Friend. It seemed like such a foreign word. All her life, she’d struggled to climb up the hierarchy within the department. Making friends had been the last thing on her mind. Those around her were colleagues or a means to a promotion with the right sugar-coated words.
Lesya was the closest she’d ever had to a real friend. The mage had saved her life. That counted for something. Right?
A cough. A sputter. Ocean water came pouring out of Lesya’s mouth. The mage sucked in a lungful of air, then proceeded to cough even louder. It was a beautiful sound. If she could cough, then she was breathing.
“Oh, goodness. You’ve both made it.” The tension in Rivka’s chest lessened and, like the two fragile humans she held, she could breathe easier.
“Lay your head on my shoulder, and I’ll try to get you untied,” Rivka instructed.
Lesya leaned forward to comply but cried out in pain.
“What is it?” Rivka asked, panicking.
“My leg. They’ve got my ankles tied together and—” Her sentence died on another cry of pain.
“Can you float on your back, Viktor?” Rivka asked. “I need both hands to be able to untie her.”
“I think so. I’m practically a siren after a life on the sea.” He chuckled, followed by a hacking cough that he laughed nervously to cover up. “Just let me go and get the lady untied.”
Lady. Rivka wasn’t sure if Lesya would qualify as a lady with the language that spewed from her mouth, but she wouldn’t argue with Viktor at the moment.
She released Viktor onto his back, and he glided smoothly over the gentle lap of waves.
Untying Lesya proved to be a challenge. It appeared she’d struggled more than Rikva. Her wrists were raw and bloody. If only she still had her bone knife. But all their belongings - their food, their supplies, their weapons - had been left behind on The Black North.
“Finally!” Rikva got the knot undone and slowly peeled the rope off Lesya’s raw skin.
Lesya rubbed her wrists lightly through the salt water around her. “My legs. Fuck, it hurts so bad.”
Rivka dove beneath the surface and went to work on the ropes binding the mage’s ankles. Those weren’t as bad because the splint had prevented the pirates from tying it too tight. And come to think of it, what kind of monster tied a girl’s broken leg? It’s not like she could easily swim with a destroyed leg. The show of cowardice masquerading as power filled Rivka with fury. It was easy to sit in a classroom and listen to a siren teacher droning on about the atrocities of human war, but to see the deep darkness inherent in the race firsthand was quite another.
She managed to gently remove the ropes, and Lesya’s boots. If water-logged boots hindered her swimming, and she was made for it, they would drag a human with a broken leg right into the deep.
Back above the water, Rivka helped Lesya to her back so she could float, then easily untied Viktor.
“Struggling only makes things worse,” Viktor said, switching to treading water on his own after he let his own boots sink into the ocean. His face saddened. “I’ve seen a few executions in my time. I’m not proud of that.”
Rivka nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“Did you throw the people overboard?” Lesya asked as she floated serenely by him.
“No. Never.” He reached out and gently pulled her upright, pulling her arm over his shoulders. “I’ve got you.”
Rivka’s heart hurt as she watched the two stare into each other’s eyes. There was something budding there, something that would be so good for Lesya.
But only if they survived this.
What were they going to do now? She didn’t have the strength to pull both of them through the water and to shore. They had no idea where land even was, or even in which direction they should travel. She’d never felt so lost.
The trio floated there in silence for a time.
Viktor was the first to speak. “I’m all for just floating here. Like I said, I’m a siren at heart and the ocean is my home. You both need to recharge your strength.” He touched Lesya’s cheek. “But we need to figure out something soon.”
Lesya swatted Viktor’s hand away, her nostrils flaring as she jerked away from his grasp. “We need to fucking figure out something right now. I can’t keep floating with only one working leg.” She smacked at her face, trying to get the wet hair out of her eyes, but only turning red with anger in the process. “If I don’t get this leg fixed, I’ll never walk again.”
