by Chris Howard
They took a table in a sandwich shop three windows down from Mad Maxine's where Phaidra almost threw up when Nicole urged her to try some Ranch dressing. Kassandra said she didn't feel well and ate nothing. Aunt Phaidra ended up with an obsessive hunger for kettle chips, scaring the young man behind the counter by going back four times and wanting to pay more for each bag than the marked price.
They spotted Lady Kallixene and Jill coming out of Maxine's, and only just managed to stop Phaidra from going right through a clear section in the window after them. They steered her through the door and she dashed into the street with Kassandra and Nicole following.
Kassandra slowed her pace, scanning the shoppers. Nicole lost her grin when she looked over at her sister's cold serious stare. “Kass, what is it?"
Kassandra didn't look back. She just held up a finger.
A second later, she said, “Someone's here, in the crowd. I can feel it.” She jutted her chin at Nicole. “Take a walk. Head toward the toy store and then circle around on the sidewalk. Tell me if you notice anyone like us."
Nicole started to frown but stopped when she understood “like us” meant “Seaborn.” Determination settled into her expression and gaze. “You got it."
"All the way around. We'll pick you up at the end, past the video store. Watch the way they walk. I'm going out to the street to get a wider view. Phaidra's with Lady Kallixene."
Phaidra had jogged away from them, going to the minivan, meeting her mother and Jill. Kallixene opened the passenger door, but stood in the gap, immediately aware that something was wrong. Her gaze met Kassandra's and she jerked back at the amount of information hitting her. She nodded, got in and slammed the door. Phaidra got in the back, the doors clicked shut, and Jill backed the van out of the space, cruising along the store windows and strolling shoppers.
Kassandra crossed the parking lot, sliding between cars, surreptitiously glancing behind her, or tilting her head back, pretending to watch a small airplane droning overhead while dropping her gaze to roam over the shoppers: a family pushing groceries in two carts, a construction worker with a toolbelt heading for his truck, a woman with a crying baby. She lost Nicole and scanned the storefronts, picking her out halfway along the strip with a video store on the end—and, right in front of her sister, walked a tall woman with long black hair, moving with a graceful gliding motion, her arms pumping the air energetically. She wore a long dress with leggings, Seaborn fashion.
Kassandra doubled back, angling toward the video store to meet Nicole there, following the woman with long hair, trying not to focus sharply on her in case the Seaborn could feel it. She scowled when Nicole picked up her pace and walked right by the woman, then slowed to match her speed, several shoppers in front of her. Kassandra jutted her head sideways, trying to warn her. Didn't Nicole notice her?
Then she understood what her sister was doing. Nicole slowed in front of a bakery, let the two shoppers pass her, and—without appearing to look—walked right into the black haired woman, almost knocking her over, grabbing her arm, in the last second, to steady her.
"Bold, Nic."
Kassandra picked up speed and crossed behind a row of cars. She watched Nicole apologize, smiling stupidly, gesturing at the stores as if they had distracted her. Then Nicole turned and continued at a quick, properly embarrassed pace to the end of the row of stores. She walked into the parking lot and stopped next to a boxy silver Honda with roof racks. Pretending the car was hers, she fumbled in her pockets for imaginary keys. The lady with black hair reached the sidewalk's end, turned around and headed back the way she had come, looking through the shop windows.
Kassandra slid around a Jeep with enormous tires and caught up with Nicole as Jill drove up with the passenger side sliding door open. Nicole jumped into the backseat, nodding her head. “Yup. She's one of us. I walked into her, pretending to be clumsy, and noticed her hands. She has webbing."
Kassandra and Phaidra kneeled backwards on their seats, their arms over the headrests. Hidden behind the dark-tinted van windows, they watched the woman walk away. “Who is she, Lady Kassandra?"
"I don't know. I've never seen her before. She felt different, too. I picked something up from her, a different sort of ... signature.” Her eyes went unfocused, her brows knuckling up with internal concentration, and she whispered a song in someone else's voice. “Something ancient, a sweetness too pure to find among mortals and mortal voices."
