Dream Storm Sea (21 page)

She reached the sea cave. A school of silver fish veiled its entrance. One of them tried to gulp her diamond, but she reeled it back to her palm.

Behind her the kraken impacted into the water's surface. The shock wave pushed Hiresha into the cavern.

The current heaved streamers of algae and parted the school of fish. A sea scorpion’s glow tinted the far side of the cave in slimy light of bluish yellow. The scorpion’s claw snapped forward, impaling a fish on a row of black spines. The fish tried to escape by turning insubstantial, but it reappeared the next second, dead from its wounds.

Hiresha saw this was not the same sea scorpion that had carried Tethiel into the cave. It had lost a hindmost, paddle-shaped leg. The thought of Tethiel’s skin punctured by claws with similar barbs revolted her. This scorpion dissected its fish with mouth pincers, cutting bits off the face of its prey.

The scorpion dropped the pulpy pieces of flesh to undulate toward Hiresha. Its broad body flapped through the water. Two claw-like fins at the end of the tail flanked the stinger.

She burned with the desire to throw her gem against its tail and Attract the venomous prong to pierce the scorpion’s own back, to kill the six-eyed horror. But she needed to save Tethiel more, and each moment of delay decreased his already dubious chances.
If he dies, I’ll exterminate these oversized arachnids. From the world.

Tossing her jewel, she flew past the scorpion. Fan coral and streamers of orange algae broke off with her passing. She braced her feet against the cave wall, between two purple starfish, and plunged downward. The cave wormed deeper.

Bubbles that clung to the walls flowed to Hiresha’s mouth, gathering into a pocket of air. The enchantress lacked the jewels for the more complex spellcraft of splitting water. Instead she Attracted the vital essence of air that was suspended in the sea. It never felt like enough, and her lungs throbbed.

A small pain compared to what Tethiel must be feeling from those stings.
She could tell another fisherman’s bane lurked around the bend by the luminescence it cast over the swaying anemones. She peeked, and claw spines reached for her eyes. Hiresha kicked back, enchanting her diamond with an Attraction trap. She dropped it then thrust her arms out for a handhold.

The scorpion scuttled into view. Blobs of light oozed beneath its transparent carapace. The diamond landed on its back and flared.

Anemones flattened toward the jewel, some red tendrils tearing off. Hiresha felt herself being dragged to the scorpion. Her hand slapped against the cave wall, and she enchanted the stone to anchor her. A sea urchin tumbled past her arm. Its fuchsia spines crackled with magic that arced to her with a jerking shock of pain. Yet she held on.

Her heart bounded. The terrifying wonder of where she was and what she was doing suffused her with whirling giddiness and churning amazement. Each second threatened to spiral her into a faint. Her concentration held.

The trap enchantment stopped its pull but still pinioned the scorpion in a curved tangle of claws and stinger. The fisherman’s bane was larger than a man, and it blocked most of the passage. She had to scrape between the bristles of its underside and the wall’s barnacles. In the crawlspace, she saw another scorpion wiggling its way toward her. The prongs of its claws stretched longer than porcupine quills.

Hiresha slapped a hand on the scorpion’s plated head, above the tiny feeder arms. An enchantress’s power in Repulsion was her weakest, and Hiresha’s touch hit with no more strength than a man’s punch.

It still cracked the carapace and gave her the time to squeeze out of the chokepoint. When the scorpion reoriented itself enough to curve its stinger toward her, she was ready. She Attracted her diamond from behind her. A crimson dart punctured the first trapped scorpion and cracked through the tail of the second.

Fluorescence spread from the wounds in smoky tendrils of green. Hiresha remembered Emesea’s warning of their blood, and the enchantress sped deeper into the caverns. A glance behind showed the glowing phlegm bubbling against stone, and anemones blackened.

The next brightness came from no scorpion. A fish resembled a moon with fins. It gleamed amid a garden of coral. Cow-like black eyes took no notice of her as it kissed a patch of fuzzy orange sea growth. Bubbles from the algae shook loose and rolled across the ceiling. Air filled the top of the cavern.

Hiresha searched further passages for the next hint of neon light. The fisherman’s bane could not have dragged Tethiel much further.

And it couldn’t have had time for more than a nibble.
Her stomach roiled.

She wove around the larger stalactites and crashed through the slender ones in her haste. Veils of vermillion seaweed parted. Air pockets on the ceiling shone like puddles on a bright day after a rain.

A glimpse of green was a smaller scorpion—only arm-length—swimming toward a greater light. Hiresha bolted past to find a swarm. The scorpion she had seen before had carried Tethiel to its brood. Hatchlings beat the water with their tails. They gripped his skin with their needle claws.

He could not seem to do more than twitch, but his eyes flicked to Hiresha.
Still conscious?
Hiresha was relieved but also sickened for his sake. He would have had no choice but to watch himself carried deeper underwater, waiting to be eaten alive.

Hiresha could not waste time fighting all the scorpions. But she could wait for the perfect moment, for their tails and pincers to line up for a throw that sent her diamond through them all to land on Tethiel’s chest. She did not even lose focus when the scorpion behind her stung her shoulder.

The diamond’s enchantment Burdened Tethiel with the weight of a solid-lead statue. He slammed through the swarm. To her surprise, fuchsia spines burst from his skin. An illusion, she guessed, but it gave the scorpions pause and the time she needed. The gem now Lightened him, and Hiresha pulled on her connection to it, towing Tethiel into her arms. The magical quills retracted back into his skin as she grasped him

He winked at her. Or perhaps it was a spasm of an eyelid.

The sting had set her own shoulder on fire. She reached behind, Attracted the venom from the puncture, and she hurled the greasy glob into the eyes of the scorpion that had pierced her.

