Goddess of Sea and War: a Fantasy Romance (Kingdom in the Sea Book 3)

by Vivienne Savage

  “What is that?”

  “What is what?” Kai asked, glancing from the viewing port ahead. “We passed a ship wreckage.”

  No, not that. He gripped the armrest and focused on the distant whisper, only for it to fade from his hearing once more.

  Kai only smiled at him, oblivious. “You know, I feel like I’m really getting the hang of this.”

  At least one of them was adjusting. He chuckled nervously, forced. “I hope so, because my life has been in your hands for the past nine hours.” Meanwhile, a goddess, or perhaps something else, intruded on his thoughts.

  He took over for the final leg of their journey while Kai dozed in the copilot’s chair. He hadn’t dared to contact Loto or Cosmas for fear of intercepted signals reaching the wrong ears. Preliminary scans as they neared the trench detected nothing, confirming their fears that the area was a dead zone in all ways. No live crew along the edge of the barren crevice. Within, anything could wait.

  Manu imagined every way that their plan could go wrong, from Thalia ambushing them, to another squad of their own people turning traitor and ratting them out. It had long ago occurred to him that they could be approaching their death, never to emerge again. They had at least said their goodbyes to their friends, a tearful farewell and embrace occurring between Kai and Amerin before Nissa wove her fae magic.

  They had operated on the belief that the fewer people to know they were away from the palace, the better. Amerin’s duty would be in pretending Kai and Manu were in seclusion in the royal residence, doing what married couples did best.

  “What now?” Kai muttered as their craft lowered to the sand bed at the edge of the canyon leading into the greater abyss. The unmapped territory of the Erebothian Trench was a place of nightmarish speculation and a subject of fictionalized accounts throughout Atlantian history. Merwomen told their children that monsters dwelled there, and that if they were naughty, they would be snatched away by the fiends and devoured. Authors wrote about it, creating their own stories about the origins of the trench and what dwelled within.

  Now they were going to find out.

  Manu steeled his nerves and unclenched his jaw. “We wait for Loto’s signal. The Erebothian Trench scrambles all technological advances, so we can rest assured that our enemy also lacks big firepower. I read once that your grandmother attempted to send a ship down to investigate, and it was never found.”

  Kai killed the engine. “That’s good to know. Ready?”

  “You’re incredibly nonchalant about this.”

  “What else can I be?” Her quiet smile warmed him and somehow chased away the doubts, one smile telling Manu it would all be okay. For her, he’d fight a dozen armies regardless of the predicted outcome, no matter how likely he was to lose.

  As he popped the hatch, the bright lights of the Pearl Shark soared overhead above them. Flares jetted from it and illuminated the ocean floor. Light glinted off the glossy, haired legs of a giant pearlescent scale worm. Its shimmering legs coasted it away, skittering into the darkness once more. No other creatures seemed to thrive in the area.

  It soon became apparent why, as the thundering noise of crustacean Gloombeasts crossed the underwater horizon. Only time would tell if Thalia was in league with them.

  Manu was willing to bet she was.

  Their descent began almost hand in hand, Kai close against Manu’s side to feel his ambient warmth in the water. It killed her inside to leave their comrades and friends behind to battle a horde of Gloombeasts alone, but if they’d waited all their effort to remain inconspicuous would have been in vain.

  Her eyes adjusted to the fathomless void, the visibility of the trench bottom limited by a blanket of foggy substance swirling in dark mist. Kai had read about every sort of biological activity in the ocean from thermoclines to the mix of salt and freshwater pools. Whatever they were soon to encounter was something else, and it loomed beneath them the deeper they went.

  As they approached, a deep foreboding weighed on Kai’s heart, and realization struck.

  “This is where she fell.”

  “What?”

  “When Calypso and Thalassa fought. This is where Thalassa fell. It was a blow so mighty it drove her into the ocean floor and created this trench. But it left Calypso weak as well, and she never gathered power of that magnitude again. This is it, Manu. We’re here. We’re really here.”

