Goddess of Sea and War
Domino Taylor
Vivienne Savage
Edited by
Theresa Schultz
Goddess of Sea and War
Kingdom in the Sea, #3
By Domino Taylor
All material contained herein is Copyrighted © Lady Raven Press 2020. All rights reserved.
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Contents
1. A Sacrifice of Freedom
2. Friendship and Trust
3. In Love and Tradition
4. Gifts of Friendship
5. Everything Dies
6. The Pact
7. By Necessity
8. Virtuous Predictability
9. A Worthy Challenge
10. Justice Always Prevails
11. The Spoils of Victory
12. Scandalous Truth
13. Lost and Foundling
14. The Nameless Gift
15. Tradition and Blood
16. For the People
17. Unseen Ties
18. Unconditional Loyalty
19. Blinded by Love
20. The Black Shells
21. Shelter From the Storm
22. Putting out Fires
23. Mightier Than the Sword
24. A True Queen
25. A Concession of Love
26. The Deepest Cut
27. By Stone and Leaf
28. Sacred Duty
29. Helpless
30. A Piece of Hidden Past
31. The Watcher of Night
32. Conviction
33. Heaven and Sea
34. The Time to Remember
Epilogue
About the Author
1
A Sacrifice of Freedom
A warm ocean breeze tossed Manu’s hair, whipping the dark strands back from his face and surrounding him with the clean smell of salt mingled with unpolluted air. Meters below the cliff where he stood, a strip of pristine, white-sand beach stretched across his field of view and the blue horizon sparkled under the afternoon sun. He should have been anywhere else—would have preferred to be anywhere else—but his commanders, advisors, and Atlantis’s Council of Lords had overruled his request to return to immediate duty and had instead assigned him and their queen a series of fool’s errands. Apparently now that he was in an awkward transition from Myrmidon Commander to King of Atlantis, his word didn’t count for eelshit anymore.
The loss of freedom provided a disconcerting insight into Kai’s experiences at the time of her arrival to Atlantis months ago, as well as a startling introduction to royal life as her prince-consort. Only a few weeks prior, he’d been able to wander out of the palace and into the city streets without an entourage of guardsmen. If the mood struck, he could venture beyond the Atlantian bubble and swim hundreds of leagues away as long as he reported to duty when needed.
Now, a team of six followed Manu at all times the moment he stepped a foot outside the palace. Doctor’s orders following the losses at the flooded shrine had been to rest, recuperate, and learn the extent of his new gifts. Then the old dogfish at the temple had reached out to a comrade in the distant city of Thrace and determined a visit to the temple of Pontus was necessary to confirm what was suspected, but too fantastical a notion to announce to the world, lest they all sound like heretics. Those priests hadn’t been able to confirm it either, but they had provided guidance despite lacking a magical litmus test to reveal whether he’d absorbed a dying deity’s power.
Naturally, Kai joined him, along with a group of Royal Guards personally vetted by Elpis and the newly promoted Commander of the Royal Guard. Both Heracles and El insisted on accompanying the royal pair to Thrace, putting aside vastly more important responsibilities to play babysitter while Manu and Kai rubbed elbows with stuffy old priests.
The summer sun blazed its unforgiving heat against Manu’s bare shoulders. He studied the view and tried to commune with nature by establishing a link with the ocean. Glorious blue waves crashed ashore, their foaming froth on scattered shells speckling the ivory sand. Manu reached for them with his thoughts. He probed for them with his mind and told himself they were one and the same, that the gifts of Pontus, their Ocean Father, filled him with a mystical force that had, a mere month ago, saved the life of a dear friend.
Nothing came to him. Failure tore a frustrated groan from his throat and drew the attentive gazes of the guardsmen twenty yards to his rear.
He hated being under watch, but in the weeks following the failed assassination, tensions in Atlantis between the varying factions rose to explosive levels.
Everyone wanted something from Kai, and the threat from the Gloom appeared to be dormant, but not yet defeated. To their disappointment, returning to the sunken temple yielded no results. All traces of the corruption had been vanquished with the defeat of Calypso, but the warmth of Pontus’s magic had fled with it. The dead stone held no sense of vibrancy. Because the water lacked life, Kai and Manu could not restore the barrier.
Faith in the Atlantian Defense System told Manu they didn’t need a magical gift from the divines. The memory of how easily traitors had thwarted it by infiltrating Central Command and disabling the perimeter cannons told him they did. Without a divine barrier, Atlantis remained in a state of perpetual danger against the Gloom, even if the daughters of Pontus and Calypso were biding their time in silence. In those weeks since Pontus told them the truth about the barrier gifted by the gods and its necessary renewal, Atlantis’s only recourse had been to increase security, to conscript even more Myrmidons, and to install a greater number of security checkpoints throughout the Atlantic with the help of Queen Laka’s loaned troops from Pacifica. The eastern United States coast had been covered by their human military allies, but they were a last defense for what slipped through mer awareness.
