The pirate grabbed Dilys’s wrists. His pathetic, frightened whimpers turned to screams as his body started to convulse. The vessels in his eyes began to burst, turning the whites into pools of bloody red. And from his nose and ears, wet, glistening trails of scarlet trickled out.
“You will tell me, now,” Dilys crooned. “You will tell me everything you did to her. You will tell me where she is, and who has her. You will tell me who hired you. You will tell me everything I want to know, and when you obey”—he smiled again, his fangs sharp as a shark’s—“I will give you the death you’ll be begging me for.”
Fifteen minutes later, his body bathed in the remnants of a hot, scarlet mist, Dilys stalked to the stern of the ship to question the rest of the pirate ship crew. Commander Friis, pale beneath his scarlet-painted golden skin and wearing globs of bone and brain matter in his hair, followed close behind. The rest of the Wintermen who had been with Dilys while he questioned the pirate captain were still leaning over the side of the ship, puking their guts up.
He supposed it wasn’t every day they saw a man’s head literally explode.
But then, it wasn’t every day Dilys Commanded every ounce of blood in a man’s body to go rushing into his brain either.
The interrogation hadn’t gone well.
The captain had possessed no useful information about what had happened to the Seasons. He remembered the Seasons being on board. He remembered keeping them drugged and compliant. As to Gabriella’s fate, that was a blank.
The interrogation of the rest of the crew didn’t go any better. No one—not one single man aboard the ship—remembered what had happened to the Seasons or how they had gotten off the ship.
“Gather your men,” Dilys commanded Friis as he finished questioning the last of the pirates, a foul-mouthed bastard who’d tried to push Dilys into giving him a quick death by taunting him with all the depraved atrocities he and the crew had supposedly perpetrated upon the Seasons. “Get everyone back aboard theKracken.We sail within the hour.” He just had to find out where they would be sailing.
“And theReaper?”
Dilys stood and, with one savage swipe of his clawed hand, ripped out the foul-mouthed pirate’s throat, taking the lower half of his jaw with it.
“Leave her,” he spat. He threw the bloody lump of flesh, cartilage, and bone over the side of the ship to the sharks circling below. “She’ll sink soon enough. These worthlesskrilloscan feed the fish—at least that will be one useful thing they’ve done with their miserable lives.”
Friis glanced at the spurting arteries of the dying pirate’s eviscerated throat, and he swallowed hard, visibly shaken by Dilys’s savagery. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“I am not Your Grace,” Dilys corrected him brusquely. Stalking back to the mainmast, where the body of the pirate captain was still pinned, Dilys yanked his trident free. “I amMyerielua.Prince of the Sea.” His men parted before him as he strode to the side of theReaper.Trident in hand, he leapt to the top of the railing and dove into the waves below.
He swam down into the water until the cooling ocean depths drained the worst of the hot rage from his soul. He’d been duped from the start. Duped into taking all his men out of Konumarr and leaving Gabriella unprotected. Duped into following theReaperlong after the princesses had been taken off it. Duped again into wasting countless precious days and diverting his fleet from the Carmines to pursue decoy vessels and a ship full of pirates whose minds had been wiped of almost all useful information.
And he said “almost all” instead of “all,” because everything about this kidnapping—the magical fog, the erasing of minds, and the fact that his sea-dwelling spies had reported no other vessels in the vicinity of theReaperexcept the five decoys—were powerful clues on their own. He just hadn’t been looking at them properly until now.
He’d been reacting. He’d been thinking with his heart, with his fear and his guilt. He’d been a boy again, shocked and shaken by devastating loss. Terrified of losing another person he loved—the one person who mattered even more than all the others. Terrified that he would fail her. That she would be taken from him like his father and Nyamialine and Fyerin.
This time, he set fear and guilt aside. He set all emotion—so strong a part of every Calbernan—aside. This time, when he sent out his call to his eyes in the water, he asked not for what they had seen, but what they had not seen.
Gabriella’s kidnappers—or rather, the individuals who had hired the crew of theReaperto abduct the Seasons—were masking themselves and had been from the start. Just as the crew of theReaperhad used magical fog to hide their presence in the Llaskroner Fjord, the real perpetrators of this crime had been hiding their presence as well, making themselves utterly invisible even to the creatures of the sea.
This time, when calling upon his ocean-borne spies, instead of asking about ships, Dilys asked about water displacement. Places where, in the absence of a tangible ship, the ocean should have been, but wasn’t. Because he was now absolutely certain there was another ship. And even masked, that ship wasn’t sailing on air.
As expected, the denizens of the sea came back with a barrage of information. He filtered through the memories and pieced together a tracking map. He’d been on the wrong track since leaving Konumarr. While he’d been heading west towards Frasia, the “invisible” ship had been heading southwest, towards the Carmines and the Olemas Ocean. And now, thanks to Dilys’s rerouting Calberna’s fleets to cut off the southern-bound decoy, the “invisible” ship had slipped past them and was well west of the Calbernan fleet, with nothing but open sea between it and a clean escape into the Olemas.
Dilys blasted a new order along the seaways, sending the coordinates of his quarry to the captains of the Calbernan fleet, and ordering every ship within five hundred miles to pursue them at the fastest possible speed. He and his four-vessel fleet did the same.
Dilys wasn’t surprised when, within a few hours of his giving that order, the “invisible” ship sped up to a shocking—and very telling—twenty knots.
And that was when a possibility he’d begun to suspect solidified into near certainty.
The initial fog used to mask the kidnapping, the interference with the eyes of the sea, the control and erasing ofoulaniminds, the obvious interception of the message he’d sent to the Calbernan navy, and the incredible speed of the escaping ship: taken altogether, the clues led Dilys to believe that whoever was on that ship—whoever had orchestrated the abduction of the Seasons of Summerlea—wasn’t using a series of expensive but purchasable magic spells, but rather a Calbernan seagift.
AroyalCalbernan seagift.
As to who that person could be... well, the list was short enough to count on one hand. Someone had drawn Dilys and all the Calbernans out of Konumarr so the pirates could sail in, undetected, to steal the princesses. And by disposing of Dilys’s men at the bottom of the deep fjord—a place no Winterfolk would ever have found them—the kidnappers had specifically intended to cast suspicion on House Merimydion—and Dilys, in particular, since it was his potentiallianaswho had been taken. Couple the clues together with a personal grudge against Dilys and an extraordinarily strong seagift, and one name, in particular, leapt to mind.
Inside his mind, Dilys’s hand curled around that name like a fist, grinding its bones, crushing it to dust.
Nemuan.
The name of Gabriella’s new captor was Solish Utua, and he was a purveyor of human treasures for the warlord king Minush Oroto. Solish, who was a eunuch, made it clear that his only interest in Summer was in training her to become the Most Favored Jewel in Minush’scashima—his pleasure palace—so that Solish could advance to a much more powerful position in his master’s court.
