“Of zero consequence? Oh, Elandria. I gave you life, child. I raised you from an infant to a young woman, and I loved you before you were old enough to understand love. I am far more consequential than your pathetic turtledove. I am your father. I am the one who taught you to sing! I sang to you every night, and I gave you the best lessons that money and power could buy.”
Elandria felt suddenly ill, and shook her head to try to clear the voice away. “You’re so lucky, little one,” she murmured to the manatee. “Your parents are good and gentle. If only you knew the heartlessness that humans are capable of, you wouldn’t be so nice to me.”
“Heartlessness?” the voice repeated, as though wounded. Even as she tried to block it out, it seemed to be growing louder and clearer.
“Yes,” she responded, even though she felt silly for speaking to a voice in her head. “Even the best of us do bad things sometimes,” she said, thinking of how Trevain had murdered her beloved Cassie in that very room, “but usually, they do them for good reasons. When there’s no other option, and it’s all they can do.”
“I don’t think you ever really understood me, child,” the voice said quietly.
It echoed in the cave around her, and Elandria felt a shiver run through her body. It suddenly occurred to her that the voice was too realistic and consistent to be a memory or a figment of her imagination. It suddenly occurred to her that the source of what she was hearing might be outside of her head. Elandria felt her body freeze, her legs rooted in place.
“I never meant to cause you harm, Elandria. You were my second-born daughter, and you sang with the voice of angels. I only wanted to protect you, and keep you to myself—away from the monsters of the world who would seek to harm you.”
She stared down at the little manatee, and saw that its head had turned away from her. The baby sea-cow was gazing curiously at something else in the room, and Elandria was suddenly conscious of a presence. The birds that had approached to hear her song now fluttered away as though someone had startled them. Her heart began to similarly flutter inside her chest, beating rapidly as though it sought a way out of its confinement. Something was wrong.
“Hearts remote, yet not asunder? It was married chastity? Dear Sedna, girl! It’s pitiful to see you singing about a man who considers you no more than discarded scraps. Your fisherman king—your glorified turtledove—he loves your sister.”
Elandria’s hands began to shake where they rested just under the little flippers of the baby manatee. The voice was too real. She had detested the memory, but now she wondered if it was possible that this was far worse than a memory. A deathly chill had seized her shoulders as a gruesome thought occurred to her:
“You shall have your family returned to you. I will give you this and nothing more—you will soon learn to be careful what you wish for.”
This was Mother Melusina’s revenge. Of course—there would be a high price to pay for abandoning the sisterhood. If anyone was capable of bringing Elandria’s worst nightmares to life, it was the High Priestess of Sedna.
“Darling, won’t you look at me?” the voice asked. “I am sure you’ll find me just as handsome as I ever was. Do you remember when I gave you this cave? You asked for a menagerie, and I made one for you. Didn’t I always try to make you happy, Elan? Didn’t I make you feel good when I came to you at night?”
Elandria was suddenly conscious of the water around her legs being unusually warm. She realized that she was gripped by such intense fear that her body was producing a fight-or-flight response. She had lost control of her bodily functions. Her bladder had emptied itself. Yet she was so afraid that she could not even seem to feel ashamed by this; all of her thoughts fixated on the question of how she would manage to escape the cave alive.
“Aazuria and Trevain sent you away from your home, honey. They are the ones who did this to you, and now they call themselves ‘king and queen.’ It’s rubbish. That whore tried to kill the rightful king and take his place, but she wasn’t successful. And that bastard sent you away, betraying you, the rightful queen, for his whore. But we could do something about that, you and me.”
Hearing a splash in the water, Elandria’s horror intensified. She forced herself to turn her head to the side, and was greeted by the visage of the man she hated most in the world. His white beard hung around his face, dripping wet with wrath.
