“What do I look like to you?”
“A heron,” I said.
“How odd. Laughter.”
“Why do you do that—say ‘laughter’? Why don’t you just laugh?”
“I’ve been told my laugh unnerves humans.” The heron swiveled on its leg, hopping toward me.
“What does it sound like?”
“Like a hurricane gale. Like a hundred knives.” Her voice dropped to a hissing whisper. “Like a drowned man’s dreams.”
A drowned man’s dreams. I thought again of the dreams I’d been having since the night I met Markos. Of the dead Mrs. Singer from the Jenny lying on a bed of coral, and all those strange, colorful fish. The fish had been like these.
“I know who you are,” I said.
“We are both who we should be.”
She who lies beneath, Nereus had called her. Her gulls had watched me, following me with round black eyes, since I was a child. She’d made a fog that only I could see through. Her drakon had protected me.
And I was hers.
“Why did you send me dreams about a dead woman?” I asked.
“I sent you dreams of this place. The dead woman is in your head.”
“Is the heron in my head too? Why did you say it was odd?” As the sea lifted and twirled my hair, I clarified, “That I see a heron.”
“A bird of both the sea and the riverlands,” she said. “Maybe it’s not so odd after all.”
“Why did I never see you before today?”
“I could ask you the same question.” The water swirled around me in a gentle caress. “There has never been a day of your life when I was not right here.”
I gazed out over the crumbling rooftops. “What is this city?”
“The humans say it was lost,” the heron said. “But they are wrong. It is where it has always been, a testament to the fact that those I claim belong to me. Arisbe Andela. Nemros the Marauder.” Her voice dropped to a hiss. “Caroline Oresteia.”
I shivered, remembering how Nereus had said the sea keeps the things she takes.
The heron looked out at the city. “It’s only the world that’s changed.” There was a certain wistfulness to her voice. She switched legs, and with them, the subject. “Who is he, that one you travel with?”
“Nereus?”
The heron made a scornful sound. “I know him. He is mine. As much a part of me as the reef and the seaweed and the swimming fish. I mean the other one.”
“Markos. He’s the true Emparch of Akhaia.” If she didn’t know about him already, I was reluctant to tell her too much. Nereus had warned me she was tricky.
“Laughter. I should have known. I smelled the stink of mountain air about him.” I thought she would have wrinkled her nose, if she had one. “And yet there is something … Well. He is of no concern to me. As long as he who lies under the mountain still sleeps, as he has these past six hundred years.”
“Why does Akhaia’s god sleep?” I asked. “Why does he talk to no one but the oracles?”
I felt rather than saw her smile. It was a smile that suggested teeth, although I could not have said why or how. Herons don’t have teeth. “Because he made the mistake of going to war against me. And lost.”
“Does every god have a country?”
“Some have many cities and many countries. All cities that sit beside the sea are my cities. Valonikos. Iantiporos. Brizos.” She lapsed into a brooding quiet. “Valonikos never belonged to him.”
“Is that why Akhaia keeps losing pieces of its empire?” A fish was trying to swim into my hair. I resisted the urge to swat it. “Because its god sleeps?”
“Akhaia was once strong,” she agreed. “It is lesser now. He licks his wounds and speaks to no one. He chooses no warriors. He cannot protect it.”
“He needs six hundred years to lick his wounds?”
“It is but a moment to him.”
“Do you?” I realized my question didn’t make sense, and added, “Choose warriors?”
“Laughter,” was all the heron said. I thought she winked, but it might have been a mote drifting through the cloudy water.
I wondered if she would ask me to make a bargain, like Nemros the Marauder. I wasn’t certain I trusted her, or her bargains.
“Trust.” She tilted her feathered head. “It matters not. You will serve me nonetheless.”
“You got no call to be hearing the things in my head,” I said. “The thoughts in my head are mine.”
“They are mine, because you are mine,” she said.
The thoughts in my head weren’t particularly flattering at that moment. “Laughter. Always the humans think they can fight it. You can’t.” Her words were eerily like the pig man’s. “It comes for you, slithering through the deep like my drakon. It always comes for you.”
“What does?”
“Your fate.”
Time stopped, or changed. The heron was gone. The city was gone. Alone I floated. Minutes went by, or days, or years, as I bobbed in endless blue nothing.
Something appeared above me. A pattern I almost remembered, though I had seen it long ago, time out of mind.
Sunlight, moving and shifting on the surface of the water. I cupped my hands and pulled toward it, my lungs burning. Bubbles rushed past me. Instincts taking over, every part of my body strove up, up, up—
My head burst through.
Much to my relief, the first thing I spotted was a beach. Sun sparkled on a line of breakers crashing on colorful, rounded pebbles, and there, on the horizon beyond, was a red-roofed city. I understood now how Jacari Bollard must have felt when he laid eyes on Ndanna.
The city was Valonikos.
I waded ashore, trousers clinging to my legs and shirt stained light pink where I’d been shot. My left foot squelched in a sand-filled boot. The other boot had gone missing. I was sure I looked like the most disreputable sailor ever to be washed up on Valonikos beach.
I shot the sea a sour look. “You might’ve left me a bit closer to civilization. And with both shoes.”
Wet sand sucking at my bare foot, I limped toward the distant city. I made it about thirty feet before a breaker tumbled over and crashed on the beach, a brown speck visible in the churning foam. The wave receded, spitting out my right boot.
I stared at it.
The undertow seized the boot, which flopped over and began to slide down the sand.
Apparently this was the kind of thing that was going to happen now that a god was interfering in my life. I let out a whoop and chased my boot down the beach.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
Vix looked pretty tied up at the dock, but it wasn’t the same as coming around the corner and seeing Cormorant. I didn’t love her the way I’d described to Markos—she wasn’t home. Even lying tamely in the harbor with her canvas strapped down, she was intimidating. I still hadn’t forgotten all the times when the sight of her terrified me to the bones.
It was funny—her painted lettering still read “Victorianos,” as it always had, but I thought of her only as Vix now.
I limped up the plank, pausing to slide my hand along her polished rail. “All right, Vix,” I whispered. “So here we are.”
A hatch slammed shut. I was unarmed, but both my hands flew to my waist out of instinct.