by Chris Howard
Kassandra let him go, stepping away, her fingers still hooked into kill-you claws.
"And you think there's a prison in this world that can hold me? Try me."
All of her words caught up to Jordan and the blood drained from his face. He shook his head vigorously, stumbling inelegantly to his ass, crab crawled away, got up and ran, clutching at his crotch.
Jill blinked, her mouth dropping open in terror. "What the fuck was that?" Her hand swept around for a slap.
Kassandra blocked it, holding Jill away by the wrist. "Jordan won't get another chance to hurt you." She let her go.
"What! ...don't need you telling me when someone's hurt me, and I don't need you...doing something to scare him off."
"I didn't do anything."
"He pissed in his pants!"
"Really?" Coming up behind Jill, Nicole turned in the direction Jordan ran. "Wish I could make someone do that."
"I didn't do anything. I just told him to leave you alone."
"What exactly did you say?
Kassandra folded her arms. "Exactly? I simply said I have a row of the severed heads of little men like him mounted on the wall in my bedroom."
"And?"
"And then I asked him if he'd like to join them—that if he didn't leave you alone, he'd be joining them. Okay, then I said I thought his blue eyes were pretty and that it would give me a lot of pleasure to see them staring out from his dead face."
Jill stared at her, face going red, making little choking noises in her throat.
Nicole was shaking her head, beaming at Kassandra. "That is beautiful."
"Then I said I like to play with the heads, braid their hair, pierce their ears. I might have told him a couple other things, but that's pretty much it."
Jill found her voice, enough to shout, "He pissed in his pants!"
Kassandra shrugged. "Weak bladder?"
Jill jumped at her, tears rolling back into her hair. She released a frustrated wordless scream, and jabbed a finger an inch from her face. "You can't do this to me! It isn't your life. Stop lording it over the rest of us."
Kassandra leaned back, a hurt look on her face. "I thought you didn't—"
"Well I did! You didn't think at all. Just because you're a damn princess or goddess—or whatever the fuck you are—doesn't mean we're your fucking subjects!
"Leave me out of this," said Nicole. "She made Jordo piss in his pants."
"You, too!" Jill screamed and ran off sobbing.
They watched her go, Kassandra with a pleading look on her face.
She gathered up Jill's shopping bags, and they walked in silence to the main mall entrance, where Nicole grabbed her arm and pulled her close. "Okay. What else did you tell him?"
Kassandra let the guilty look slide off her face reluctantly, replacing it with a sharp smile. She threw an arm over Nicole's shoulder and leaned in to whisper in her ear.
Nicole stopped in the middle of the walk. "You did not!"
The guilty look was back, and Kassandra's expression hardened. "Yeah, I did. It just came out. You're right. Jill's completely right. I didn't think before I said it."
Bachoris was singing in the shower to music playing in his head, very old music. The water ran down his body, a soggy facecloth draped over one shoulder, soap slipping along his biceps. He lifted his chin, felt the swell of air in his throat, the chorus coming back strong after a swirl of delicately plucked notes, one steady low tone gliding underneath, twelve chilling beats of silence like death.
And then something like death herself slid back the shower curtain, startling him into silence.
Bachoris' voice came and died, and he grabbed the shower curtain to cover himself.
Akastê nodded for him to continue. "Please go on, now you have an audience."
The girl with the mask was going through the medicine cabinet, shaking brown bottles from the rental's previous occupants, reading the warnings on the labels, setting aside the ones with dire warnings, using a purple pen to draw little skulls and crossbones on them.
The young man with the long white blond hair stood next to the dark hair-in-motion Akastê, looking up at Bachoris expectantly. He whispered, "I've Got the Music in Me," when it was clear that Bachoris wasn't going to continue.
Akastê patted his shoulder consolingly, and then reached her arm out, and curled her fingers toward the open bathroom door.
A clear globe half-filled with a pale blue fluid floated into the room, and inside a female figure, Agenika curled in pain, floating in poison. She screamed and choked and begged, clawing blindly at the walls of the sphere.
