a small, thin triton dressed in similar woven sashes glared at me as he crossed to the smokestack in the center of the stage and refilled his quills.

  "Mara, Undine of The Depths," Dorcus announced as my mother took the opportunity to narrow her wide, yellow eyes at me. "Her Royal Majesty, Queen Necksa, bestows upon you the rank of Squadron Captain. Present yourself for promotion."

  "Mara!?" I echoed abruptly, turning a few heads in my row. Mara smirked at me as she pushed past. I looked over at Reed, who rightly should have had that promotion, but he didn’t so much as blink.

  My mother’s gaze bore through my chest. I could already hear the scolding about appearances, about how it was a conflict of interest to allow me to serve in the militia when I was the princess, despite me making it perfectly clear to her I only asked to be one of these things.

  "Cora!" Reed hissed when I realized Dorcus was staring at me, pitching a white eyebrow.

  She cleared her throat. "Lieutenant Cora of The Shallows…?"

  "Yes, sorry. Sorry." I fumbled, darting quickly down the aisle and to the stage. My mother wouldn’t look at me when I finally made it to the master inker.

  "Do you accept your new position as Regiment Captain, Cora of The Shallows?" Dorcus asked, her head covered in a woven net of pearls.

  "I do," I answered, turning my shoulder to the inker. He removed the quill from the mouth of the smokestack where it had been inserted and refilled it with ink.

  I pulled a drag of water through my gills as the master inker tattooed another swirled line over the two already on my arm. The burning travelled down the rest of my arm and numbed everything as I curled my fingers into a fist.

  "I pronounce you Regiment Captain, Cora of The Shallows," my mother echoed, the angles of her narrow, silver face creating shadows under her sharp cheekbones. She looked like a phantom floating there behind the smokestack, her long, silver body draped in sashes and shells and wrapped in dissipating smoke.

  "Thank you, Your Majesty," I echoed.

  "Citizens of The Shallows, I give you our new Captain of the Queen’s Guard," my mother echoed, motioning for me to face the gathered crowd when I didn’t move. I turned to a harmonized wave of echoes as she spoke again. "Thank you for your attendance at this year’s promotion cer
emony." My mother began to follow her entourage off the stage as the crowd dispersed.

  "Wait!" I called to her. "What about Reed?"

  Dorcus stopped and turned to me. "What about him?" The lines around her pinched mouth deepened as she forced a smile.

  "He was supposed to be Squadron Captain. How could she have promoted Mara?"

  "Mara of The Depths has accepted the position," Dorcus answered, but that wasn’t the question I asked.

  I glared at her. "Mara!? She’s not half as qualified as Reed!" I echoed, louder this time so it would reach down the corridor. "Mother, you must—"

  "I must have a squadron leader who is prompt," she echoed without stopping or even turning to face me.

  "That was my fault!" I called after her. "He was late because he came to get me for the ceremony!"

  Dorcus looked at me with a laugh in her eyes. "I’m afraid it’s done, Your Highness."

  "Take my promotion back then. He was only late because of me."

  "We couldn’t possibly," Dorcus echoed, a small laugh actually escaping her. She turned to join my mother and her departing entourage.

  "Why?"

  "Your Majesty?" she looked over her shoulder at me in surprise. "Because you are the Princess."

  I wanted to echo loudly enough to rattle the cavern walls, but nothing came out when I opened my mouth. I watched Dorcus leave the cavern.

  "It’s all right," Reed echoed just beyond the stage. "Mara will be…just fine as Squadron Captain."

  "You must be joking. She’s the last person who should have any authority. This isn’t over. Come on," I echoed, darting through the water of the cavern after my mother.

  Shoal, the guard who escorted Dynah to a holding cell, was talking with my mother in the distance by the time I rounded the corner. I sped up before he told her whatever nonsense Dynah had fed him, and Shoal caught my eyes. He nodded to me and moved back from my mother.