Chapter Twenty-Eight Zephyra
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ZEPHYRA
Princess Amaya Frost is not exactly happy about the whole mind-control thing.
Within seconds, she tackles me to the floor, and my dagger falls from my hand upon impact, dropping between us.
She scrambles to reach it first, but I rope a hand in her messy bun and wrench her backward.
Her gaze crackles with vivid yellow streaks of lightning.
She turns to me with a snarl and forgoes the dagger now.
Chokes me instead. Her thumbs press hard into my windpipe, and I gasp, clawing at her hands. Her arms. “A little—help—”
I can’t see the others. Only Amaya’s wicked gaze.
Her tan skin and gray eyes and auburn hair as a bolt of lightning shoots from the ceiling and almost electrocutes me.
I roll at the last second, and now Amaya scrabbles beneath me.
Arion rips me backward, however, before I can slam her head into the floor, and the skull cackles somewhere to my left. “Bite her, Amaya! Bite! Bite!”
“Zephyra, stop.” Arion wraps strong arms around my chest, lifting me up and away as Amaya sends another bolt. Still, I lunge for her face. “Enough, both of you!” To Amaya, he snarls, “We had an agreement—”
“Fuck your agreement.” Thunder cracks, and the wind picks up around us.
It tears at my hair, at Arion’s wings, at Vesper and Gavriall as they watch with fearful gazes.
The skull rolls toward Gavriall while his attention is diverted, desperate to gnaw at his ankles while the princess continues speaking.
“That merrow just held a knife to my throat, and that one”—another bolt of lightning, this time at Vesper, who leaps away seconds before losing a foot—“dug her claws into my brain. I am the princess of Tempest, and I offered you a bargain. I will not be made a fool!”
Gavriall yelps, and I glance over just in time to see the skull sink vicious teeth into his boot.
Kicking out wildly, he trips over the body of a soldier, slips on a puddle of crushed melon, and slings panicked arms around Vesper’s neck.
She shoves him to the floor herself. The skull cackles again, still nose deep in his leather. “I want to go home,” Gavriall declares.
“We want that too,” Vesper says.
I release a harsh breath. Even though I’d love nothing more than to gouge out Amaya’s eyes, I can’t. If what Arion said is true, she’s the only way we’ll survive on this goddess-forsaken ship—unless we’d like to be smote by Tempestas, or skewered by her men, or struck down by her fucking lightning.
I try to break free from Arion to fix this, but his arms tighten around my chest. “I’m fine, warlock.”
Thunder rumbles again, low and ominous. “No”—Amaya’s eyes flash—“you are not. I will cook you from the inside out and serve you to my soldiers—”
“With a side of fruit?” Vesper nudges a soldier’s face with her foot, arching a sardonic brow.
Arion cuts a sharp look at her. “You aren’t helping.”
“None of you are helping.” I push at his arms again, and this time, he releases me, watching cautiously as I step closer to the princess and her lightning. As I ignore the soldiers, the fruit. Ignore Gavriall and that obnoxious fucking skull. “I’m not going to fight you, Princess.”
“Oh, please do.” She steals a small sickle from her belt and smiles wide. “I’ll enjoy watching you struggle.”
I snarl. It’s too much. The last day. The day before that. The day before that too. I’m fucking exhausted. And really, I’d love nothing more than to charge her. Throw her to the floor. Bludgeon her against the electric bars of her gruesome cell. I’d love nothing more than to kill her and run.
But—I glance at Arion, who watches me helplessly, pleading silently for me to make the right choice—that won’t help us escape our current predicament.
A predicament that is entirely my fault.
Gritting my teeth, I lift my hands. Spread them wide in a show of submission.
“I won’t fight you,” I repeat. “I just want to talk. Arion said he made a deal with you. I, of course, had no idea because you locked me in the brig”—my voice strains with frustration—“but if I’d known, I would have honored it.
You want to know what we’re looking for? ”
She blinks at me, still poised to attack.
“Mortem’s heart,” I say. “We think we’ve found the location to Mortem’s heart.”
Amaya hesitates. Her eyes narrow on Arion, and the clouds overhead gather in anticipation. I hold my breath as she asks, “What do you mean, ‘Mortem’s heart’?”
The lightning ceases. For now. So I take another step.
Cautious. Slow. We just need her to listen.
Admittedly, a difficult task in these circumstances.
The cord tightens, and Arion’s pulse thunders through mine.
Everything is on the line. This is one thing I can’t screw up.