  Understanding dawned upon Manu’s face. He placed a palm against the polished wall of the deep crevice. It gleamed with its own luster, like scar tissue drawn taut. “The attempted murder of Thalassa wounded the ocean itself and left this mark.”

  “Now we have to find her. If there’s truly a temple here, it was built by those who wanted to protect her after the fall.”

  “Then we’ll—” Her husband abruptly stopped, staring with a far away look in his eyes that he then shook off. “Then we’ll scour every inch until we find her.”

  He heard it again.

  They swam for so long toward bottom that Kai wished they’d brought dolphins, reaching depths no human was ever meant to travel without the protection of a submarine. Just when her body cramped with exhaustion, Kai noticed glimmers of ruby standing out like embers against the perpetual darkness. Manu eased her hand into his grip anew and laced their fingers.

  “Stay with me,” he murmured, voice low.

  “Those are the red slugs, aren’t they? The ones that led you to Amerin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they here to help again?”

  He stared for a while, consternation carving wrinkles in his brow. “They are, but we don’t need them to lead us, because I hear her. For the longest time, I confused her voice for yours. A voice spoke my name, I’d turn, but you said nothing. I thought the gift from Pontus—his power—was driving me insane.” His feet touched down on the trench’s sandy bottom. The cliffside walls adjacent to them were worn polished, unnaturally smooth. “Now I get it, and I understand. It’s been her all along, hoping to guide us right here where we needed to be.”

  With Manu leading the way, they swam through a vast trench that stretched across the Atlantic for more than a hundred miles. Its close proximity to Atlantis had left it unexplored for years, untouched by explorers of humankind. Conflicted thoughts questioned the likelihood of finding a place Thalia had spent years researching and hunting, but faith in Manu told her they would find their destination.

  Her muscles were cramping long before they found the first corpse, a black-armored Myrmidon. Then they found more, a number of them speared through their chests yet showing no indication of the Gloom infecting them.

  “What did this?” she wondered aloud, manipulating her tail into a pair of legs once more to kneel beside the bloating body on the trench’s cold floor. They were long dead, enough that the foulness offended her sense of taste and smell. She grimaced and turned her face away to look at Manu. “Thalia, Nammu, and Narkissa are working together. I’d expect these mers to be transitioning by now if a Gloombeast murdered them.”

  “Which is unlikely, unless Narkissa has turned on them.”

  “That is always a possibility.”

  “Where the name of Tartarus were they going?” he muttered, glancing up and down the length of the trench into a bleak abyss too dark for even her enhanced vision to see.

  “They weren’t here without reason. Something happened here for them to—”

  Something flickered beyond the wall before Kai, the image of an ascending stairway as translucent as a ghost and barely perceptible to her eyes. She squinted at first then whirled to face her husband. “It’s been here before us this entire time, Manu.”

  “What?”

  Kai pointed toward the barren wall. “There.”

  “There’s nothing but—”

  It began as a glimmer of warmth and a subtle tingle. When she next blinked, another image emerged from the polished wall of a cavern entrance yawning wide open and shrouded in darkness. At the same time, Manu jerked backwa
rds a step. Little by little, the image clarified before him.

  “It’s an illusion.”

  The world opened before them to reveal a temple in the distance, a majestic place of dark stone that felt as if she were stepping into another another realm once she surpassed the illusory barrier.

  Orbs of magical moonlight cast their glow in shades of silver over wild mosses and overgrown seaweed. Corals in every color and anemone of every variety flourished. Some glittered and others glowed like flames in violet, fuchsia, and tangerine. Despite its underwater location at the bottom of the deepest trench of the world, magical life thrived.

  Awe filled Kai as she absorbed centuries of ancient lost history. Manu grabbed her by the shoulder before she stepped forward. Lit by the facsimile of a moon and strewn across the ground were a dozen bodies, each of them a mer from Thalia’s team.

  Far beyond it, the Temple of Nyx arose like an ancient Babylonian temple with great arches shrouded in darkness to conceal whatever secrets were within.

