Just before Dilys ducked through the door to head down to the fjord, he saw the Winter King emerge from the room with his slight, very pregnant queen clutched in his arms. He was shouting for the royal healer, Tildavera Greenleaf.
Dilys turned away and headed for the fjord at a dead run. He ran for the same reason Wynter had run. Because his woman needed him.
No. No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t run for her need—although he would, without question. He ran for his own. Not because she needed him, but because he needed her. Because the slightest threat to her safety made his blood turn to ice and his heart pound so hard it nearly burst from his chest.
He didn’t bother running all the way down to the water’s edge. He dove from the garden terrace. For a long stretch of seconds, he soared, weightless, a diving seabird. Then his body pierced the sea like a sharp spear, and he was soaring again, but this time in the denser, still weightless world of the ocean.
Power roared up inside him. He pulsed it out. A beacon of awareness, of searching, that raced with electric speed from one tiny molecule of water to the next.
The pulse filled the breadth and width of the fjord in an instant then kept going.
As it went, he sent out a second, slower but stronger pulse of power.
If the first pulse had been the crack of an electric whip, a bolt of lightning leaping though the cells of the sea, this pulse was the rolling heave of some great colossus shrugging beneath the mantle of the earth. It rolled out of him like a tsunami, a wave of immense power shifting entire oceans as it went.
Every Calbernan was born with a seagift. All Calbernans could manipulate waves and currents to some extent. Even in the doldrums near the equator of Mystral, no Calbernan ship ever stalled, not even when the sea was still as glass and the sails hung dead-straight from the masts. Most Calbernan Houses could commune with one or more of the myriad species that dwelled in the oceans as well.
Dilys of House Merimydion could commune with them all.
Every creature, from the tiniest amoeba to the largest whale, to the wild, cold-blooded beast, the kracken, that great, deadly dragon of the sea that dwelled in the darkest abysses of the ocean.
As he floated, weightless, in the water of the fjord, sending his power out into the sea, the golden trident on Dilys’s left wrist glowed sun bright.
“This is my mate,” that second pulse called, carrying with it a vivid, sensory image of Gabriella that shared every sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch of her that Dilys knew. “Find her. Find the ones who took her. Show me the way.”
Two hours later, Dilys stood at the helm of his ship, theKracken,as it sailed out of Konumarr’s harbor and down the Llaskroner Fjord towards open ocean. Ari’sOrcaand Ryll’sNarwhalfollowed in his wake, along with the remaining three ships from Dilys’s fleet.
He’d found his missing men—Synan and all nine others—at the bottom of Llaskroner Fjord, wrapped in sailcloth and weighted down with lead ballast. Dilys expected to find them drowned, their foreheads branded with the symbol of the Shark, but if they’d died at the hands of Dilys’s greatest foe, thekrillohadn’t had time for his usual torture. Instead, Synan and his men’s throats had been slit and the right half of their faces, including their ears and a goodly portion of their scalps, had been sliced away. The grim finding helped put an end to any remaining suspicion that Dilys or his men were behind the abductions.
He’d also found a trail to follow. In response to his inquiries, the inhabitants of Llaskroner Fjord had shared with him images of a ship that had sailed into the harbor under cover of fog. The same ship had dumped the bodies of Dilys’s men overboard as they departed. No doubt to cast suspicion for the abduction on Dilys and his men, a ploy that might have worked had not Dilys returned as soon as he had.
As it was, however, whomever had created the fog had been complacent in thinking Dilys was away from Konumarr, because while the fog prevented any pursuers from seeing or identifying the ship above the surface of the water, those precautions did not extend to the eyes below the water. And while most nonmammalian sea life didn’t have particularly long memories or a particularly accurate sense of time, Dilys’s swift return to Konumarr had enabled him to extract from the Llaskroner’s many small, marine minds enough detail to piece together a reasonably specific description of the ship’s keel. He’d sent that description out to pods of whales, seals, and dolphins and asked them to help him locate the ship he was seeking.
So far, none of the hunters had reported a live sighting of the ship, but he had received multiple reports of a mysterious, fast-moving fog bank that had traveled west across the Varyan several days ago.
Dilys had traded hisshuma,belt, and bands for the Calbernan version of armor: the blue-green loincloth lined with rings of hardened steel; the protective chest, arm, and shin guards; and the thick leather belt that strapped two sheathed swords to his waist. His trident was belowdecks, hanging on the wall of his cabin along with his shield. The twelve White Guards Wynter had assigned to Dilys’s ship were just coming back above decks after stowing their gear in the bunks below.
He regarded their plate-steel armor with distaste.
“You and your men should lose that armor,” he told the Winterman, a commander of the White Guard named Klars Friis. “Plain furs are better than that.”
“Oh?” Friis arched a white brow.
“Tey.If the ship goes down, my men and I can swim in our armor. You White Guards will drown in yours.”
The Winterman paled a bit beneath his golden skin. “You expect this ship to sink?”
“Expect? No. But ships do on occasion sink—especially in battle. And given that whoever took the Seasons has powerful magic at their call”—it took powerful magic indeed to hide a ship on the water from Calbernan eyes—“you can be sure there will be a battle. A fierce one, I expect. Exchanging your armor for something that won’t take you straight to the bottom of the ocean seems a wise precaution.”
Friis blinked, then said gruffly, “I’ll speak to my men.”
Dilys nodded curtly. Off the port bow, a large blue-and-white whale leapt out of the water. Massive flippers slapped the air as the whale’s body twisted. The creature slammed down on the surface of the water with a mighty splash.
Dilys turned the helm over to his second mate and walked to the port railing. He held a hand out over the sea. A spout of water rose up from the waves below and engulfed his hand, connecting him to the ocean and all the creatures in it.
Then he could hear the whale song repeating the tonal cries that had traveled through hundreds of miles of ocean from distant pods to the blueback whale that had just breached beside theKrackento get Dilys’s attention.
They had located the ship carrying the Seasons. It was already a thousand miles away. Whatever magic these pirates had at their call, it was damned powerful. Even among Calbernans, summoning an ocean current to speed a boat along that fast was a gift limited to those of royal blood.
