Seaborn 01 - Saltwater Witch

by Chris Howard

  Didn’t have a choice. The vision or dream, whatever this was had me locked in. I fought to keep my head above the water, trying to focus on a point where my grandmother would be—where she had been a moment before.

  The old woman flashed in and out of existence with each blink of my eyes. A strong tug started behind my navel, spread through my body, pulling harder, like the roots of a tree, gnarled, burrowing through my skin, coiling around my bones.

  I couldn’t fight the currents.

  My fingers slipped and I fell into the dream torrent, pulling everything that mattered to me into that fathomless well at the center.

  Spinning in the water, glimpses of yawning doorways along a black-bricked outside wall, so many tunnels leading into the core where the water spiraled toward the sinkhole, and passed through it.

  I blinked.

  My grandmother sat across from me in quiet immobility, like the trunk of a deep-rooted tree, silent and anchored to the earth. I reached out to her. I felt the strength in her dark eyes, weighed down with sorrow and sympathy, as if the old woman wanted to save me from something far beyond her powers to direct. Kallixene jumped at me and screamed in anger, clawing through the water, fighting the vision to take my hand.

  The violence in the water clawed at my skin. A weight hit me and knocked me flat.

  Pretty sure I knew what it was. I was feeling the presence of the Wreath. It was the whirlpool, the many-faceted room of bricks, the countless black rectangles of tunnel entrances. And it was inside me.

  My neck ached as I fought the water. The weight increased in sharp steps—I was buried under broken piles of tombstones, and every few seconds someone heaved another marble slab on top. I clenched my teeth and tasted blood in my mouth. The Wreath fought my anger; it made me the soul of a people and then wiped away their safety, the fortress walls that protected them crumbled; I was the earth and the highest ranges of mountains collapsed into the sea; I was the stone ground smooth under a glacier, crushed into dust, all the force of a dam break in the space of an inch.

  And then my grandmother took my hand, pulling me from the Wreath’s control. I struggled against it, and the images of the things winging by me in the torrent changed to teacups, saucers, and old red bricks, bowls of chicken noodle soup, English ivy and Little Red Riding Hood delivering cookies—the foolish little girl—and oh, what big dark eyes you have, grandmother.

  “The better to see you with, my dear,” said Kallixene with a sad smile. She nodded a few times, as if to say, that’s enough of that.

  I coughed, a sluggish intake of water that caught behind my teeth, and I gripped my grandmother’s hand harder.

  “You look like Ampharete.” A small muscle in Kallixene’s chin trembled when she said it. I thought she was nodding at me, but it was a shudder, something painful going on in her soul. “Your eyes. My Gregor had green eyes with blue, and your mother’s were very deep blue. But you have...”

  My eyes widened. “I have yours.”

  “There is some of your mother’s in them, but yes.”

  That seemed to put a final seal on our kinship.

  Convinced, Kallixene released my hand, kicked gracefully up to the ceiling, and unfastened the clips that held on her armor.

  I started to rise, a glance over my shoulder with a questioning look at Ephoros. He shrugged at me, a watery shuffle of his huge arms and shoulders.

  Untangling my feet from the stool’s legs, I swam to the center of the room. Something itched in my head as if there was there was an obvious thing I needed to do or wanted—the need for room to swing?

  I watched—curious more than anything else—as Kallixene, now completely upside down, set her sword on the table and pulled away the suit of blue shield-shaped plates. She wriggled out of it and draped it over six thick pegs that stuck out from the wall. Underneath, she wore a wrinkled black dress with leggings that went into small pointed boots covered in miniature versions of the scales of her armor. She sat down again and removed them, heaving them at the wall.

  Then she turned back to me while the boots tipped and pendulumed in the water to the floor.

  She’d allowed me in the room with my sword. She’d taken off her armor right in front of me. She trusts me. And I relaxed, let my eyes close briefly, let my own armor and sword drift away. The weight lifted, made me hunch my shoulders, and then a chill and the not-very-comfortable feeling of being close to undressed in my shorts and tee shirt.