  29

  Helpless

  The dull white walls of the healing house’s makeshift nursery had become home for the foreseeable future. Amerin loathed it, but she wouldn’t argue the compromise that guaranteed Atalanta remained her child. Discovering her parentage had been a bittersweet confirmation of what she already suspected from the moment Vitalis revealed Kai and the infant shared ancestry.

  On one hand, the baby was hers, and no mother or relative would arrive to whisk Atalanta away. On the other hand, the baby was from a creature some would call a monster. Too many mers would be eager to put the child to the death, her only crime that of being born to a mother who had haunted their kingdom for centuries and caused countless deaths.

  Time after time, Amerin wondered which sister had birthed the baby, and then she told herself it didn’t matter, though it had kept her up at night many times.

  I am your mother now. Whoever she is, it doesn’t matter. You’re mine, and I love you.

  Despite Amerin’s unspoken promise, Atalanta squirmed and fussed, flailing her arms free from the swaddling blanket. Unlike their human counterparts, merchildren advanced rapidly during the earliest stages of development, often learning to raise their heads within days of birth, and to roll over and lift onto their hands and knees during the early weeks. Then their maturation slowed dramatically before the onset of puberty and they remained in their awkward teenage years for nearly twice as long as a human.

  “Shh, shh. What’s wrong?”

  An infant’s shriek was the response. She cried, and she cried, and she cried some more, her face turning red and tears forming in her eyes. She sobbed until her breath was ragged no matter how much Amerin rocked her or tried to soothe her. What hurt more than the lack of sleep was watching the infant she’d taken in as her daughter writhe in apparent pain. She had never known how much she could love someone until Atalanta came into their lives. Of course, Cosmas would always be her true love, but the affection she felt for the baby was something new, something untainted.

  Losing the son fathered by Cosmas was agonizing in ways Amerin hadn’t known she could endure, yet she had somehow emerged from it stronger. Then fate had gifted this infant to her and cruelly tried to reclaim her.

  Eventually, when the cries subsided for a while, Amerin slumped in her chair with her head back.

  I won’t let them have you, little one, Amerin thought as the irritable child wrapped a tiny fist around her index finger. Though she wanted to sleep, she couldn’t until her young charge nodded off and remained asleep.

  It had been a grueling therapy session that day with Vitalis, the old healer torn between three duties of immense importance—treating her, studying Atalanta’s bloodline, and manufacturing a vaccine of sorts for the Gloom from Kai’s blood samples.

  In the day since Kai and Manu’s departure, she’d prayed countless times to Thalassa, Poseidon, and any deity of the ocean who might listen. At first, pleading for the former’s assistance seemed a counterproductive task until she reminded herself, quite firmly, that Thalassa had survived all this time.

  Their patron deity was a survivor.

  Just like Kai.

  They’ll make it.

  Amerin refused to believe otherwise. Her heart wouldn’t allow it.

  “How is my favorite patient?” Vitalis asked, sweeping into the room. White robes decorated with the symbols of his patron deity, Asclepius, billowed around him with dramatic flair.

  “Fussy,” Amerin replied. “She won’t sleep.”

  “Ah, well, we cannot have that. Perhaps you’d like if I took her for a time? These arms have held plenty of babies over the years.” With a groan and creak of ancient joints, the high mer settled in an adjacent chair and held out his arms.

  “Vitalis, you don’t have to do that.”

  “But I am offering,” he said, the very model of compassion.

  The offer tempted her. Cosmas was away in the name of duty, but the idea of stretching out all alone in their bed held no appeal, maybe because she’d been alone for so long.

  Amerin smiled. “I’ll stay. Maybe a little warm milk will ease her discomfort.”

  “Very well. Perhaps a pinch of blue sweetwort to calm her? The waters surrounding Atlantis are turbulent at the moment. I overheard the young mers outside speaking of a Gloombeast sighting.”

  “Yes! Thank you.”

