As he swam, Dilys sent calls to every large sea creature within twenty miles of Nemuan’s ship, ordering them to pursue the vessel and do everything in their power to slow it down.
It wasn’t long before Nemuan’s ship began to falter. Dilys’s waves were churning the waters, disrupting currents and turning the entrance to the Kuinana into an impassible, frothing white explosion of huge, crashing waves. Whales and dolphins were harrying Nemuan’s ship, slamming against the hull to slow its speed. Nemuan’s crew had begun harpooning everything in sight, turning the sea around the ship bloodred.
TheKrackenhad caught up with him. Dilys rode a spout of water back aboard deck as he and the rest of his fleet closed in around the foundering vessel.
“It’s over!” Dilys shouted, pitching his voice so that it could easily be heard by Nemuan’s acute Calbernan ears despite the distance between them and the turbulence around his ship. “You have nowhere to go! Heave to and prepare to be boarded. Surrender the Seasons!”
Dilys calmed the waves and called off the attacking whales and dolphins as the Calbernan fleet closed in. TheDancing Ray,one of the shallowest-keeled vessels in his fleet, came abreast of the foundering ship and used grappling hooks to tether her in preparation for boarding.
Seconds later, there was a burst of powerful magic and the ship Dilys had chased halfway across Mystral exploded in a fiery ball, raining fire and molten shrapnel upon every ship in a two-hundred-yard radius.
For one stunned, horrifying moment, Dilys couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. He could only stare in mute horror at the fiery inferno that had been Nemuan’s ship. Then the shout of one of his crew brought him snapping back into himself.
“Gabriella!” Dilys howled her name and dove over the side of theKracken.He pierced the water deeply and began swimming with desperate speed towards the burning wreckage.
The sea was aflame with a dreadful, unnatural fire. Heat scorched him when he surfaced, turned the tropical ocean’s sparkling blue waters into a hellish red-orange sea when he dove. The shattered hulk of the pirate’s ship lurched drunkenly on the fiery waves.
“Gabriella!” he howled her name again. Shrieked it.
There were men in the water, screaming and thrashing as the unquenchable flames stuck to their bodies and consumed their flesh. The water did not douse the flames. Instead, it almost seemed to feed them. Some of the burning men were pirates. But most were Calbernans. Sailors from theDancing Ray.
He ignored them, his mind utterly possessed by the driving need to find Gabriella and save her. Nothing else mattered. Not even the agony of friends and countrymen burning alive in a flaming sea.
He summoned a spout of water, riding it up towards the broken shards of the ship’s deck. “Gabriella!” he shouted. The whole craft was engulfed in fire, hardly an inch untouched by the hungry, licking flames. No place for him to stand, no way for him to search for her. Even here, beside the burning craft, the heat was so intense the water beneath his feet was starting to boil. Some distant part of his mind was aware that his own flesh was cooking, both from the scalding water bubbling at his feet and the fiery inferno burning before him, but he kept searching, kept screaming her name.
Something exploded nearby. Flaming debris struck his arm and flung him backwards into the sea. He surfaced quickly, aware of a sharp, searing bite of heat and pain. His arm was on fire, and his swift plunge into the sea hadn’t doused it. He slapped at the flames with a bare hand, and cursed as fire spread to his palm as well. The fire was like burning pitch. Sticking to whatever touched it. He slammed his burning hand back over the burning patch on his arm and held fast, hoping to smother what water couldn’t put out.
“Gabriella!” he screamed again. And despite the futility of it, too mad with horror and grief to admit that no one could still be alive in the fiery inferno, he swam again towards the burning wreckage.
“Dilys!” A small rowboat bobbed in the waves nearby. Ari was leaning over the prow. The tang of sea magic surrounded the small craft and its crew, a fresh scent wafting beneath the acrid smoke and stench of burning wood and flesh. They were using their seagifts to keep the fire away from their boat. “Get the Hel out of there!”
He ignored them and dove towards the fiery, sinking ship. Even here, beneath the waves, the fire was still burning, the heat overwhelming, but Dilys dove towards the shattered, sinking, flame-engulfed ship, no thought in his mind except the need to get to Gabriella. To find her. To save her.
Hands grabbed him from behind. He fought them, claws out, fangs snapping, roaring and thrashing, screaming her name. “Gabriella! Gabriella!”
Something hard smashed into the side of his head.
Before the magical, inextinguishable fire finally died away, seven ships of the Calbernan fleet were sunk. More than two hundred Calbernans were dead or missing. TheKrackenand its crew had nearly been among them, until they discovered they could smother the fire by dousing it with sand.
After the flames finally died down, the grim business of recovering bodies began. Ari and Ryll had arrived with the rest of the fleet, and they, too, joined in the search. They searched throughout the rest of the day and on into the night, using the glow of theirulumiand the senses of the ocean’s denizens to penetrate the darkness of the night-shrouded ocean.
A few hours before dawn, the Calbernans searching the wreckage made a chilling discovery: the remains of two women burned beyond recognition and torn apart so violently by the explosion, it was hard to identify all the pieces. But two parts were easy to distinguish. One was an arm, the other a charred, ravaged bit of once delicate skin—both bearing the distinctive raised birthmark shaped like a rose.
They had found the Seasons of Summerlea.
“No.” Bereft, hollowed out as if his heart and every organ in his body had been ripped from his chest, Dilys stared at the gruesome remains, all that was left of two daughters of the Summer King. He refused to believe the truth before his eyes. “It isn’t her. She isn’t dead. She can’t be. I would know if she were dead!” But would he? She’d never claimed him. Their bond wasn’t complete.
“Dilys.” Bleak-eyed, wan beneath his sun-bronzed Calbernan skin, Ari started to reach for Dilys’s shoulder, only to let his hand fall away. There could be no condolence, no assuaging of grief. Not for this.
Helpless to lessen their cousin’s pain, both Ari and Ryll regarded him with agonizing sympathy.
“It isn’t her,” Dilys said again. “It can’t be her.” Numahao could not be so cruel. To take not one but twolianasfrom a man in one lifetime. To strip him of all those closest to his heart. Surely not.
But the raised rose birthmarks on those charred bits of flesh made a mockery of his protests.
Numahaocouldbe so cruel. He was living proof of that.
“Why?Why?” His voice was hoarse, shredding as the words scraped through a too tight throat. His claws dug deep furrows into the planking of theKracken’s deck. “I couldn’t save my father. I couldn’t save Nyamialine. I couldn’t keep Fyerin safe. And now G-Gabr—” His voice broke. He couldn’t say her name. Couldn’t add it to the list of his beloved dead.
