Kingdom of Salt and Sirens

by J. A. Armitage

  “Where are they going?” I asked, my head still so heavy with fatigue.

  A single flash of lightning blinded me for a second, except for the image of Djin’s beautiful, exotic face, her black hair and thin, dark eyebrows pitching in excitement.

  “They’re going to war, water child!” She laughed, and the booming sound of it shattered the exhaustion weighing me down. It seemed to fall away like sheets of broken ice, leaving whole sections of my body lighter as fiery bolts again shot across the sky—another army charging in the same direction as the multitudes of tornadoes that spun across the wide, endless sky.

  “Cora!” Reed echoed, the sound reaching through the air like a hawk’s hunting cry, sharp and piercing until he pulled me under the skim. “What happened? Where did you go?” he demanded.

  “They came,” I echoed, the heaviness in my body gone except for the leaden grief I felt for Nicholas.

  “Who?” He blew a rush of water through his gills, causing a million tiny bubbles to form behind him.

  “Them.” I smiled as the little bubbles combined into larger bubbles, then into two enormous bubbles like the one that carried me to the surface. They began pushing us in the direction of the lighting and the tornadoes.

  “What is this?” Reed tried to dart away from his bubble, but it only found him again and pushed him on.

  “Don’t fight it. They’re Sylphs,” I explained. “I told you. We’re not alone.”

  “Where are they pushing us? Cora!”

  I felt a heat spark, then spread in my chest. “To war.”

  18

  Reed and I followed the Sylph tornadoes toward Scrapper Island…toward The Shallows, our home. We were going to end this war before it spread any farther. End it before more people were killed.

  I thought of Nicholas, how he stood against his own people to defend mine, even as many of them were attacking his ship. He could have assumed that Opal and I were like the Lawless, but he didn’t. He didn’t deserve to die, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to forgive Reed for it.

  Things would never be the same between us, and I had to accept that.

  A bolt of lightning struck the water just ahead of me, throwing me off my trajectory. The green glow of St. Elmo’s Fire hovered, undulating just above the skim until it took the form of a man. He stretched toward me, his long arms mock-swimming through the air. I started swimming away until he spoke.

  “Hello, little sister.” His thin lips pulled to a smile, and his voice was palpable—electric—on my skin. A crack of thunder filled the air as his eyebrows and hair took on the color of dark green, then deepened to black. The rain that was pelting my skin passed right through him while I watched his coloring shift like the Undines’, but he encompassed the spectrum of yellows, blues, and greens, while we could only achieve the range of black to white.

  Reed stopped in my wake, confused. “What’s wrong?”

  “You don’t see…him?” It was the only way I could think to describe what I only assume was one of Djin’s Salamander Elementals.

  “Who…?” Reed echoed warily, his airborne voice low and warning like a sea lion’s bellow.

  The Salamander flickered to bright green as he briefly bared his teeth at Reed. “I should make a soup of him,” he said, twirling his finger in a circle.

  I swam in front of Reed. “No!” I echoed, holding up a hand.

  The Salamander’s wide smile wilted as he rolled his eyes. He dropped his spinning finger, and gave me an exhausted look. “Honestly, you really should make up your mind.”

  “What? I didn’t ask you to do that!”

  “Cora? What’s happening?” Reed touched my shoulder, but I shrugged him off.

  “Just stay quiet.” I glared at him, still angry.

  The Salamander laughed. “You didn’t have to ask. I should boil him just for what he tried to do to that son of Eve.”

  “What he tried to do?” I waited for the answer without even allowing myself to blink. The Salamander’s slow smile returned just long enough for me to see it before he dissipated into green and yellow wisps, then vanished in the rain. “Come back!” I echoed after him, but he was gone.

  “What’s going on?” Reed surfaced in front of me abruptly, but I didn’t answer him before I dove into the water, renewed. “Cora!” The echo muffled from above the skim.

  Could Nicholas have survived? I saw his blood. He was unconscious, unable to help himself even if he could have been saved. And if he wasn’t dead, how was it that Reed and I were made Undine again after swallowing whatever that liquid was?

