by Chris Howard
Sea Throne
Christopher Howard
1 - Kassandra
2 - The War-bard's Daughter
3 - New Sirens
4 - Alexandros
5 - Bachoris
6 - The Boot and the Vents
7 - Nikasia's Chain
8 - The Untrusting Book
9 - Nothing Left For Me
10 - Strange and Wonderful
11 - The Vents
12 - Connections
13 - Mortal
14 - Barenis
15 - Monsters
16 - The Book and the King's Trusted Eight
17 - Gifts from the Sea
18 - Mirrors
19 - Dining with the Sea
20 - A Morning Visit
21 - Dangerous Types
22 - King's Monster
23 - Sailing
24 - The End of the World
25 - Soul Stuff and Open Wounds
26 - Thursday Night
27 - World Without Water
28 - The War-bards
29 - Scissors
30 - The Old Sirens
31 - Storm Eating
32 - The New Dead Army
33 - Coronation
Epilogue
Chapter 1 - Kassandra
Anna Mallozzi knocked on the dark windows of Hovand's Hardware Store, knowing it wouldn't do any good, the glass hard on her knuckles, closed sign hanging at a slant. She cupped a hand against the window, peering into an inside world protected from the rainstorm rolling over coastal New Hampshire.
Her breath fogged the glass. "I'll get here, honey—tomorrow when the store opens. Cumberland's fine and dry."
She turned for a reaction, expected tears, but Shelly wasn't even listening.
A stab of panic, and Anna grabbed her daughter, pulling her close, away from three women walking without umbrellas in the pouring rain.
"Don't stare at them." She shook her head.
Shelly couldn't help staring at them, a spine-straightening creep of daring that drove her to study the women, each of them in turn, not quite alike, but close enough to be sisters. They all had their hair tied in braids that hung down their backs, rings of gold and seashells bound in them. Their clothes were soaked, shorts and long-sleeved rashguards—surfer-girl wear, and they walked past, chatting casually as if they didn't notice the water on their faces, rolling off their chins, off the ends of gesturing fingers, rainwater sheen on their bare legs. And all three wore expensive watches, blocky steel timepieces, too big for their wrists.
One was barefoot, and Mrs. Mallozzi made a sour face, one side of her mouth tightening. She clutched her umbrella handle, shaking it, emphasizing that she had one, nylon-shiny black wings folding over her and her daughter, protecting them from the rain.
She lowered her voice to complain, "Even worse because they can afford to keep dry, but choose not to."
One of the sisters stopped, turning to Shelly and her mother—and the water drummed harder on Anna's umbrella.
"What did you say?"
All the courage puddled out of Shelly. She backed into the rain, under the clouds, against Hovand's dark windows. Her mother didn't follow her.
Anna Mallozzi's body stiffened, her shoes rooted to the ground. The umbrella slipped from her fingers, falling to the sidewalk, cartwheeling into the street, cars honking and metal spiny claws scratching for a hold on the asphalt.
A dark bloom of wet material spread along Anna's shoulders, down the back of her raincoat, and Shelly smelled her mother's perfume and fear, thistle sharp and deadly like insecticide.
"Mom?" Shelly reached out a hand, fingers stiff, crying, a prey animal's shuddery bleat.
Her mother couldn't move.
"Don't, Kass. Come on," said one of the sisters, reaching for the other.
Kass pulled out of her grip. "Answer me!"
"I said you can...afford to...stay dry." Anna's voice stopped and started between each word as if they were being tugged out of her mouth. "But you choose not to."
"And why is that worse, Annalisa Mallozzi?"
Shelley went cold, caught in freefall helplessness. Her arm dropped. How did this stranger know her mother's name?
Mrs. Mallozzi shook her head stiffly. "I—I don't know."
A smile touched Kass's lips. "A little rain on your skin will do you good." A roll of thunder started at her stress of the word "rain" and slipped into the sound of her voice—and the rain poured harder, opaque sheets of silver, milk white splattering on the concrete, swirling an inch deep around her toes.
