Ice Crypt (Mermaids of Eriana Kwai Book 2) (13 page)

He pushed harder, until blood swirled around her pale face.

“So you can make our job easier in exchange for your life, or you can die here, knowing we will still find—”

“Medusa’s army has no limits,” said the mermaid.

Strymon eased up on the blade. “Where are they stationed? Are there more coming towards us?”

The mermaid’s gaze flicked to me, and then back to Strymon.

No one could help her, and she knew it. Her fear dissipated as she surrendered to her fate. Resolve took its place.

She snarled. “Queen Medusa will always be the rightful ruler of the seas. Your king will pay for all he has done.”

There was a terrible pause. I felt Strymon’s decision before he acted. I looked away, but it wasn’t enough to stop me from feeling the stab of the blade.

The soldiers holding the mermaid’s arms let go. I smelled the blood, felt the life leave her body.

“Fall in line and wait for the commander’s instruction,” shouted Strymon.

I turned and collided with Coho.

“You okay?” he said.

I shook my head once. I needed the surface. Without hesitating, I shot upwards and broke into the hot night air.

I’d killed someone. More than one. I’d never killed a merman or mermaid before, and I hadn’t planned on it. Then, maybe worse, I’d done nothing to stop that mermaid from getting murdered. She should have been my ally and yet I had done nothing to protect her.

Coho and Spio surfaced.

Spio had an Iron Hook of Doom in each hand. He passed one to me, apparently not caring that I’d nearly lost his precious weapon a moment ago.

I tried to thank him, but couldn’t form words. I took a deep breath.

“Either of you hurt?” said Coho.

I shook my head.

Spio grimaced. “Bruised ribs, I think.”

“This is bad,” said Coho.

“Don’t worry, I can still fight. You haven’t lost your champion.”

Coho ignored him. “The Atlantic army made it a lot further north than we thought. Either we were given a wrong tip, or they’ve got secret reserves hidden around here.”

“What do we do?” I said, secretly hoping we’d have to turn around.

“We get in line and wait for orders.”

A heavy silence fell between us. At my tail, ripples pulsed from the feeding hammerheads. Fins skimmed the surface as more sharks joined in. No doubt they’d smelled the bloodshed from a league away.

Coho and Spio submerged. I took a long, slow breath, and followed.

Beneath the surface, soldiers convened in an enormous, perfectly spaced grid. I copied Spio in positioning myself, treading upright.

The mood had darkened since the attack.

The commander rose higher than the grid and faced us. He was flanked by ten officers, whose hair glistened with emeralds.

“We are stopping sooner than planned, but we must consider our strategy,” said the commander. “I will consult the king as soon as we are able to locate an acoustic channel. In the meantime, we will spend the night at a reef half a league east.”

He glanced to his officers, and then back to the army.

“Soldiers, you fought bravely. This has been a war of many successes, but also of many sacrifices. Keep up your unwavering courage and remember whom you fight for. The opposition we met today, and those we will meet in the coming days, are resisting the rightful king. They are damaging the potential for a prosperous tomorrow—a worldwide Utopia. Remember this as you swing your weapons, and it will be impossible for them to take us down.”

He glanced to Strymon, who floated closest to him. Strymon smiled.

“For the king,” said the commander.

“For the king,” said the army around me. The sound rippled like the moan of a whale.

We followed the officers towards the reef. Nobody spoke. The words “rightful king” and “worldwide Utopia” lingered in my head.

The reef was a lumpy, shallow plateau that protruded from the water in a few places. It might not have been an ideal place to rest, but to me, it was perfect.

At my request, Spio and I moved to the furthest edge possible, away from everyone else. I perched with my tail in the water and my upper body in the open air, leaving me free to breathe without growing too warm in the tropical breeze. My tail tingled when I sat down, every muscle having been worked past the point of exhaustion.

Thousands of stars shone in the clear sky. The soldiers shuffled around noisily, grabbing food, finding a place to nap, rehashing the fight with excessive bicep-flexing.

Spio told me to rest, since I looked terrible and had obviously not slept in several tidecycles.