Bachoris stared in horror, the blood draining from his face. "Please stop. Do not do this. I have promised you."
"But you are spending my time unwisely, Bach—isn't that what the sea bitch calls you, Bach? How cute."
Eyes stinging with tears, he reached for the globe, and it vanished. "Where is she? Bring her back!" He was screaming, made more demands incoherently. He ripped down the shower curtain. "You said—"
"Bring me the crown, Bachoris. I am losing my patience. I said I would give you a little bit of time before I had to hurt her—your sister, I mean."
"But—"
"Lead Kassandra into your desert, let her fade, let her die there, take the crown. Simple. Do not come out without the Sea's crown, Bachoris, or I will consider you a failure, a loss, and I really have no use for Agenika without you."
His lips twitched, "Please don't."
Her voice dropped so low he barely heard her. "Then simply bring me the crown, dear Bachoris, and Agenika can finally go home."
He nodded. "Yes. Give me a little more time. I will take Kassandra inside, let her..."
"Dry up and die?" said Akastê helpfully.
He bowed his head. "Yes."
Then there was only the sound of the running shower, the crinkle of the plastic curtain in Bachoris' shivering hands. The girl with the mask, jumped down from a stool with a handful of pill bottles. The slender man retreated to the bathroom doorway, and the tall dark haired Akastê, fixed her gaze on Bachoris, something sorrowful in her eyes, perhaps even sympathy, which made him shake more, a louder crinkling of the shower curtain.
"You know, I was cursed once," she whispered
He just stared at her.
As if to explain how that could possibly be, she added, "I was once young and stupid. Like you. And cursed to know what death was like. To live, but have death follow me, every footstep, share every breath with me, sleep with me, invade my dreams, decay as I grew."
Akastê blinked as if confused by the need to show her own feelings; her expression hardened, and she turned and left the bathroom with the other two of her.
Nikasia of the Kirkêlatides walked out of the low warm waves off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the sand smooth and fluttering under her toes. She twisted around, waving to the curling neck and head of Barenis, drifting along the bright green water between a sandbar and the beach, and crying a little when the dragon went under.
She wiped her eyes, looked up at the blue sky, and found a nice fat white cloud to manipulate. She sang down a thread of moisture, and it condensed, vibrating in the sea wind; it spilled from the cloud like a silk thread from a spider, and she caught it, anchored it to her song, and she fed her words into it,
Dear mother, I have met the daughter of my father's killer, and she is a goddess, the Sea. She is the battle mind behind our defeat in the north against Rexenor. She is Kassandra, the Wreath-wearer, the Alkimides princess, granddaughter of Tharsaleos. She is everything I fear in an adversary. Kassandra denied her father's part in Lord Epandros' death, but like all goddesses, tells as many lies as truths. I need you, mother. I cannot face her alone.
A message from Theoxena came back a day later. Remain where you are. I will join you. Together, we will hunt your father's killer. Together we will face an enemy greater than ourselves. Together we will beat her.
Chapter 22 - King's Monster
King T
harsaleos, Lord Dosianax, ruler of all the seaborn, floated in the center of his high study, legs folded, surrounded by a hundred bobbing, drifting, glassy seerspheres. He plucked one from the water, a cold blue glow across his nose and cheeks, peering in to spy on his stepping stone, his footstool to the seaborn throne, his wife, the queen, Isothemis of Alkimides.
She was crying, blurry tears like lacing in the water. The king swiveled the globe in his fingers and spied his young sons, Tharsiadas and Zomenes, looking up at her, concerned, pleading, a gentle clutch at her sleeve, a touch to wake their mother from her grief.
The king tilted the sphere up, turning it slowly to pan through the queen's sitting room, giant oval windows black against the abyss—Helios' Twin had set. Tharsaleos rotated the view, a sweep of her room, caught a pale blue smear of movement outside a window behind the queen, darkness oozing in and it was gone, possibly one of her house guards along the balcony, a reflection off armor.
