by Chris Howard
Corina was him, Aleximor, hundreds of years ago. He was dreaming this, and she was living it.
The name of the man in front of him rose in her thoughts, but it hurt to remember it. The man wore a helmet with a tiny gold embossed seabird stamped above his brows. Strands of thick brown hair stuck out and brushed the plates that curled over his shoulders. He wore armor, scaly like a fish, sharp little shield shapes of what looked like pale lime-green plastic. He was young, maybe twenty, but he looked serious, as if his life had never been easy, and he had a long curved black dagger in his right fist. His eyes were fixed on Aleximor, cold and pitiless rings of bright bluish-green.
He drifted forward about a foot off the ground, dagger held low. His voice exploded with hatred.
"You killed my brother, Aleximoros! Dead raiser. I'm told I cannot take your life. Strates Unwinder tells me that I can, however, prevent you from taking another's."
The knife moved against the Bone-gatherer's throat.
Aleximor's neck snapped back, and he cried the man's name in agony and hatred. “Kassander! I will make you—and your king—pay for this!"
Kassander shouting back, “He is not my king!"
Aleximor woke, the heart in his new body thudding over the noise from the scene, smears of color in a pool of syrupy black ink. He blinked and breathed deeply, folding his arms in front of him protectively.
Half an hour passed while he held his new host body tight and took in slow breaths to calm down. Then he moved on and made no comment on the nightmare.
Corina had the feeling that he had experienced this many times over the last two hundred years—and there hadn't been anything to hold on to. Nothing physical.
Aleximor stretched out his arms and legs, and kicked up a good pace, singing low to himself of blood drawing out the psyche and of locking it in the earth—and of someone he hated almost as much as the king, one of the names from his nightmare, Strates Unwinder.
Corina spent some thought on their depth, but she couldn't produce anything but a wide range, from one hundred to five hundred meters.
She spent some time thinking about the man with the knife in the dream, Kassander—and even the name, Strates Unwinder, wondering what he had unwound. They all belonged to some group called Rexenor ... House Rexenor. The guards who brought Aleximor in to be judged called Kassander a lord, and Kassander had called Aleximor, “dead raiser."
Any way she looked at it, it didn't sound like a good thing to be associated with.
Aleximor stopped every fifteen minutes and stared around at black empty ocean.
Swimming to the floor of the Monterey Canyon? Then what?
He followed the descending walls of rock another hour as it flattened into a field of slate-colored sand, swimming faster than any human.
He kicked along the smooth floor for what felt like miles to Corina. Silt swirled in his wake, and his eyes darted to little reddish crabs, an occasional spidery tube anemone.
Aleximor stopped, startled by something, twirling his arms to keep himself upright. A cloud of dust enveloped him, settling while he floated a few feet off the ocean floor.
He pushed out his hands, straightened his legs, and planted his fins in the sand, a cloud of silt blossoming up his legs. Then he tilted his neck back, sniffing the current, and he smiled with Corina's lips.
"I taste death,” he said with her high whispering voice.
Is that what it is? Corina willed her nose to scrunch up, but nothing happened. All I can sense is that weird sour overcooked cabbage smell. And I thought it was you.
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Chapter Eight
The Wreath-wearer
The number three has special meaning for the Seaborn. Three is the minimum number of strands required to braid, three is the shape of their world. The surface is two-dimensional. The sea is three. It is a common belief among the Seaborn that the ocean's currents are three-part, and with the right power and knowledge, a current can be unbraided, broken into its three separate tracks, even controlled.
—Journal of Michael Augustus Henderson
* * * *
Gregor Lord Rexenor, son of Lady Kallixene and the late Lord Nausikrates, wiped his forehead on his forearm, brought the rake up straight, and leaned on it. He tilted his head to the side to listen, scowling at the sound of someone hammering.
A female scream of frustrated rage and pain came from the house.