Hiresha kicked her way with Tethiel ahead of a tide of scorpion pincers. A flick of her jewel carried them away. His skin scalded her from the venom within him. She held on, with sensations of opal pleasure flashing through her in flecks of pink, lime, and mauve.

Underwater, her laugh sounded distant and bubbly but no less joyous.

They returned to the room with the moonfish. The glowing disk had giant fins on its edges and stumpy ones on its flat sides. If the smaller fins were thought of as ears, the fish took on the appearance of a floating head with an expression of open-mouthed bafflement.

The red diamond flew above the moonfish into the garden’s air pocket. The gem drew them to the ceiling, and Hiresha rested Tethiel on a patch with fewer spiny urchins and more starfish.

The enchantress first Attracted the sea from his lungs. He gasped, his brow streaming with salt water and sweat. Next, she rolled him over and found the puncture marks on his back. Her magic leeched the venom out. It floated above her palms in a sphere of fluorescent red. She split the toxins into harmless pieces then let the glob fall into the water.

Tethiel’s breathing eased. He regained his nighttime splendor with a mane of spidersilk hair and eyes like black pearls. “This cannot be a dream,” he said. “It’s too unexpected. This can’t be real. You’re too radiant.”

“Your brain can’t be much damaged,” she said. “You’re as nonsensical as ever.”

“I was underwater an age. It couldn’t have been longer than minutes. The stings felt like fiery carnivals of efreets. I thank you for dousing them, my heart.”

The corner of his lips curved and spiraled in an impossible grin. Hiresha’s own glitter of happiness crashed against her anger. “The Murderfish knew the scorpions would eat you alive. It brought you here for that torture.”

“She is a most thoughtful terror.”

“Speak of the Murderfish only in past tense. I could never allow something so cruel to live in the Lands of Loam.”

Vertigo shook her senses, and the color palate of starfish twirled about her while remaining in place. Such disorientation surprised the enchantress. True, her magic had made the ceiling their floor. More than that, she felt as if in another place and another time she had come to a very different decision about the kraken.

“Man must love his monsters,” Tethiel said. “Only by kissing death can we remember the taste of life.”

“That, or make a point to appreciate. Whichever comes easier.”

Above them, the moonfish swam upside down among coral of chartreuse veins and creepers of crimson. Clouds of pink minnows turned a more sickly hue when scorpions entered with tails wriggling. Hiresha doubted the fisherman’s bane would see her through the reflective surface. To be safe, she placed the red diamond on the water. The liquid would harden to crystal if any unwelcome claws or stingers tried to force their way through.

The enchantress worried for the moonfish. She was in no mood to see the puffy-cheeked creature torn apart, but the scorpions paddled past without so much as a claw twitch.

Tethiel crouched beside her, gazing at the coral garden. “If this isn’t a lull within a nightmare, then do tell. How’re you doing all this?”

“Using a trick you taught me.” Despite their safety, Hiresha’s muscles stayed tense. Tethiel’s nearness was a comforting coldness, like sitting beside an ice sculpture on a sweltering day. “I can enchant because I believe I may be asleep. For all I know, you’re a falsehood.”

“I’ve often wondered the same about myself.”

“Now tell the truth, if you can. Did you expect me to become a Feaster?”

The question had niggled at Hiresha, and it hung between them like a pendulum axe. The enchantress braced herself for the pain of Tethiel’s answer.

“Once, I feared you’d Feast.” His eyes were a black purity as if his pupils had dilated all the way to his lashes. “But mine is a magic for the desperate. You’ve no need of it, my heart.”

Relief seared its way up her arms and spine to meet at a flaming intensity in her chest.

He touched the red diamond above them. It stuck in the water. His straight and sharp finger lowered to rest at the center of her brow. It seemed to brush against the bone of her skull.

He said, “You’ve made truth of my lies and become everything I’d hoped.”

“Yes, since now I am a paradox. By dreaming I awoke.”

“You were always a paragon of unique impossibilities.”

Her fingers ran down the labyrinth embroidery of his vest. The masterpiece needlework had stayed pristine even after days at sea. She could call it illusion, even if it felt real. She had similar doubts about her own happiness. It struck her as unreasonably powerful. Beside Tethiel she felt a painful sense of peace, an unnatural rightness.

She asked, “If I’m not to succeed you as a Feaster, then why would you do something as ludicrous as follow me to sea?”

The triangle tattoo glistened as if that part of his face were crafted of onyx. It and his eyes reflected only her. Hiresha assumed it another illusion that made her look so majestic, an empress with her eyes alight with possibility.

Tethiel rested a hand along the line of her chin. Each finger felt like a diamond tinkling across her skin, sharp and brilliant against her jaw and neck.

“My heart,” Tethiel said, “I’ll not stoop to answering that with words.”

He kissed her.

Hiresha had never felt more in command of herself and the world around her. And to this, she said yes.

She kissed him back, and he tasted of bitterness sweetened by honey, of secrets kept safe, of hearth-fire smoke on a winter’s night.

When Tethiel touched her, she felt it everywhere. Both a feathering that left her skin taut and trembling, and a scraping ferocity that made her gasp.

Hiresha would never have countenanced such behavior as provost. Wearing a red dress, she felt more forgiving to a different perspective on the proper decorum of men toward women. Her former maid would've approved.
Besides,
Hiresha told herself,
this is quite possibly a dream.

His suit sprouted filaments like a thistle flower. Spines surrounded her but never pricked. The softness of his jacket and vest flowed across her chest. Embroidery wrapped around her; warm threads rolled across her arms and thighs then tightened.