He shifted back to Isothemis, and she was holding her sons in her arms, sobbing harder, her tears blurring the view entirely, indistinct shapes of things he still recognized, blending until he couldn't tell his son's apart, and when he swiveled the sphere it showed him globs of color and cold light, and nothing more.
A woman's soft chuckling behind him, and he tossed it away, spinning in the water, short bursts of song rolling out of his mouth. He focused, scowling, and dropped his hands, unhooked his fingers, and swallowed the notes gathering momentum in his throat.
The king of the seaborn bowed his head and looked up expressionless.
"My lady Akastê. An honor."
"Of course." She stepped out of a dark corner of his study, hair rolling along her shoulders, flicked away a seersphere with a little glass tinkling sound. "She's a sad one, your wife."
Tharsaleos' gaze did not move from Akastê's face, even when the skinny man with long pale hair stepped out of the gloom on her left, and the strange masked little girl followed on her right.
"Why are you here?"
"Ah, ah." Akastê wagged a finger. "Your tone seems to suggest that you have forgotten that it is you who owe me something."
He scowled, looking up in an expression that made it appear that he was trying to remember if he owed her anything—when he knew perfectly well that he did, and it was more than he could afford. He waved one hand ethereally. "Do you waste my time?"
"Your time is not yours to spend, dear king, but mine. You waste it holding the leash tight. I just swung by to make my pet a little hungrier."
He suppressed a twitch, clamped down any other reaction to the sudden scream of guards, raising a call to arms, go to battle ready. He felt the defenses unfold around his residence. Felt a call in his thoughts from one of his trusted Eight. He ignored it all.
"What have you done?" The king's voice came out a cold growl.
Akastê twirled a strand of hair through her fingers, shrugging childishly, her smile sharp with all the innocence of a skull fracture. "My beauty must eat, and I simply pointed out the abundance of ready prey in the fields beyond the walls of your splendid city."
The king stared at her a moment, bent his head, rubbing his eyes.
"I hope she cries for the loss of her bleed—upset by who the Fates have chosen for it."
"What?" The king ran his fingers over his short white beard.
"Your wife? Queen Isothemis? You remember her, do you not?"
His head came up sharply. "What about her bleed?"
"It goes to feed that whore Kassandra. I thought you knew."
Emandes of the One-eye, of a house of no importance, kicked through shadows and sea-moss up a seam in the high walls of the Queen's Residence, slithering into the weeds, his body going dead still when her guards passed, big Alkimides soldiers in blue scaled armor and loaded crossbows.
He pulled in the sea slowly, carefully, and let it out, holding the oily glob of poison tight under his tongue.
He brought up one butchered hand with the thumb and forefinger intact, the other three fingers lost long ago in a battle that haunted every today. He held a tiny silver tube to his lips, prepared to blow a note. He waited, frozen, watching them move past. The guards slipped into the gloom below, and Emandes didn't have to use the music. He kicked straight up, gliding over the walls, flattening his body along the lip of stone just under the windows of the queen's sitting room.
He waited again, whispered a song to blend into the coral mats, his body covered in thousands of overlapping feathery discs, his eyes peering out to watch for the next round of guards.
After they passed, he reached over the lip to touch the pulsing veil of sensory spells wrapping the queen's windows. Very sophisticated. It would take several minutes for him to disable one pane, but enough to get inside.
A flash of blue underneath him. Emandes jerked his arm back, so startled he lost his camouflage, his body stretched out along the wall, exposed. He saw teeth, gritted, the sharp edge of a helmet's cheek guard right in his face. He tasted the guard's surge of motion, anger, a bitter flavor like metal, an electric snap on the tip of his tongue.
Both of them grappled, wrestling into the open, rolling up over the lip of stone, in view of the queen's windows. Emandes shoved his face forward, lifted his tongue, blew poison into the guard's face.
Emandes followed it with vigorous spitting, digging into the floor of his mouth to scrape out the last of the hypnelos, controller of destinies, spiritsleep.
He felt the guard's fingers go slack on his arms, eyes wide in shock, the dark hole of his mouth opening, lips shuddering as the sleep took hold of him, seeped into his limbs, made them heavy, made his thoughts too heavy to lift, his voice too deep to bring to the surface.