Shelley closed her eyes and tilted her neck back, sticking out her tongue to taste it. "It's bitter." She made a face, and then panic hit her, as if it wasn't something she was supposed to say aloud. She blinked to clear her eyes, trying to see if anyone had heard.
Kass turned and looked right at her—really looked, locked eyes, and wouldn't let her go.
"Just like the sea, Shelly Mallozzi."
"Kassandra, stop it. She's a kid." It was one of the sisters, but her voice was faint, miles away.
The hard shell of the world crumbled under Shelly's feet. She fell into a rush of surf, dead cold water on her skin, a burn of salt in her throat, darkness and pale fingers slipping over her hand, and somewhere a thousand miles away a man was drowning, sucking in seawater, wet choking, fighting the heavy pull of the ocean on his ankles—and oh, god, there's blood, I'm going to die. Shelly tried to pull away. The surface of the ocean was above her, ripples and bolts of trapped sunlight, the taste of ancient names in every roll of saltwater.
Is your name Kassandra?
Kassandra nodded. "Do not let go, Shelly. The Ocean obeys me and few others—as long as you hold on to me. I can show you things, cliffs of ice blue at the world's end, the Nine-cities on the Atlantic's floor, fire in the ocean's heart."
They were over the continental shelf in seconds, diving into pure black.
Kassandra wore a crown and interlocking plates of armor, knobby like a crab's carapace; segments of armor curled around her arms, across her hands, extending past her knuckles into claws of bone white.
A teardrop rolled thick like mercury along Kassandra's lower eyelid, trapped a moment in her lashes, a silvery bead that slipped away, released into the dark turbulence of her wake—and something like thunder kicked in the sea behind them, following them into the abyss. Speeding up, Kassandra glanced over her shoulder and laughed, "Ochleros, you slowpoke. I'm always waiting for you."
Straight down into the deepest channels in the Atlantic, bubbling plumes of black smoke and raw fiery wounds in the earth's crust splitting open, scabbing over in buckles of ocean-cooled rock.
Kassandra touched down, danced off the floor, and tossed a ball of pale blue light high over her head. It lit up walls of molten rock gone black cold and revealed a giant human-shaped thing with huge pointed teeth and eyes like infinity, rolling lumps of seawater hide, twisting thin fibers of ice, bundles of it spun into muscle and bone, and Kassandra, dancing in the abyss, came up to it's knee.
She laughed again. "What took you so long, Ochleros?"
She kicked higher, pulling Shelly by the hand, one foot bounding off Ochleros' arm, up to his shoulder where she set her feet down and leaned an elbow against the sea-demon's ear.
Then she said something in another language—and Shelly understood her, a precious question asked in jest, encased—perfume in a bottle—inside a laugh, "Old friend, how shall we go about setting things on fire?"
Kassandra didn't wait for a response, bent to her knees, and kissed the demon on the cheek. "Just visiting, Ochleros. See you around."
Kassandra shot straight up, her armored claw fingers twined with Shelly's. "Is there anything you wish to
see? Anything I can give you?"
Shelly squinted up at Kassandra's blinding white crown, and she wanted to ask what was going to happen to the drowning man, but sobbed instead, "I just want Cumberland."
A jolt ran through her body, knees bending, and Shelly felt the concrete hard and real under her shoes, the windows of Hovand's at her back. Cold fingers slid from her grip. Kassandra stood over her without her armor and crown, eyes like the abyss looking back into hers. The storm shifted, cutting them off from the rest of the world; silver curtains and rushing water on concrete, sparks of headlights shooting electric through walls of rain—so much like sunlight in the deep.
"Meow. Here he is, Shelly Mallozzi. Cumberland wants to go home."
Shelly flinched in surprise. Kassandra held out her orange tabby stuffed kitten with stiff fishing-line whiskers, and she took it, digging her fingers into its soft body, pulling it under her chin.
Then all the shifts in reality caught up to her, and she grabbed the last one sliding by, propping up a few bricks of defiance. She lifted her chin, jutting it at Kassandra.