“We could kill them both, my love. We could take back Adlivun.” He waded toward her in the water, his blue eyes deceptively sympathetic. “I know how you feel—going from an honorable position in luxury to a wretched exile! Damn them!” His voice roared out in the cave, scaring away the baby manatee. “Damn those murderous fiends! Now that I have found you, Elandria, we will set things right. I promise you that. Trevain will perish painfully at my hands, like he should for calling himself the king of my land. And worthless Aazuria—oh, I have something much better planned for her. I spent a whole lifetime building her up, but believe me when I say that it will be much easier to break her down.”
She was suddenly very sure that this was a dream. It was simply not possible. She has watched this man die, and she had seen his body remain frozen in the family mausoleum for at least a dozen years. It did not make sense that—something in her mind suddenly clicked. His body had been frozen. Like Aazuria’s.
“We will fix this backward country, and sever all these despicable ties with the land-dwellers. Adlivun belongs to us, Elandria—and we belong to each other.” He reached out to grab her waist and pull her against his body. He leaned down to kiss her.
Elandria let out a piercing, bloodcurdling scream.
Chapter 11: The Paris Guy
Snow was falling gently over Romanova while the royals enjoyed an outdoor party behind the heavily guarded palace. A woman with long, wavy red hair was lounging in the enormous hot tub in her bikini. She was telling stories to the onlookers with such animated passion that it was hardly necessary to listen to her words to be enraptured. However, if one was able to get past her dynamic gestures and intonation, they would have heard an equally enchanting story.
“So we finally get to Yonaguni, after all of that—and wouldn’t you know it? The place is overrun with giant squid. I’m not even joking—you think you’ve seen squid? No. These things were monsters. I’m talking eyeballs the size of my entire head.” She lifted her hands into the air beside her ears to emphasize her point. “Huge tentacles flailing in every direction, covered in gross suction cups. The stuff nightmares are made of! Yama and Kaito are terrified, and I have no idea what to do. Part of me wants to say, ‘Uh, nope. Let’s just go back to Shiretoko and abandon this city forever. Let the behemoth squid have it. The ruins of Yonaguni are just going to have to stay ruined.’ But how would I ever be able to face my sister again if I chickened out like that? How would I ever be able to call myself Sionna Ramaris?”
Visola giggled and lifted her martini glass. “Awww. You think of me when you encounter colossal sea creatures and feel inspired to commit acts of violence! I feel so good about myself right now.”
“Be quiet and stop spoiling my story,” Sionna said sharply. “So I see that one of Empress Amabie’s guards is just staring at the giant squid, flabbergasted in awe at this translucent, squishy beast heading right for us. I reach over and grab his sword, right out of his hands, and I lunge at the thing! I chopped and I hacked—tore it to shreds. Dude, I just ripped them apart. I felt like a big heroic man—heck, I felt like I was channeling Visola for a moment there.”
“Then, of course, we had calamari for dinner,” Princess Yamako said with a smile.
“Delicious,” Sionna said with a sigh. She looked around at the other adults in the pool with her usual knowledgeable expression. Everyone was present for the little pool party, except for Naclana and Empress Amabie who were indoors with the children. “The thing you all need to remember about fighting a giant squid…”
“Is to kill it?” Visola asked, acting bored.
“Stop interrupting
! This is my victory, little sister.”
“Little! Blistering barnacles! I must have at least forty pounds of muscle on you, Sio.”
“Ah, but I have at least sixty seconds of age,” Sionna said, sipping her own martini smugly, “and in those sixty seconds, the universe must have surely opened up and given me all the wisdom and maturity it forgot to give you.”
“What a pile of malarkey!” Visola said, wading forward to unleash a string of insults on her twin. “First of all, the divine universe must have made some mistakes, because you’re a bulldyke, rug-munching, clitty-licker! That’s right, I’m the normal one because I like boys.”
“Oh, for the love of Sedna! Since Yama and I got together your insults have become so unoriginal,” Sionna said in disappointment. “Don’t forget that I had to pump you full of drugs to get the cobwebs out of your uterus so you could use it again. You’ve got so much testosterone that your body forgot you were female. So let’s not talk about which one of us is more of a woman, sweetie, because I can still get it up.”
