Page 35 of Depths
“I don’t suppose I can ride on the whale instead?” I’d asked half sarcastically.
“The people expect it,” Sahar had argued. “The seahorses are the symbol of your house. It’s ceremonial. And the carriage protects you … from the current.” She hadn’t meant from the current.
Foolishly, I’d listened to her advice and let Posey ride my gargoyle. But with two extra competitors, there were no longer enough seats on the whale for all the men. So I had the constantpleasureof entertaining them, two at a time.
I was currently tucked in the middle of the scientist siren named Julian—Mateo’s roommate—whose brown eyes glinted a bit manically. The light of the sole circular bobbing glass lantern that floated aimlessly throughout the carriage reflected in his irises. When it bumped the side of his head, he shoved the little floating glass sphere aside as he continued a rant about medicine without magic, a topic on which he’d been speaking for the past twenty minutes. “Can you believe they think that?” He snorted in derision. “Mesmerization as a means of sedation before surgery?! Utter madness. I can’t believe they wasted the ink and parchment to write that bullshite down. Of all the foolish things. Yes, let me wave my hand in front of you and speak a bit, that will ease the—”
Basil, the squi-shifter on my other side, interrupted Julian, leaning forward so that I was forced to recline completely in my seat. “What is surgery?” His large forehead creased in confusion, and I had to say, I secretly found him one of the most unattractive men in the competition. His mouth area was a little … beaky. It was almost as if his squid beak didn’t fully transform when he changed shapes. But acknowledging that, even to myself, made me feel a little guilty. Before magic had made me into a sprite, I’d considered myself on the wrong side of pretty. Until Mateo at least.
Julian’s face flushed, and his eyes widened for a moment as if he could not believe the utter ignorance of the man sitting on my left side. But he took a deep breath and then calmly explained, “It’s the treatment of internal injuries without magic.”
“Wait. What? How do you treat them?” Basil let his thick brows draw together so that they nearly touched. He’d clearly done an excellent job of following Julian’s conversation, which had basically begun as soon as they’d both sat and Julian had folded up the parchment he’d received from a fellow “scientist” in the city of Sky Stones.
“With knives and stitching to repair the injury, sewing it up just like a hem.”
Basil snorted. “That soundsstupid.”
I heard Julian grind his teeth together, and my eyes darted between the two of them, semi-amused. How would the budding non-magical healer handle the derision his work was likely to receive?
“I’ll have you know I’ve performed four operations myself,” Julian responded primly.
“Four people let you cut on them? Fourlivepeople?”
Color rose on Julian’s cheeks. “Of coursenot live. It would never do to practice one’s techniques on the living until they were perfected.”
“Oh. I understand now. You’re more like a butcher. Or cannibal.” The squi-shifter sat back in his seat, tossing an arm casually behind my shoulders. Smug satisfaction radiated from him as Julian clenched his fingers and began to shake in a fit of rage.
“That’s not it at all and you know it!”
I debated internally whether I wanted to allow this banter to continue, if I should stand up for Julian,—but that would show favoritism—orif I should put us all out of our misery by sending both of them away.
While I wasn’t necessarily attracted to Julian, I did find his ideas quite fascinating. As someone who’d had to live without magic for so many years, I did recognize there was a huge need for people without magic to find self-worth and for the world to have solutions that didn’t involve magic. I was attracted to his ideas.
As far as I could tell, based on the small amount of information I’d been able to extract from Basil, he was a fisherman who spent his days tossing nets and collecting shrimp. A completely necessary vocation. Honorable even. But a bit on the boring side. And it seemed like the mind between his ears was as soft as a fried egg. A small part of me was tempted to kick him out of the carriage and keep Julian so that I could ask about all the macabre details of his “operations,” but the speculation that would cause was not worth it. Not when I didn’t intend to make Julian a favorite because it would just be too unkind to him.
My curiosity would have to remain unsatisfied.
I opted instead for my age-old standby, to break up the tension by changing the focus. “So, tell me what you know about Reef City. Any favorite haunts?”
There was an awkward moment where both the men stared at me, and my smile grew a bit stiff. But gradually, Basil cleared his throat and said, “Well, there’s a pub—”
At the exact same moment, Julian replied, “Well, there’s a library—”
They glared daggers at each other.
Luckily, Sahar opened the door at just that moment and stuck her head inside. “Gentlemen, I’m sorry to disturb you, but some other contestants need time with Her Majesty.”
Once they’d exited, she told me, “You get thirty minutes reprieve before the next batch come. Use it wisely.”
I could have kissed her. A moment alone was a rare and precious gem to a queen. Of course, I squandered my minutes with a nap.
* * *
Camping was not nearlythe fun adventure it was made out to be in stories. First of all, it was bitterly cold, and my seamstress, who’d never left Palati, had left me woefully unprepared for that. I rubbed the scales that lined the outsides of my arms, trying to warm myself, even debating if I should swim closer to the surface in order to warm up a bit, despite being told repeatedly that we were just beneath hammerhead territory, and it would be incredibly stupid of me to do so.
The plains were much lower in elevation than Palati, and the water was chilly and dense at this depth. Our tents couldn’t touch the actual sea bed, because that would be far too cold for most of us to survive the night. So instead, our tents were floating cubes attached to anchors buried in the sea floor. I watched Felipe and several other soldiers construct my tent with metal poles, drop the anchor, and then stretch whale skin across the sides to enclose it. There was only a tiny narrow slit for me to squeeze through in order to enter, and the entire thing looked hardly large enough to fit me, though I supposed that meant my body heat would fill the space decently.
Around my tent, my guards set up their own, and though they slept two to a tent, their rigs were the same as mine. I looked outward and realized we had created a little village of bobbing cubes. A smile quirked my lips, and a little sliver of excitement crept back into my frozen bones at that novelty.
