Page 26 of Waves
Briefly, I wondered what my undead soldiers would make of this holiday. I’d have to look for them later. Sahar waved goodbye as she went off to get herself ready. Then Gita’s magical painting skills took over.
Purple and blue shadows lined the edges of my face before she patterned my forehead and cheeks with green scales.My nose and lips became skeletal outlines created by purple shadows with white teeth upon the gaping jawline she’d created over my lips. After all of that, she adhered little jewels to my forehead, the apples of my cheeks, and along each of the painted teeth.
Staring into the mirror, I was awed by her artistry. I was wretchedly beautiful, obsessed with my own reflection as she fashioned my hair into giant buns that resembled bubbles. After she finished the buns, she added pearls suspended on pins to complete the bubble look.
Instead of simply sliding a skirt onto me, Gita presented me with a bodysuit that mirrored the painting she’d done on my face. The fabric gave the illusion of a skeleton with bones in white surrounded by purple shadows. A green scaled skirt that resembled a mer tail finished off the ensemble.
I couldn’t stop staring as I tilted my head in all directions and lifted and lowered my hands. “Gita, you’ve outdone yourself.” While I didn’t appear dead or mer in the literal sense, she’d somehow embodied both, but made them beautiful.
Her grin was smug. “I know.”
“When you marry Humberto, you’re still not allowed to quit,” I warned her with a wag of my finger.
My maid smacked my arm before realizing what she’d done. Horror filled her expression as her hands flew to her cheeks. “Oh?—”
I cut off her apology with a laugh. “I mean it. No quitting. Now, go get yourself ready.”
She scurried off with a series of mortified mumbled apologies trailing behind her as I met up with Sahar. My adviser wore a massive black cloak with a hood stretched around a frame so that it encircled her head like a haloed shadow. Two white stripes lined either side of the hood. Her entire body had been covered in a black shimmering substance, only her eyesremained golden, an effect on them that was rather like a raccoon.
“What are you?” I asked as we walked down the hall.
“Orca spirit,” she replied.
“Clever.”
“Now, Kremos, with their burial practices, takes Banishment more seriously than most. They want to respect the dead and include them, but they don’t want their spirits cluttering up their living spaces.”
“Just their decomposing bodies.”
“Traditions don’t make sense. They’re a bouquet of ancient beliefs and random traditions bound together over the years. But they are what they are, and people cling to them. People love to know that they’re repeating something that’s been done thousands of times for thousands of years. Gives them a sense of connection.”
I nodded, remembering for a moment how all Gela’s husbands in Evaness dove into the sea to follow her into death. Stupidity and loyalty rolled into a single ceremony that left my chest feeling bruised. Even though they had betrayed me, though my childhood was a lie, I still loved them. And still believed they’d come to love me.
How betrayal and love could coexist, I wasn’t certain. But they could. Just as surely as death and beauty—as evidenced by my current costume. Life was a tangle of contradictions.
As I followed Sahar out of the mayor’s house, I was lost in thought. In memory. So much so that at first, I missed the winking lights.
While the bridges were always dotted with lights, tonight, a strange path of blinking stars led around the side of the mountain, away from all the structures of the town. People swam ahead of us, most in extravagant costumes in bright colors, following the path created by those stars.
And I focused on the people at first, taking in the sight of a dozen ghostly blue jellyfish outfits, several sirens who had coated themselves in rust and barnacles and resembled aged bronze statues from above, three people swimming in synchronized perfection, holding a skeletal whale puppet that surrounded them in a cage of bones. I’d thought that Okeanos and its costume balls had been impressive, but that was before I’d seen the lengths that the underwater community went to for Banishment.
That’s why I didn’t notice the angler fish until I’d almost swam into it. A scream rippled up my throat when I almost smashed into the body behind the glowing little star. I swallowed hard and used the frantic, fearful energy to flicker my wings so that I swam backward a few feet. My hands clutched at my chest as my eyes took in the thing’s ghastly face, tiny eyes, and massive mouth full of jagged teeth.
“Oh, yes, I forgot to mention them. People catch and set out angler fish in order to scare away any lingering spirits,” Sahar said bemusedly.
My eyes glanced around at the path that I’d thought was made of beautiful magicked starlight. This time, I was able to make out the small shadows of each ugly little fish just behind the light.
“Well. They certainly do a good job. My spirit nearly left my body just now.” I gaped down at the bobbing monster, hand on my chest to calm the pounding of my phantom heart.
With a chuckle, she gestured ahead of us, where the crowd was gathering in the darkness. “Come on then. Let’s go. It’s nearly time for the shelling.”
I had no chance to ask what she meant because the competitors descended upon us then and I got to see all of them decked out to the nines in haunting finery. Mateo was, ironically, dressed as a drowned sailor, though his silver tail whipped backand forth underneath the ragged and rotting outfit he wore. His face, like mine, was artfully skeletal.
Valdez had chosen to become a possessed dolphin; his eyes somehow magicked a glowing red for the evening and lined with kohl. A dolphin-shaped cape flowed around him, constructed to rise into a peak at his back and then split into a tail. His pink hair was slicked straight up in a fashion that would have been wild and unkempt on anyone but him. The fact that he still looked so utterly attractive when he also looked a bit evil was not lost on me. And when he kicked up one corner of his mouth in a grin, my wings fluttered girlishly.
Humberto was completely painted pale green. “I’m a full ghost,” he announced when I raised a brow.
“Be careful people don’t try to banish you then,” I told him.
