The Poisoned Crown (2 page)

“Thank you,” said Keerye, and he kissed her cold little cheek.

“Thank you!” cried Ezroc, and he spread his wings, driving himself into the air.

The mermaid held her hand to her face for a second or two, as if she feared to lose the imprint of the kiss, though it was a gesture she had never known. Then she forgot it in the wonder of the bird’s rising.

“Come back when you’re grown!” she said. “Come back and fly me to the stars! Promise?”

“I promise!” Ezroc called as he veered southward. Below, Keerye streaked like a javelin through the still-gleaming water.

Behind them, Denaero arced and plunged and dived, churning the midnight waves to a tumult of foam.

I
T WAS
dawn when they reached the Great Reef Wall and saw the steam of the boiling sea like a cloud over the sun. Keerye swam to the edge of the shallows, where the reef fell away in a submarine cliff down to unguessable depths. Far below there must have been vents in the seabed, emitting gas from the planet’s core, and so the water beyond the wall bubbled like a cauldron, and the stink of sulfur hung in the air. Ezroc flew high above, soaring on the thermals, but he could see no way for a selkie to pass. “The steam barrier stretches as far as the eye can see,” he told Keerye, “and at its narrowest it must be more than twenty spans across. We might travel a sennight and find no way through.”

“Show me the narrow part,” the selkie said. “In seal form I can leap high and far, higher and farther than any from the Ice Cliffs.”

“Not that high and not that far,” said Ezroc. “You’ll scald in the water and bake in the steam. It will kill you.”

“If you were to lift me, I could do it,” Keerye said.

“I cannot bear you. I am not yet strong enough.”

“But if you swoop as I spring, and hold my foreflippers, the joint impetus of both leap and flight will carry us over the barrier,” Keerye declared.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Ezroc said doubtfully. “The risk is too great. Let us turn west. Somewhere there will be a break.”

“You said there were none,” Keerye pointed out.

They might have argued about it long, but Ezroc, rising to scan the seas again, saw shadow shapes skimming the reef toward them—the vanguard of the hunt. Mermen mounted on blue sharks wielding spears of bone tipped with blood coral, barracuda trained for the chase with fin rings that rattled to denote their route, and behind them on huge hammerheads the king and his court, trailing cloaks of whalehide and brandishing axes of polished obsidian. The king himself wore a helm or crown adorned with the claws of a giant lobster and mail of oyster shells gleaming with mother-of-pearl.

“Now
we have no choice,” said Keerye. “Swoop on me as I leap— catch me and hold firm—and we will make it.”

“Suppose I cannot…? If I let you fall—”

“I have faith. You won’t let me fall.”

Keerye could not go deep—the reef was too near the surface—nor give himself a long run, for the hunt was drawing close. But he swam back as far as he dared and then arrowed toward the wall, driving himself forward with his powerful tail, all seal now, breaking the water and rising up … and up … The sun glittered in the spray around him, then the sea smokes stung his eyes, and he felt the talons of the albatross digging into him, tugging, lifting, sweeping him through the fume toward clear air and cool sea. Sudden pain scorched his flank—a well-aimed spear glanced off him and dropped into the fog. And then before he knew it he was plunging down, betrayed by his own weight, torn from the albatross’s grip to fall into the seething water …

It was hot, but it did not burn. He was through the barrier. They had done it.

T
HEY SWAM
south for many days at leisure while the spear wound healed and fur and feathers, singed in the sulfurous vapors, grew again. The days were longer, and the sun had barely dipped below the horizon before reemerging to resume its orbit of the sky. Once, they came across a great shoal of silvertail and fed until they were almost too full to float, but they saw no creatures they could talk to save a few small-fish who spoke a dialect they did not recognize. Another time they found a vast mat of kelp, rootless, drifting on the current with all its mobile populace. Ezroc thought it might be one of the Floating Islands from the stories, but Keerye said no, islands were solid and did not wallow in the water.

“I think there are no islands anymore,” Ezroc said.

But they kept on searching.