He dropped the rake and spun away from the driveway, his eyes stopping on the kitchen window, catching a dull flash of reflected light off moving metal.
Gregor ran for the nearest door.
Nicole and Jill were in Rye at the harbor aboard Stormwind. Zypheria was at North Hampton Beach. Kassandra was alone in the house.
Then he heard a high-pitched angry sea of words ending in, “Kill the old kings!” and it sucked his store of courage dry. It was his daughter screaming the Alkimides battle cry, not in English, but in the old Hellene dialect of the Seaborn.
He jumped a low stone wall, waving madly as if he could move his body faster by pushing the air behind him. Damn thin world. He could move so much quicker in water.
"Kassandra!” He cried her name before he reached the house, hoping she could hear him and take it as a sign that help was on the way.
He cleared the stairs, wrestling with the screen door. He shoved the side door in, dashed through the mudroom, and slammed clumsily into the paneled wall leading past his study. He fell into a narrow table, knocking everything off it. A lamp crashed against the wall. A stack of books skidded along the hall's polished wood floor in his wake.
The tiled kitchen floor came into view and he let out a grunt of horror, breathing in the coppery smell of blood. The floor was syrupy, a dance of bare footprints decorating it, a folded broken strip of armor scales, and long blotchy streaks where someone had slipped.
Gregor skidded at the top of the stairs that led to the grotto, his eyes following the bloody footprints on the stones.
"Kassandra?” He stuttered her name, grabbed the railings, and jumped three stairs at a time into the dark under the house.
"Dad?” Kassandra shut the refrigerator door and took another long drink of orange juice. She hadn't been able to hear him over the roar of her heart beating and the chattering of the crowd inside her head.
He spun with a jump, thumping his head on the thick beam across the basement entrance. He came up the stairs slowly, his face pale. Then he noticed her sword on the kitchen island counter, in easy reach. She had already cleaned the blade, but she was a mess. Blood oozed between the scales, down the front of her armor and down her legs. One of her braids had come untwined. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a war.
His jaw started working before he could get sound from his throat. “What ... what happened?"
She nodded, acknowledging his question. She was breathing hard, and spent a minute getting her racing heart under control. She took another sip and jutted her chin toward the blood-covered stairs. “Soldiers from my grandfather, looking for you. Four of them. I wounded two, one badly, and let the other two carry them away.” She tipped more orange juice into her mouth, swallowed it. “It was obvious they'd never fought above the waves. They knew little of the sweep and swing of a sword. The terrain was mine. One managed to get out of the stairwell and he paid for it."
She noticed the expression on his face—neither pride nor fear, but a deep mix of them that looked like agony.
Kassandra tilted her head to the side and gave him a reproachful you-worry-too-much look. In a sweeter voice, Gregor's daughter surfaced, and without a hint of sarcasm, said, “I was just making friends, Dad."
He closed his mouth and thought about it. With an exasperated breath, he said, “How does friendship play a role?” He gestured down the bloody stairs. “You hurt them.” He bent down and picked up the torn strip of green scaled armor, turning it over to examine it. “Badly."
"I let them go.” She said it coldly and s
imply, as if it was the obvious conclusion to draw, as if the only other possible path she could have taken was to kill them all. “They are at this moment cursing my grandfather for sending them unprepared against me."
"The Wreath-wearer,” he whispered automatically, his eyes roaming thoughtfully, stopping on the half-buried crossbow bolt in the ceiling above her head.
She placed her glass in the sink, a ring of orange juice at the bottom, darkening with blood from a cut on her knuckles. She kept her right hand and arm pressed to her side, body turned toward her sword.
She gave him half a shrug. “Rumor is a capricious friend."
Gregor's eyes crinkled in suspicion.
"But it can be a powerful ally. I let them go so that they may talk. Their story will get around the City in a matter of days."
Gregor sighed. His daughter was in there somewhere, but that was the Wreath-wearer talking.