“Shh. Let’s deal with one thing at a time.” Rivka placed a reassuring hand on Lesya’s back. The mage’s near hysteria had shoved aside her own fear. “Viktor and I can take turns helping you swim. You have your leg splinted. There’s a good chance it’ll heal correctly.”
“You don’t know that. You’re not a doctor.” Lesya’s face still sported a shade of red, but the manic gleam had left her eyes.
“Let’s focus on the stone.”
“Fuck the stone. We need to focus on us!” Lesya jerked away from Rivka’s touch. “You and this stupid stone!”
Viktor’s intelligence showed as he remained silent. Getting between the two would have been a death wish.
“No, Lesya. Listen to me.” Rivka reached out and took both of Lesya’s hands to help her tread water with just one leg. “You’re locked onto the magic of the stone, right? You scried for it. You connected with it. If we can swim in the direction of where you feel the stone is, we’ll make it to land.”
“Oh.” Lesya took a calming breath. “What if I’m wrong? What if I didn’t actually connect with the stone?”
“At this point, I have no idea which way land is. Our best chance at survival is following the stone. And that means you.” Rivka hoped Lesya would drop her attitude and see reason. Following the legacy stone and finding land killed two birds with one… stone. She inwardly snorted at her pun. Even she knew how bad that one was.
“Fine. We’ll follow your stone,” Lesya stressed. She closed her eyes, her breath evening out. A calmness seemed to settle over her. Rivka felt her relax beneath her hands as she buoyed her friend in the water.
Lesya’s eyes snapped open, and she yanked an arm from Rivka’s grip, thrusting a finger over Rivka’s shoulder. “This way. The stone is this way.”
Rivka grinned. “Good. That’s where we’re headed, then. Put your arm around me. I’ll take you for the first leg.”
The mage complied. In a sheepish voice, she said, “Thanks for talking me down. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Pain and fear can ruin anybody,” Rivka told her. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
Amused, Lesya asked, “When did you become so wise?”
“I’ve always been this wise. Maybe you just didn’t see it clearly.” Rivka grinned and then set off in the direction Lesya had indicated.
“Um, ladies?” Viktor said tentatively as he stroked alongside them in the water. “What stone are you talking about?”
Lesya and Rivka gave each other a look. Lesya nodded. “I think we’re probably stuck with him for a while. We might as well tell him, even though I still think the whole plan sounds as crazy as Captain Dyatlov.”
“It’s not crazy. You just have so little faith.”
“That is a bald-faced lie!” Lesya declared. “I have faith in my puffins.”
“In your… puffins?” Viktor said slowly.
Rivka shook her head. “Oh no. Uh uh. We aren’t even going there right now.”
On a background of Lesya’s laughter, Rivka started from the beginning, telling Viktor about the letter they’d found in the hold and everything it contained. How she was certain she’d been meant to find the letter, and she and Lesya were supposed to save the world. Then she proceeded to tell him what they’d actually been scrying for.
If only they’d been smart enough to scry for a way to escape instead of a stone, but that was in the past. They were technically free and on their way to the stone. Did that mean everything was working out for them?
/> “Really? I hadn’t realized we’d stolen something so important,” Viktor said, appalled. “I heard in port that letters were being sent to the different regions to help save the world. I thought it was just some drunk sailor telling tall tales.”
“It would sound like a tall tale if I hadn’t seen the letter with my own eyes,” Lesya said. “And I still accused the writer of being somebody’s imaginative mom telling stories.”
“She did,” Rivka confirmed.
“Man, I need to quit my life as a pirate,” Viktor said, rolling into his backstroke. “Maybe I should work hard, buy my own boat, and become a fisherman or something.”
“I need a break,” Lesya said tiredly. She let go of Rivka and leaned back into the rolling waves.
Much of their journey passed like this. Rivka and Viktor swapped helping Lesya to swim as she grimaced through the pain. Then they’d stop for a break, letting her float and breathe through the ache. They talked during those moments of rest, learning that Viktor was an orphan, just like them, and that he’d first set sail on a pirate ship at thirteen years old. His life had been much more exciting than Rivka’s.