And then they saw it, on a day without sunset, a great hump looming out of the water ahead of them. It looked like a boulder or cluster of boulders, sea-smoothed, rose-tinted, marbled in blue, with occasional fan-like growths sprouting from cracks and testing the air with feathery tendrils. Keerye swam eagerly toward it, ran his hands over the boulders, then pulled himself out of the water and sat in the sun, shedding even the semblance of a tail, naked in his skin and gilded with light. Only his long silver hair and velvet-dark eyes showed him for a selkie.

“This is what we sought,” he said. “A Floating Island. Where there’s one, there will be more. Maybe there’s real land still, in the utter south, land with roots that go all the way to the world’s heart. The stories must be true after all.”

“Are you sure it’s an island?” Ezroc circled the atoll, still too wary to land there. “Denaero warned us—”

“Denaero was a child, afraid of ghosts. This is solid: look!” He slapped the boulder, making a wet sharp
thwack!
, but to Ezroc’s ear it didn’t sound quite right.

“It doesn’t feel like rock,” he said, alighting beside Keerye. “Rock should be hard.”

“It’s hard enough. I’m going to sleep here for a while. It’s been too long since I slept out of water.”

“I’m not tired,” Ezroc lied. “I’ll keep watch.”

He took off again and drifted on the high air, scanning the sea in all directions, but he could see no other island nor any living thing. The translucent water seemed to be empty even of smallfish, clear and limpid as a lagoon. That troubled him, though he couldn’t define why, and he widened the radius of his flight, covering a large area around the atoll, but still there was nothing to be seen. At last he settled on the water close to the island, folded his wings, and slept.

When he awoke he was alone. The sun was low, though it would not set; sky and sea met on the horizon in an arc of reflected fires. And in every direction there was only water. The island—and Keerye— had gone.

Ezroc hurled himself into the air with a great cry that seemed to carry to the ends of the world. He told himself it was a Floating Island: it had simply floated away. He would find it soon, and Keerye still sleeping, stretched out on the blue-veined boulders. He had only to fly high enough and he would see it: how could you lose an island?

Those are not islands
, Denaero had said.
Don’t go near them …

The dread lay coldly on his heart, dread and worse than dread, the terrible foreknowledge that it was too late, it had been too late from the moment he fell asleep. The island was gone and Keerye was gone and he would never see his friend again. The wide wastes of the ocean ached with his desolation, a void that could not be filled. He flew higher and higher, and the sun fell away beneath his wings, and the huge solitude of the sea unrolled below him, without land or life, empty now forevermore. He would fly all the long lonely miles back to the north, and tell his tale to those who would mourn, or curse his name—Ezroc the faithless, who lost his childhood playmate and dearest friend—and return to the south, traveling the seas for countless moons, until he knew every wave, every tug of the world’s current, every whim of the winds. His journeys would become a legend to outdo his ultimate
grandsire, his adventures a fairy tale for children; but he would never find Keerye again. His keening wail echoed over sky and sea, harsh with longing and despair.

“Keeeeryeee …
Keeeeeeryeeee
…”

No answer came.

H
E WAS
the bird, and the bird was him. He felt the air under his wings, bearing him upward, the sun warming his feathers, the huge angry pain of his heart. It was too much pain, too much to endure, and he pulled his mind away, letting the bird go, watching its flight track into the sun while his thought sank seaward and drifted into a dim blue realm, no longer sharp with the awareness of the bird but soft and dream-like. In the azure gloom he saw the island, not floating on the surface but moving through deep water, the rose-stained boulders swelling and shrinking like the bulb of a vast jellyfish. A skein of tentacles trailed behind it, fifty yards long or more. Something pale was tangled in their grasp, something that barely struggled now. Vision dipped under the bulb and he saw a dozen mouths opening and closing, each with a ring of needle-tipped teeth. The pale thing, still wriggling slightly, was maneuvered toward them, passed from one to another as each took a bite. Blood smoked on the water, but not much: the feeder did not believe in waste. Above, the bulb turned from pink to crimson as it gorged, pulsing with a glow of its own; the blue veins empurpled and swelled into ridges. Briefly, he touched its mind, such as it was—the mind of a glutton enjoying a rare special feast.

He wrenched his thought away in horror, out of the sea, out of the dream, through the veils of sleep to his own world.