Page 65 of Depths
20
Always have a scapegoat ready. The people require a blood sacrifice.
—Sultan Raj of Cheryn
* * *
I flew outof the corridor with fear pulsing in my ears as loudly as the screams that filled the arena. I emerged in open water where the sea was lit by a merry sun, and the water might have been light and bright if it weren’t filled with mud and blood.
Sard.
My eyes found the other side of the arena where the crowd still ran for the exits. The coral rainbow stands had fallen in right above one of the competitor’s entrance tunnels. The stands had sunken in; some people were still trapped among the rubble. The entrance tunnel itself was completely filled in with boulders.
Dismay whipped me raw as my hand flew to my chest. “Tell me someone wasn’t in there. Tell me they were between matches,” I ordered Felipe and Ugo.
But my guards didn’t respond. They didn’t know. They couldn’t. Both of their faces reflected the shocked horror I felt.
To one side, the protestors who’d been carrying banners with Forsake the Crown were shouting, their anger as sharp as spears. Of course, the arena collapsing had to be my fault. Another stick in the pyre they were building for me.
Sard them! Couldn’t they see people were hurt? Why weren’t they helping?
I flickered my wings and kicked my legs, swimming hard through the muddy water, which was still soiled from the collapse, not caring how the particles clung to my skin or the waves fought against me and slowed me down to a pathetic crawl. The shouts and crying got louder as I approached, and my stomach sank beneath the ocean floor to hear them.
I emerged from the cloud of mud to see several of my soldiers, most of the competitors for my hand, and a few burly merman citizens dutifully shifting the coral. Gah! Close up it looked even worse. It looked like a mountain had collapsed. From the highest row to the bottom, an entire section of the stands as thick as the blue whale we’d ridden into the city had just crumbled.
I swam toward the nearest person I saw trapped, a siren woman whose leg was stuck. I reached for the boulder pinning her, and Ugo called out, “Majesty!” in a shocked tone.
“Shut up and help!” My manners had fled. Nothing else mattered in this moment but getting these people to safety. I shoved fruitlessly at the purple boulder, but it was nearly half my size.
A warm hand touched my shoulder, and Felipe gently said, “Let Ugo and me get it.”
I grimaced but moved aside, cursing my uselessness. I’d seen Mayi form ice spears, watched her lift all the water in my cave, leaving me suffocating in the air at the bottom of the cave, helpless and gasping, until finally she let all the water crash down on me at once, slamming into me with a pressure so intense I’d been certain I’d die. This time, the memory didn’t bring with it the normal bout of turmoil and emotion. I simply thought,All that power. And I can’t even move a stupid stone.
I watched dully as my guards carefully lifted the stone enough for the woman to drag herself backward. Then they let it fall again, it was too heavy to keep aloft for long. As they picked the woman up and carried her over to several others laid out along the benches at varying heights, my eyes took in more of the scene.
My mages and random strangers worked together, tending to those who bled. Several tournament competitors were helping. I saw Mateo, Watkins, Valdez, Stavros, and Humberto in the crowd along with others. I noticed Julian helping one man with a dislocated shoulder. The man’s scream when Julian wrenched his arm back into place made a shudder run down my spine, and I pulled my eyes up and away from the pair. Near the top of the arena, one of my mages held a snarling shark shifter at bay with a magical green shield. The shifter’s tail already turned shark, his teeth long daggers. The blood in the water had clearly riled him up.
Shite. We were lucky there weren’t more.
My eyes drifted away from him—the mage seemed to have it under control—and back to the entrance. Or where the entrance had once been. The highest peak of the rubble seemed to be right there. On that very spot. That was odd, unless the collapse had caused a miniature avalanche and rocks had rolled down to pile just there.
Mayor Deacon noticed me as he assisted a siren hobbling on one leg to a seat. He gestured for a mage healer before he swam over to me. His face had turned into blotches of rainbow to match the muddled rockfall behind us. Despite his bright colors, his expression was somber.
“What happened?” I asked softly.
He shook his head. “Uncertain. But I know I had my people check this arena three times before your arrival.”
My throat tightened, and I could predict what he was about to say before he said it.
“I don’t think it was an accident.”
Self-loathing roared at me. Logic shouted. My stomach ached just like it had in the cave with Mayi after she had slowly stabbed me with ice only to magically heal me. Black specks danced in my vision because I knew, immediately, what had happened. “Protestors.”
Deacon’s nod was slow and steady—the opposite of my internal rant.
I should have halted everything after that attack on the road. I should have done more than question Watkins. I shouldn’t have operated on the assumption that they’d attacked for gold because it was easy, or because no huge contingent of knights or soldiers would chase them through the open plains.
What a fool.
