Shafts of golden light pierced the green twilight, penetrating the waving fronds of the forest to leave pools of light on the ground. The path to the Great Palace, paved with pearl-shell, unraveled along the sand, a broad ribbon of iridescence, burned into a patch of blinding white when one of those shafts touched it. On either side of the path, at charmingly irregular intervals, stands of long, waving kelp, beds of colorful anemones, or coral “bushes” were being carefully tended and cultivated by a small horde of tiny sea-creatures.
No one ever actually set foot on the path, or truly even needed to use it. This was, after all, the bottom of the sea. People swam. Even the few two-legged people, like the Sea-King’s daughters, swam.
Nevertheless there was a path, winding through a “forest,” though the forest was kelp, the “birds” were fish, and even the “hawks” had an analogue in the form of sharks and other predators.
There were all these things because the path went to a palace. The Tradition said that all palaces hereabouts had winding paths leading to them, that traveled through mysterious forests filled with enchanting wildlife.
So this Palace, although underwater, had such a path.
In many ways, it was a good thing that no one ever actually walked on the path. Pearl shell, while pretty, had very sharp edges, and no one down here wore shoes.
And that, Ekaterina reflected, as she swam in a deceptively languid manner towards the palace, was a pity.
Ekaterina loved shoes. Dainty, embroidered silk slippers. Thigh-high leather boots. Strange wooden things that were like walking with tiny tables strapped to one’s feet. Dancing shoes, red-heeled shoes, shoes that were hardly more than thin little straps, shoes that were substantial enough to pound a nail with. She loved them all.
In fact, she loved clothing. She adored clothing. It didn’t matter what the style, the fashion was, she loved clothing the way she loved shoes.
Sad, really, since no one wore clothing, or at least much that was like clothing, down here.
As a warrior in her father’s Personal Guard, she wore her fish-scale armor of course. In fact, she was wearing it now, since she had been summoned for official business. It was as pretty as she could engineer, despite being first, and foremost, very functional. The fish-scales glittered in the errant beams of sunlight filtering down through the kelp-branches. It was the same pearly white as the shells beneath her, and gleamed with the same iridescence. The scales of the form-fitting tunic were about the size of her thumbnail, while those on the sleeves of the tunic and the equally form-fitting leggings were much, much smaller, about the size of the nail of a baby’s littlest finger.
Her sharkskin boots were a dead white, matching the sharkskin belt and gloves. The belt held nothing at the moment. No sword, no knives. But Ekaterina didn’t need a weapon. Ekaterina was a weapon.
Her hair had been bound up into a severe knot…another pity. She had lovely hair, as pearl-white as the shell also, and the fact that living under the sea allowed only two basic hairstyles—severe knot, or long and floating free—was another source of private longing for her.
Small wonder she welcomed her father’s regular summons.
Hopefully this would be another trip to Dry Land! Even better if it was to a new bit of Dry Land, some place she had never been before! That would be glorious!
The nearer she came to the Palace of the Sea King, the more people she encountered, though most of them were dolphins and the smaller whales, who served as her father’s Palace Guard. You could always tell one of those, as it had fluke-studs denoting rank, small gold or silver rounds much like earrings, and put in the same way. She always winced at a fluke-piercing, though the cetaceans were quite proud of enduring the pain. She supposed it must be like some tropical islanders’ tattoos. They, too, made a point of experiencing the pain of their decorations.
There were a few mer-folk though; a couple of the mermaids of her mother’s Court, sitting, gossiping and combing their hair. Mermaids did that a great deal. Part of it was because when your hair was long and floating free in the water and you didn’t have two dozen little cleaner-shrimp to keep it disentangled and sorted the way the Queen did, it got knots very easily.
But part of it was The Tradition, which said very clearly that mermaids spent a lot of time combing their hair, sitting on rocks and singing, or both. Her father had managed to put an end to the part of The Tradition that had once made them sit on rocks and sing sailors to their doom—now they only enchanted the poor lads so that they forgot their One True Loves, at least until the One True Loves managed to break the spell. Her father was clever that way. He hadn’t wanted sailors with their ears stopped up with wax or clay slaughtering his subjects, so back when he was the Sea Prince, he’d gotten hold of a half a dozed very good bards and paid them generously to write songs on the new theme. It had taken several years of concentrated effort, spreading the songs, singing them in contests, even introducing very elegant versions into several Royal Courts, but the effort had paid off handsomely. Now the only sea-creatures that lured sailors to their doom were the Sirens, and they didn’t acknowledge her father’s authority, claiming to be descended from gods. So the Sirens could just handle the odd clever hero with murderous intent on their own.
