Chapter 15
Sunlight sliced through the shallows in pale ribbons, and Thalos stretched. Lithe and predatory, made lazy in the sparkling warmth.
Floating on his back, arms folded behind his head as his tail traced lazy figure-eights, he drifted into a shaft of sunlight. Fins spreading to catch the heat, warming his opalescent scales until they gleamed.
Satisfied. Venom sacs emptied, and his balls…
A slow smile spread across his lips as the color of a Siren in the throes of orgasm flashed behind his eyelids.
Glorious little monster.
Yet, from below, the complaints had not stopped for the better part of a full tide.
"—an affront to biology itself. The cold alone should have killed the fetus in the first trimester." Listing, Pelagius scraped at the calcified growths edging his jaw with one claw, the sound grating through the current as he complained. "My joints ache. This water is glacial."
Thalos didn't open his eyes. "It's twenty degrees, Pelagius."
"Glacial," Pelagius repeated. "I have served Caelith Mare since the time of Jeiot Asterion, and not once have I—"
"No one cares about your tenure, Pelagius." Vorthane's fins were pressed flat, clamped tight against his spine. "What I want to know is when we're leaving this wretched, poisoned tide."
Syrathis hung motionless several meters below, his skeletal frame barely distinguishable from the murk.
Those milky amber eyes saw nothing, but the sensory barbels trailing from his jaw trembled ceaselessly, tasting every shift in temperature and salinity.
"It is the child that concerns me more than the weather. "
"Everything concerns you more than the weather," Vorthane muttered. Steel-blue scales caught a stray beam of light as the scarred male worked a cluster of sun clams free from a rocky outcrop, depositing them into the woven pouch Thalos had ordered them to fill. "You want to study it."
"Oh, yes. Quite desperately,” Syrathis said, humming a distracted agreement.
Barbles growing stiff, reaching to sample some unseen current, he added, “Two venoms," in a tone that was both wheedling and pitchy.
The sound grating. An irritating itch beneath the scales that refused to be scratched. “Can you imagine?”
Pelagius snorted. "I witnessed it.”
Ignoring him, Syrathis’ fins fanned along his sinuous body. “Competing strains staining a Siren’s womb?” His gills schliicked, the academic glee left to shiver in the current. “The Pelagorn that creature carries will be… singular. A prize Caelith Mare must claim.”
"What emerges," Vorthane corrected, "will be unprecedented. Which, I’ll grant, is far more interesting."
Thalos cracked one polar-blue eye open, watching Vorthane pry another cluster of clams free.
"More," he said simply, lips curving in a tiny hint of amusement. Because the scholars were doing his work for him. Refining arguments he'd already considered, but in finer detail.
Vorthane glanced up. "She's one girl, sovereign. A Siren, not a garrison."
Scales glittering, Thalos flicked his tail in a lazy nonchalance and shrugged. "More," he said again.
The scarred scholar grunted but resumed his work.
"If we can make a case to show the child expresses primarily Asterion traits," Syrathis continued, each word measured and clipped, "then—”
"Then our sovereign holds the stronger claim." Pelagius' dull pewter scales rippled with greedy satisfaction.
"If it survives the pregnancy," Syrathis continued carefully, "Caelith Mare has grounds. A claim. The courts would have to acknowledge—"
"The courts," Thalos drawled, speaking without turning.
Flat and amused. "You think Nyxarion will honor court rulings?
After winning the Spiral?" he clicked his tongue and moved to pluck a sun clam from the shelf himself, turning it over in his palm.
Perfectly shaped. Heavy with nutrients a pregnant Virelii craved.
Cravings only his people indulged in.
And now, one Siren.
He tucked it into the pouch alongside the others and thought of Kore's throat moving as she swallowed.
For a few long moments, silence pooled between them.
Thalos selected another, inspecting it with a shrewd eye before letting it flutter down into the dark.
Imperfect.
Barbles twitching, Syrathis read the quiet with a slow, deliberate shiver that meant the blind scholar was choosing his words with meticulous intention.
And then, "Nyxarion was exiled," he said, and his voice carried no hint of inflection.
“For creating a Siren. Breaking the Accord. These are not uncharted waters. Precedent was set long ago. And there could be an argument made,” he said, head tilting, “to claim the child as reparation.
Vorynthar itself is unrecognized territory, despite what he titles himself.