Gregor's thoughts drifted to Kassandra's mother, Ampharete, the prior wearer, who had been just like this, voices of past wearers in her head, always plotting, a princess of the royal house. She had been in exile, hiding from her father, coming north with Zypheria and her personal guards to the Rexenor fortress deep in the North Atlantic.
Gregor pointed at her with the rolled-up piece of scale armor. “The king knows you exist and his opinion sways everyone else."
"I'm counting on it."
"Why reveal yourself to all the Seaborn now? Tharsaleos controls the ears of every listener. He will make you the enemy."
She smiled happily. “I'm counting on precisely that."
Gregor waited for an elaboration, but Kassandra's eyes went unfocused, wandering off somewhere in her head. He watched her pull a memory, a painful thought inside. The expression disappeared from her face.
"Kassandra.” He called her back, and then held a hand up in appeal, the strip of armor rattling in the other. “You scare me when you're like this."
Pretend not to know what he's talking about. She lifted her brows and gave him a questioning stare. “Like what?"
"You are like ... As if you're already..."
Kassandra frowned. It wasn't like him to stammer. The Dosianax soldiers getting through the gate had really shaken him.
Gregor gestured with a half-folded hand, trying to hold on to an idea that was delicate and at the same time caustic. “You're cold. You fight alone. It's as if you believe you're indestructible. You're like...” His voice trailed off. Gregor dropped his hands, got a better grip on one of the rails, and gave his daughter a deeply-concerned-father look, adding one twitching eyebrow to show his uncertainty about something.
She'd seen the look before. Reading it as clear as if he'd brought the accusation to his tongue, Kassandra's right hand went reflexively into a fist. She tugged in a breath, deep enough to hurt, and prepared to shout. She held back, furious words burning in her throat. She coughed to cover the process of stuffing her anger inside.
"I am not...” She spoke evenly, in a hard, controlled voice. “I am not like my grandfather."
Gregor said nothing, but it was a nothing so thick it hung in the air with the words: If you're like this at your age, you have the potential to be worse than the king.
That was grounds for letting the urge to yell off its leash. “How dare you! He killed my mother, your wife."
"He sent the dead army to destroy House Rexenor.” His voice trembled. “Not to kill Ampharete."
Her face scrunched into an indignant snarl. “That's Lady Ampharete. And she died because of it.” Kassandra waved away his response. “Tharsaleos killed your friends, your family, your father, my grandmother Queen Pythias—his own wife.” She screamed at him. “I am not Tharsaleos!"
In her head, Kassandra heard her mother's angry questions, followed by another woman's snobbish voice: Is your sword handy, dear? If that Rexenor doesn't know his place ... why not cut off his—
"Shut the hell up, Andromache!” Kassandra's fists went white and a stab of agony shot through her ribs on the right side. “Or I'll come in there and put you to sleep myself."
She blinked, held her eyes closed a few seconds, and then grabbed the counter to keep her balance. Something in her head woke, a cold bullying motion, dizziness with fingers that touched her thoughts, smooth prodding fingers, smooth like saliva.
She shook it off.
Gregor's eyes widened and his mouth came close to a grim smile. “Queen Andromache agrees with me?"
Kassandra's eyes swiveled to her father, focusing. She shook her head. “No. She just thinks you ought to be polite to your daughter."
Gregor dropped his shoulders and wheeled toward the dark stairs, coiling the scrap of armor tighter in his fist. “Can you do something to protect the grotto entrance? We obviously need more than the gate if they can get through the lock."
She nodded, her eyes going to squints of pain. “After I rest I'll go down and summon Ochleros."
Gregor let a minute pass, studying the green scaly armor, the expression on his face souring even more. He recognized their shape and color, the kind worn by the old Rexenor enemies, House Dosianax—the king's house warriors. Dosianax was the Sparta of the Seaborn, rarely defeated, and only then by death. His neck went prickly at the thought of his daughter doing something to make them flee.
Gregor gave her a pleading look. “You don't realize how much you scare me when you act like this."
