Contrary to the suffocating fear that paralyzed Erin the first time through the pitch-black tunnels, she was almost outright elated when it was time to go back in the other direction.
As soon as she slid into the water, Coyrifan was there, close enough to take her hand in his. She was pleased to find that it was warm and most certainly not slimy, as the Aeriemaster had once described. He had deep golden eyes with exotic, crescent-shaped pupils that resembled a waning moon when turned on its rounded side.
With the merling doing the swimming for the both of them via powerful sweeps of his finned tail, they passed through the tunnels in seconds, fast enough that Erin didn’t even need to stop for air.
Arlis let out a cry of relief when they broke the surface in the lamplight near Koben’s rowboat, leaping to his feet like he was about to jump over the side to join them. “Erin, you’re back! I was so worried—wait,” he paused, eyes searching the water, “where are the others?”
“They’ll be along,” Coy assured him. “I confess, I was excited to further our negotiations and swam quite a bit faster than they’re able to keep up with.”
“No complaints here,” Erin said. At that speed, she barely even had time to be scared at all. Belatedly, she turned in a circle as she treaded the water, waiting for two familiar faces to appear.
“I see you’ve brought a friend with you,” Koben noted, inclining his head toward Imyra, who was still wrapped around Coy’s arm like a piece of living jewelry.
Raising his arm out of the water, the merling brought his beloved baby beast very close the the prince, who held out his hand as if waiting for her to sniff it. “Imyra, darling,” said Coyrifan, “meet our new friend, Prince Koben.”
Whether it was thanks to the pre-approval of her bondmate or something that she herself sensed in the prince, Imyra only pulsed with the barest hint orange before returning to her cheerful yellow, snaking her pearlescent head back and forth as she examined Koben’s hand in earnest. Her mind made up, she slithered between the two males’ hands and up the prince’s arm. From there, she studied Arlis in the boat beside Koben, and seemed to find him similarly acceptable, blinking a pure sunny hue at him before twining her way back down to Coyrifan.
The prince and the merling were just starting up a fresh banter session when Kaleit and Leslyn came up into the air and light, one right after the other. The dark tunnel was filled with the sound of their near-panicked breaths, but Erin remembered what it was like before, in that black nothingness below. They were far less shaken this time, and recovered much more quickly.
“This infant seabeast is what he wants us to take ashore,” Kaleit said as soon as he was able, still panting as he flicked his wet hair back and then pointed at the frilly-finned, eel-like creature on Coy’s arm. “He’s already admitted that the merling chief will kill our citizens on sight if word gets out that we have it. Nothing is worth that risk.”
“Thank you, Kaleit,” Koben said. “That was a very wise conclusion.” He turned to Coyrifan. “We’ve a large enough body of water inland for her to stay as long as she’s still small enough for transport.”
Kaleit, who had been wearing a smug, self-satisfied smile, abruptly exposed the whites of his eyes in a startled stare.
Leslyn, too, stared at his prince.
Arlis looked painfully uncertain, but held fast to his earlier conviction, saying nothing.
Erin’s logical mind knew that she should be concerned about this, but try as she might, she couldn’t feel much of anything except a pleasant warmth at the thought of helping to keep Imyra safe and sound from anything that might harm her. She was still just a baby, after all. Surely, everything would turn out fine.
“Excellent!” Coyrifan crowed, slapping the water with a palm.
Koben grinned, shielding his face from the flying droplets. “Now that that’s settled, may I have the location of the artifact, my dear merling friend?”
“The artifact is in the possession of Chief Ferrifan Ere Alten Mivusa of the Terbinalta Depths and the Nilvar Flood-Shallows.”
“He has quite the extensive title,” was Leslyn’s dry observation.
“I know. Pretentious, isn’t it?”
“And how might we go about retrieving the stone from Chief Ferrifan?” Koben solicitously inquired, drawing the merling’s attention back from grinning raffishly at Leslyn.
A stone? Erin wondered what kind of stone, and what it was for. Certainly, Koben would tell everyone when it was fine to do so.
“I should be able to get it for you, but it will take time and require a bit of complicated management of some particular things.”
While they were talking, the boat tipped precariously for a few seconds as Kaleit climbed on board. In the middle of squeezing the water out of the front of his shirt, he sullenly spoke up with, “Your beast must be very important to you, to risk starting another war with us for it. You do know that’s where this little transaction is like to lead, right?”
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“She is important,” the merling insisted. “She’s to be the next guardian of my tribe.”
“Then why aren’t you raising her with your tribe? She’ll have no opportunity to learn her role, if she’s isolated from them.”
Coy just gave him an enigmatic smile, which rankled Kaleit enough that he yanked his shirt off with a growl, then turned away and hunched over the other side of the boat to wring it out, signaling his exit from the conversation.
“You’ll need to guarantee that you can fetch the artifact before the following Dry,” Koben gently warned. “If Imyra grows too large for our available modes of transport, she may become stranded inland on a rather… permanent basis.”
“Chief Ferrifan would understand that as a threat,” Coy observed with equal gentleness, “but, since he is not here, I will gracefully submit to your request. On my honor, I will bring the artifact to you well before your deadline.”
“Very well, then. I accept your terms.”
“And I, yours.”