  With the assistance of his staff, Vitalis rose and crossed to the door. Amerin followed on his heels through the healing house, from the little room with the crib into his main parlor. There, shelves held all manner of books, translucent jars with floating flora, and some little pickled organisms he once studied. He fetched a jar from the wall of reagents, removed the lid, and spooned out a small measure of the rich, cobalt blue herb inside into a piece of parchment.

  “Just this much in warm whale’s milk should—”

  An explosion rocked the palace. Jars of herbs and bottles of salve shook off their shelves and clattered to the floor as Vitalis toppled to the side and collapsed behind the desk.

  Atalanta shrieked from the commotion. A low rumble continued in the distance, occasionally punctuated by rapid weapons fire, peppered by the occasional detonation of another device that shook pieces of ceiling loose.

  “Vitalis!”

  Bound to her chair, Amerin could do nothing but shelter her daughter from the falling debris. The last rumble ended as Vitalis climbed to his feet again, blood dribbling from a gash in his forehead.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her. “Is the child hurt?”

  “No. We’re fine. We’re both fine.”

  He hurried past them to the door and tugged it open, just in time for Jason to lunge into the doorway.

  “We’re under assault! Gloombeasts overtook the northern gate. It would appear one of the remaining sisters is leading the charge.”

  Vitalis dabbed his brow with a handkerchief. Almost immediately, the cut faded away and the red staining the white silk remained the only evidence he’d been injured at all. “How could this be?”

  “Traitors,” the Royal Guard replied. “Lady Amerin, I must ask that you come with me. Cosmas ordered that I protect you and Atalanta.”

  “But what of Vitalis?”

  “My duty calls me to the battlefield. That is where a true healer belongs when war encroaches upon one’s home. Be safe, Lady Amerin.” The old mer clapped one hand to Jason’s shoulder in passing then hustled from the room with more energy than Amerin had ever seen from him.

  Before the door could swing shut again, Jason took charge of the chair and rolled Amerin into the corridor, turning on a dime and rushing her away from the healing house wing.

  “The palace won’t be safe for long. The Black Shells believe His and Her Majesty are present. They’ll overrun this place soon enough.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “Somewhere safe. We’ll take the secret tunnels,” he said.

  There wasn’t another guard in sigh
t. The palace shook again, quaking from whatever attacks occurred outside beyond her sight. Atalanta’s wails turned her red with fury. Her little chest heaved with the intensity.

  “Jason?”

  “Yes, My Lady?”

  “There are no secret tunnels here. You passed them.”

  Silence fell. Hard, unnerving silence. The thunder of her beating pulse surpassed the ear-splitting screams of a child in distress.

  “My apologies, Amerin. I don’t wish to do this.”

  His word submerged her in an ice bath. “Do what, Jason?”

  “Give me the child.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that creature,” he spat, moving to stand before her in the corridor, “outside is here to collect her spawn. We’re not fools. I overheard everything about that… I can’t even call it a child. No one else has the jellies to do what must be done. Not our queen, not our commander, but I know. It has to die.”

  30

  A Piece of Hidden Past

  Worse than the smell of the Myrmidon corpses was something else. An old stink of something rotten and foul that had nothing to do with the soon-to-rot, newly deceased black-armored mers. Manu wanted to mourn them, but circumstances left him short of sympathy and unable to dredge up an ounce of pity for the disloyal warriors.

  Something stirred what should have been otherwise still and peaceful water. One glance at Kai confirmed she detected the same thing. Her nose crinkled with disgust as the ripe smell of rot billowed over them. "That's awful."

  “Something's here,” he whispered.

  They proceeded with caution toward the marvelous relic of Ancient Greece. Despite the trepidation tensing his every muscle, Manu was blown away by the architecture of a structure that struck him as a blend of many different civilizations—the ziggurat style of Ancient Sumeria, the marble columns of Greece, the reliefs of Egypt.

  “What could it be?”

  They saw no sign of Nammu or Thalia, and perhaps that was the most disconcerting thing of all.