“What do you know of Mortem and the mermaid?” I exclude any talk of Vila.
No human would believe in our goddess, and I can’t risk pissing Amaya off further.
“Do you know how the Fathoms were created?”
“Do I know of the Fathoms?” Amaya’s jaw clenches.
The clouds darken. “I am a daughter of Tempestas. I hail from a sacred lineage of the greatest women on this earth. My great-great-great-grandmother led expeditions you wouldn’t believe.
She discovered half the world’s minerals in a single lifetime.
My great-great-grandmother invented a way for ships to fly without magic or beasts.
My great-grandmother brokered a treaty with Mortia and Lucia to extend our small kingdom’s reach.
My grandmother built orphanages. Homeless shelters.
She established health care for an entire continent.
Do you really think I do not know a simple story from Mortia’s shores?
Are you, demon of the deep, really insinuating that I am stupid? ”
Fucking great. Somehow I managed to not just insult her, but her entire ancestry as well. Tension knots Arion’s brow as my eyes dart to him. Quickly as I can, I blurt, “No. No, of course not. You seem—wildly intelligent. Far smarter than any of us.”
“And more beautiful too,” Gavriall says in earnest, forcing himself up from the floor on shaking legs. The skull rolls away from him with a deep chuckle.
The princess of Tempest does not seem humored in quite the same way. She glowers at me. “I do not like false niceties.” Then, after a brief pause, she adds, “You held a dagger to my throat. You must understand it is hard to recover from that.”
“In my defense, you locked me up. I thought we were all about to die.”
“You still might.”
Goddess help me. I slide back a step. “Right. Understood.”
She glances to Arion, to Vesper, to Gavriall, and then back to me.
Her gaze narrows on mine. “Mortem fell for a mermaid who carved out his heart. When his power left him, his existence exploded into ash and dust, and his spirit forged the Fathoms. A way for him to remain eternal even if he was no longer a part of this world. That is the story you speak of, isn’t it? ”
I shake my head. “Kind of, but not quite.”
The wrong thing to say, perhaps, because Arion moves forward, and his wings thrust in front of me to shelter me from Amaya’s view.
Or to protect us all from another explosion of violence.
“His power didn’t just dissolve,” Arion says with forced calm.
“It left him when he lost his heart. It stayed in his heart. And we know where that heart is located.”
Thunder reverberates the floorboards. The walls. Amaya cocks her head, looking more like a lion on the prowl than a woman. “And where might that be?”
“Abysses,” Arion says. “We believe the heart is in Abysses, and with it, I’ll be able to strengthen my power. Anything you want—anything at all—I swear to grant you—”
“You’ll be a god,” she murmurs. Silence echoes through the brig. Even Vesper doesn’t seem to be breathing. Several seconds pass, the tension thicker than the charcoal clouds. Water begins to mist on our skin. Droplets finer than grains of sand. “How do you know? What proof do you have?”
Arion shifts uneasily. His spine straightens to an impossible degree, as if he’s afraid of the princess spotting any sign of weakness. Any holes in our logic. “There was a poem—”
Amaya barks a harsh laugh. “Poetry? You must be kidding.” Lightning splinters through the cloud. “You really seek to barter for your life with poetry?”
“If you’ll recall, you offered to help us first,” Gavriall says.
A streak of vivid yellow lances the floor at his feet.
Gavriall throws himself out of its path, cursing under his breath as he palms the wall for support.
“Wait, wait.” He exhales hard. “It’s not just a poem.
The poem told us where the heart is located, but we—I—read journals from firsthand accounts. They tell us where to go.”
Amaya crosses her arms. “You have two minutes. If your proof is shit, I will collect the bounties King Constane has put on your heads—or I will murder you myself.”
My gut roils, and not just because the ship keeps tipping this way and that.
I’m so—so tired of this. Tired of threats and danger and enemies, of constantly fearing for our lives.
Luckily, Arion speaks before I can dig us even deeper into a hole.
“Dima Vasiliev,” he explains. Amaya listens without a single emotion flickering across her sharp face.
“Gavriall read about an expedition. Gavriall is a historian, and he’s clever.
He memorized them.” Arion sounds pained to admit it.
“Vasiliev was setting off on an expedition to uncover the ruins of Abysses. He found some sort of rock that was old and strange, and he thought it came from the Sol.”
Amaya grins, and the sight is deeply unsettling. “And what happened on this expedition?”
Arion swallows. Hard. “We—we don’t know. No one ever returned.”