"How did you do that?" Shelly spun to look through the dark windows of Hovand's. The store had been closed for an hour, the lights out, doors locked; old Mr. Hovand had gone home for the night. She had left Cumberland on a stool next to the files and rasps, rows of red wooden handles along a wall of dark brown perfboard.
Cumberland the kitten had been locked inside the store a moment before. Stores had alarms. Doors had keys. Mr. Hovand wouldn't be back until tomorrow.
Kassandra smiled. "There is no door in this world that can keep me out."
The rain dropped to a steady splattering on their shoulders. The walls washed away, and Kassandra turned to the other two. "It's never too early to plant the seed, my sisters."
Shelly felt fear unfolding inside her, something with bones and tendons popping, fingers slippery on the walls of her stomach, blood thumping hard through the rest of her body.
Plant what seed?
Kassandra slid a hand along Shelly's shoulder, one cold finger touching the side of her throat, moving in circles, working a series of letters, and the fear drained out of her, into the street, away with the rain on the sidewalk.
"Shelly? Your mother loves you, but that doesn't mean she always knows what's right for you. Sometimes mothers do interesting and awful things to their children—even in the name of caring for them. Mine did. And look what happened to me." Kassandra fanned her fingers open under her chin. "What am I?"
Shelly stared up at her, felt a burn in her throat, something trying to stop her from speaking. Her voice came out in a hoarse whisper, "Someone who can afford to keep dry...but chooses not to?"
Kassandra waited for her to continue, and when she didn't, said, "Now, tell me what you really want to say. You have many things to fear, but not from me."
The words slipped into Shelly's mouth and they didn't entirely feel like her own, but a bitter gift from the sea: "Someone who can feel a man's final drowning breath a thousand miles away..." Shelly stopped because her hands were shaking. Kassandra nodded at her encouragingly. "...but is powerless to do anything about it."
"Brave girl. Give your mother a paidarion from me—a kiss on the cheek, and she'll wake. See you around, Shelly Mallozzi." Kassandra gave her shoulder a squeeze and walked away with her sisters.
And the rain followed her.
Chapter 2 - The War-bard's Daughter
Nikasia followed her mother's phosphor trace three thousand miles across the Atlantic's floor, over the deep mountains, up the steep rise of the continental shelf, into the shallows off the coast of the Americas.
She closed her eyes, planted her toes in the sand, and stood up...into the Thin, into the air above the surface, years since she had been above the waves. The last time she had been holding her mother's hand.
And she knew what would happen next.
The ocean inside her climbed into her throat. A spasm of nausea shoved her organs around. Something had her stomach squeezed in a fist. She threw her braids over one shoulder, bent forward, hands on her knees, and vomited everything out of her stomach and lungs, gushing seawater and her half digested lunch. Her eyes watered and then went burning dry in the wind.
"Air." She whispered the word as reverently as she could with her mouth hanging open like a cave, all teeth and molars and her tongue pressed flat, saliva dribbling over her lips.
Cold sweat beaded up on her forehead, damming against her eyebrows, running down her nose.
She spit, wiped her face, and stood straight, her toes digging into sand. Then she sucked in her first breath above the sea.
Cold razorblade air caught in her throat, slicing flesh raw. She tilted her head to the sky, the sun bright enough to blind her through her tightly closed eyelids, and she sang a note. Then another, higher, that came out sour.
"Cut the balls off Kronos' daddy." A wet rasp edged her voice, and she spit again. "I can scarcely hold a note. Won't do at all."
Nikasia walked out of the surf, black braids flying in the wind, her hands over her face to block out the day—the day coming through a sheer spread of skin between each of her fingers.
"Lamporos..."
Squinting at the strip of bright she let in under the palm of her hands, she watched her toes sink into the wet sand, and listened to the voices down the beach, the cries of birds, the sharp rush of the sea against the land.
"Beautiful and..."