Red twilight had faded into red night when Lesya asked for another rest. She turned onto her back, even though the waves here seemed choppier than they had been on the journey so far. As Rivka and Viktor chatted, keeping half an eye on Lesya, the mage drifted farther away than usual.
When Rivka surfaced from her own exhaustion and realized what had happened, she cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “Lesya, you need to come back over here.”
Lesya popped up out of the water at the sound of Rivka’s voice. But then a scream tore from her throat, guttural and bone deep.
Viktor launched into a hurried breaststroke to get to her, splashing like a sea bear was after him.
Rivka understood something was wrong, but a pall of exhaustion had covered her senses. She heard Lesya shriek, not just a scream of pain but actual words. But between the exhaustion and Viktor’s loud splashing, whatever Lesya had said went unheard by both.
Viktor neared Lesya and his cries of pain joined hers.
Rivka swam into warmer water, but she didn’t register the danger until a long tentacle tangled around her legs. Venom burned into her skin, followed by a second tentacle, then a third before she lost count. The sting felt like it went soul deep.
In the seconds it took her to realize what was happening, she watched both Viktor and Lesya’s heads dip below the water.
The world blurred around Rivka, lost in a cloud of fatigue and searing pain. She sank under the water, tangled in too many sticky tentacles to count.
They’d run into a bloom of Lion’s Mane jellyfish.
The largest species of jellyfish. Capable of heads six feet in diameter and tentacles a hundred feet in length. They’d existed since time immemorial, casually drifting on the ocean’s currents until they grew too big and washed up on shore. Relatively harmless towards people who didn’t have preexisting allergies to their sting.
But then the seas had been cursed.
Now they were bigger. Longer. More venomous.
Deadly.
Rivka shoved at the head of one, steering it away from her before it could add its tentacles to the existing mix.
Through the buoyant forest of crimson red and exquisite purple jellyfish, Rivka saw her friends struggling to unwrap their arms and legs. She tried to call out to them, to tell them the tentacles were sticky, don’t touch them! But she couldn’t open her mouth.
A tentacle had wrapped around her head.
Rivka closed her eyes and activated a second set of vocal cords. A beautiful chorus emanated from her throat, a type of echolocation that didn’t require her mouth.
The song was a call for help. A beacon to let any creatures nearby know she and her friends were in danger. She only hoped something or someone was close enough to hear it.
14
Lesya
Lesya had lost all sense of her body. Fire burned every inch of her exposed skin as the jellyfish venom worked through her system. Even the cold ocean water that surrounded her couldn't ease the burn.
Between the searing pain and her broken leg, she couldn't even think enough to figure a way out of her predicament. Moving her arms to try to swim for the surface only entangled her in more jellyfish tentacles. They had hold of her arms, her legs, her neck, there were even tentacles wrapped around her torso under her shirt.
She'd barely survived being tied up and thrown overboard. If not for the fact Rivka was a siren, she would have drowned. Just like her parents.
Now she was just going to die anyway because they'd had the bad luck to drift into a school of incognizant fire blubber.
She considered giving in. Sucking in a breath of ocean water and letting go. The fire on her skin, the crush of bones in her broken leg… Her urgent need for air.
But before she could talk herself into it, a sound filled the ocean. The melodious tone seemed to occupy her mind entirely. It lived inside her and around her. Lesya stilled and relaxed, even as her lungs burned for air, and she fought the impulse to breathe in.
What is that?
The urge to breathe got stronger just as the strange song changed into a chorus of similar, haunting sounds. These sounds she knew.
Suddenly, she was ten years old again, swimming in the ocean with her father. He had splashed her and disappeared under the water to hide from her retaliation but resurfaced almost immediately.
“Puffin, come here. I want you to hear something.”
Lesya had moved to stand before him. Her toes barely touched the sand beneath the waves.
