Songs of the Hunted

Anthia, Queen of the Blu Seas.

One season before capture …

“What they say, is it true?”

“What do they say, your grace?” Anthia asked.

“That they hunt you,” came the reply that chilled her to the bone. Not because of the words the king used, but the way he said it. As if it were a challenge he might like to take up. “Your kind—the men—they hunt you down and take you in front of anyone who can see, and that is how they claim you as theirs. Is it true?”

How dare he?

The thought seared through Anthia’s thoughts like the bright star overhead that streaked through the purple sky as it fell from its otherworldly throne. How dare he ask me that? As if the bond between mates was nothing more than a hunt between a merman and his chosen female, instead of the unbreakable, life-lasting tether to another soul that it truly was for her people. The song between two souls that connected kin across seas and lands. A choice to irrevocably, in most all cases, leash oneself to another even if it meant a fight to the death for it.

He had no right to ask about that.

Of her thirty trips around the sun, seventeen of them spent sitting on the throne of sea glass that once belonged to her father, for a short time, and his before him for much longer, no one spoke to her the way the Bloodhurst King just did. In all the realms of the 9ine that she had visited or seen, never had another being spoken to her so abrasively, either. No king, or ordinary man, no fire breather or even a man of the seas.

None.

Those customs and traditions, their secrets, were not for those who could not experience them. Only sea people could speak on such things freely. But not this man.

Not this landwalker.

He had no concept of how much he just offended her, and if anything, the tap of his leather, laced boot against the glossy ship deck told her that he expected an answer. And probably sooner rather than later.

It took a heavy breath of sea air expelling from her mouth and neck gills, and the squawk of gull birds overhead to give Anthia something else to affix her stare upon, anything except King Misael. Only a few years on his throne and barely beyond his twenty-fifth year, if her sources could be trusted, she heard rumors that he shared a similar affliction to his now-dead father before him.

A taste for sea women.

They just didn’t like them free.

The way he appraised her every time he looked at her made Anthia think those rumors had a tad more than a touch of truth to them.

The king felt entirely too close to her in that moment for her to speak the way she wanted to when he had a broad sword hanging at his back. Not to mention, guards waiting beyond the gangway connecting their ship to the one at their left, another at their right, and her people were scattered between the seas and the jagged cliffs carved into the land surrounding them.

“You’re asking after things that are not of your place or people,” she tried to say kindly, even gently, adding that, “The ways of the people of the seas are coveted and protected from those who would try to use it against us.”

“How would I use that against you?” he asked back, seemingly unconcerned with her reasoning for not answering his inquiry. “People on land, we wed and bed. Your kind, well, you hunt and fuck. Say it.”

No, that was the most disrespectful and disgusting filth someone had ever had the indecency to say to her, and by all the seas and the stars, Anthia did not know how she lasted standing next to the king on the ship’s deck for so long. She bet the longer she spent there with him, even if they could benefit from the ships, the more he would take her silence and indifference to his behavior as acceptance.

How far might he take it?

Men like him were predictable.

“How about a question for a question instead?” she returned. “If you answer mine, I’ll reply in kind.”

“Depends on your question, Queen.”

Of course, it did.

The challenge didn’t scare her a bit.

“Is it true that your father died at the hands of a mermaid in his bedchambers and you had her burned in the square while they coronated you, King Bloodhurst? That you covered it up and buried him with a funeral pyre so no one would know that he got what he deserved?”

The king’s jaw tightened. “That was two questions.”

And neither needed answered, honestly.

Nonetheless, their time here, this entire charade between them, was just about over. Appealing to a man with known questionable honor was a losing game, and Anthia wasn’t the queen who could afford to fail her colony of people. Refusing to even let her brows knot with the frustration caused by the king and let him know he’d rattled her, she simply released a sigh.

“I’m bound by an oath I spoke to the Gods and seas on the day they crowned me to give my life for my people to live how they always have for thousands of centuries. Not even a king with fancy ships set all out like gifts for me will change that,” she said, gesturing to the flags whipping above, each embroidered with a cursive B and the Bloodhurst crown. “I did not come here to speak with you about the ways of my people, your grace.”