The Black Sea holds no sovereign charter under Pelagorn law—no ancestral claim or court sanction. "
Thalos's fingers stilled. Glacial blue eyes flicked up to those that were faded and milky.
"Any offspring born outside recognized waters," Syrathis continued, "falls under the jurisdiction of the nearest chartered authority.
Which is Caelith Mare." A pause. The barbels swayed.
"Nyxarion may have won the Spiral, but such a victory merely grants breeding rights over a bride.
And never a Siren. Not territorial sovereignty, nor lineage.
Should Caelith Mare lodge formal claims over the child as Thalos' firstborn heir, the offspring is—"
"Stateless," Vorthane finished, his voice flat with reluctant understanding.
Syrathis tilted his gaunt face toward Thalos. Those clouded amber eyes fixed on nothing and everything all at once. "He can rage and threaten. But if you choose it, Sovereign, your claim is the stronger."
Thalos's mouth curved.
Clever old eel.
He gathered two more clams. Choice morsels with plump, iridescent shells. Then sealed the pouch. Full to bursting. Enough to keep her fed for days.
As if there wasn't ulterior motive in everything he did.
The distinction mattered less each time he descended into the abyss.
Lost in thought, Thalos watched them without seeing. His mind circling far below, where the heart of Vorynthar burned at the bottom of the sea.
His claim on the child had been a blade thrown for sport. Nothing more. A barb designed to lodge in Nyxarion's skull and fester, to keep the Abyssari king circling and snarling and stupid with impotent fury while Thalos calculated his next move.
Paternity was a useful fiction—a political lever.
The kind of elegant cruelty that cost very little to wield, but was exceptionally hard to defend against.
That had been the intention.
But then he'd seen her, and his throwaway gambit had found an anchor in something real.
Thalos closed his eyes. The image surfaced unbidden.
Vivid. Painted in brilliant shades and stark relief.
Kore caught on Nyxarion's knot, curled into his chest. That beautiful skin pulsing in waves of enticing, erratic color.
Hypnotic patterns threaded in a braid of shifting waves that rippled through her scales.
Light dancing across a reef.
Moonlight and malice.
Asterion braided through with Korrides.
Lips twitching, Thalos shook his head, bewildered, for it was a potential he hadn't foreseen. A Siren marked by two kings.
Rolling, letting the current carry him in a slow drift, his smile became something wicked.
Because Nyxarion had allowed it.
Threnakar’s exiled prince. Who’d built a kingdom from forbidden coral, won legal breeding rights over a Siren, and beaten Thalos at his own game through brute savagery. He had delivered his precious bride to Thalos, despite all of it, and demanded service.
Grinning, Thalos flicked his tail and caught a warm current. Plotting what came next.
The second trimester was only a few tides away. And with it, a time of peace. Where Thalassari females began to hunt for a suitable nest. Where they could seclude themselves for the third trimester. Force their environment to suit their needs.
He felt the vibration before the ancients reacted, startled from his thoughts, for it was a particular harmonic.
A frequency meant for him. Sung in a tune that matched his own Resonance with deadly precision.
As one, the scholars stopped plotting and griping. Recoiling, Pelagius and Vorthane surged toward the surface. Alarmed.
Syrathis alone remained still—but those trembling barbles went rigid, reaching down. Straining into the black.
It was a summons between kings.
Nyxarion.
Concentric waves of sound thrumming in the abyss. Subaudible. Insistent. Laced with urgent demand.
Grinning, Thalos stared into the gloom. Pulled from his lazy basking, he rolled. Tail sweeping through the shallows in a single, sleek stroke. The pouch of sun clams settled against his hip, in the spot where the Waveblade was meant to hang.
"Sovereign," Pelagius hissed, fins in full, bristling flare. "You must not answer such a summons! It is a trap. A clear ambush.”
Vorthane lunged forward. Crooked and listing. "Take Cymareth," he said, steel-blue scales bristling with the state of his alarm. "At minimum. You should be attended by a delegation. Armed by the Hollow Court at your flank.”
But Thalos was already moving.
Camouflage rippling across opalescent scales, silver blended with dark waters. A cloak of invisibility that absorbed the dreary tones that matched the abyss.
Ignoring their delicate sensibilities, grin cutting and eager, he dove. Descending without so much as bothering with the riptide, he slid through the layers. Driving toward the mid-ground.
A beacon in the dark, Nyxarion made absolutely no effort to hide.