Emandes spun the guard around, sang a careful string of notes to pin the guard to the wall, threads of the rock reached out, fusing to the armor plates, hundreds of them, fingers leeching through the back of the guard's helmet. A tight crunching noise of scales grinding against the stone and coral mats.
"Sleep my friend, wake when I am gone."
Emandes looked above him, and then below. He had enough time before the next round of the queen's protectors kicked by.
He drew a wide box in the window, and without lifting his finger, continued around, writing something across the smooth pane, then repeating the box. The window softened, and dissolved in the water. He slipped through the open space low, pulling his body through, snaking over the floor. The queen was alone in the room, drifting in the center, sobbing softly.
Queen Isothemis, the sister of King Tharsaleos' first wife, Pythias, ran her fingertips along her lashes, gently urging the tears from her eyes. She tugged on her three long gray braids with her other hand, fingers trembling, and bent her head in sorrow. She drifted in the center of the room, her toes brushing the floor, her body encased in a dress and leggings, sewn together panels of some stiff turquoise material, almost like armor, long flowing wings of gold brocade trailing sullenly behind her, a cheerless angel.
Isothemis sniffed in her tears, straightened up, and spun toward the windows. She lowered her hands, made a welcoming gesture with one. "Emandes, it is safe. Show yourself."
The one-eyed old soldier pushed off the floor, let his feet come down softly in the queen's sitting room. Then he bent low into a bow. "My lady, I have so much to tell you."
She motioned for the chair in the room's center, but he declined politely, holding out his incomplete hands like a shopkeeper showing his range of wares. "The Lady Nikasia has found the dragon—took her from me."
Isothemis gave him a sad smile, winked at him to remind him of the loss of his eye. "You could never catch that dragon. She'd catch you first—and eat you."
He inclined his head, agreeing. "If anyone can, it would be Theoxena's daughter, and if she survived, she now seeks her father's murderer. Lady Theoxena is in the Americas. There will be terrible battle if they join to find Gregor Rexenor."
"Enough of the Kirkêlatides. I get their news inside these w
alls. What of my sister's granddaughter, the Wreath-wearer." She paused, sucked in deep water, whispering, "Kassandra."
Emandes' head came up, his one eye cold and fixed on the Queen. She frowned at his reaction; there was uncertainty, wonder, but cold fear in a man who had been close enough to death to see over its edge.
He bowed his head. "Oh, my lady, she is so much more than that."
The Queen of the Seaborn deepened her frown, waved Emandes to continue. "What more is there than to be Poseidon's own, the chosen of the Lord of the Sea?"
"To be the ruler of the sea herself, my lady. Kassandra—she has the crown of the Sea. She has the trident. She travels like an immortal. The king of the sea-daimones is her servant. All demons are."
Isothemis let her feet come down on the floor, finding it difficult to keep her balance, her hands curling into small tight fists that trembled. The frail, old queen Isothemis appeared to be real. In all his years of passing information to her, Emandes had never seen genuine weakness in her, only knew her weakness as an act.
He didn't want to break her mood, but time was slipping away. "Milady, I have more."
She turned to him, staring, unfocused. "How? An Alkimides with the Sea's crown? Kassandra is seaborn, we share the same blood. How can she become something she is not? Never was? And she is the heir to the throne of the seaborn. It belongs to her." Her questions spilled out of her soul unchecked, no wall of caution, no pretension. She sang, "Secret family, chosen of Poseidon, you wear the wreath, you share the victory of your ancestors, soul-sharer with kings, you are almost like the gods."
He kicked closer to her, picking up her pain-song, flowing with it. "Kassandra was sent to the surface by Tharsaleos, punished for being what she was, the daughter of your niece, Ampharete. Your dear sister had a daughter that she kept from everyone. Your husband killed your sister, my queen. Did you know that? The assassin was sent by Tharsaleos. He is your sister's killer."
She went still, dropped her gaze, her fists shaking. "I know many things. I did not know that, Emandes. Suspected, but did not know."
