A small, awed gasp sounded at my side. My head snapped toward the sound. Halla stood there, Theodore’s guards at her back, staring gape-mouthed at the lagoon and the faint curve of shoreline on the other side of it. She raised her hand to the middle of her chest, forcing herself to breathe. Then slowly, she turned to look at me.
When our eyes met, she jolted. I knew what she saw.
The startlingly white gaze of a Mage Seer.
My attention dragged back to Anthemoessa, and I slowed the ship once we were fully within the lagoon. With gritted teeth, I let the wind go sluggish and stopped the mucky currents, then worked to close the connection between me and Eusia. In this blighted place, it was like trying to shore up a torrent with a handful of loose mud, but finally I managed.
I called over my shoulder to the captain, who stood not too far behind me, brows raised in approval. “Prepare a launch.”
She adjusted her tricorn and nodded, just as the ship shuddered and a loudthudechoed through its hull.
“Something in the water!” one of the sailors called out. “Port side.”
Halla raced to where the sailor pointed. The captain rushed to the same spot, followed not far behind by Lachlan and Theodore.
Halla leaned out and gave a frustrated growl. “I cannot see anything at all.”
The sailor pointed to a spot straight down. “It was there. I only saw it when it surfaced. Don’t know what it is.”
My stomach gave another deep and terrible twist at the very same moment that something sliced through the surface. It took its time, rolling sluggishly through the dense waves like it wanted to be seen. The thing was pale, its skin reflective and thin, letting me make out the veins beneath. Tentacles splayed wide before us, far longer than any I’d ever seen. One arched from the water, ramming itself against the side of the hull. The strike reverberated through the vessel like a drum.
Like Halla, I bent myself over theEleuthios’s rail, trying to see the thing better. It surged just then, grotesque body floating on the surface, and as it twisted over itself, it mirrored the twist and roll of my own insides.
I was suddenly—awfully—certain…
Even with how the sea had transformed it—the glittering patches of scales, the haphazard razor-edged suckers dotting it, the pale barnacles clustered over its glossy skin—I could make out the pink curve of a stomach. The dark reddish-brown of a liver. The trailing, ropelike intestines.
I went cold. Rigid. “My Gods…”
“The sea monster Marshal Baros told us of,” Halla breathed.
A sea monster.
How very right—and very wrong—the marshal had been.
16
Imogen
The anchor fell with a clanging that shook through my bones.
Across the deck, sailors continued their work, but now soldiers had come up from the lower decks too. Courtiers had slipped from the safety of their cabins and Theodore’s council had emerged, all to take in with their own eyes the transcendental world we’d slipped into.
Debris and ropes still littered the planks, and I began navigating through the maze of it all, toward the launch hanging over on the ship’s starboard side.
Trepidation crept up my spine. I could see the shoreline, the faint shape of the ruins of my mother’s keep. Its towers and ramparts. Now that I was here, the truth that I’d not wanted to acknowledge reared its grisly head: we might be too late.
Lachlan was already climbing into the launch. By the horrible look on his face, the gray of his cheeks, I knew he had the same fear. The monster in the water was the least of our worries now. The empress’s ship was nowhere in sight. She could be lying in wait among those ruins, ready to ambush me and help bind me to Eusia,or she’d already done what she’d come here to do—gift Agatha to her saint—and left. Both prospects made me feel ill.
I heaved myself into the launch behind Lachlan. As I settled onto the bench, Halla approached me. She still wore the white shell-and-crystal-strewn gown from her wedding feast, but now its silk was deeply creased.
She looked tired, mussed. “I told you I would help.”
I hated that I needed it. Hated that I was willing to trust her. “If I have come all this way,” I said, “only to find that my friend is not here, or worse…” My stomach twisted once more, and I lost my words. When I found them again, I spoke though my teeth. “I will have no qualms with treating you precisely the way your mother has treated Agatha.”
Halla blanched. Nodded quietly. I’d meant the threat and she knew it. The guards helped her into the launch, and she settled onto the bench farthest from me, her gaze stuck on the misty outline of the keep. “What spell will you need me to perform?”
I pressed a hand to my churning guts. “We’ll discuss that later. After we find Agatha.” I’d hardly slept trying to decipher the answer to that question. What would break our bond? The inverse of the spell that had forged it felt most likely, but I expected we would have to fumble through many attempts to get it right.