Untangling the web of deceit responsible for Calypso’s sympathizers infiltrating the Royal Guard would be a lasting process. At least, it would be until they uncovered the root of the problem and ripped out its treacherous source. No mer could be trusted completely.
In the meantime, he grumpily overlooked the island serving as a pit stop along the final leg of their journey home, loathing that his comrades had been right. He did need time away from his duties. He did need a day without the rigorous stresses of command. The first step to becoming a good king was learning to accept advice from others. He may not have experienced any sudden revelations, but he felt lighter—freer than he had in months.
Bootsteps fell behind him, a seventh joining the half-dozen already in his retinue. “Prince Manu,” Heracles spoke up.
“I swear to every god of the land and sea—” Manu turned to find his friend grinning at him. “Must you?”
Sun glinted against Heracles’s gilded curls. “It sets a good example for all to know you have earned a position of profound respect. Calling you by your rightful title doesn’t in any way diminish that you are still my brot
her in arms.”
Though Manu and Kai hadn’t yet wed, she, the council, and all the non-royal authorities over the Atlantic kingdom insisted that he be known as prince until the day they took their final vows. He hated it.
If I hate it now, how much will I hate it when I’m king?
Despite the irritant, Manu wouldn’t have it any other way. He’d take any title they threw at him if it meant Kai became his bride at the end.
“The ladies are ready to disembark,” Heracles told him, a nod of his head indicating the two merwomen down below. Kai and Elpis wandered on the beach, one in armor, the former in a human-style bathing suit. An iridescent sea-green sarong fluttered in the island breeze and revealed her long legs. Contrasting the queen in a shark skin and tortoiseshell breast plate, Elpis walked alongside the young queen with a trident in hand. From a distance, he noticed the two were deep in conversation, Kai’s brow creased in consternation.
Manu squinted. Kai had requested the detour along the way home, citing the chance to relax.
Heracles stepped to the cliff edge, positioned to Manu’s left. “Know how I realized the two of you were meant for each other?”
“Hm?”
“The way you look at our queen, my friend. Each time you look at her, it’s as if you are seeing her again for the first time. I watched my own great-grandfather look upon my great-grandmother that way until the final day of his life. It’s the kind of love a man would die for, without duty or responsibility obligating him to sacrifice.”
Conversation between the two women continued near the shore. Within a few seconds of bearing his silent scrutiny from above, Kai glanced up, as if acutely aware that his mind was on her. One smile from his future bride constricted his ribs around his heart.
“I never took you for a romantic, Heracles.”
“One does not need to be a romantic to recognize love.”
If the group wanted to return to Atlantis by midnight, they’d need to move soon. Despite that, Kai loathed the need to return to the Black Anemone.
Cool ocean mist kissed Kai’s skin while she waited for the rest of their entourage to assemble. With Elpis and Heracles sharing the responsibility of leading their protective detail, she’d never felt safer. Despite how much she loved both commanders, she couldn’t help but share Manu’s opinion that it was a gross overcompensation.
Above them, Manu chatted with a mer who would be dead if he hadn’t manifested miraculous powers of healing at the zero hour. Most stunning about the events following the confrontation between a small squad of loyal mers, traitors, his deceased father, and the Gloom Queen herself, was that he didn’t remember saving Heracles. She wondered if he’d blocked it out.
She also wondered if, like they did to her, the gods had been fiddling around in his brain. More than once, she’d stirred by morning to remember the whisper of a compassionate voice in her mind. Her greatest recollection after her time at the Temple of the Other Queen among Amphitrite’s most devoted priestesses had been the fever dream their sacred water subjected her to.
Forget until it’s time to remember.
Maybe it was blasphemy, but Kai thought the gods sucked. Why couldn’t they ever be direct and forthcoming?
Whatever he’d endured, the incidents left their scars. Sometimes Manu jerked awake in the middle of the night with a petrified shout to the goddess Thalassa on the tip of his tongue, always apologetic if he interrupted her sleep. Not that she would have minded him waking her, if it was for another reason altogether. Their sex life had taken a dramatic decline into the nonexistent.
Who could focus on being sexy when the underwater realm relied on them, the gods used them as playthings, and the enemy had infiltrated their army?
“I’m sorry again that our needs have dragged you away from your duties, Elpis.”
“Sorry? Please, Your Majesty. The operative word in your statement was needs. Besides, that was a relatively pleasant vacation, and I am happy to be at your service any time.”