There was a chilly silence in the van. Jill slowed down, cautiously passing a parked North Hampton police cruiser bristling with speed-trap gear. She passed through two more intersections along Lafayette before her heart slowed to a normal rhythm.
When they turned right on Atlantic, heading east, Kallixene held up her hands, webbing tight, her fingers straight, the moons of the nails a creamy opaque and the ends an iridescent bluish red.
"She's gone. Forget about her. Look at my nails!"
* * * *
While the noble ladies went into town to have their nails done and shop for archery supplies, Gregor, Michael Henderson, Zypheria, and seven of Kallixene's Rexenor guard piled into a pick-up truck and headed out to Rye to prep Stormwind for sailing.
Michael Henderson led a basic sailing course. “Stormwind's a cutter, which means she's got a single mast. She's a fore-and-aft-rigged boat with multiple headsails—she's got three. Notice also that the mast is set further aft than a sloop's."
The Rexenor guards, none of whom had ever set foot on a sailboat, noticed only because he pointed at the shaft of metal sticking up out the boat, all of them exchanging the same puzzled look: “What in Poseidon's name is a ‘sloops'?"
Henderson paced the forty-two feet, stem to stern, while he explained the purpose of the multiple jibs, which, “with the forestaysail dropped and combined with a reefed mainsail and the full staysail, makes for a damn tight rough-weather rig."
He lost them all at “forestaysail,” although there was some nodding at reefing the mainsail because they all knew what a reef looked like, and one of them made a knowing draping motion with his hands, as if at some point they'd take the sail off and stow it under the boat, but only when they approached the tropics. One of the Rexenors stared at the harbor's mouth and out to sea, wondering if there was a reef within a thousand leagues.
"Michael,” said Zypheria, interrupting his monologue on how much weather justified flying the small jib. “I think it would be wiser to show them how the machinery works, how to raise and lower the sails, what the wheel does, and maybe a little bit about how the wind works."
"Excellent! Gather round.” He pushed the chrome wheel one way then the other. “This is how we steer Stormwind."
Lady Kallixene and her party drove up in the middle of the afternoon, dressed for getting wet. In forty-five minutes they were underway with Jill skippering, the sunlight in her hair, fingers tight on the wheel, her favorite place in the world. Nicole and Michael Henderson handled the cloth, and everyone else was just along for the ride, gulping in gusts of salty air and pointing at seagulls, fascinated at things with wings.
Kassandra sat at the bow, chin in her hands, brooding about the strange Seaborn woman in North Hampton.
They passed the Isles of Shoals, flat slabs of brown rock miles off the port side. There was mild chop and a good wind. They sailed until they reached a uniform horizon, a flat line of blue that was almost black, broken with little ruffles of white in every direction. Jill yelled that Stormwind was coming about; the sails snapped and the boom swept the space over her head. Nicole dropped the jib while Mr. Henderson hauled down the mainsail, and left the boat drifting in the currents.
"I believe we are ready,” said Lady Kallixene, but the wind whipped her words away.
Kassandra tugged on the elastic of her bathing suit bottoms, snapping it lower on her butt. She hopped lightly to the narrow runner along Stormwind's starboard side, arms out for balance, her face lifted to Helios, her eyes closed, and one tear rolling down her right cheek, a silv
ery line on her skin.
"Kassandra?” Gregor called from the mast where he was helping Michael Henderson furl the mainsail. “Are you okay?"
She ignored him, but everyone else on board turned to her as she let her head fall forward, and the teardrop slipped off her skin into the sea. Breathing in spasming sobs, she dug something gold out of the tiny pocket in the shoulder of her long-sleeved shirt, clutching it in one fist, and without looking back, dove in after her tear.
The Rexenor guards moved to the starboard side, glancing at Lady Kallixene and Phaidra for cues. Kassandra surfaced a minute later, her eyes red and swollen, wearing a defenseless smile. She sounded like a little girl. “Come on in. The water's great."
Nicole didn't have to be told twice. She peeled off her sweatpants and shirt, wearing a dark blue one-piece suit underneath, and dove in. She came up shivering, her teeth clattering, cutting through her words, urging them to hurry.
