Chapter Two #2
Perri nudged the sailboat lightly, and Marin braced herself as it rocked. As the boat drifted closer to the wall, she jabbed with the pole to guide it straight again.
“No judgment! Pickled squid is delicious.”
They’d met Dax over a year and a half ago on a routine delivery to the conservatory.
He’d happened to be at the dock, and he’d been enamored with Perri, the first sea serpent he’d ever seen, as well as with Marin’s tale of how she’d met him, which was only about sixty percent accurate at that point.
She varied the details each retelling to keep herself amused.
As she recalled, in that retelling, Perri had been stranded halfway up the cliff with seagulls pecking at his scales, and she’d climbed to the top of the mast to free him.
Or maybe she’d told him the version where a magic storm was brewing just beyond the islands, and Perri had rescued her immediately after she’d rescued him …
Anyway, Dax had been thoroughly enraptured (his words) and had promised to bring Perri his favorite food the next time they visited as thanks for the entertainment.
He was a composer, she’d learned. Despite being the same age as Marin, he’d never traveled outside of Alyssium, except when he’d first arrived as a young child.
He’d been a child prodigy, one of the youngest composers to ever achieve master status, and now spent his time …
composing musical stuff, she guessed? Whatever he did at the conservatory, he certainly hadn’t been assigned to work the docks.
But the dockworkers tolerated his presence because he didn’t get in their way and was just so damn smiley all the time.
Eventually, they’d accepted the fact that he was going to be on the docks whenever a freelance supply runner was due in, and they just let him officially receive and pay for shipments whenever he wanted.
She wondered if he’d bribed them with pickled squid too.
Regardless, she didn’t blame Perri for wanting to see him again.
“He might not be there this time,” Marin warned Perri. He wasn’t always, and given how weirdly vacant this section of the city was … As she turned right at another fork, she thought she heard shouting in the distance—it was so jarring after the uneasy quiet that she jumped.
Perri swiveled his head toward her.
“I’m fine. Just … It’s not a holiday today, is it?
” That would explain the quiet, if people were gathered in the squares and plazas away from the canals.
It wouldn’t explain the boarded-up windows.
She’d spotted multiple windows that had slats of wood nailed over them, as if a storm was expected.
It couldn’t be, though. The city’s sorcerers controlled the weather too tightly for any danger of that—the emperor didn’t tolerate storms near Alyssium, though he couldn’t be bothered to care about storms beyond the shadows of his lovely spires.
One canal away from the conservatory, she heard the first strains of music, discordant, as if three different sets of musicians were playing simultaneously, which was likely.
Horns ran scales while an organ blared chords at the same time as singers started and stopped on a tricky piece of five-part harmony.
Marin felt the knots in her shoulders and neck begin to unravel.
If there was anything truly wrong in the city, the students in the conservatory wouldn’t still be practicing.
Everything’s fine. She just had an overactive imagination.
She poled faster until the canal split. Perri spurted ahead to the left fork, and she followed, Silver bouncing over the waves in his wake.
The conservatory rose above them, a sugar-art cake amid all the pastries.
It spiraled up from the canals into six spikes.
Each was made of a latticework of ivory stone with thin windows of blue and crystal clear glass.
Roses had been coaxed to grow over the lacelike stone, and they bloomed in cascades of purple and a red so dark it looked black.
The whole concoction was positioned to catch the morning light as it spilled down the spires, falling into shadow only a few feet above the canals.
Using her pole to slow, Marin guided her boat into a tunnel beneath an array of roses.
She inhaled the scent of the blossoms, rich and heavily sweet.
Sunlight failed to reach the tunnel, but sconces, shaped like musical notations, had been lit.
Perri pressed closer to the hull. Candlelight danced over his mother-of-pearl scales and over the walls of the tunnel, which were inlaid with mosaics of tiny tiles that depicted various instruments from harps to flutes to horns to drums, continuing up to the vaulted ceiling, which was high enough to fit her mast with plenty of space to spare.
So far beneath the conservatory, the sounds of musicians practicing were muffled.
Echoing, their songs mixed into a low hum that reverberated throughout.
