The sea crashes against the shore again, slamming into the side of the Tower. I am glad Nightfell is already in my hand.
“Why?” I ask, hearing Nicasia’s words pounding in my ears like the surf: someone you trust has already betrayed you.
“I served Prince Dain,” the Ghost says. “Not you.”
I begin to speak when there is a rustle behind me. Then pain in the back of my skull and nothing more.
I wake at the bottom of the sea.
At first, I panic. I have water in my lungs and a terrible pressure on my chest. I open my mouth to scream, and a sound comes out, but not the one I expect. It startles me enough to stop and realize that I am not drowning.
I am alive. I am breathing water, heavily, laboriously, but I am breathing it.
Beneath me is a bed shaped from reef coral and padded with kelp, long tendrils of which flutter with the current. I am inside a building, which seems also of coral. Fish dart through the windows.
Nicasia floats at the end of my bed, her feet replaced by a long tail. It feels like seeing her for the first time to see her in the water, to see her blue-green hair whorl around her and her pale eyes shine metallic under the waves. She was beautiful on land, but here she looks elemental, terrifying in her beauty.
“This is for Cardan,” she says, just before she balls up her fist and hits me in the stomach.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible to get the momentum needed to strike someone under water, but this is her world, and she connects just fine.
“Ouch,” I say. I try to touch where she hit me, but my wrists are restrained in heavy cuffs and won’t move that far. I turn my head, seeing iron balls anchoring me to the floor. A fresh panic grips me, bringing with it a sense of unreality.
“I don’t know what trick you performed on him, but I will discover it,” she says, unnerving me with how close her guess comes to the mark. Still, it means she doesn’t know anything.
I force myself to concentrate on that, on the here and now, on discovering what I can do and making a plan. But it’s hard when I am so very angry—angry at the Ghost for betraying me, angry at Nicasia and at myself, myself, always myself, more than anyone else. Furious at myself for winding up in this position. “What happened to the Ghost?” I spit out. “Where is he?”
Nicasia gives me a narrow-eyed look. “What?”
“He helped you kidnap me. Did you pay him?” I ask, trying to sound calm. What I most want to know is what I cannot ask—does she know the Ghost’s plans for the Court of Shadows? But to find out and stop him, I must escape.
Nicasia puts her hand against my cheek, smooths back my hair. “Worry about yourself.”
Maybe she wants me only her for reasons of personal jealousy. Maybe I can still get out of this.
“You think I performed a trick because Cardan likes me better than you,” I say. “But you shot at him with a crossbow bolt. Of course he likes me better.”
Her face goes pale, her mouth opening in surprise and then curling into rage when she realizes what I am implying—that I told him. Maybe it’s not a great idea to goad her into fury when I am powerless, but I hope she will be goaded into telling me why I am here.
And how long I must stay. Already, time has passed while I was unconscious. Time when Madoc is free to scheme toward war with his new knowledge of my influence over the crown, when Cardan is entirely free to do whatever his chaotic heart desires, when Locke may make a mockery of everyone he can and draw them into his dramatics, when the Council may push for capitulation to the sea, and I can do nothing to influence any of it.
How much more time will I spend here? How long before all five months of work is undone? I think of Val Moren tossing things in the air and letting them crash down around him. His human face and his unsympathetic human eyes.
Nicasia seems to have regained her composure, but her long tail swishes back and forth. “Well, you’re ours now, mortal. Cardan will regret the day he put any trust in you.”
She means me to be more afraid, but I feel a little relief. They don’t think I have any special power. They think I have a special vulnerability. They think they can control me as they would any mortal.
Still, relief is the last thing I ought to show. “Yeah, Cardan should definitely trust you more. You seem really trustworthy. It’s not like you’re actually currently betraying him.”
Nicasia reaches into a bandolier across her chest and draws a blade—a shark’s tooth. Holding it, she gazes at me. “I could hurt you, and you wouldn’t remember.”
“But you would,” I say.
She smiles. “Perhaps that would be something to cherish.”
My heart thunders in my chest, but I refuse to show it. “Want me to show you where to put the point?” I ask. “It’s delicate work, causing pain without doing permanent damage.”
“Are you too stupid to be afraid?”