Zypheria, Lady Kallixene, Phaidra and all but two of the guards went in at the same time, hardly moving the surface of the ocean. Michael Henderson and the remaining Rexenors were going to take Stormwind for a trip up around Newfoundland before returning to Rye.
Jill was last, hugging Gregor, who jumped in just before her.
Kassandra circled and then surfaced between her sisters, pulling them together with a hug. She kissed each on the cheek and whispered, “Be calm. This will be over in a minute. Afterward, we'll dive deep to the Rexenor stronghold. You are my sisters. You will be Seaborn. You will have everything afforded to you by right."
She kicked to a position behind them as Phaidra took hold of Jill's shoulders and Zypheria took hold of Nicole's. Lady Kallixene faced them, but kept shooting Kassandra suspicious looks. Then she noticed the thing that had come from Kassandra's tear, thundering out of the ocean like an island. The Wreath-wearer couldn't cry because she used her tears as doorways for Ochleros, a king among sea demons.
Ochleros’ head and shoulders stuck up out of the blue right behind Kassandra, an enormously muscular humanoid made of the waves and foam and turbulence. His head was bald and splotchy gray, like a granite boulder rounded by storm waves, with a craggy brow ridge over abyss-deep black orbs that stared without pupils or detectible focus. Ridges of clashing currents rolled up his back. His shoulders tumbled into the ocean five feet on either side of Kassandra. She looked like a child in front of him, braids swinging in the wind, innocently unaware that the shadow she cast on the face of the sea had monstrously long teeth and claws, but a closer look revealed a drop of it in her soul, like a splatter of ink on white paper, a stain of his power in her dark eyes.
Lady Kallixene snapped her hands open nervously, spraying water. “I cannot concentrate with him here."
"He's helping me.” Kassandra rubbed her eyes.
Jill and Nicole glanced over their shoulders to see what the problem was, but they had met Ochleros several times and, on the list of anxieties, ranked him lower than imminent drowning.
"Helping with what?"
"Mind your own business, Grandmother. Get on with it, or I will do it for you."
Phaidra's mouth dropped open, stunned at hearing anyone command her mother. Zypheria shook her head, resignedly. Nothing Kassandra did surprised her.
Kallixene let out a long controlled breath, trying to hold on—with her iridescent fingernails—to her patience. “Very well. My granddaughters, Nicole and Jill, you have agreed to go with us, and we have selected your partners in the rite. Close your eyes, take your final breath, a shallow one, and push as much of it out of your lungs as you can, then we will begin."
Nicole glanced at Jill, and winked before shutting her eyes and emptying her lungs. Zypheria flipped upside down, grabbed Nicole's ankles in her strong hands, and kicked into the depths.
Nicole shuddered as the dark water closed over her head. The cold on her face was like a slap, and she opened her eyes because her lungs reflexively pulled in the sea. There was no air left in them.
Jill gave a last exhale and launched a fist-sized mass of bubbles to the surface. She jerked her legs hard, trying to break Phaidra's grip, but kept her eyes shut tight.
Lady Kallixene dropped into the sea with them, starting her song about a home in the dark sea and bestowing the curse on her two beautiful granddaughters. She sang about “the flow of life from birth to death, first to last breath ... breathless breathing ... doom of the Cloud-gatherer, boon of the Earth-encircler."
Kallixene sang, her eyes half-closed, and the Rexenor guard formed a semi-circle around her, their hands white on the grips of their swords. They feared the huge demon accompanying the Wreath-wearer, although all of them had seen this one and benefited from his presence once before, in the final moments of the battle in Nebraska against the king's dead army.
Behind her back, Kassandra took a small curved knife from Ochleros, flinching as she touched the tip to her skin. She cut an inch long crescent-shape into the meaty part of her left palm. Reversing the step, she cut the shape into her own right palm.
Jill's eyes fluttered open, snapped wide, and then relaxed as she drew the ocean inside her. Nicole closed her eyes as her lungs worked the fluid, straining to move it. Sharp cramps prodded and poked their insides, rearranging organ functions. A burn raced through their bones, stepping up their spines, fanning over their shoulders and their arms to their fingertips. Nicole made chewing motions against the ache in her jaw, and opened her eyes.