He had taken her hands, a smile on his face. “Close your eyes and hold your breath. We're going under.”
Lesya recalled vividly the strong sure grip of his hands and the way the water had opened and accepted her, closing around her head until the world grew silent.
Except for the chorus of sound that waited for her underwater.
She'd resurfaced, tugging at her father's hands. “What was that?” she asked as he joined her.
“A pod of whales, puffin. They're calling to one another.”
And there was the sound now. Lesya opened her eyes. The saltwater stung at first but faded nearly instantaneously. Jellyfish hung suspended all around her, tentacles dangling and bodies undulating. They were monstrous, longer than her cabin, bulbous heads as wide as her kitchen table. Magnificent, even as they drowned her.
Beyond the jellyfish, Lesya caught sight of several large, dark forms moving through the water.
Whales.
A faster form, less whale-shaped and more human-shaped, whipped right up next to her. A knife chopped through the jellyfish, removing the bodies closest to her. Her rescuer slashed through the tentacles holding her down, then gripped her bicep. She caught sight of an unfamiliar male's face before he jettisoned for the surface with her in tow.
Dark specks had begun bursting in her vision. She kept her gaze firmly on the pale surface, fighting against losing consciousness for a second time.
Then her face broke free of the water. She gasped in a breath, and then another, hysterically drinking blessed oxygen.
“Grab the whale!” the man said, shoving Lesya towards a gently floating lump.
Even in her groggy, half-conscious state, Lesya saw the shimmer of siren scales that decorated the man's neck and face. She grasped the whale's slippery back and watched as the siren dove back underneath. She gently began to peel sticky, disembodied tentacles from her skin.
A moment later, the strange siren returned with Viktor and shoved him against the whale beside her. “He's not breathing,” he said, before disappearing beneath once again.
Lesya grabbed for Viktor's shirt and leveraged him against the side of the whale. Like her, he was still covered in tentacles from where the siren had cut him free. She'd worry about that after she got him breathing again.
She had to kick her legs to stay afloat, and her bro
ken leg screamed at the movement, but she didn't have much choice. She pressed her lips to the pirate's and breathed for him.
She wasn't in a position to do chest compressions, but she also hoped he hadn't been without oxygen long enough for his heart to stop beating. She breathed for him again, and again, and on the fourth breath, he coughed up a river of water and sagged into her arms.
Lesya struggled to hold his weight above water as he vomited up all the ocean he'd swallowed. The whale moved closer, tucking her fin beneath Lesya, almost as if she understood the predicament.
Viktor inhaled several shaky breaths, his arms around Lesya's neck. When he had finally gathered himself, he let go of Lesya and set about treading water.
“You can hold her,” Lesya said, patting the whale’s exposed back. She peeled a particularly large tentacle off her neck, cringing as it took the top layer of skin with it. “She's here to help. I think Rivka called them.”
Viktor laid a hand on the slippery surface, awe on his face. “I've never seen one so close.”
“Me either.”
“I take it back. I’m done with the ocean. No boat, no fishing. I’ll stay on land until the day I die, and it won’t be because I drowned.” Viktor flipped his long blond hair from his eyes and met her gaze. He touched his lips. “You saved my life.”
“Only a little. I had help.” Lesya motioned with her head as the water breached nearby. Her face flushed hot under Viktor's scrutiny.
The strange man appeared with Rivka at his side. She was conscious but covered in raw, red burns and tentacles, like Lesya and Viktor.
As the siren pair swam to join them behind beside the patiently floating whale, Lesya helped Viktor start peeling tentacles off his skin.
Rivka sank against the whale, wrapping both her arms over the creature's back. She petted the whale and whispered in her ear.
Then she whirled on their savior.
“Who are you?” Rivka demanded.
The siren backed away. Lesya couldn't blame him. Rivka looked ready to fight. The burns and remaining tentacles didn't exactly lend to a pleasant look, either.
Sordid Depths (The Cursed Seas Collection) Page 9