“Whoa, ladies,” Vachlan said in a cheery tone. “No need to stoop to this level of bickering. You’re both lovely and charming identical individuals. And I would be happy to provide a sperm donation of superior quality for Sionna—you know, if she ever feels the urge to use her amazingly capable uterus at any point in the future.”
“Why thank you, Vachlan,” Sionna said with a snooty smirk at her sister. “See? Even your man likes me better than you. That’s only the millionth time he’s asked to do me since I came out of the closet.”
“I can’t help myself,” Vachlan said innocently. “She just became so much hotter. A lesbian clone of my wife wearing only a lab coat—isn’t that what every man wants for Christmas?”
“Go on then!” Visola said, returning to the side of the hot tub to refill her martini glass. “Enjoy my husband. You can have him for the night—for free, on me. Let’s see if you can still remember what to do with it.”
“She might not,” Princess Yamako said with a smile, “but I do. We will gladly accept your offer.”
“What? No! I was bluffing,” Visola said in a panic, reaching out to grab the back of Vachlan’s shirt, for he had already started moving across the hot tub. “Princess Yama, you were supposed to get possessive and say: ‘No way! My darling Sio belongs only to me.’ What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s so good to see them fighting again,” Trevain told Aazuria fondly. His arm was resting comfortably around her shoulders. “Now I really feel like everything’s back to normal.”
“I can tell they really missed each other,” Aazuria added, sending him a private smile. “Their insults seem far more aggressive than usual.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” said Dr. Rosenberg in horror. “This is normal for them? I find a dozen, deeply-damaging psychological problems in every sentence they speak to each other. This is not healthy!”
“Calm down, Dylan, darling!” Sionna said with a wink. “This is a special language I share with my sister—only twins can understand what it really means, and everyone else can just appreciate the entertainment value.”
“I need to get my notebook and write this down,” Dr. Rosenberg mumbled.
“He’s so adorable,” Visola commented as she sized up the nerdy doctor. “Where’d you find him, Sio?”
Sionna choked on her drink, turning to her side to glance at Princess Yamako shyly. “Um. It’s a long story. We’d better not get into that now.”
“Why not?” Princess Yamako asked suspiciously. “It’s an innocent question. How did you meet Dr. Rosenberg?”
“Uh.” Sionna sighed and sent an uncomfortable smile at her lover. “It was Paris. 1572. The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. I was studying medicine at an apothecary when the riots broke out, and we unexpectedly had tons of patients to treat. The apothecary sent for his son to help out, and this really handsome young man showed up. That was Dylan. We began to chat as we tended to the dying, and we just clicked. All those wounded bodies, all the blood and the smell of primitive pharmaceuticals. It was really romantic.”
“Ah, Paris,” Dr. Rosenberg said in fond memory. “Fluctuat nec mergitur: she is tossed by the waves but does not sink.”
“He speaks Latin?” Yamako asked jealously.
“All doctors needed to know enough to get by,” Sionna said lightly. She saw that Yamako was crossing her arms and glaring at her suspiciously, and she began to feel guilty for hiding information.
“I wasn’t aware that you were even a sea-dweller,” Aazuria said in surprise.
Trevain nodded as he absentmindedly rubbed his hand up and down his wife’s shoulder. “I’m really shocked, Dr. Rosenberg. I thought you were younger than me!”
“You might as well call me Dylan,” the doctor said affably. “I wasn’t sure how much Sionna had told you all about me, and I didn’t want to share more than appropriate.”
“Oh, you’re sharing everything now,” Princess Yamako demanded, kicking Sionna underneath the water.
Sionna smiled, a bit flattered at the woman’s show of jealousy. She had been so cavalier about Vachlan’s flirting, but she seemed to instinctively know that Dylan was important. “It ended in tears,” Sionna explained with a carefree shrug. She glanced at the other adults with an unusual shyness, feeling her cheeks rouge slightly. “I was a young girl in Paris. What do you expect? Dylan and I spent a summer together along the Seine, and it was one of the happiest times of my life.”
