Page 43 of A Magic Deep & Drowning

His excitement to see her quickly faded. Her flippant tone grated on him, added to his already sour mood.

“You might ask how I got in here,” she said, peevish. “Do you know that a dire whale is lurking about out there? Thade must have made some deal with it to stand guard. I only just managed to slip by while it was feasting on a squid. I don’t know how I’m going to get back out,” she added, glancing back up at the gap.

The dire whales. The name alone sent a ripple of fear through him, making him feel as if he were a small child again hearing tales about the horrible and shadowy creatures that were seldom seen, but often spoken of in hushed tones. His mother told them that the dire whales were creatures of chaos, that they would as soon see the Water Kingdom crumble and fall as they would devour little merchildren just for the sport ofit. “They remember the long-ago times when their kind ruled the seas. They are bitter that the triumph of the Water Kingdom left them with only the deepest reaches to lurk in.” Until now, he had never quite been sure if they were truly real or merely an invention of parents trying to frighten naughty children into obedience. And if theywerereal, then he wondered how much he had been taught about them was really true.

Neese seemed to be waiting for him to say something. He gestured to his throat.

“Mm, no tongue? How wonderful. You can’t interrupt me when I tell you how spectacularly fucked you are.”

Maurits clenched his jaw as Neese launched into a detailed account of Thade’s rise to power, and how Maurits, as usual, had been a fool.

Neese caught his look. “Yes, yes. You’re wondering why I did not warn you if it was so obvious. Well, I would ask you this: When was the last time you came to court? How many times did I seek you out, only to find that you were on land? Don’t give me that look,” she chastised, when she caught him glaring at her. “You were so busy with your prize when I saw you last that you hardly took the time to listen to what I was telling you.”

Neese had every right to be angry, though it didn’t take the sting out of her words. Hehadbeen lax in his attentions, not just to his duties, but to his friends as well. It was so much easier up on land where he didn’t have any commitments, any worries beyond returning to the water in time. As much as he loved Neese, seeing her was a reminder of who he was, who he was expected to be. It filled him with shame, but his life was infinitely less complicated and unpleasant the less time he spent in the water.

Neese was continuing. “You once told me that your mother granted you your land form for seven days during the full moon.”

Maurits nodded to confirm. An uneasy feeling was beginning to grow in him.

“Yet you were coming and going as you pleased for some time. Did you never wonder why your mother was so lax in enforcing her rules? Or abandoning them all together?”

The realization lodged deep in his chest. It was so obvious; why hadn’t he seen it? It hadn’t been his mother, it had been Thade. His brother had wanted him far away so that he could scheme and set his plans in motion. All the times that Maurits had been elated to find himself able to possess legs and lark about on land beyond the seven days had been his brother’s doing. When the flood had happened in Franeker and he was stuck as a useless dog, his form had been restored by Thade. And Maurits, a fool, had been content to accept the gift, unconcerned from whom it had been given. All so that Thade could continue to plot and put his plans into action while Maurits was blissfully ignorant on land.

Neese watched as grim understanding set in. She nodded. “He’s powerful, more powerful than any of us realized, and he’s had time to hone his skills. You’re lucky he decided on imprisonment for you.”

What of my mother?Maurits wanted to ask.

For all the ways in which Neese could find to be a pain in his ass, she had always been uncannily good at knowing what he was thinking. He was grateful now for being spared having to sit with his questions unanswered. “No one has seen the queen,” Neese said, dropping her voice. “Which is concerning. Thade is not popular, not among those who were loyal to your mother and who would have liked to see you on the throne. He is brash and ruthless, and many are afraid that he will undo whatever diplomacy still exists between the Water and the Land.”

Brash and ruthless.Maurits closed his eyes. Those were not qualities that whoever sat on the throne should possess,especially when his brother now only had to snap his fingers to call upon the water to rise up. Thousands of humans and other innocent land folk were up there, unaware that Thade was working toward their destruction. Clara was there, widowed and alone, vulnerable. She should have been under Maurits’s protection. He bore so much fault for what had happened, and the least he could have done was stay with her, somehow, made sure that she was safe. With a fruitless yank, he strained at his bonds.

Neese lifted a dark brow. “Goodness, you burn for her, don’t you? I never saw you so moved to action before. If only you had this much passion when Thade was consolidating power.”

He held up his wrists, defeated, and Neese finally had pity on him.

“Very well.” She sighed, coming closer and inspecting the manacles. Her brow furrowed, and he did not like the implication from someone who usually would rather die than admit defeat. “He’s laced them with some sort of magic,” she said, her long, webbed fingers skimming over them. “I can’t get them off.”

Suddenly, Neese pulled back, her head craned high as if she was hearing something. “Did you hear that?” she murmured. Maurits couldn’t hear anything, but then, he didn’t possess the ability that the nixies did to hear a raindrop falling miles away.

Neese put her fingers to her lips, forgetting that he could not speak anyway. And then he heard it. The long, low eldritch moan of a dire whale.

He’d heard the stories, knew that to hear the cry of a dire whale was to be given an omen of bad news. But nothing could have prepared him for the way his blood seemed to stop in his veins at the unearthly sound.

“I must leave, now,” she said in a low hiss. “Before it comes closer.”

He wanted to reach out and make her stay.

But he had no voice, and he could not reach her. His friend shimmied through the gap and disappeared into the murky waters, leaving him alone with a monster just beyond the walls.

The darkness folded in around him, and he let his head rest on the cold, hard wall. How had Thade found a dire whale? And more importantly, what kind of deal had he made with it to enlist it for his purposes?

Chapter Twenty-Six

A silver charger with a thick wedge of cheese sat on the wood table, a tumble of grapes, a few apples, and a half-peeled orange spread around it. Clara stared at the cheese until her eyes began to ache, trying to identify the exact spot where the creamy white flesh gave way to the rind.

“Why must I paint cheese?” Clara asked, finally giving up and closing her eyes. Now that she had experienced the exhilaration of putting her dreams on canvas, anything else seemed like torture. She knew that it was very gracious of Alida to ask her to be her apprentice, but all Clara wanted to do was paint the roiling waves and shafts of moonlight filtering through water that filled her mind. Not cheese.

“If you can paint a sweating rind of cheese and make it beautiful, then you can paint anything,” Alida told her. She gestured to the fruit. “Each apple, each grape, has its own relationship to the light from the window. There is no detail too small to be excluded. Even Van der Poel was able to master fruit, and the man can hardly a paint anything that is not a night scene swathed in shadows. I’ll not have my apprentice lack the most basic skills.”

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