Chapter Twelve
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The sun was quite low in the sky by the time Jaykun and Dremu reached the cove and it was making Jaykun nervous.
There was no way, he thought, that they would make it to Serenity in the hour before dusk and also be able to find a safe place for his curse to come upon him.
The island was just too far, and given the wind of the moment, they wouldn’t travel fast enough.
The last thing he needed was to be on a wooden ship when the curse struck.
It would immediately be burned to cinders and ash.
He would simply have to tell Jileana that they could not leave until after juquil’s hour. She would not like it—for some reason she was in a desperate hurry—but there was nothing to be done about it.
As they approached the cove, he peered out over the water in search of a ship. There were none to be found anywhere on the horizon. No dingy was rowed in and waiting for them. All he could see were the rocks of the jetty and a colony of seals and morari sunning themselves atop them.
As he entered the cove, he saw Jileana standing there waiting.
She was completely naked, holding her dress folded in her hands.
Jaykun sucked in his breath at the sight of her.
He had truly never seen anything so beautiful in his life.
Her skin was warm and dark, her long hair streaming down her back in a silky black cape.
He balked at her nudity, however, in front of this other man.
He walked up to her, shielding her from the servant.
But luckily for him the boy had averted his gaze and was nervously trying not to look at her.
Good, he thought. He didn’t want this Dremu to look at her.
He didn’t want anyone to look at her when she was like this.
But she walked around his shielding body and presented her dress to the boy. “Put this in the trunk as well,” she said.
Dremu hastened to do as she asked, dropping the trunk on the sand, opening it, and shoving the dress inside.
“You are not going like this, are you?” Jaykun demanded.
“We do not wear much in the way of clothing in Serenity. It is too confining and drags us down. You may want to remove your clothing as well.”
“I will not! I’m not going to present myself naked in a foreign court!”
“As you wish,” she said simply. “Dremu?”
“N-no, my lady. I-I am fine like this.”
“Very well, then,” she said breezily before Jaykun could work himself up over her inviting a servant to get naked with her. “Let’s go!”
Then she ran into the water.
Jaykun just stood there and stared after her, at a total loss. Where in the eight hells was she going? Did she expect them to swim all the way to Serenity?
“Come on!” she called out gaily.
“Jileana, what in the eight hells are you doing?!” Jaykun shouted out to her.
“It’s here. Under the jetty. Come on!”
Under the jetty? Jaykun wasn’t sure he had heard her right. But sure enough, she dived downward.
That was when he began to realize there was a lot more to this than had been immediately apparent to him.
Things began to click: Finding her naked on the beach.
The way she had said he couldn’t get to Serenity by ship.
The way she had treated everything like a new and wondrous experience …
as if she had never experienced the world before.
The fact that there had always seemed to be something a little … otherworldly about her.
He suddenly began to strip down, disrobing faster than he ever had before in his life, throwing his clothing and boots at the hapless servant, who stood quivering at the water’s edge with his trunk.
The instant Jaykun was naked, his heart racing with a combination of fear and excitement, he plunged into the water and chased after her.
When he reached the place where she had dived down, she popped back up, her hair slicked back and a laughing smile on her face.
The water was cold but not frigid and he felt very exposed being naked with her.
“What are you?” he demanded of her.
She smiled again. “The Krizans call us prava. But that is a derogatory name. You would probably call us selkies. These are all my people.” She indicated the seals diving from on the rocks, entering the water and swimming down beneath the jetty. “Look. See?”
She dived under the water and he watched as she swam around him, her long woman’s body suddenly changing shape into that of a sleek seal. She surfaced again croaking out a happy sound, dived back under the water, circled him again, then came up as the woman he had come to know.
“Beneath the water, built into the jetty, is the portal to my home. To Serenity. You have to swim down and through it. Come on, Dremu!” she shouted out.
Dremu stood uncertainly at the water’s edge, holding the trunk in his quaking hands.
“B-but the trunk, my lady!”
“It will be as nothing in the water,” she said.
Then she lifted a hand, rotated it in a circular motion, and the trunk became light as a feather in Dremu’s hands.
Stunned by this magic, and swept along in the current his life had been caught up in, he found himself splashing into the water.
He had to follow. He had to. He was finally going on an adventure, an adventure no one else would ever be able to lay claim to.
His adventure. It was an amazing thing … It was better than gold.
Jileana waited until Dremu and the trunk had joined them.
“You will be able to see the portal straight away. It glows. Just follow me through it!”
She dived down and the men had only two choices: follow or go back to shore. Of course, each for their own reasons, they chose to follow her.
Jaykun felt as though his life had suddenly become completely surreal.
He should really give this some thought.
He shouldn’t merely jump in without thinking of the consequences.
But, he realized, that was exactly what he had been doing ever since he first met Jileana.
Jumping in with both feet and letting himself be swept away with hardly a thought to the consequences.
It was probably because his life was so written out for him already.
He had a role to play and no choice but to play it.
He was slave to the whims of a goddess. At least in this small thing he was able to make a free choice, to choose to go or not to go.
Oh, he had cloaked it in the cape of diplomacy, telling himself it was still in Weysa’s best interest, but in the end …
in the end, it had been about what he wanted.
And what he wanted was her: Jileana. He didn’t know how long he wanted her, but he wanted her now to the exclusion of all else.
He gave the briefest thought to his brothers. But he pushed that concern aside as well and dived down beneath the blue waters.
The water was not crystal clear, not like he had seen in his travels along the southern continents, but it was still clear enough for him to make her out as her sleek body dived down and swam along the rocks.
The rocks turned to coral almost immediately as they swam downward, and it was only a short distance before he made out the glow of the portal.
Excitement coursing through every last one of his veins, he swam down along the peach-and-russet-colored coral, swam through a school of little fishes, and then came to a halt in front of an archway of rock and coral that glowed blue along its edges, each end of the arch rooted in sand on the ocean floor.
As he watched, several seals swam through the portal, disappearing in a bright flash of light.
He could see them swimming away on the other side.
In fact, on the other side the water was a completely different color.
Or rather, it was much clearer. The coral was a different color as well.
It was red and tan. Schools of brilliantly colored fish were darting around, disappearing from view when they should have just been showing up around the other side of the archway.
Jaykun was curious as to what the portal looked like from the back, but he had been holding his breath for quite a while and his lungs were beginning to ache.
True, he could not die from drowning, but it would not be a pleasant sensation to drown over and over again. Besides, Dremu was not so fortunate.
Almost without thought for them, Jileana swam through the portal in a brilliant flash. Then she stopped and waved them onward. Figuring he had only two choices, to go forward or to go back, he decided to go where the most appeal lay. He swam through the portal.
It was the strangest sensation … almost like touching lightning.
Only not as violent as he imagined that would be.
Also, the temperature in the water was radically different from one side of the archway to the other.
It was much warmer on this side. The moment he crossed through, he saw Jileana dart upward, her body moving so fast it was amazing.
He followed her readily, very much in need of taking a breath.
He only spared a glance backward to see the servant swimming through the archway, the trunk dragging behind him in one hand.
Everything within it should be wet, ruined, and heavy, but the servant was pulling it along as if it weighed nothing at all.
He and Jileana broke the surface of the water together and drew in breath. She waited for Dremu to surface. He did, spluttering and gasping. She laughed with delight.
“You did it! You both made it! Wonderful! Look! There’s Serenmitazahmiktubarinaty! My home!”