But even with Spio on lookout, my body wouldn’t let me drift off. Not in such unfamiliar surroundings. Plus, even though I trusted Spio, I wouldn’t have put it past him to find sudden inspiration for a new weapon and leave me to go find a narwhal horn.

Waves whispered against the rocks, pushing my tail back and forth. A pair of seagulls squawked overhead. The air felt thicker than I was used to, wrapping around me like a blanket.

It all should have sung me to sleep. But I lay staring at the reflection of the moon on the water.

After a while, I rolled over. Spio was sitting up, gazing at the black horizon.

“Spio?”

He turned.

“You remember that friend I told you about? The one I had as a kid before …” I motioned to the scar on my waist.

“You mean that human girl from Eriana Kwai?” he said.

I sighed. So much for subtlety. “Yeah. Her.”

He’d known about Meela for years. He also knew her father had been the one to give me the iron scar.

Spio listened while I told him about seeing Meela aboard the ship we were sent to attack. I didn’t know why I needed to tell him so badly. Maybe I wanted to explain why I was here. He never would have asked me outright.

“She’s the same girl,” I said. “I mean, she’s different, older, but that compassionate little girl is still there. The one who cut me free of the fishing net the day we met. The one who moved a starfish once because she didn’t want it to dry out in the sun.”

I smiled to myself. “It was easy for me to remember why we were so close. I remember being afraid she would get sick of me and stop coming to see me—but she never did. She kept coming back.”

“As kids, you mean?”

“As kids … and on the ship. In battle. She came to see me in secret.”

“You miss her,” said Spio, in a tone so casual he might have been pointing out a halibut.

I stared at my hands, feeling myself blush. I must have given more away in my mood than I intended.

“I love her.”

He grinned. “Ah, so Adaro saw you talking to Meela and got jealous. He couldn’t accept that your heart belonged to someone else. Not to mention the
someone else
wasn’t even a merman. Or a man by any definition.”

I shoved him. “Ew! No, the girls realised what was going on. Adaro decided he could use me as leverage, to get Meela to do what he wanted.”

“So he threw you behind jellies as a threat to Meela? What a jerk.”

I cringed and glanced around, as though dodging an iron bolt. “Shh!”

He lowered his voice. “Seriously. That guy can go bathe in whale turds.”

“Don’t say stuff like that,” I whispered, not feeling the humour.

Though we were isolated on the outskirts of the reef, a few mermen were in hearing distance. For all I knew, someone was listening.

“You know he screens former humans?” whispered Spio. “Coho had to take a test to prove he’d left his human life behind and was loyal to merpeople. Like his past is criminal. It worked out, but I don’t know how it would’ve ended up if he didn’t get hitched to Ephyra.”

“Coho used to be human?”

“Yeah. Ephyra saw him and wanted to keep him.”

I wrinkled my nose. “You make it sound like she wanted a pet.”

Spio shrugged, as if to say, ‘Your words, not mine.’

“Who’s Ephyra?”

“She works in government. Minister of, I don’t know, telling Adaro he looks pretty or something. I met her once. She reminds me of what you would look like if you were ten years older and had dark hair. And darker skin. And bigger—”

“So she looks nothing like me.”

“Not really.”

Spio studied me for a moment.

“What?”

He glanced around. “There’s something you should know. I think. Or maybe you don’t want—well, I think you should know it. If you want. But you don’t have to. But if I tell you then you’re kind of doomed, anyway.”

I waited, not understanding in the slightest what he was on about.

Without warning, he slid into the water. I stared at the ripples he left behind. He moved away from the reef.

He must have decided we weren’t far enough away from everyone. I slid in after him.

We surfaced far from the others, beside a rocky protrusion so small we had to fight a pelican for it.

Spio propped his arms on the rock. I did the same across from him. Waves hissed rhythmically against it.

“I get the drift you don’t really want to be here,” said Spio. “You want to be back home with that human.”

I said nothing.

“I want to help you get home, buddy.”

I sighed in relief. “Spio, thank you.”

“But we need the right moment,” he said. “That moment, in my expert opinion, is one where you don’t have a chance of getting caught and executed for breaking oath.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“A few of us in the unit—we have a plan.”

“You want to escape?” I whispered. “How many of you?”