Ekaterina reflected that her father really was one of the cleverest Sea Kings of his line. He wasn’t the only King of the Sea, of course; for one thing, the sea was twice as big as the Dry Land, and it would be absurd to think that one person could govern all of it. But he was certainly one of the cleverest of those currently ruling. As a young Prince he had quickly come to understand how The Tradition shaped the lives of everything, and had determined that it would no longer be The Tradition that controlled the lives of his family and his people, but the other way around. To that end he had studied as much about it as he could get his hands on, certainly as much as many Godmothers, and had educated his subjects in how it worked as well. But when you were a magical creature, as the peoples of the sea generally were, The Tradition had a tendency to shove you about more ruthlessly than any mortal.
Unless you knew how to do a little pre-emptive shoving of your own.
As Ekaterina swam past the coral garden, she caught sight of her sister Tasha with her nose buried in a book, her back cradled by an enormous sea-fan. There were no Godmothers for the sea-creatures; evidently only mortals got the services of such cleverly manipulative creatures—but the Sea King was doing the next best thing to getting one.
He was training his very own Sorceress.
Now, all of the Sea King’s children—and he had quite a few—had positions of real authority or meaningful jobs. He had told Ekaterina once that this was the way to make sure none of his offspring “went to the bad.” “Everyone needs to have responsibility,” he had told her. “The more clever you are, the more responsibility you need. Nothing breeds discontent like idleness.”
Tasha was one of the cleverest of his daughters, and she had a real aptitude for the handling of magic. Not that Ekaterina envied her all the special tutors, the tower of her own, and all the special considerations. Not once it had become obvious that Tasha was never going to leave the Palace grounds again.
Not that Tasha cared. That was the genius of the Sea King; his children were all considered and studied as carefully as any sculptor would study a block of stone, and then positions were created for them that especially suited not only their talents, but their aptitudes, and not only their aptitudes, but their desires.
Ekaterina had enough wanderlust for twenty sailors. She was never happier than when she was sleeping in strange beds, eating strange foods and wearing strange clothing.
Oh yes. Especially wearing strange clothing.
Tasha did not even notice as her sister swam past. But then, it would take the eruption of a volcano beneath her feet to get Tasha out of a book of magical theory once she was deeply engrossed. Such ability to concentrate was invaluable to a Sorceress, whose life might well depend on being able to carry out every step of a complicated ritual while an Evil Mage was throwing everything he had in the way of an attack at her head.
Now, Mischa, the Crown Prince, would not dare to allow his mind to be so focused. A King—or a Prince in line for the throne—needed to be able to divide his attention among a dozen or more things at once, and change from task to task on an instant, exactly like a juggler keeping a complicated number of balls in the air at once.
Mischa was superbly suited for such a thing, to the extent that the people were already calling him “Prince Mikael the Clever.”
That was a talent he shared with Ekaterina, though the throne was absolutely the last thing she wanted. Ever. Not all the lovely dresses in the world and the ability to wear them underwater could have bribed her to take the throne.
The kelp forest abruptly gave way to open sand, and the Palace rose up before her in all its splendor. A dazzling ray of sun pierced through the surface of the ocean far above, and bathed the intricate spires and delicate towers in green-tinted glory. It looked for all the world as if nature had conspired to put that shaft of sunlight right there—
And of course, Ekaterina knew very well that it had.
Here again was the hand of The Tradition at work. The Tradition decreed that the first sight of the Sea-King’s Palace should be of it bathed in a shaft of sunlight piercing the depths.
So of course, it was. All the time—well, all of the daylight time at any rate. By night, as long as there was a moon of any strength, it was bathed in moonlight. As a child, Ekaterina had taken particular and mildly mischievous delight in dragging visitors through the kelp forest on wretched and stormy days just to see that shaft of sunlight break through the clouds in time to perform its magic.
The walls were made of pink coral, carved and polished to a soft glow. Beautiful patterns had been inlaid into the walls and around each window in mother-of-pearl, black and red coral.
Unlike the fortress-palaces of Rus, this place could not possibly withstand a siege, or even the attack of a child with a sling and a stone. There looked to be two dozen spiral spires, like the long and delicately pointed seashells or a narwhale’s horn, and half again as many filigree towers. In fact there were twenty one spires and nine towers, each of them the private domain of someone in the Royal Family. Not just the King and Queen and their brood, but the Dowager Queen, and several assorted Aunts and Uncles. Whenever another family member turned up, if there were no vacant places available for them, another was created.