“Sionna was the most incredible woman I ever courted,” said Dr. Rosenberg sadly.
“Courted?” the Japanese woman repeated bitterly. “Really?”
“Yes. I was determined to marry her until my country began waging war against hers, and it became difficult to see her. I would send messengers, but they would never get through…”
“Wait, you’re that guy?” Visola said in disbelief. “No way! You’re the Paris guy? She cried over you for years!”
“Shut up, Visola,” Sionna said with a warning in her voice.
Visola, however, continued in awe. “Sweet Sedna! You’re the Paris guy! You sounded so much hotter in my sister’s descriptions.”
“I was a lot younger back then, my dear,” Dylan said dejectedly. “Anyway, as you know—only a few years later, the northern mermaids abandoned Valhalla for Adlivun. It was a smart move too, but it took Sionna away from me permanently. We were in different oceans, and it was just impossible. Just surviving the constant war and chaos in Ker-ys was difficult. I remember the city being so wonderful when I was a boy—I even apprenticed as a trainee physician for the royals in my youth. But my father eventually took my family out of France and we joined the Rusalka.”
“You apprenticed for the royals of Ker-ys?” Vachlan asked softly. “Did you know my mother?”
Dylan nodded. “Of course, Prince Vachlan. I tended to Queen Dahut when she was carrying you, actually. So you might say that we’ve met, in a roundabout way. The rightful queen was a wonderful lady. I am sorry for your loss.”
Vachlan’s eyes narrowed. He had not been addressed by the title of “prince” in a long while, and it made him somewhat uncomfortable. The last person he had met from his homeland was Marshal Landou, and it had not been a pleasant experience. He was distracted from his thoughts by Visola’s hand caressing his abdominal muscles beneath the water to soothe him. She could tell that he had been placed on edge by the reminder. He looked at her, and saw the silent plea in her jade eyes; she was asking him to trust her sister.
His eyes darted back to the stranger in their midst, and he carefully began to study Dylan Rosenberg. As a rule, he did not trust anyone from his birthplace; but as another rule, he trusted the judgment of the Ramaris twins. Visola’s fingertips slid lower, wiggling their way under the waistband of his swimming trunks, concealed from the other people in the hot tub by the bubbles of the massaging jets. Yes, he definitely trusted his wife’s judgment.
“So you lived among the Rusalka for al
l these years?” Princess Yamako demanded. “Did you end up courting anyone else? Any children?”
“We don’t have to talk about this, Dylan,” Sionna said softly.
“No, it’s fine,” the doctor said gently. “Yes, Princess Yamako. I eventually got married and had children. But when the Clan of Zalcan occupied the Rusalka nation—my entire family was killed. That was how I came to truly understand trauma. My wife and I—we’d been fighting for some time, and I never even got to apologize. That’s how I got into family counseling. So, you see, I have tried to remain impartial and keep my personal life out of my work, but it is a great honor for me to serve the people responsible for destroying the Clan.”
A silence followed his words as everyone in the hot tub processed this information. Everyone suddenly seemed very aware that they were coupled up, while Dylan stood alone in a corner of the pool. Aazuria sighed, lowering her eyes to look down at the water. Trevain squeezed her shoulder in a comforting way.
“I feel guilty, Dylan,” Trevain admitted. “You’re here trying to help us when you’ve been through so much—our problems must seem so petty.”
Dylan shook his head. “Petty problems are the worst kind—they can steal away your precious time much more effectively and easily than your enemies can steal your lives.”
Trevain nodded in agreement. “Well, thanks to you, Dylan, we’re doing a lot better.” He turned to his wife. “Don’t you think so Zuri?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “The trip we took last weekend really opened my eyes. Revisiting Antarctica was a good idea. I feel much more clearheaded—much more at peace. I haven’t felt this way in a long time.”
“In other words,” Visola said with a grin, “they’re playing hide the sausage again.”
“Viso!” complained at least three people around the hot tub with annoyed groans.
Tides of Tranquility Page 16