Kassandra swung her hands from behind her, blood following like a cape of sheer black. She grabbed Jill by the back of the neck and cut a small crescent in the muscle tissue on the left side, then the opposite with Nicole. She glanced down at the knife and heaved it over her shoulder to Ochleros. Before Kallixene or Gregor could question her, she placed the cuts seeping blood from her palms directly over those on her sisters’ necks, digging her fingers into their skin.
"Do it, Ochleros."
"Are you certain, Lady Kass—"
"I said, do it!"
Kassandra closed her eyes. She felt a jolt through her body that shoved her organs around. There was a metallic taste in her mouth. A burn deep in her stomach ... reminded her that she hadn't eaten yet today.
"What happened?” she whispered over her shoulder, her fingers still clawed into Nicole's and Jill's necks. “I didn't feel anything."
Ochleros’ voice was a deep volcanic rumble. “You have not yet given up who you are, Lady Kassandra. Perhaps that is when you will feel something?"
She whispered, her thoughts a mile away, “Or maybe nothing is exactly what you feel when you give it up."
Kassandra released her sisters as Gregor swam to her, a look of horror on his face. “What have you done?” He looked at her hands and then at Nicole and Jill.
She sounded disappointed. “Nothing, apparently."
She waved him away, holding one hand out to Ochleros. Her fingers trembled and she focused on them to keep them still. She held up her other hand. The blood and the deep cuts were gone. There were no marks of the knife on her sisters’ necks.
She blinked away the rush of questions, and lifted her eyes to her grandmother, nodding. “Please, put your bracelets away, Lady Kallixene. I have brought my own."
Ochleros’ enormous fingers opened and a small jumble of gold fell into her hand. She picked out two of the bracelets. Then she spun Nicole and Jill by the shoulders in opposite directions so that they now faced her.
She held each of their gazes for several seconds.
"Close your eyes, my sisters. Think back to lovely St. Clement's Education Center. Dammit, Jill, you knew everyone in that school. Remember the day you two scared the hell out of me, the day you brought me to the administration office to meet Mrs. Lindsey, the day she dug out my personal effects envelope and gave me my name bracelet, collecting dust for years. It was the day you ended my sentence, the day I discovered the school was no longer my prison, that I was free to go. I had my name back. I became an Alkimides again."
She
flipped over the faceplates in her palm, pushed one over Jill's pale hand and the other over Nicole's brown hand. They looked down at them, bright against their wrists, staring at the Alkimides stamp.
Kassandra took their hands, tugged them around so that they faced their grandmother. “By the grace and generosity of Lady Kallixene, we are Rexenor and Megalesios. We are also Dosianax, the house of the current king, may his rule end soon. But above all, we are Alkimides, the royal house of the Thalassogen?is, the chosen of the Lord of the Sea, may his rule never end."
Lady Kallixene bowed to Kassandra, and then to her sisters.
"Welcome, Jill and Nicole, to our world."
Nicole turned to Kassandra, opening her mouth, releasing the heavy fluid, an expression of wonder struck deep into her features. “So, this is what you've been doing all this time?"
Kassandra laughed. “This isn't half of it. Wait until you see the Rexenor fortress or the Nine-cities.” Her eyes went unfocused at her own mentioning of the city, as if a particular distant memory had the power to magnetically attract all of the thoughts in her head toward a single point on some mental horizon.
Jill put her hand on Kassandra's shoulder, bowed her head to Lady Kallixene, and tried out her voice under the sea. “You took my breath away, Grandmother."
Kallixene started to smile, but at that moment Kassandra—in a burst of possessed rage—threw one fist above her head and half-sang half-screamed the Alkimides war cry, her voice a siren's song that hooked their senses and chilled the thoughts in their heads.
"On Alkimides!” She was a young woman on the outside. “Right of the Earth-encircler, dark-haired Lord of the Sea!” On the inside, part of her had been there, storming the walls of Telkhines outposts with three thousand of the drowned dead—the seed of the Olethren. “Souls arise, with third fore-fathers by our sides...” She drove the Telkhines from the Nine-cities, led the hunt for them to their old homes in Rhodes, and to the ends of the earth.