This wasn’t just whim or fancy. This was, after all, the sea, and such an arrangement made it possible for the Royals to come and go as they liked without having to pass through the rest of the Palace. When you lived at the bottom of the sea, exit was as easy as swimming out your window, and the towers gave discreet points from which to do so. No doubt many Royals in the past had taken such exits in order to meet with a paramour they had rather their spouses didn’t know about.
To Ekaterina’s immediate right, the parade-grounds, which just now were empty, but often as not held her brother Mischa as he drilled his troops. For the most part, the Sea King’s troops were ranged in “battles” that had very little to do with war. There were monsters in the sea, enormous behemoths that came with ravening appetites for which a whale was nothing more than a morsel to whet the appetite. When they appeared, they had to either be killed or driven away, and it took strong creatures armed to the teeth to do so. Mischa thrived on combat, hence his position as the Commander of all of the Sea King’s forces.
And though the army was a small one, it was formidable, for Mischa employed magicians alongside the armsmen, training the two to work together as a seamless whole. To Ekaterina’s certain—and it was very certain—knowledge, no one else in the sea-kingdoms did such a thing. As a consequence, it was vanishingly unlikely that any attempt to take this kingdom by force would succeed.
Today Mischa was out there alone, drilling. The resistance of the water to fast movement made sword-work impractical, so the most common weapons beneath the sea were bows and arrows, trident, spear, and knife. Today he was drilling with knives, working against a seaweed-stuffed dummy which already was losing its stuffing through several slashes.
She swam a bit faster; this close to the Palace there was always the chance of being ambushed by a would-be suitor, some acquaintance trying to find a way to the King more direct than waiting his turn for an audience, or one of the young women at the court hoping for one of Katya’s brothers to happen along.
Now Katya was of the mind that her brothers were perfectly capable of deciding for themselves who they would and would not court, she was not about to play the stooge for yet another sycophant, and as for would-be suitors for herself— That, she could do well enough without. So far there had not been a single young man she had ever met that could keep up with her. To be brutally frank…they bored her silly. All they ever thought about was the Court. Who was advancing, who was declining, who was allied with who, and what that meant for the tiny, tiny circle of “those in the know.” They never looked past the boundaries of the magical barrier around the Palace grounds to even the greater and far more dangerous world of the open sea, much less to the Dry Land. Most of them didn’t even know the names of the countries that bordered this Kingdom, if they weren’t also Sea Kingdoms.
They didn’t think twice about the very powerful and at the same time, very delicate magic that kept the water warm, those without gills breathing, and predators peaceful. This was the only place in the Kingdom where a seal could swim with an orca and the orca wouldn’t even think of harming it.
Sea Kings many generations ago had bargained for that spell. Up above the surface, storms might rage and winter snow might pepper the waves; here it was pleasant enough that tropical fish and other creatures of warmer climes played among tropical corals. And it was the day that Katya caught one of her would-be suitors trying to use some unauthorized magic here—magic that might well upset that finely-tuned balance—that she realized that the young men of her father’s Court were either empty-headed idiots or one of Mischa’s warriors. There just was no middle ground.
Perhaps that was because any young men even remotely useful to their parents was either sent to the Royal Guard or kept at home. But when you had an ornamental dunce sitting around doing nothing but making idle trouble, your only real solution for what to do with him was to send him to court and hope he could make a good marriage alliance. If he could snare a Princess, all the better.
If there was one thing the various peoples of the Sea were, it was prolific. The Royal family was by no means the only one with an entire shoal of offspring. The Sea was dangerous; outside the protections of the Palace there were killing storms, giant octopods and squid, and an entire bestiary of monsters. There were undersea quakes, volcanoes, whirlpools, and landslides. And then there were the wars between Kingdoms, and the inevitable appearances of Sea-Hags and other evil magicians whenever things threatened to remain peaceful for a while. The Tradition might not rule beneath the waves with quite so firm a hand as it did on Dry Land, but it was powerful enough to stir up trouble, and plenty of it.
Now, the North Sea Kingdom had been peaceful since Katya’s father—who, according to her sources, people were starting to call “Vladislav the Merry”—had fought his way to the throne over the bodies of several would-be rulers who tried to keep him from taking it. Vladislav wanted to keep things that way. All though he was an awe-inspiring fighter, he hated conflict—but he was very, very good at handling people, at politics, and at history.
The result was that his reign so far had been so peaceful that the various Noble families had seen a great many sons survive, who would in previous reigns have made fatal errors of judgment. That was what, in this generation, had been sent off to Court.
When Katya had reasoned all that out, she had vowed that she was not going to even think about courtship unless the young man in question was at least as skilled and clever as she. He didn’t have to be skilled in the same ways, of course—she’d be perfectly happy with a highly intelligent scholar, for instance—but he had to be some kind of a match for her.
