2. Pain | Lyra #2
He should have just told her about the assault on the senses she would suffer, and that would have been enough to keep her well away.
The eerie quality of Ithicais and the shipwrecks brought to life those old stories and had Lyra studying every shadow for movement and listening for anything unusual.
Wood groaned from the wrecks, their boards still succumbing to the clutches of the sea. A hint of copper trailed along the current, probably from the rusted bolts still holding the ships together.
Drystan’s quiet voice caused her to flinch. It seemed so loud in the silence.
“Can you believe I once lived here?” Drystan muttered to the guard flanking him.
He had taken a leading position for their travel party, the emerald of his tail the only bright spot in her line of sight other than the trident he brandished.
The guard did not reply.
Lyra took notice of the mermen accompanying them. They didn’t appear to be from one specific territory. Hence, the variety in their tail colors.
The only thing they appeared to have in common was their high level of skill, if the way they had wielded their weapons on shore gave any indication.
Lyra wondered if these men had once served her father.
Had they played a part in Drystan’s rise to the throne?
His voice interrupted her thinking as he spoke louder, attempting conversation with the guard again.
“It’s not an enjoyable place to grow up, I can assure you, Captain. There’s a lack of power that comes from living in a place that serves you up to sobeks daily.”
The guard he attempted civility with slowed the propulsion of his bright-orange tail, bringing him to the guard at Lyra’s side and out of speaking range of Drystan.
“Switch me,” he ordered the silver-tailed guard at her side.
Lyra heard Drystan call him captain, so it was no surprise when the guard obeyed without question. As they exchanged positions, Lyra pressed her lips into a thin line to keep from laughing.
The captain wasn’t the only one disgusted at the so-called king’s presence.
What an interesting turn of events, Lyra thought. If they already hated their new king, it wouldn’t take too much for her to persuade them to her side.
Lyra cleared her throat and raised her shackled hands towards the guard.
“These hurt,” she said, forcing a meekness into her voice. “Can you take them off?”
“You’re lucky you’re only shackled and not gagged,” the captain said, pulling his venomous glare from Drystan to her.
Lyra’s eyes bulged. “Excuse me?”
He tightened his grip on her arm, and Lyra felt the prick of each of his talons pierce her flesh.
“Sirens should be sacrificed to Ennosidas, not paraded through the kingdom as a princess. We should have never rescued you from land.”
The guard opposite him increased the tightness of his hold as he muttered his agreement.
Her blood turned icy in her veins. She was trapped between two mermen who thought her a monster.
She, a mere prisoner who had been used time and time again, with nothing of her own decisions to show for it.
Lyra wanted to injure him as he had bruised her with his opinion, but with her power still empty and her hands shackled, she resorted to the only weapon she had left.
Snarling her lip back, she let the vitriol spill from her lips, “Says the captain whose allegiance is as changing as the tides.”
He gave her a withering look and spoke between clenched teeth, “I served your father with honor. It’s not from my lack of duty he bore the consequences of?—”
“Captain Brine, that is enough,” Drystan’s voice cracked through the water between them like a whip, snapping their attention to the fury twisting his face. “Leave us. I will assist the wayward princess.”
Their gauntlets pulled against her skin as they ripped them out from beneath her arms, not once casting her a backward glance.
They formed a spearhead, leaving her and Drystan protected in their center.
“Wayward princess?” she shot at him, raising her shackled hands and shaking them so that the chain sang.
Drystan cast his attention around them to the guards that hovered just out of earshot. “You were on land for quite some time, were you not?”
Lyra bit down on her tongue fiercely enough that the taste of copper flooded her mouth. She choked on the rage that fluttered untethered before locking it away and heaving a breath.
“It was not at my request that I stay on land.”
Drystan slipped his hand under her arm, pulling her body against his. He led them back into the safety of the guards’ perimeter. “That’s not what the kingdom believes, and who am I to sway their opinion?”
“Are you not the king?” Lyra’s voice chilled with contempt.
“Not yet,” the guard with the silver tail muttered under his breath.
His words bordered on disloyalty, and Lyra watched as Drystan’s chin rose with arrogance.
“Yes, well. My bride-to-be has returned. The wedding will commence.”
Lyra struggled to pull her arm from his grip. “There will be no wedding.”
The looming horror of a betrothal to Drystan had the fear she had locked away vibrating in her chest.
She could not—would never—marry him. Not if the entire world crumbled to dust at her feet could she ever imagine tying herself to him.
“Without a wedding,” Drystan purred in her ear, and she flinched at the nearness of him, “there will be no one on the throne, and no one there to protect you.”
Protect her? Lyra’s brows knitted together.
“The kingdom will fall without a ruler,” he tacked on louder, sensing her confusion.
“Then maybe it should,” she hissed.
Atlantis was no paradise. The subjugation of half of its population long boiled her blood, and it was the reason she sought her own life outside of its grasp.
Drystan heaved a sigh and shook his head. The golden coif of his hair did not move.
“You do not know of what you speak. There are worse things than me on the throne, I can assure you that.”
Captain Brine led them around a large boulder, its northern side crusted with bioluminescent algae that cast the water in an eerie glow.
Several more clusters of large sea rocks dotted their path as they kept close to the seabed.
Lyra snorted at Drystan’s words. She couldn’t imagine anything worse.
Her father had been awful, but Atlantis knew peace, not only within its borders but with other realms.
Lyra glimpsed the hunger in Drystan’s eyes when he talked of power. That sort of voraciousness would be limitless.
He would conquer anyone and anything that stood in the way of what he wanted, and what he wanted was everything.
“A lot has changed during your misfortune, princess.”
“Misfortune?” Lyra hissed. She shivered in the shadow of a shipwreck, the water cold outside of light’s reach. “You had me?—”
Drystan cut off her retort. “Shh. You’ll wake the beasts.” He waved his trident around, encircling the surrounding land.
Blood roared in her ears at his arrogance, but she could have sworn something shifted in the shadows outside the lurid glow. She fell silent, not condemning his behavior as she tried to focus her eyes.
Using all her senses, she felt the current brush against her skin. It prickled her flesh, erupting in bumps that spanned her arms and chest. A sharper rot in the water made her want to plug her nose.
Lyra strained her ears, focusing past the horrid scent. She closed her eyes, and that’s when she heard it.
Far in the distance, there was singing. An ancient song she did not know the words to, but her heart thumped in line with it.
She listened intently, calming the roaring in her veins, and the singing became clear.
Become what your blood demands
A siren queen is home, come to claim her throne