  I swam faster than I ever had, onward to Scrapper Island. Onward to where Mama Luz’s barge was waiting for Mara to return with the Guard, no doubt so they could become the leaders of her new, Lawless army.

  Would she give them legs and send them onto land to invade, along with her feral creations? Would they also be utilized at sea? My mind was spinning with what she might be planning…with how I could outmaneuver her.

  “Cora!” Reed’s echoes continued to wash over me in the current, but I still couldn’t divert my attention to answer them.

  I swam even harder, running every possible scenario I could imagine through my mind. Even if I could regain control of the Guard, we would still be outnumbered by the Lawless. I needed to unite the Undine again. I needed to show them that Mama Luz was just using them all.

  We finally reached the sandbar, but I didn’t see Mama Luz’s ship. Reed surfaced next to me, his chest heaving and his gills flaring.

  “Where’s the ship?” I echoed, scanning the outskirts of The Shallows surrounding the prison island. “Mara will be bringing the Guard there.”

  “What…is happening, Cora?” Reed demanded.

  The rain fell harder and the wind picked up, causing the tide to heave. Webs of lightning reached across the sky again, some even striking the island.

  “They’re really here. Djin and Paralda really did send them…” I echoed.

  Reed squared my shoulders and met my eyes. “Cora! Send who? Tell me what’s going on!”

  “The other Elemental queens…they promised they would send help to sink Mama Luz’s boat—I need to find the Lawless.”

  I dove under the surf and echoed a rally call for the Queen’s Guard, though I didn’t see any of them. I didn’t pick up a response, either.

  At least not from them.

  The Shallows were filling with swells, clouding the water, but in the distance I saw a pod of Lawless Undine approaching…maybe five or six tritons and three or four sirens. They shimmered silver in the flashes of lightning that cut through the skim, and the reverberating thunder that sank through the water only served as a dramatic backdrop for their answering echoes.

  “Well, hello, little pearl,” one of the sirens cooed, her silver hair nearly glowing in the surreal green light that permeated the water around us. “We thought you ran away to the Southern Depths with your mommy.”

  “Listen to me.” I tried to explain, but none of their venomous expressions changed. “I know Mama Luz promised you the world would be ours again, but it’s because of her that we were banished to the water in the first place.” They drew closer, encircling me. “Are you listening to what I’m saying? She was there in the days of Eden. So was my mother. Luz told her the humans wanted to make us their slaves so the Undines would help her rebel, but that was never true—listen to me!” I echoed again when none of the Lawless seemed to acknowledge anything I was explaining.

  They dove at me, slicing at me with their fins. I reached for my short spear, forgetting that I didn’t have it anymore. I didn’t have any weapons at all except for my training.

  “Where’s your mommy, Your Highness?” one of the tritons echoed. His pale, silver face and chest were scarred with long, ragged marks from what must have been territory clashes. His armored scales were torn away in places, his fins ripped and split. I scanned the others and noticed they were all battle scarred in similar ways.

  “Pl
ease, listen to me. We need to come together. Let me help you—don’t you see that Luz is only using you!?”

  “Help us!?” one of them echoed while the rest laughed, the sound again rivaling the rolling thunder that shook the swells around us. I tried to dart upward, out of their closing circle, but there were too many of them.

  “Move back!” Reed commanded as he darted toward the pod. He jutted his short spear at them, and my stomach lurched, remembering the sight of Nicholas’s blood on it.

  The pod just laughed again as four of the tritons broke off and surrounded him. The others closed the circle around me again and began slashing and jabbing the edges of their tails at me. One of the sirens jolted forward, but I moved aside and slapped her back with my tail, knocking her into the remaining triton. The two other sirens came from behind and bound my arms with my hair. Mara must have taught them because only members of the Guard know how to tie those knots so quickly.

  “Will you just listen!? Mama Luz is immortal! She’s responsible for us being banished from The Garden!”