Icey, blade-colored eyes turned on the queen of seas where she stood in the middle of the large ship’s upper deck to survey the peace offering made to her between two kings she couldn’t trust. That, above everything else, Anthia believed without a doubt. Well, that and the fact that King Misael Bloodhurst’s eyes on her felt like dirty hands reaching under the low-cut collar of her bodice to get a palmful of something that wasn’t his. And the landwalker wasn’t even touching her. His gaze remained affixed to the brand of her royal status on her throat for long enough that the intensity made her swallow. Every royal line to sit on the Blu Seas throne accepted the brand to denote and mark them. Her family’s had been on their throat, but the king of a now-dead line that came before her grandfather had his family branded on their palms. She was concerned with the level of interest the king showed in her brand, really.

“That there,” he said, gesturing to her throat. “Do you remember it—did it hurt?”

“Not particularly. And probably. We’re also not talking about that, your grace.”

“I wonder if that might make it easier to find you?”

Even knowing the Bloodhurst King watched her, bold and unashamed in the way he drank in what he could see the shape of her legs beneath her gown’s slit skirt, and bare feet, she pretended he wasn’t. Better not to give his blatant interest any time or mind, lest he think she want it. And she certainly would not be entertaining any talk of finding her. Whatever that meant.

Gods forbid it, she prayed silently to the beings above land and below the seas. Anyone who might be listening.

The last thing she needed was a landwalker king to think this meeting was anything but exactly what he and she agreed it would be. A small fleet of three ships from his Royal Naval Guard in exchange for the endless piles of sea glass he stole from their seas to sell to the King of the Red Seas two seasons before.

This meeting, and his offering to her along with the gold from the King of the Red Seas in the belly of each ship, was a long time coming.

But something about it also felt wrong.

Anthia couldn’t put her finger, or a fin, on what it was.

Thankfully, they no longer had to fight to protect that precious resource from the bastard on land. For now. She bet his mind was as fickle as the winds that rolled through their realms during the season storms, though, and like the winds, his decision could change faster than she would be able to prepare.

She would have to worry about keeping the mostly unbreakable, meltable and moldable clear stone from getting into the landwalkers’ hands another time. Besides, her High Master of the Army assured her they wouldn’t get even a pebble once the safety of the upcoming storm season passed and the landwalkers put their ships back at the ports and moors. But for her, an even more pressing matter was at hand.

Instead of sea glass only found in the Blu Seas that she was sure the landwalkers would pull from the seafloor until nothing was left, she worried the king had once again taken a liking to pilfering something else from her kingdom just as his father had done before him. Something far more precious and important.

The sheer fabric of her skirt billowed wildly around her legs with the next gust of wind, giving the king an even better view of her body. She regretted the choice in attire in that very instant, wishing she had ordered her maidens to put any other gown into the watertight trunks for their trip to land but the one she now wore. Well, what was done couldn’t be helped now. Anthia would deal with how the gown made her feel, and every other frustration, later. The very second she finished with this terrible idea of Zale’s, once her father’s truest and loyal friend, and now her most trusted advisor because of it, in fact. It was only his assurance that the gold, and even the ships, were paid for by the King of the Red Seas that dragged her from the seas on this day to face Misael. And with this nonsense with him out of the way, she could figure out another solution to her colony’s latest problem. The missing caravan of her people, that was.

A large part of the cause of those missing mermaids—and the goods and young they had been traveling with—she was sure stared her straight in the face when she finally turned to grace the young king with what he seemed to desperately want and need from her: her attention.

Apparently, wasn’t that exactly why they stood where they did on this day of all days? A king and queen with far better things to do, undoubtedly, but the landwalker went through a lot of trouble for this to happen.

Anthia wanted to know why.

“I could say the ships and gold are enough to make right your wrongs of seasons past,” Anthia said quietly, “but I fear accepting either thing from you or the King of the Red Seas will simply lead one, or both, of you into believing that you can do it to me—to us—again. At that point, will you wait so kindly and gallantly for me when I bring my army to your shores, King?”

“Is that a threat?”

“How many of my kind, and our things, have you pulled from the seas?” she returned just as hotly as he. “I don’t need to make threats, your grace, because that would mean I foolishly believed they could work on you and make you see reason.”

Clearly, King Misael Bloodhurst saw no reason that was not one of his own making.

“No, this isn’t a threat,” Anthia added, her tone leveling coolly, “it’s a promise.”

“If you think to—”

“Whose turn is it to speak, your grace? At my tables, I let the person needing the loudest voice hold a dagger of sea glass and only when it exchanges hands does another voice join the chorus. Shall we also do that here?”