Then she tasted it in the wind, something sweet and ancient allowed to develop, someone else from the sea, but untouched, lungs that had never taken the water inside. She licked her lips, and sang the softest of notes, threading the breeze in order to control it, directing it's currents to her so she could determine more about...him. She found him by the trace of his curse in the wind.
He walked out of the waves, stopping to look back at the Atlantic as if called, one hand shading his eyes.
"Yes...that's him."
She licked her lips, tasted a bitter edge. To herself she whispered, "Perhaps he has taken the sea inside once, but he is unaware of his curse?"
Nikasia blinked, took a slow deep breath, and sang against the brightness of Helios pure and burning in the heaven, that he would direct his rays elsewhere and allow her to see, and she felt the man with the seaborn curse look away from the Atlantic, and up at the gathering clouds.
Nikasia let her hands slide cautiously away from her face. Then she bent low and sprang into the air, startled by the quick pull of gravity, the jolt of her heels hitting the sand. She paced up and down the slope of the beach to get a feel for it in her legs, kicking dried strands of seaweed and gull-cracked mussel shells. She still felt water-dizzy; the thin air didn't hold her up like the sea. It forced her to spend some thought on keeping her balance. And then there was a creep of a headache starting in her temples.
She sang a short hopping string of notes, curled in her fingers one at a time, and then stretched them open as wide as they could go, a tight pull of webbing between each of them. The ache in her head drifted away along with the wobbliness in her knees.
Then she walked casually up the beach toward the man with the curse. He was about her own age with light reddish blond hair cut so short it stood up in spikes.
"What an obnoxious color for hair to be."
He held a flat elliptical board under one arm and he was wearing a tight blue and yellow suit that appealed to her.
Nikasia followed him along the beach, closing the distance between them, and when she was close enough, she sang to him, "Where is the murderer?"
Alexander Shoaler turned, startled, and grabbed his surfboard before he dropped it. He hadn't heard her approach.
He was already scowling, staring at her, mouth just starting to part with a question that seemed to just hang there in his mouth. Nikasia tilted her head to the side, slipped in a shade of mockery, and gave him back the same look. She was used to the staring; even in the Nine-cities she was an oddity, pale, a dus
ting of freckles over her nose and cheeks, and her orange eyes—gorgon-stare, fish-eyes, she'd heard them all. She had pulled her hair into three long braids, two draped over one shoulder and down her back, the other curled once around her throat, a choker of twined black and coral rings that coiled and rolled on its own like a tentacle.
Alex couldn't look away from her eyes, cold liquid orange, an impossibility like glacial fire.
"I...don't know what you're talking about." Whatever he had been about to say, that wasn't it. He couldn't find the right words. He couldn't find the right anything.
He couldn't breathe. Saliva collected his mouth, slick against his teeth, and something was stealing the thoughts right out of his head. He felt them leave without a goodbye, fleeting chains of information—his name, where he lived, his mother, the tale told in his blood—it all skipped through his cortex and out the other end before he could seize them.
It was her. The blaze of sunset in her eyes unsnapped the links between thoughts and stole them, fiery light, orange and wet, and then he thought of Seph's stupid sunscreen lipstick, and that was enough to break the binding set on him by this orange-eyed beach freak.
Alex turned, pulling his surfboard around, and forced his feet to move. Walk. Just keep walking.
He didn't want to know if she was following him, just concentrated on setting one foot further along the beach than the other. He steered his feet toward three surfers, his friends lined up with their backs to The Wall facing the Atlantic.
Hampton Beach wasn't crowded, a handful of surfers taking in the iron gray waves, some storm's leftovers.
Halfway up the slope, Alex dropped his board in the sand without looking back, leaving the deadweight behind. Just keep moving.
He corrected his path over a line of sea-rounded gravel, straight toward Rude, Jadey and Seph in her tight as a corset black wetsuit, black gloves, dyed black hair, waterproof black eyeliner, and hot orange lipstick that allegedly did something to protect her lips from the sun. She held her board—midnight black—loose under one arm, pointed at the sand.
