Page 4 of Depths
He immediately swam closer, and I felt the water grow warmer around me as he radiated heat like a furnace.
“Yes, Your Majesty?” His tone was dark and decadent like a bass note on a cello. I glanced over briefly but quickly back out at the crowd, giving a cheery wave despite, or to spite, my detractors. I found it hard to look directly at my guard. Felipe was just too handsome. He was stacked with muscle in a burly, intimidating, and grumpy sort of way, with a big square jaw and a scar that sliced through one of his thick, dark blue eyebrows. He had a tattoo of a wagon wheel over his left pec that I was insanely curious about but too shy to ask about, especially when faced with his burning brown eyes. Despite his surly manner, I did find I trusted him, though I probably irritated him at least fifty times a day. Like I was about to do.
“Invite the protesters to the ball,” I instructed, trying not to spit as I realized a bit of the ink had gotten into my mouth. It was sour and disgusting, but I swallowed it down with a stilted smile.
“Majesty?” His tone was mystified, as though I’d just suggested we put the protesters on fishing hooks and suspend them from the ceiling in the throne room.
While my birth mother might have taken that approach, I’d always taken a different route. “I’d like them to come, meet me, and discuss their grievances in a civilized manner,” I told him. “Please go deliver my invitation.”
I heard and enjoyed the barest of teeth grinding as my guard battled over his resistance to my order and sought a way to counter it. “I’ll have someone else deliver it,” he finally grumbled.
“Wonderful.” I agreed to his modified plan. Sometimes, I’d learned, you had to make concessions to allow others to feel like they had some power over a situation, particularly men. Bloss always said being born with a penis was a handicap because men were required to spend so much time stroking their own egos that there was hardly any brain power left for anything else. Of course, she said that years ago just before she fled from her fiancés. Still, she had a point.
I gave a quick nod to Felipe, and his deep blue tail flicked as he swam back over to the door of the glass castle behind us, no doubt to change his earlier angry order to forcibly remove the “sea scum”—his pet name for nearly everyone.
I returned my attention to the crowd gathered below me.
It was high noon, so the sun was straight overhead and provided the greatest amount of illumination, aided by glowing sea lanterns, orbs brimming with orange magic dotted around the peridot-colored glass palace behind me. Even so, the ocean was cool at this depth. Add a swift current, which we had today, and it was uncomfortably so. I longed to bundle up in a thick, warm shawl. But a queen couldn’t show petty weakness. A queen was a figurehead, an idol on the altar, some forgotten god’s messenger to earth. Petty things like warmth or squid ink couldn’t bother me.
It was all bullshite.
The crowd gathered today didn’t care about me, as a person or their queen. Some outright despised me. I doubted most gave two shites about this tournament I was hosting to find myself some husbands, a horror I was not ready to endure but apparently had to undergo. For Okeanos’ sake, the eighth kingdom of Kenmare.
The herald on the small balcony separated from mine by only a low, waist-high wall shuffled forward a step, his formal shell armor clinking. He raised a large, gold-covered conical shell and spoke through it so that his voice was magnified, “Her Majesty, Queen Avia, is delighted to open the Syzygos Tournament to all contestants brave enough to face her challenges.”
My heart faltered slightly at the thought of husbands, and I swayed where I stood. I was merely eighteen. I’d only ever kissed one man. Now thirty men would compete for my hand, most at least a decade my senior. And though the marriage itself wouldn’t take place until I was ready,ifI survived …
I splayed the wing-like fins on my back a bit in order to maintain my balance at that dizzying notion.If. It was utterly scary and made me stumble, mentally and physically. My heart pulsed weakly, showcasing the reason I wonderedif.
“Chin up.” Next to me, a siren named Sahar spoke through her teeth, her smile stretched wider than natural. I hadn’t noticed her join me on the balcony, but she was one of the more popular of my advisers. Perhaps she’d decided to dissuade any more sponge attacks by standing beside me. If so, I was in favor of her decision. “Flutter your fins. Give them a little show,” she instructed. An older siren, in her sixties, Sahar was genteel and refined in all the best ways. She’d lost that competitive gleam in her eye that women often get toward one another. Instead, it seemed like wisdom radiated from her very gaze. She was absolutely the best person in the entire castle, if not the kingdom.
But it was easy for her to say flutter. She had no idea that my chest was currently being pinched by a vise. In fact, it felt like a giant thirty feet tall had taken my heart between two fingers as thick as tree trunks and squeezed. Pain radiated through my center.
Sard her and her good intentions.The bitter thought popped into my head before I could quash it.
I fought the urge to bring my hand to my chest and curve my body protectively around the poor quivering organ.
My heart had been injured irreparably by my own stupidity. I’d made assumptions about other people’s magic. I’d expected my sister and her husbands to swoop in and save me from the monster of a mother who’d trapped me and bound me to her. I’d stabbed myself in the chest in a bid to escape her magical ties and carve her heart from my body. I’d been saved … in a limited fashion, by Lizza, my sister’s mage. But my own heart … it stuttered again as it struggled to pump blood through my body, no doubt weakened by the cold water all around. My heart had been injured and would not last. Not if I kept it.
I blinked hard and fought not to stumble a second time as my heart trembled.Shite. Play it off. Do what Sahar said, put the wings out fully and give a huge wave and smile,I told myself.
I flared my wings, two semi-translucent betta fish fins that resembled fairy wings but could slice through the water and propel me along. As I flapped them slightly, creating gentle waves, I could see the orange glow of the lamps behind me illuminate them so that they became luminescent. I gave a wave, letting the pearlescent scales that lined the outside of my arms get caught in the light as well, reminding the people that I was of the sea, just like them. Despite my golden hair and soft human facial features, I was sea-born. My little gesture earned me cheers from the crowd.
There. Overripe berries turned into delicious pie. Something nearly ruined made right again.
Next to me, a herald blew his spiral shell again, releasing a blast of sound before speaking through it. “Welcome to the tournament!” he shouted into the shell. “Today, the bravest among you will begin a quest for Queen Avia’s hand!”
I waved, but the announcement spurred the protesters again.
Insults floated up from the crowd and pummeled my ears, crashing down on me like massive waves.
More and more voices took up the chant, “Renounce the throne, earth walker!”
Sahar’s hand came to my arm in a public show of solidarity. “Don’t listen, Your Majesty.” I turned to look at her, and she dropped my hand like she’d burned herself.
I didn’t care that she’d touched me. But she was wrong in her advice. “Of course I must listen to them. I am an outsider. They have no idea what to expect of me. It’s natural they’re upset.” I kept my false smile and tried to appear calm, stay diplomatic. I didn’t say that they were right to suspect me and my intentions, though they were. If only they realized that this little tournament was just chumming the water so that I could sink my teeth into one of the men.
Instead, I turned to my herald and extended my palm. Despite our “separate” balconies, he was only five feet to my right. “May I use your shell please?”