  I also expected a disapproving the-stuff-kids-wear-these-days look, but I got something a lot more intense from my grandmother.

  Kallixene’s gaze hit me hard, forced me to kick away. I bumped up against Ephoros, pausing over the decision to recall the armor and my sword. It would weaken me, but the look Lady Kallixene was giving me scared the shot out of me.

  “The last time I saw your mother, you were in her arms at her breast. You must have been six or seven months old.” Kallixene’s eyes shifted to the window but didn’t look past them. “She wrapped you in a blanket and handed you to Zypheria who already had her armor on. And then she did that, only the opposite. She closed her eyes and then opened them and she was ready for war. A sword like yours appeared in her hand, not the identical one you carry. Your armor is different, too.”

  “Did...she say anything?”

  Kallixene lifted her head, eyes on the ceiling of her sitting room. The grim smile appeared for a moment and faded. “She said only a fool would come between the Wreath-wearer and her child.”

  Sorrow hung in the water, thick and painful, like the cloud of blood over the Rexenor fortress after its fall.

  Kallixene collected her thoughts, set her grim smile, and swept the sadness away with her hand. “I just want to hear my granddaughter’s voice for a little while.”

  Chapter 24 - The King’s Trap

  Kallixene pressed her hands together, the webbing between each finger a fine see-through sheet of skin.

  “Tell me everything you know about your father.” Her tone was patient, even tranquil, because she obviously thought it wouldn’t take much patience to get through my story.

  “I dreamed of him, grandmother.” I paused over the decision to tell her about the naiads. No. “I was alone in the ocean and I went into the abyss and found a stone floating above the floor, but chained down to the earth. There was a man inside who said his name was Gregor, who had a daughter with my name, and he was married to an Alkimides princess, Ampharete.”

  Kallixene nodded. “I was expecting something like this, most likely a trick of King Tharsaleos. And then what did you do when you woke?”

  “What would anyone do? I went to find him.”

  “Where?” Kallixene leaned closer.

  “The abyss, not far north of the Nine-cities. The lithotombs.”

  I paused only a second at Kallixene’s stunned look and told her everything that Ochleros had related about the ancient Telkhines book, Gregor’s many punishments, including his time as a porthmeus along the New Hampshire coast, and how King Tharsaleos had moved him within the last two days from the abyss of the lithotombs.

  No one I’d talked to knew where he was now, but he was still alive, presumably. The king wouldn’t have given up on his hunger for the rest of the book. Lord Gregor was the key that unlocked it.

  Kallixene interrupted me at every significant point in the story. She wanted to know about Ochleros, who she had heard of but never seen. She knew about the book, but it had not been complete or useful when she had last seen it. She wanted to know about the lithotombs and the creatures that guarded them.

  Nearly all of it was new to Lady Kallixene. Halfway into the story, her arms were folded impatient and demanding, and she mumbled curses over the fact that Rexenor was an exile house, with little or no contact with other seaborn.

  I could tell the fate of her son and the book weighed the most in her mind, but there was some serious doubt in her eyes, too.

  She’d lived her whole life in fear, with the king’s assas
sins throwing curses at her, and treachery lurking in the spaces between the words of trusted men.

  “We still have our sources of knowledge in place among the Thalassogenêis, but we don’t get much out of them anymore, unless we threaten them. Not since our fall. We have spies among the agents on the surface. I even have a sister who had been enslaved by Tharsaleos. We found her and released her. She now delivers information to us from above. We know more about what’s going on among the surfacers than the court in the Nine-cities.”

  “You know the Olethren have been awakened?”

  Kallixene went still and then nodded, rubbing her eyes.

  “Grandmother? Why did you kidnap Mr. Henderson?”

  “Because one of our...” She paused for the correct term. “Sources of information among the surfacers told us that King Tharsaleos had ordered his death.”

  “Death?” I backed away. “Why?”

