I hate liars.
Ihate being powerless.Ihate the threat of death. More than anything, I’m really fucking sick of losing my mermaid. So I lie.
“We were swimming.”
Amaya’s boots slam onto the floor, and she grips the armrests of her chair with white knuckles. Lightning flickers out from her hands, then descends on me with wicked speed. Good thing I was waiting for it.
I raise my hands high overhead, letting the electricity strike—and burn straight through my poisoned ropes.
The second they fall from my wrists, my magic surges forth. I deflect the rest of the lightning with a simple wind as the princess leaps to her feet and hail the size of her precious coins cascades from the storm clouds. My wings beat them away. Piece by piece by piece.
“You can try and kill me, warlock”—the princess snatches three blades and wields them between her knuckles like claws—“but youwon’tsurvive the rest of the ship. It’s teeming with guards and soldiers. They’ll slice up your merrow before you can flee this cabin, and then they’ll slice you navel to nose. We are in Tempest territory, Warlock Arion Stone. You can’t save yourself here.”
I glare at her. Magic twitches on my palm. She’s only partly right—we’d be able to survive the ship, but we’d be lost afterward.Tempestas controls the weather from the sky over his small continent, and if one of his direct descendants dies in a bloody fight beneath him, there’s no telling what the god will do. This isn’t Mortem—ripped apart and banished to the Fathoms. It’s not the merrow goddess either; the forgotten lore of monsters. Tempestas’s tornados whirl across the walls. His storms beat down on the stone roofs of a thousand homes.
Which means evenifexpending the magic necessary to explode this ship wouldn’t kill me on the spot, Tempestas fucking would.
Gavriall understands this, possibly faster than I do, because he climbs off the bed and brushes a still-trembling hand through his shoulder-length hair. “Why—why are you in the skies, then?” he asks. “If you’re the princess, why are you up here playing captain instead of sipping tea in the palace?”
Amaya catches hail in her hand and crushes it in her fist. “Why is Mortia’s strongest warlock in our territory, fraternizing with the enemy of all humankind?” Ice shards dust a blue woolen rug, and she grounds them further beneath the heel of her boot. “Are you truly prepared to try and assassinate a foreign princess, Stone?” Yellow veins flicker inside her eyes, and her hair falls from her previously messy bun as the wind in the room whips faster. Faster.
“Yes.” The silvered cord shimmers white. I try to reach Zephyra through it, to tell her to escape, tofight, but nothing returns through the bond. Not a thought or feeling, not even a color. Zephyra is still knocked out cold. She won’t be awake to learn of her fate—for better or worse.
Princess Amaya Frost levitates on a swift wind, her plum-purple dress billowing at her thighs, her weapons belt rattling. Her gaze darkens from gray to charcoal, lightning still crackling in her irises. “Mors est velox; Fathoms non est,” she murmurs, the divine language ancient as time itself.
The skull repeats the message in the modern tongue, “Death is swift; the Fathoms are not. Fight, dear child. Fight and win. Bring glory to us all.”
Gavriall marches straight up to the skull and turns her around, barely avoiding getting his fingers chomped off.
“Young man,” the skull admonishes, “die, die die.”
“That’s not even a rhyme!” Gavriall swipes at the mounds of treasure, forcing the princess’s attention onto him. I assume he’s stalling for time, buying me a moment to murder her quickly, until he says, “Tempest is a kingdom known for its million resources.”
He snatches up a coin, another and another, flicking them between his fingers with the dexterity of a practiced gambler. “You have hoards of gold, silver, bronze, gemstones, crystals, minerals, and more. Is that right?” He glances at the princess, raising an inquisitive brow, challenging her to state otherwise. “The thing is—Tempest is a small continent, roughly the size of Mortia’s coast and capital. It was desolate forone hundred yearspost-Mortem. That was the reason for your trade agreement with Mortia. They shipped you food and goods that you couldn’t produce yourselves.”
Graceful as a feline, Amaya stalks forward. She brandishes those claws like a feral panther. “Who are you? I wish to know your name before I splatter your blood.”
“I can see where you’ve inherited your feminine wiles,” Gavriall says with a vague gesture toward the skull, “but I’m not insulting you. I’m reasoning with you.”
“You’ve the charisma of a doorknob,” Amaya says.
Gavriall retreats a step, watching the lightning continue to crackle in her gaze. “Possibly, but I’m also right. Tempest broke their agreement with Mortia the day they tried to secretly claim the shore-palace for their own. The day a certain warlock… removed the threat.”
“Killedmy people,” Amaya snarls.
I step between them, instantly understanding Gavriall’s point. “Tempest hoards are dried-up.” My gaze locks on to hers. “You’re not partaking in some kind of royal vacation in the skies—you’retreasure hunting.”
“Yes.” Gavriall shakes his bound hands, trying to loosen the ropes. “They’re treasure hunters, led by a semidivine huntress.” He glances at me from his periphery. “And you really could’ve given me my moment. I figured it out first.”
I glare at the cloud-covered ceiling. “I figured out she was the princess first.”
“I woke up first,” he argues. Then he pauses and sniffs, looking away quickly when I catch his eye. “I simply wanted to snuggle for a moment.”
The floor throttles with thunder—both Amaya’s and my own. Our frustrations mix, and the air smells like char and rust. The princess searches my gaze, her power thick and heavy. I should run her through with a glass sword before she can slit my throat. That would be the smart move. A soldier’s move. However, she blinks, and the lightning dissipates in her eyes.
She tosses her blades onto the table. “I did not take you to seek vengeance, Warlock Stone. We found you in the waters after receiving word from another ship of a devastation in the Greenwood Isles. They said the land was dried-up and the people were dead. Each person had been drained of life, body parts gnawed off and intestines strewn across ash. They said a winged warlock lay at the center of a massacre.” She sweeps her hair away from her face, twisting it into a bun and impaling the knot with a peacock-feather quill. “It was you.”
“We didn’t kill anyone,” I growl.