“It wasn’t a true vacation though, was it?” Kai’s strained attempt to smile stretched her uncooperative mouth. “We’ve shuffled from one temple to the next seeking answers no one can give.”
“No one can tell us the things we already know in our hearts. My grandfather is the most powerful of healers across the Atlantic, and even he cannot bring a mer back from the dead. What happened there, what you three described, was nothing less than an act of divine intervention.”
“But Pontus sacrificed himself. How could he work through Manu if he was dead?”
“Dispersed. Dead. We don’t have an answer for what occurred when Calypso struck him, but…” The redhead paused, pulled her shoulders back, and tilted her face skyward with her eyes closed. “You don’t want my theories.”
“No, I do,” Kai said in a rush. “I have my own, and so did one of the priests in the Temple of Pontus.”
“It’s entirely plausible that in his final moments, he…bequeathed his gifts to Manu.”
“Are there any recorded incidents in Atlantis of divine figures transferring their power?”
El shook her head. “None that I’ve heard about. Theology isn’t really my course of study anymore.”
“Cosmas and I both share a belief that Manu may have absorbed Pontus’s…I don’t know. His something. Part of what made him a god, perhaps. His physical body perished, but what made him a deity lives on in Manu.”
Kai glanced toward the cliffside, where Manu and Heracles carried on a conversation that appeared deeper than the Mariana Trench. “The only working theory from the priests in Thrace is that Pontus or another divinity worked their magic through Manu, enabling him to heal Heracles. No one, not one person or priest, has suggested Manu could…”
The thought was too much to bear, too preposterous to breathe out loud.
“Be Pontus?” El suggested uttering the insane statement. Though, the longer she considered it, the less fantastical and crazy it sounded. How crazy was it that she was born the fifth descendant of the gods? How crazy was it that one had been there among their people for centuries, working to restore the peace behind the scenes?
And how crazy was it that this very being, exhausted from lifetimes of stewardship, had at last faded away and left his godhood behind for another mer to wield?
“It’s insane. No one would believe us. Most didn’t in the temple when I brought it up. You’re the first, El—the first to make me feel that I’m not insane.”
El placed her hand on Kai’s shoulder, her grip a reassuring squeeze in a moment when doubt churned in her gut and stole what little appetite their stroll had worked up. “It doesn’t matter what they believe. They’re mers accustomed to praying to a silent god who provides no answers and ultimately doing whatever they can justify. If the spirit of Pontus has faded and his godhood lives on in Manu, then… Well. That’s going to change a lot of things, and everyone may not be ready for it. It means a return to the days of the past, when Pontus and Thalassa guided from their temples and visited with their congregation. It means a return to the days when the gods listened.”
The words gripped Kai’s heart with a tight fist, anxiety squeezing with impunity. She couldn’t begin to fathom how Atlantis as a whole would react to the news that their divine father was a mer of flesh and blood, ruling on the throne.
“But this is perhaps too heavy a discussion for a shoreside stroll. Tell me about that whale-sized bag Manu dragged aboard the ship for you when we departed from Thrace.”
Less than a week ago when Amerin assisted Kai with packing for their journey into the Mediterranean, there’d been envy in the other mermaid. “I told Amerin I would bring her gifts from Thrace. She’s never visited the city before…” Where had her friend ever visited during the long lifetime of servitude to the crown, living as little more than a pampered slave? Kai sighed. “I should have insisted that she come. The open air would have been a kindness for her.”
“Perhaps…”
“There
’s no perhaps about it, El. How fast can she recuperate from the attack if she never leaves the palace to—”
To stretch her paralyzed legs?
The absurd thought went unsaid, lingering like bitter poison on the tip of Kai’s tongue.
Before she could say another word about it, El maneuvered in front of her and hugged her in an embrace she hadn’t known she needed until strong arms were around her. Standing there barefoot on the shore, warm sand between her bare toes, and her friend’s armored body supporting her, a thousand worries diminished at once.
“Don’t use your gift on me.”
El’s arms tightened as if Kai would break away and run for it. “Is it working?”
A fleeting urge to punch Elpis passed, hesitation and a pregnant pause giving way to a reluctant, “Yes.” Kai hated that it soothed the edge off her melancholy with more efficiency than a dose of Xanax.
“Good. Now listen to me, Kai. You are not responsible for the speed of Amerin’s recovery. Mental, emotional, or otherwise. What happened to her was a terrible thing beyond your control.”
“And I will spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t do more to help her before it came to this. I—ugh. I’m ruining this moment, aren’t I?”
A dozen guards hung back beyond earshot, granting the women the peace and privacy to converse among themselves. Kai appreciated that the Myrmidons weren’t witness to her meltdown.
Goddess of Sea and War: a Fantasy Romance (Kingdom in the Sea Book 3) Page 1