  “I was going to ask you that. The whole ocean has been turned upside down in the last week. So much activity, the king communicating with the surface—and we sensed his panic. We learned the Olethren were awake again, that a school in Nebraska was suddenly very important to the king, and a teacher from this school was to die. We didn’t learn why any of this should be, and we are waiting for Michael Henderson to open his eyes and tell us.” She shrugged. “We went on the principle that any enemy of Tharsaleos is a friend to Rexenor. Now you’re here, and with eyes open.”

  Kallixene paused only a second to see if I was going to jump in with some answers, and when I didn’t, she continued. “We thought we had far greater problems when we learned that Tharsaleos had awakened the Olethren. That’s why you see us readying for war.” Kallixene laughed grimly. “Not that you will ever catch us unready. But we weren’t sure why the dead army was being brought out to battle.”

  “It didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Henderson. The king found out about me.”

  Kallixene nodded deeply. More of it made sense now. “Which is why you still find us here. We’re not going to run if we don’t have to, and to be caught away from the protection of the mountains and our house enchantments would be certain death for the last of Rexenor. We were preparing to move to another hidden village when, at great risk, we pressed our old spies among other seaborn houses. It wasn’t Rexenor they swore, that no one in the Nine-cities even discussed Rexenor any longer. We are a dead house as far as they are concerned. No. They told us all the king’s power is directed at a surface school in Nebraska called St. Clement’s Education Center.”

  I kicked off the floor and my armor slipped around my body, followed by the weight and weakness that made me slump forward. My fingers tightened around the sword’s grip, and the nightmare shuffled through my head—a flash of dead soldiers breaking down the door to the nine-to-sixteen’s hall and the screams of my friends.

  I spun upside down, reached down, and tilted my fallen stool back up on its legs.

  “But if I leave, they won’t bother St. Clement’s,” I whispered. “I can lead them somewhere faraway, and maybe that’ll give us time to gather an army and plan their defeat.” I looked up at Ephoros for encouragement but he showed no readable expression.

  Lady Kallixene laughed, a slow, deeply complex laugh, that didn’t stop when I thought it should’ve. She was laughing at me, and I gave her back the most hate-filled look I could conjure, hoping I’d recaptured most of Andromache’s “raging arrogance”.

  That made her stop laughing, but she continued smiling pleasantly. “That is a strong look, young lady.”

  “Why do you think this is funny?” My hands curled into fists, one still on the sword.

  Cold and grim settled on her features, and she looked down at the open gesture she was making. “I don’t. I have fought the Olethren, girl...with these hands. They obliterated my entire house. They killed my husband, Lord Nausikrates, and almost every one of his bodyguards. I still taste blood and hear children screaming every time I close my eyes. Your own mother possessed the gift of Poseidon and failed against them. Do you have any idea how many Olethren there are?”

  I knew exactly how many. I glanced up at Ephoros and he looked back at me, still nothing in his blurred monstrous face, so alien.

  “Two-hundred and forty thousand.” I said it evenly, but stretched the number out to add some force.

  Kallixene threw me half a scowl and one lifted eyebrow.

  “And I have time,” I went on. “Tharsaleos woke them up, but if I leave St. Clement’s, he will have to wait to find me before sending them out. By that time I will have rescued my father, taken the book, and discovered how to defeat them.”

  Kallixene’s body jumped as she snorted in surprise. Her lips did a little twist, mildly impressed, either with my answer or bravery—or utter stupidity—in the face of such a threat.

  “How do you happen to know how many there are?”

  “I counted them,” I said as if I was talking of nothing more deadly than tallying pennies. “Eight blocks of thirty-thousand.”

  “You saw them?” Kallixene leaned forward.

  “I stood on the battlements and counted them last night. They’re awake. They’re probably marching right now. And the Nine-cities is closed up tight.”

  Lady Kallixene held my eyes for what felt like an hour, and then dropped her hands to the table.

  I nodded decisively. “I just need to get away from them. That’ll give me time to take my father’s book from King Tharsaleos.”