So far, the crop of young fellows swarming her had failed miserably in producing someone of that order.
She had the sense that her sisters, and perhaps her brothers too, felt the same way. Certainly Tasha was not showing any signs of welcome to the few who dared approach her. In a lot of ways, Katya envied her. She might not look intimidating, but the fact that she was a sorceress-in-training scared the scales off most of those poor fish. Whereas the essence of what made Katya just as dangerous was by necessity cloaked in secrecy. She couldn’t be her father’s hidden weapon if everyone in Court knew what she was and where she went.
She wound her way through the halls of mother-of-pearl and coral, of abalone and amber, checking the usual places where Vladislav might be. And finally she found him. The King was in his counting-house, but he was not the one doing the counting of the money. Four earnest, clerkly Tritons were tallying up the contents of what must have been a treasure-ship. Gold and silver bars already lay neatly stacked, awaiting transfer to the vaults. At the moment, it was the contents of several chests that occupied their attention. Katya’s eyes gleamed a little as she surveyed the wealth. From the fact that the styles and gems of several different lands were jumbled together in the one she was nearest to, she suspected that the vessel that had sunk must be a pirate raider. If so, good riddance. The Sea-peoples were always being blamed for the depredations of pirates, and many a war had been started between Dry Land and Sea because the Drylanders were certain that the Sea People had been plundering their ships.
“Ah, now, save this out,” the King said, pulling out a delicate tunic woven of tiny gold and silver links. “This should be in Galya’s wardrobe.” In her arsenal, you mean, father, Katya thought with amusement. Galya was the most beautiful of his daughters, the one that displayed the Siren blood they all had from their maternal grandmother most clearly, and she was, next to Katya, the most subtle weapon he had to deploy. Not subtle in and of herself; her seductive lure was more like a bludgeon to the head. But subtle in how Vladislav used her.
Any time he wanted to read a man, or deflect his questioning, or confuse him, or make him forget all about caution, all he had to do was bring Galya in for some pretext or other. Katya hadn’t seen a man yet that didn’t end up with his eyes riveted on Galya’s magnificent bosoms—or, rarely, some other part of her—within the first few heartbeats. And it was certain that as he stared, he was not thinking of how best to negotiate with Vladislav.
This delicate tunic would allow Galya’s body to shine through while giving the illusion of modesty. It was exactly the sort of thing that delighted her.
It would also be cursed heavy. For all that the garment was a work of art, Katya did not envy her the wearing of it.
“And what of you, belochka?” he asked. “Do you see anything here your heart craves?”
His eyes flickered from her to the chest and back again and she read the wordless message clearly. There must be rumors about her again. Possibly only that she was too serious, too unfeminine, but those were rumors easily quashed with a moment of girlish vanity.
Fortunately there were some things in that chest that she would like. With a squeal of glee she pulled out six elaborate hairsticks of the sort the people of Qin wore. One pair was done in the likeness of cascading fuchsia blossoms, the blossoms and leaves being formed of delicately carved, whisper-thin semi-precious stone. One pair featured the Phoenyx-bird and the Dragon, wrought in gold and silver, every feather and scale perfectly represented. And from the final pair, chains of tiny golden bells descended, so that the wearer would be surrounded by gentle chiming as she moved.
Of course, the fact that these “hairsticks” were absolutely lethal weapons was something best kept between the two of them. How these ornaments had come into the hands of pirates she had no clue, but they were one of the many weapons used by a certain class of courtesan-assassins, who would insert themselves into a Qin-lord’s concubines and wait, sometimes for years, before striking.
It was a good tactic. One Katya did not have the patience for, but a good tactic none the less. “Come, my daughter. My business here is finished, and these young men can complete the tally without me. Come and tell me of your day.” Vladislav smiled at his daughter. He was possibly one of the most gorgeous Kings of his line to date, and that was not just her admittedly biased opinion. The Siren blood that made Galya so stunningly beautiful was expressed in him as powerful masculine charisma. He truly was a “golden king;’ blond, clean-shaven, he had all the physical perfection of the statue of a god. Square-jawed, with startling blue eyes, a musical voice, and a ready wit, it was small wonder that he was also known as “Vladislav the Handsome.” But this was his cue to her. It was time for them to find a place in private to talk.
Her heart leapt with excitement. This could only mean he had a task for her that she must carry out in secret.
And that almost certainly meant a trip to Dry Land.
—Reprinted from Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey, by permission of Harlequin Books, Copyright © 2006 by Mercedes Lackey. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.