----------------------------------------
Coyrifan did not accompany the prince and his four “renegades” when they left the caves, rowing out into the bright sunlight with Imyra clinging to the bottom of the rowboat, her skin now a muted mottled brown to blend in with the wooden planks.
Though he hadn’t seemed so when they’d come from the shore on their way to the cave entrance, Koben was now outwardly vigilant, regularly leaning from side to side to scan the deeps around and below the boat. At one point, he motioned for all to be still and silent, and they waited for several tense minutes before the prince directed them to move on again.
Erin never saw what had moved him to take such a precaution, but she spent the rest of their time on the water with her imagination gone wild, dreading what it might have been.
When they finally reached the shore they’d started on, the girl went straight for the tree where those two horses were tied by the wagon and sat her little self right up against it, reveling in the stillness and solidness of the ground underneath her and the scratchy, safe, familiar texture of the bark against her back, instead of empty darkness or damp, cold stone walls.
Meanwhile, the prince and Arlis, Leslyn and Kaleit all worked together to get the barrels off of the wagon, fill them with sea water, and place them back on board. They held the last barrel in the water long enough for Imyra to swim inside, then that, too, was loaded onto the wagon.
When Koben had hitched the horses up and was guiding the rolling wagon back inland through the endless grasslands, Erin was beside him on the driver’s seat, sitting sideways so that she could talk with the others who rode in the back… for all the good it did her.
“I was not acting strangely,” Erin snipped at Kaleit.
“What possessed you to put your hands on me, then?”
Well, that was unexpected. The stunned look lasted just a split second before she broke it off with a disgusted glare, but she couldn’t likewise cancel out the warmth around her ears. “Excuse me? What reason under the sun would I have to do that?”
Kaleit turned to Leslyn. “See? She doesn’t even remember.”
“You really did startle everyone,” Leslyn said, shrugging. “Just doing it out of the blue like that.”
“What, exactly, did I do?” Eyes flitting back and forth between the boys like a terrified rabbit caught between two foxes, Erin tried, with only middling success, to keep the mortified screech out of her tone.
“You were defending Coyrifan, and shoved him right in the chest.” Leslyn shook his head. “I thought for sure you were going to outright attack him after that.”
Oh. Was that all it was, then?
“I’m telling you, Erin,” Kaleit said, “merlings are dangerous for more than just their seabeasts. The fact is, he bewitched you.”
“Yeah, right,” she snapped. “I just got along really well with him, and you were being a jerk like usual. There was no reason to be so rude to him.” She took a breath to give him more of her opinion, but something suddenly occurred to her. “Actually, I think I might have met him before. Maybe he was walking on legs then, like today, before he got into the water.”
Leslyn shook his head. “You couldn’t have met him before, if you lived so far away that no one around here even recognizes the name of your hometown. The merling tribes stay in their own territories, and Coyrifan said his tribe controls the area around Nilvar.”
He was right about that, though he couldn’t have known it was because of the fact that there were no merlings on Earth. She shrugged. “I still feel like I know him from somewhere, or maybe from a long time ago. Like, when you haven’t thought about a person in years and almost forget they exist, but when you see them, you suddenly remember everything.”
“Haven’t you realized it, yet?” Koben asked. “He’s the very same merling who brought you to my ship during the storm, and who escorted us for several days after. He was certainly looking after you.”
She turned a surprised look on him. “You think so?”
“It’s quite clearly the case: After you finally came to and he saw you alive and well on deck, he left. I only saw him again when I escorted Queen Katharesa and Teryn to the harbor, the same day that Wrath turned Phoebe over to your care. By chance, she sensed her missing artifact, which led to her and Teryn meeting our merling friend. I was called in to assist with the negotiations.”
“That’s what you were doing?” Leslyn yelped, half-rising from his seat. “And you didn’t tell anyone?”
Koben’s hazel eyes creased with fondness for the boy as he smiled. “I told them later. The Aeriemaster, the Guard officials and I also spoke of Coyrifan that time in the canteen, when you were asked to leave the table.”
“I don’t understand,” Kaleit said. “How did you get Tannoran and Xavara to agree to send us—“ he gestured around at himself and the other three young folks, “—with you on this mission? We’re fresh recruits, our griffins are still keets, and even if we were able to fly, we have absolutely no training in fighting against merlings. This could have been a fatal encounter for all of us. It should have been.”
“It was easy. Well, sort of,” Koben chuckled, giving the reins a little shake. The horses picked up speed. Ahead was a thick copse of pine trees, a single wide dirt path giving the wagon just enough room to go through safely.
“Easy?” The tall boy glanced meaningfully at Arlis. “I highly doubt that.”
“You may not think much of Katharesa’s sense of people, but you’re the exception to the rule,” the prince coolly informed him. “According to our beloved Queen, Coyrifan is as sincere about needing our help for Imyra as you are about your desire to become a captain.”
Kaleit snorted and turned away, but Erin thought she saw the slightest flicker in his eyes before he did. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he kept his Big Friggin’ Dream a secret.
Ahead, the trees became less dense, and the path began to widen, opening out onto a wide pond. Some griffins were there, along with a group of people, but Erin couldn’t quite make them out at that distance.
Except for one. The red hair instantly gave her away.
“Speaking of Queen Katharesa,” Koben sang out, “here she is now.”