  “Come and tell her yourself,” one of the sirens echoed. I somersaulted, whipping both of the ones behind me with my tail. They fell away long enough for me to cut my sloppy binds with my fin, but the remaining triton grabbed Reed’s short spear as the others restrained him.

  He held it to Reed’s gills. “Are you done, Princess?” he echoed, the long scar down the side of his face wrinkling his mottled skin when he sneered at me. The tritons behind Reed bent his arms behind his back so tightly that his shoulders were pushed grotesquely forward, and I worried that they would be knocked out of joint.

  “All right…” I echoed, holding up my palms.

  One of the sirens hit me in the stomach with her tail, knocking me in the direction of The Shallows. “Go then!” The pod rippled with laughter again as we started to move.

  I had to trust that Djin and Paralda would help us once we got to Mama Luz, though I wasn’t sure how her ship could be overturned now without Nicholas.

  My mind wandered back to him as we were driven through the water, and I let myself live in the possibility that he really could still be alive. The Salamander said that Reed tried to kill Nicholas, I repeated to myself… When I pressed him on it, he just grinned and drifted away. Nothing about that reaction would make any sense unless he knew something I didn’t.

  Why wouldn’t the Salamander have just told me? Why the games?

  Djin and Parada had also played games. I started to get angry. Maybe that’s how their kind were because they had the luxury of options all these centuries—to come and go over the earth as they pleased while the Undines were banished to the water.

  I wasn’t made for games. I had to decide on an action because bouncing among so many unknowns would make me lose my mind. I had to believe.

  Somewhere, Nicholas was still alive.

  19

  The pod of Lawless brought Reed and me to the largest school of Undines I’d ever seen. They had overrun the boundary lines of The Shallows and taken over, but there was no sign of Mara or the Guard. No sign of my mother, Enoch, or Shoal.

  And no sign of Nicholas or his ship on the heaving, tossing skim. He’s alive… He has to be alive… I repeated to myself.

  Mama Luz’s boat was anchored in the same place I’d left it along the sandbar. The undulating tide pitched it out of the water in places, crashing it back down again and submerging nearly half of the hull. It had to be midday by now, but the world above was dark with storm clouds, the only exceptions being the explosions of lightning exchanges that continuously raked the sky.

  There wasn’t a length of water in any direction that wasn’t occupied by countless Lawless, every one of them, as far as I could tell, scarred from decades of fighting, brutal, and angry.

  I had no idea what would happen next. There were too many possibilities, too many variables, and too much I didn’t know.

  And I was supposed to know.

  Hundreds of Lawless rode the undertows with no regard for the danger they were in when they shot over the arcing waves into the open air, then dove back into the water.

  “Don’t you see the storm?” I echoed to those who were closest. “You can’t breach when it’s like this!” I tried to warn, but none of them listened. The Lawless were from The Depths—their gills larger to offset the pressure they’d adapted to, their eyes smaller—and the only time they ever surfaced was when they were attacking ships. The only thing greater than their naivety at this point was their stupid pride.

  I’d barely finished this thought when a blinding flash of lightning ripped through the sky. It lingered in a pulsing explosion for several seconds while the deafening crack of thunder seemed to shake the earth itself, the tremors driving straight through the twenty or so feet of water this close to the island.

  When the tremors passed, large pieces of debris rained into the skim. I thought it might have been pieces of Mama Luz’s boat or maybe coconuts pulled from their trees by the wind, but as the pieces sunk, I realized they were neither of these things. They were the remains of those Lawless Undines who rode the undertows and breached themselves into the air just now, despite my warning.

  I squeezed my eyes shut when a Lawless siren’s scarred arm washed in front of me, pushed and pulled by the violent, crashing waves. But even with my eyes closed, I couldn’t erase the image…the blackened skin and flayed scales, the muscles severed by what looked like claw marks clear down to the bones.

  If I had any doubt the Sylphs and Salamanders were indeed here, it was erased. This was not natural lightning—it was something more.