The fire that flashed in the king’s eyes would have frightened a weaker woman, but Anthia simply tilted her chin up subtly to square her jaw the way he did with his. The two of them, as different as the land and seas around them, continued their silent battle of wills until he broke it first by glancing away with a boisterous laugh.

As if this was all in jest.

Just a big joke.

“Well,” the king muttered heavily, “it wasn’t as if you answered me in any other way that I’ve tried to get you to speak, mermaid queen.”

Was that what he wanted? Had he done all this just to speak with her? After menacing and terrorizing her kingdom and their colony since before he even took his throne, all this just to speak? Something smelled terribly foul, and it definitely was not the gathering, rising seafoam starting to fill up the bay where the ships took port.

Anthia didn’t give him a reaction to the pet name that his tone twisted to be something that made her stomach clench almost painfully.

No, she wouldn’t entertain a messenger sent from him time and time again, season after season, but the King of the Red Seas, a man who bled a different color than her but swam and changed in the seas as she did … Well, he was a separate matter altogether. Even if Nodan had made the purchase of their stolen resources, it was the respect of their kind to give another the opportunity to make things right.

When it could be done, of course.

The seas might run through their people’s veins, but it did not look fondly upon their blood staining the waters. They were the water. When possible, war should always be avoided. How they treated the land and seas, well, the Gods would treat them in kind.

She chanced another look at the young king to find him watching her again, and thought, All of us, or none of us.

Anthia.

King Misael took his time dragging those cold, gray eyes of his back up her body to where they needed to be. The turn of her shoulders, and a flick of her wrists at the collar dropped the cloak at her back more around her front to give her exposed skin showing off a spattering of sparkling scales down the middle of her chest a bit more modesty. At least, he didn’t continue to let his attention linger longer than he already had when she finally made a physical show of her displeasure with it, but it was still too much for her.

All of this was too much.

It took but a few words from this man who called himself a king for her to understand—and well—that he did not see the crown of twisted, sharp pointed sea glass on her head as something that made her anything close to his equal. She was now glad she’d accepted the cloak of heavy fur-lined velvet from her maiden after their trip through the Blu Seas brought them to the bay carved into the south end of the continent named Atlas for its centered position to the circle of other realms across the 9ine. She tried not to let her gaze stay too long on any one crumbling structure on the face of the jagged cliffs above them but some she could name from memory alone because of the stories passed down to her by her father and grandfather. The latter of whom once ruled both these lands and seas from his palace that used to be seen from Atlas as if floating on the water’s surface.

But that time was long gone.

The kings before her were not ready to face the House of Bloodhurst, and their weakness had always been the land anyway. As it appeared, Anthia also wouldn’t get a choice in whether the man made a mess out of her reign like his father did to the kings of the seas before he was even born.

“Are the ships and the King’s gold not to your favor?” the king asked.

A lot of things were not particularly to her liking, but Anthia didn’t think it would benefit either of them for her to go about naming her list. Besides, it was quite a long one.

“No,” she settled on saying, “they are not, I’m afraid.”

“Pardon me?” King Misael all but spat her way.

That was either not the answer he expected to hear, or worse, not the one he wanted if the sudden and severe pinch of his broad brow was any indication. As handsome as any other king still in his best years from a good bloodline with enough ambition to get themselves onto the throne, she was sure he didn’t lack companionship. His seeming fascination with her made no sense to Anthia.

Hadn’t her advisor even said he had a wife—the closet thing a landwalker could get to a mate?

Anthia had gone along with this meeting as much as she could, but there wasn’t a single part of her that cared to stand there and do it for one second longer. All this day had done was prove to her that the King of Atlas would never bend or break, and certainly, not in a way that would change him for the better.

People were who they were.

She believed this man was a monster.

Her heart—owned by her people and the seas so much so that she had refused for all of her many turns around the sun to mate lest it break the bond she’d already made—told her so. Misael Bloodhurst, King of Atlas, wanted nothing good from her. Whatever it was he did want, she would make good and sure he didn’t get it.

“Send the gold back to the Red Seas,” she said then, turning away from the Atlas king without the proper respect of a goodbye, “and tell the king there that he can choke on the betrothal he offered me to protect the Blu Seas from you.”