The water vibrated with drumbeats as she followed the tunnel to the delivery dock.
Ahead, on the dock, she saw a flock of winged cats clustered around a figure: a man, skinny and tall, with startlingly purple hair and two crystalline horns that curled into spirals like the spires of the conservatory itself.
She couldn’t help but notice, not for the first time, that he was stunningly handsome, in a carefully curated work-of-art kind of way.
Dax was as delicate as the roses that bloomed on the stone latticework, as precisely perfect as the mosaics, and as ethereal as the flute music that drifted down the staircase behind him.
He looked as if he’d never faced wind peppered with sand and salt, as if the sun had never dared burn his skin, as if he’d never been touched by the world and certainly never been hurt by it.
It made her want to wrap him in soft cotton and hold him close, which was a patently absurd way to feel about a grown man who neither needed nor had asked for her coddling.
She shook herself to knock the image of Dax in her arms out of her head.
She was not interested in any kind of relationship with him or anyone else.
She’d made that mistake once, and she wasn’t ever making it again, even for a ridiculously handsome man who was nice to her sea serpent.
Shoving the pole down to slow the boat, Marin raised her voice so it carried through the tunnel. “You’re feeding the cats, aren’t you.”
Dax looked up from the flock of winged cats, and a smile blossomed on his face. If she were interested … wow, that smile. But she was not.
“Marin!” Even his voice was beautiful. “Is Perri with you?”
Of course he was asking about the sea serpent.
The musician clearly didn’t have the same kind of reaction to seeing her as she did to seeing him, which was fine and did make things simpler.
She knew better than to trust her own instincts.
As usual, she boxed up all her admiration for the handsome composer and tucked it away where it wouldn’t bother her.
Perri rose partially out of the water, lifting his shimmering head up to be even with Dax’s. With hisses and squawks, the winged cats scattered. As fearless as they were, none of them were interested in being up close and personal with a sea serpent.
Only one orange cat with purple wings stuck around. He wove between Dax’s ankles, rubbing his cheeks against the shimmering silver of Dax’s pants, until the composer reached into a bucket and dropped a chunk of what looked like a tentacle.
The cat flapped his wings and caught the treat midair. He then retreated to the stairwell to munch, safely away from the edge of the dock and the hungry-looking sea serpent.
While all this was happening, Marin had maneuvered Silver alongside the dock and was tying off onto the cleats.
She secured her pole within the sailboat.
“Hey, is there something going on in the city today? Felt odd out there. Quiet, but more an everyone-holding-their-breath quiet than a peaceful quiet.”
“Frankly, I was hoping you’d have news for me.” He looked sheepish. “I know it’s politics. Lots of protests near the palace, I’ve been told. But that’s about as much as I know.” He reached into a bucket. “Got a treat for you, Perri. I’ve been saving it.”
The sea serpent rose higher, flapping his fins like an excited toddler. Marin resisted rolling her eyes. “You do know you’re supposed to be a terrifying, ship-wrecking monster,” she told Perri. “Every song says so.”
“I looked into it,” Dax said, his face lighting up. “There are several sea shanties, three ballad sequences, and one lovers’ quarrel duet that feature murderous sea serpents, but I did uncover one folkloric cycle that considers serpents to be omens of momentous change, often in a positive light.”
Of course he’d researched it. She guessed composers had time to research whatever musical trivia they wanted.
Actually, she had no real idea what he did when he wasn’t busy charming sea serpents.
She hadn’t had many conversations with him about what went on inside the conservatory. He was always much more interested in—
“If you don’t have any news, have you visited any spectacular new islands?”
Me. Us. He’s always much more interested in what we’ve seen and done.
She usually liked that. He was an attentive listener, to the point where she thought she saw his fingers twitch as if he wished he were taking notes.
This time, though, she wasn’t in the mood to tell stories.
“Not recently. Why don’t you know what’s happening in the city? You live here.”
He frowned, and his forehead creased. It occurred to her that she’d never seen him frown before. He was the kind of person who never seemed to worry. “The more tense it gets outside these walls, the harder it is to find anyone who’ll tell me anything.”