  Something supernatural. They were killing my people. This was never what I wanted.

  I never would have agreed to their help if I knew they were going to kill the Lawless, but I couldn’t find words to form, to shape into an echo that would be enough to stop the horror playing out around me.

  The sound I made instead was grief. Grief for Nicholas and for the hundreds of Lawless who were destroyed just seconds ago.

  It was the sound of decades of fear and anger and resentment, but most of all, it was the unequivocal, absolute call for everything—for every single thing including the raging, unbridled sea—to stop and listen.

  To my amazement, the lightning and wind did stop as the water churned in the aftermath. The driving rain was replaced by softer, sparser drops until they, too, stopped falling.

  The Lawless had all turned to me as far as I could see in the tossed waters. I knew there were thousands of them in any direction, and again I called so loudly that I was sure I would be heard at the top and bottom of the world, under glaciers, and in the boiling pools that lay at the center of the Earth.

  “I have something to confess to you,” I echoed, marveling at how clear it all suddenly was. “I have been your leader, but I have not led, and you were right not to follow me. I wouldn’t have followed a coward either.”

  “Cora…” Reed echoed softly from somewhere behind me, but I wouldn’t be silenced now.

  I smiled at him. “You have always protected me. But I should have been the one protecting you.” I nodded and turned back to the Lawless, who looked both shocked and confused as the waters began to clear. “Over the past three days I’ve learned that we have been manipulated for centuries into believing that humans were our enemies, but our real enemy was The Gnome Queen Ghob,” I explained, feeling the reverberations in the water starting again. “Her name is not Mama Luz, and she cannot give us the world back. I’ve learned what she knew all along. If we follow her, we’ll only be helping her take it for herself.”

  The Lawless began to jeer and protest, some of them even began advancing on me.

  “Did your mommy tell you this, Princess?” a large triton echoed, and though I couldn’t see him in the disturbed water, I felt him advancing. Several others echoed in agreement, the sound revealing their ranks closing around him as a wall of them began moving toward me.

  “No, my mother did not tell me.
I only wish she had,” I answered without moving. “It was the Elemental Queen of the Air, Paralda, and Djin, the Elemental Queen of the Great Fire.” I felt the wall of Lawless stop abruptly, so I advanced on them. “And when I find my mother, my first question will be the one you have right now as well. Why were we not told of the others like us in the world?”

  “I had no choice,” my mother echoed from somewhere beyond the murky water. Some of the Lawless closest to me bared their teeth at the sound of her voice, and for an instant, I thought they might all charge in her direction. But another small echo broke through before they could mobilize.

  “Cora…Cora!” Opal darted out of the opaque waters toward me. Her little arms were welted, and there were ragged gashes over her shoulder.

  “Opal! What happened to you?” I echoed, squaring her shoulders in front of me so I could scan her.

  “I couldn’t catch up with the Guard to the Southern Depths, so I just swam there on my own,” she said with not a little pride. “I made it, Cora. I told them about Mama Luz and…” She trailed off when she saw Reed over my shoulder, her shock vanishing almost as quickly as it appeared. She rocketed toward him, throwing her arms around his waist. The tritons holding Reed backed away at the sight of Enoch and Shoal, each of them equal in strength to fifty Lawless.

  My mother smiled, her long, narrow face looking paler than normal as she lowered her large, yellow eyes. “I owe you an explanation,” she echoed, and after a few more seconds, lifted her head to the Lawless. “I owe all of you an explanation!”

  She went on to explain about The Garden of Eden, how we were all once welcome there until Ghob had lied to her, and the Undines had been banished from The Garden as a result.

  Some of the Lawless clamored near the surface and surrounded Mama Luz’s ship as my mother explained how the Gnome War started. That she started it as futile revenge, and that the treaty we shared now was nothing more than a guarantee that if we stopped attacking her ships, Ghob would watch over the Undines who had been stranded on land when the rest were cast permanently into the sea. Those who were always called to it, but could never return. My father was one of these Undine.