She stared back at him, silent for ten long seconds, no expression on her face. Suddenly she was too weary to pretend, and she ignored the directives in her head.
"How do you think I feel?” She was annoyed that he thought he had any idea what her life was like. “I have Andromache teaching me to kill when she's not bickering with Praxinos about turning me into a witch. I talk with sea demons two or three times a week; without a lot of trouble I can control half an ocean.” Her voice went bitter. “I can kill a man with a teaspoon of water."
As if to demonstrate this, Kassandra swung her left hand over her shoulder, curled two fingers, tapped a rhythm into her palm, and sang a command. The kitchen faucet flipped up and water jetted from the tap into the drain. In one sliding motion, she brought her hand forward, pointing at her father. A disk of water shot at Gregor from the stream, flattening with stiff, jagged teeth like a saw blade of ice.
Kassandra was halfway through the command to stop its motion when Gregor—much quicker than she'd anticipated—did something with one hand, deflecting the blade to the side. It flipped vertical and went four inches into the wall above the basement stairs, a hand's width from the edge of a framed Little Mermaid movie poster.
Kassandra fixed her eyes on her father admiringly. Even with his power waning, he still had it, although he rarely let it surface. He had grown up in the fortress of House Rexenor and had been taught by a student of that famous old Rexenor mage, Strates Unwinder.
Gregor straightened out of his defensive stance, and Kassandra went on as if nothing had happened, casually stopping the flow of water into the kitchen sink with another gesture.
She brought her hand up and touched her forehead.
"You don't know what it's like in here.” Her voice was thin and angry, clipping the ends off the words.
She caught herself tightening up all her muscles, breathing hard through her teeth, but didn't do anything to slow her anger.
"You have no idea. It's every second of every day of my life.” She tapped her temple, glaring. “Never being able to hide. Someone always looking over my fucking shoulder. They were all in here the first time I kissed a boy—telling me I was doing it wrong. They were all in here advising me when I had my first period, a committee wondering what surface women did, with running commentary as I sat in the bathroom and read them the damn Tampax directions."
She gripped her forehead in one hand and the pain made her voice go rough. “I have this thing in here that I cannot stop. I have three full time—"
Four, said a man's eely smooth voice in her head.
Kassan
dra jumped, grabbing the kitchen counter to keep her feet. “Who the hell are you?"
Not quite the reception I had anticipated. The man was slightly put out. I am King Eupheron.
"Eupheron.” She had been warned about this one already. “Pleasure. Now, if you'll shut up for a moment, I'm in the middle of a conversation."
She ignored the follow-up grumbling from all four Wreath-wearers, waving at her father to continue the discussion, anything to hold off the voices in her head.
Gregor swallowed dryly and let his gaze roam over the blood-covered floor. “Do you know what King Tharsaleos will do to those men when they return without me ... or you?"
"There was no other way."
"There might have been."
"They came to take you, probably kill you, and they'll get what they deserve."
He looked at her pityingly. “Don't you understand? The king will not stop with them. Can't you fight it? Look what it's done to you, Kassandra. You are...” She watched his expression change, fascinated as he struggled for a word to describe her. “Ruthless."
She jutted her chin at him, retort ready. “And what did twelve years in the King's prisons do to you?” Kassandra bit down hard, holding her mouth steady, opening it only enough to say, “You are soft."
She had to suppress something inside that told her to use the word, “Weak."
He mimicked her, clamped his mouth shut, grinding his teeth, holding in whatever he was about to shout back at her. He swallowed it, took in a breath, and went on in a forced calm. “It's a pity you couldn't have persuaded them to—"
"With crossbow bolts coming at me and the points of their spears in my face, I didn't have time for pity."
"Time for cruelty, time for calculating their destruction?"
She glanced down at her feet and moved one to cover blood pooling on the floor, and then her eyes hit his eyes. They hit him hard and forced him to back up a step.