  Kallixene shook her head. “That’s not the way the Olethren work. The king gives them a name, a target, an image of the hunted, the signature of their soul, and the dead will stalk that person to the ends of the world, abyss to mountaintop. They can smell the spirit of the one who has been doomed. It is the king who decides. It is the king who plants the image of the fated one in the dead souls of the Olethren. It is the king’s soul that drives them and gives them the strength to march. When Rexenor was defeated, Tharsaleos sent the Olethren after my husband, knowing that Lord Nausikrates would die before leaving his home. Tharsaleos was right.”

  “I don’t really have a home. I can keep moving.” I kicked off the ceiling and used my hands against the floor to spin my body upright.

  “The oceans are deep but not that deep.”

  “How fast can an army that size move?”

  “They do not rely on speed to bring death to the fated. They do not have to eat. You do. They do not stop until they have finished.”

  A line up of faces whirled past in my thoughts: Jill, Nicole, Mrs. Vilnious, Hipkin, the laundry lady. “I just need to lure them away from St. Clement’s”

  “You have friends there?” Kallixene raised an eyebrow. “What makes you certain that you are the target of the Olethren?”

  I lurched forward in shock, kicked sideways to slow my turn in the water, my thoughts skidding to a halt. “King Tharsaleos knows I wear the Wreath! He knows where he can find me. Who else would they be sent after?”

  “The king is also not stupid. He’s defeated shrewder enemies than you or me. He has powers that we never suspected he had. The book my son recreated explains much. Tharsaleos killed most of my family, my House is in ruins, my friends are dead. Your mother perished. Kassandra, there are few things worse than a bad king. I will never underestimate him again.” She pointed a long bony finger at me, and in a cold serious voice, said, “You may be certain that whatever Tharsaleos has planned, you will not be able to run from it.”

  I kicked to the front window, glancing out at the sleeping form of Mr. Henderson in the courtyard. The question nagged me, burning in my thoughts, all the hotter because my grandmother had laughed at me.

  “Why? Why don’t you think the Olethren are coming for me?”

  “Because King Tharsaleos will have thought of that.”

  “Who can it be then? If it is like you say, that he needs to plant the image of some person as a target for the dead army...If not me, then who?”

  “There is a man from the
sea up at your school.”

  “Mr. Fenhals?”

  Lady Kallixene nodded, a curl in her lip of something sour in her thoughts. She didn’t seem to like the idea that I already knew about him. “He is not the target. He is an old and powerful agent who works on the land for the king. We know who he is.” Kallixene pointed beyond the window. “Fenhals was charged by the king to kill your teacher. Do not speak to Fenhals. Beware him. My suspicion is that he brought someone with him. A prisoner.”

  “Who?”

  “Did you see him when he arrived?”

  Parresia had told me, floating into the deeps with her basketball-sized remote communicator—to find me on the battlements of the Olethren. “No...uh...I was away.”

  “Do you know if he brought anything or anyone with him?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know.” I shook my head, then several thoughts came to a neat conclusion in my head. “You know what’s weird? This Fenhals guy came to Clement’s in the middle of the night, very early in the morning, somewhere around three or four o’clock.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Kallixene cleared her throat, waiting for my answer, and then in a tone that clearly meant, let-me-rephrase-that, she said, “How do you know what time he arrived, but not know what he brought with him?” Then seeing the look on my face, added, “What were you doing when you saw Mr. Fenhals arrive?”

  I bit my lip, hesitating. “I wasn’t at Clement’s when he came. Someone told me of it.”

  “Someone? Who?”

  “A naiad.”

  “At the school? Or one of the three staying on land outside the town of Mullen, Nebraska?”

  “Four.”

  Lady Kallixene scowled back at me. “In Mullen? We have evidence that there is one at the school, but we don’t know who it is.” She held up a finger as if to cut off further discussion on the topic. “Don’t trust the naiads. They are friendly with Tharsaleos.”

  “They told me everything. And they also sent me the dream of my father.”

  She shook her head, puzzled. “Why?”