He shook his head. “It’s more than just escaping I’m talking about. We all agree Adaro’s been a bit of a …”

Tyrant
, I thought, not daring to say it aloud.

“Lumpsucker,” said Spio. “Everything he’s done has been a disgrace to merpeople.”

I glanced around, nervous. The army was well out of sight, but I still heard the distant hum of conversation.

“A lot of guys feel the same,” said Spio.

“They do?”

“Lysi, it doesn’t take a whole lot of goop in your skull to see the number of deaths Adaro’s causing. Between the Battle for Eriana Kwai and the expansion across the Pacific, we’re getting picked off like krill.”

“Not to mention the humans who get in his way.”

“See, you get it. A lot of soldiers talk all wise and righteous, but no one has the guts to do anything about it.”

“What about the other cities?” I said. “The Atlantic Queen? Soon his army will be big enough to match hers. Someone must be noticing.”

“They don’t give a flying flatfish. I think they aren’t expecting Adaro to get that far. Think about it: the Atlantic is the biggest, oldest kingdom in history. Do you really think Adaro has a chance of taking it?”

“At this rate, yes.”

“That’s what we thought,” said Spio. “We’re a tidecycle away from a total clusterf—”

Beneath our tails, something moved. We froze, feeling the ripples. It was small. Too small to be anything. The way it flapped about, it was probably a squid.

Spio continued, dropping his voice lower. “We’ve decided we’re not happy doing his battles, helping him take over the seas.”

My pulse quickened. If others wanted Adaro ousted from the throne, maybe it was possible.

“You know the first thing he’ll do once he’s king of the seas?” said Spio. “He’s gonna push humans out of the water for good, and we’re gonna have the wrath of the President of the United freaking States of America dropping iron on us like snow.”

He was right. Adaro might have been keeping away from open conflict with the rest of the humans for now—I thought of his truce with the Aleut people near my home—but those peace treaties wouldn’t be forever. He would declare war on humans as soon as he was ready. As soon as he secured the oceans.

“We’re stopping him before it’s too late,” said Spio.

“But how can anyone stop him? No one has power over the king.”

“We already have a plan.”

Spio dropped his voice so low, I wasn’t sure he even spoke. I had to lean so close that he could have bitten my ear.

“We’re gonna assassinate him, Lysi.”

I leaned back to see his face properly.

He stared back, dead serious. Moonlight glinted off his dark eyes. Replacing Adaro with a new king or queen was one thing, but killing him?

I sank lower into the waves, shaking my head. This wasn’t a choice I wanted to make.

“Spio, what about the oath? We swore total obedience—”

“The oath!” he said. “That doesn’t matter anymore. Our duty as soldiers isn’t to Adaro. It’s to merpeople. And the enemy of merpeople is the one waging war across the globe. King Adaro is more than just the enemy of the humans. He’s our enemy, too.”

A wave broke against the rock and sprayed over us.

I exhaled slowly. “You surprise me, sometimes.”

“I stole that speech from Pontus.”

Spio tilted his head back, basking in the tropical air. The night was too silent and peaceful for what raged inside me.

He was talking about life-or-death.

But when had I ever not been in that territory? I risked death every day fighting a war I didn’t believe in. Now I had a chance to risk my life for a cause I did believe in.

This was more than I was ready for. I just wanted to go home. I wanted to work with Meela on the plan we already had, not join forces with a bunch of guys I didn’t know or trust.

“Until that lumpsucker’s dead, any attempt to escape is gonna get you killed,” said Spio. “You saw the way the officers are.”

I glanced back towards the army. Maybe this was the best way home. With Adaro dead, I would have no obstacles. Plus, I wouldn’t have to worry about Meela. She would be safe from him, and so would her people. That was all she wanted.

“Of course, I gotta take this up with the guys,” said Spio. “They won’t be happy I told you. We agreed not to recruit others.”

“Why not?”

“It’s more likely someone will betray us or let something slip.”

I frowned. I hadn’t even met these guys and already they didn’t want me around.

“As far as they know,” he said, “you’re a pretty face who got stuck here because you already did something stupid.”

“These guys made it clear they don’t think I’m a pretty face.” And, if I admitted it to myself, I had noticed a lot of sidelong glances, sneers, and whispers.