Silence. Then, curtly, “I will meet you. It will be my pleasure to rip out your heart and feed your body to the sharks.”
“And mine to tear the entrails from your body and turn the ocean red with your blood,” Dilys shot back, “but it won’t be sharks I summon to feast upon your flesh. It will be the kracken.”
A blast of fury shot across the ocean. Dilys smiled coldly and waited for the burst of magic that announced Nemuan’s presence in the water before he began to swim.
As he swam, Dilys monitored his cousin to make sure he was, in fact, headed for the location Dilys had specified. He also tried to anticipate all the ways Nemuan would try to win the advantage. The shadow-stained—those Calbernans, like Nemuan, who were so beset by grief that they’d recorded their anguish on their bodies to be remembered always—never wholly healed from their loss. The pain stayed with them, like the squid ink tattooed into their flesh. It made them a little mad. A lot unpredictable. Quick to anger, and savage when they attacked.
Nemuan planned to fight, but there would be nothing fair about it. The battle would be vicious, brutal, and to the death. Like any predator’s attack.
Dilys had chosen open ocean for their fight, far enough away from either of their respective ships to discourage interference. If any of Nemuan’s men had followed him into the sea, Dilys hadn’t seen signs of them, and he’d kept an eye on every living creature swimming in his same direction.
The waters were clear, visibility high. The flat ocean floor lay one hundred feet below the surface. They were miles away from the cave-riddled reef system as well as the sharp drop-off of Ardul’s continental shelf.
They met fifty feet below the surface. Two Calbernan males in their prime. Lords of the sea. Sunlight filtered down through the water overhead. It played across their bodies, illuminating the iridescence of their blueulumi,making them shimmer. The long ropes of their hair and the drapes of theirshumasfloated lazily about them as they hung there, suspended in the ocean’s liquid embrace.
“Merimynos.” Dilys voiced the greeting not with power, but with the tonal phonemes ofCoa Anu, Undersea Tongue.
“Merimydion.” Nemuan’s lip curled back in a sneer, his teeth flashing blue white in the sunlit waters.
“What happened to you, cousin?” Dilys asked with genuine regret and bafflement. “You were a prince of Calberna, the honorable son of an honorable House. The son of a queen! How could you betray everything? How could you shame your mother’s name this way?”
Nemuan’s battle fangs descended, white and sharp and deadly. “What would you know of honor and honorable Houses,krillo? You, who would foul Calberna’s line of queens with inferioroulaniblood.”
“Inferior?” Dilys laughed without humor. “Mylianais the first Siren returned to us since the Slaughter. You heard her Shout. You know it to be true.”
Nemuan’s lip curled. “I know there are many kinds of magic in the world. Including magic that can make the impossible seem true. But true Sirens are daughters of Numahao, born to the Isles.”
“Is that what you told your men? How you got them to continue this madness of yours even after you all heard what she was?”
“My men live to serve a true queen of the Isles, not someoulanislut.” Nemuan gave a sneering laugh. “Though I have to hand it to you, Merimydion. At first, I thought you’d picked the runt of the litter. I mean, compared to her sisters—especially that Autumn—little blue eyes wouldn’t be my first choice. But then I showed her the joys ofIlilium.Again and again and again. And she was begging me for more. You must be ashotolover, Merimydion.”
For an instant, Dilys saw red and nearly lunged at Nemuan in a blind rage, but at the last second, he saw the triumphant gleam in his cousin’s eyes and realized that was exactly what Nemuan wanted. His cousin was no green boy. He was every inch a warrior of the Isles, just like Dilys. And if Dilys lost control, that gave Nemuan an advantage.
“I know what you did to her, magic eater. Even without all your many other crimes, that alone would have earned you a traitor’s death. But enough of this.” Dilys’s eye flared bright gold, and his power boomed out, filling his sea voice with Command. “Confess your crimes, Nemuan Merimynos, and accept your punishment.”
Nemuan’s body went rigid. The tendons in his neck stood out like ropes pulled tight beneath his skin. His eyes went wide and filled with shock.
Before her death, Siavaluana’s youngest son would have been able to slough off Dilys’s Compulsion with a sneering laugh. Even a few months ago, he might have been able to resist, despite his mother having been dead so many years. The last threeMyerialshad been daughters of House Merimynos, so despite the House’s devastating losses, its surviving sons and daughters still wielded great power. But Dilys now carried in him the most powerful of all Calbernan magics: the gift of a Siren.
Nemuan’s arm shot out and his wrist turned up, baring the small harpoon gun built into his wristband. The small gun fired, shooting a tiny streamlined dart through the water.
Dilys spun to one side and barely managed to avoid the projectile, which he was sure must be poisoned, given its miniature size. By the time he’d recovered and spun back around, Nemuan was racing away, swimming very fast towards the continental shelf. Clearly, he thought to lose himself in the darkness of the ocean’s depths, where the eyes Dilys could access were few and far between.
Putting on a burst of seagift powered speed, Dilys followed.
Even without Gabriella’s gift to aid him, Dilys was—always had been—the faster swimmer. He caught Nemuan a quarter mile from the shelf drop-off and attacked, claws extended and battle fangs bared. They tumbled through the water, limbs flailing, bodies twisting. Teeth and claws flashed as they fought in brutal silence, each struggling for supremacy. Dilys ripped slashes across Nemuan’s chest, tearing hunks of flesh from his arms and legs, but Nemuan, a prince of Calberna, had lacked no training in battle. He managed to get in more than a few strikes of his own.
Blood spilled. Scarlet eddies wound around them like unraveling ribbon.
Nemuan swiped a clawed hand at Dilys’s throat. Dilys felt the sting as his skin split but managed to twist away before Nemuan could slice his jugular. Another quick twist brought Dilys back around, and he raked his own claws deep and hard down Nemuan’s side, ripping through his gill slits and shredding the delicate oxygen-filtering filaments beneath the skin.
Nemuan roared and coughed a mix of blood and water and air. Pressing the advantage, Dilys rammed a fist into the wound and raked the claws of one foot down Nemuan’s thigh, gouging deeply. The sea around them was a mist of red now, and the sharks Nemuan had taken as his namesake began to gather.
Seizing them with his seagift, Nemuan drove three bull sharks towards Dilys. Though Dilys was the better swimmer, Nemuan had always been better at controlling sharks. Dilys spun away, evading the sharp, biting rows of teeth but losing a layer of skin along his calf to the sharp, dermal denticles of the predators’ skin. A swift call on Gabriella’s gifts gave Dilys the edge he needed to briefly override Nemuan’s control and send the rest of the sharks skimming harmlessly past. But even without Nemuan’s control, the blood in the water would keep them coming back and drive them into a frenzy of hunger.
Dilys dove for Nemuan again, driving sharp claws into his cousin’s torn side and ripping out the exposed gill membranes. Nemuan screamed and convulsed in pain. The sharks darted in for a second pass. This time, Dilys grabbed his incapacitated cousin and shoved him towards the sharks’ gaping maws. Only Nemuan’s quick, barked Command saved him from losing a limb to the predators’ snapping jaws.
Dilys locked his cousin in an unyielding grip, one taloned hand poised over Nemuan’s unprotected belly, the other at his throat. “I can do this all day,pulan,” he hissed near Nemuan’s ear. “I’ll feed you to them bite byfarkingbite if I have to.”