She wouldn’t sacrifice herself to one man for another. Not her crown, her kingdom, and not even her body. None of these men would get anything from her.

“Where are you going?” the king thundered behind her. “We’re not done talking, mermaid queen!”

“Oh, aren’t we?” she asked back, scoffing.

She was certainly done.

“Queen Anthia?” came the call from a familiar voice somewhere down on the rocky shore of the portion of bay that remained ledgeless. She didn’t bother to look Zale’s way. The advisor would figure out soon enough that this meeting had not exactly gone according to plan, but he should have known that from the start. She’d not kept her feelings hidden before they’d even arrived.

“And what of my fleet?” Misael shouted at her back. “Do you know the trouble I went through to deliver these to you?”

“I’ll take them if only to show the people of my kingdom what sails to look for when we burn them to the seafloor, King.”

“You’ll regret this, mermaid!”

Anthia didn’t think so.

She also didn’t take the gangplank down to the waiting rowboat that should have ferried her back to the shoreline where her maidens waited to help her change into something more suitable for underwater travel. It didn’t seem like a bright idea considering the way Misael’s armored guards turned on her with hands ready to unsheathe their swords when she first walked away from their king.

Instead, she took the rear steps of the ship’s deck to the captain’s port until her feet found the railing ledge and the bay waited down below to greet her.

“Find another realm to line your kingdom and house’s pockets, Misael,” Anthia told the fuming king, “because it will no longer be mine.”

The murder in his eyes told her that the sea glass, ships, and all the rest was probably nothing compared to the vision of her walking away from him because he wasn’t worth it.

“I’ll get what I want,” he returned through clenched teeth. “One way or another.”

She would let him think as much.

So be it.

The water did greet her sweetly, like a nuzzle from a mother, when she dived from the ship’s stern. The currents called her home; the very second the water filled her lungs and her legs and feet changed. From flesh and bone to a tail of blue-green scales, and an elongated, delicate tail fin of blue and black markings. Bone melded to bone; muscles expanded with the life of their seas; skin melted to sparkling scales. What the land exposed, the seas protected. The last thing Misael would have seen had he been looking before all of Anthia disappeared under the surface of the bay. She wouldn’t break the surface until she was back in the safe waters of her Blu Seas, but those waiting under the surface found her before she had even made it out of the bay completely.

She could already hear the tsks of her maidens for ruining a gown and cloak that could have been used again, but she made no apologies about ripping the garments away from her lithe form because they slowed her down as she cut through the water.

“Your majesty?” came the chirp of one guard. “Is everything all right?”

In the water, their mother tongue traveled like the calls of other underwater mammals. Noises from clicks, whistles, chirps, and hisses that made up words she didn’t want to waste time hearing from the people calling for her. No, the more space she put between her and the Atlas king, the better she would feel.

Surely.

So, why didn’t she believe it?

“My Queen?” the guard asked again.

“I don’t trust him,” was all she managed to say at first. It should be all that needed said, frankly. Tak, the youngest of all her personal guards but also her favorite because of his length of time serving her family from his youngest years, barely ten then, was still a young merman even if he had already reached adult age. His youth did not stop her from posting him at the end of her chamber of suites in the palace more often than anyone else. She liked his conversation, his ideas, and frankly, his company at times.

Not that the guard had ever stepped out of line with her.

“He wants something from me, I don’t know what it is other than me.” But he can’t have that, she didn’t say out loud. “I can’t trust him not to be plotting against me while I stand there beside him and give him the opportunity to do it. No, I don’t trust him at all, and we’ll accept nothing from him. Not even one of his godforsaken ships.”

She let that statement be her final one on the matter—whoever needed to carry it on to the rest of her gaggle of advisors and guards would do so. It seemed to be enough for the guard. Tak slowed his swimming pace to fall in line behind her. She didn’t wait for the rest of the royal caravan made up of her maidens, guards, and advisors to catch up before she slipped into the stream carrying water back out into the seas from the bay.

It was in moments like these that Anthia sometimes wondered what it would be like to forget the crown on her head and the duty in her heart, but alas, somethings were just not possible. The same way the Gods had doomed their kind to need both the land and sea to survive, she was also hopelessly devoted in her duty as queen—the very last of her bloodline, in fact, and her kingdom, no matter how much they loved and adored her, knew it.

Worse yet, what if the land king knew it, too?