“You’re taking too long!” Pavonis hissed through the window. “Time waits for no one.”
Ignoring him again, Coralline sat at her desk. She examined the streaked red-brown sandstone jar standing in its corner—her carapace crock. Holding the crock next to her ear, she shook it, listening intently to the jingle of shells. She hadn’t told anyone except Ecklon and Pavonis—she hadn’t even told her father—but she was saving to start her own clinic one day, Coralline’s Cures.
She unlidded the crock carefully. The shells within would clang if she were to empty the crock directly onto her desk, so she gathered the shells in her hand and placed them one by one on the gray-slate surface of her desk. When she’d arranged them all in a neat line, from smallest to largest, she started counting them eagerly. She had one moon snail shell, luminous even at night—equivalent to one carapace. One wentletrap, a lovely, spiraled little white cone—two carapace. One slipper limpet, smooth and rounded—five carapace. One scallop, patterned calico—ten carapace. And, thank goodness, one cerith, pigmented and pointed—twenty carapace.
She did the math; the total came to thirty-eight carapace. It was much less than she’d hoped. How she wished she had a conch or whelk in hand—shells worth fifty and a hundred carapace each! But Rhodomela had paid her only fifty carapace per week at The Irregular Remedy, and Coralline had spent much of the amount in household expenditures, for she’d wished to ease her family’s financial burden in the wake of her father’s retirement. Her decision to work at The Irregular Remedy had been a wrong one in every way, she now admitted to herself.
She piled the shells in a golden drawstring pouch her mother had stitched for her, embroidered with her first and last name in cursive letters. She then extracted a pen and small parchment-pad from the first drawer of her desk. She ran her fingers lovingly over the cover of the pad, embossed as it was with the armored, branching shape of coralline algae. Naiadum had given it to her on her twentieth birthday, and she’d adored it the moment she’d laid eyes on it. She’d considered using it for medical instructions and prescriptions to patients, but she had decided it was too beautiful and special for such a mundane use.
Biting a corner of her lip, she tore a page out of her parchment-pad and wrote:
Dear Mother and Father,
I’m leaving to find the elixir to save Naiadum. I’ll return as soon as I can.
Love, Coralline
She read it over. The note’s brevity gave it an unintended sense of formality and finality. She thought of writing a new note, but tears rose to her eyes and her hand trembled over the parchment. She had never left her family before. Not one night had she spent away from her home. Could she truly leave her parents and brother, and that, too, in the middle of the night? Why did she feel like she was abandoning them, like she was trying to escape the circumstances she herself had created? Was leaving home the courageous thing to do, or the cowardly thing?
“Don’t, Coralline.”
She didn’t know how he knew, but Pavonis always knew what she was thinking.
Coralline hurriedly placed a starfish-shaped parchment-weight atop the note. Her parents would see the note as soon as they entered her room in the morning. She added the pen and parchment-pad to her satchel—the parchment-pad would serve as a memento of Naiadum.
“The Elixir Expedition may be the journey of a lifetime,” Pavonis drawled, “but it will not last a lifetime. Your satchel is as thick as two pillows. We haven’t even left, and we’re already stalled with your sentimentalism.”
Coralline drifted up to the ceiling and collected a luciferin orb. It was warm in her hands—its heat and glimmering white-blue light consoled her. She connected the orb to a rod—thus connected, the luciferin orb transformed to a luciferin lantern. It would guide her at night during the Elixir Expedition.
Zipping her overflowing satchel with difficulty, she slung it over her shoulder.
“You’ve forgotten the most important thing,” Pavonis called. “A dagger.”
Ecklon had tried to teach her how to wield a dagger, but after trying a few swipes with his dagger, she’d handed it back to him, saying, “The only sharp instrument I need to be able to wield with any level of skill is a scalpel.”
“Fetch your father’s dagger,” Pavonis directed.
Coralline could picture her father’s dagger precisely; it would be hanging in a sheath above his desk in a corner of the living room. He would never miss it—it was largely ornamental—nor would he begrudge her borrowing of it. But her bedroom door would creak if she were to open it, and if either of her parents awoke from the sound, the Elixir Expedition would end before it could begin. They would not want her to leave home, not like this, not on a quest to find something that may be no more than a legend.
“You’re better than any dagger, Pavonis,” Coralline said, intending it as a compliment.
“You need to be able to defend yourself—” His voice cut off, and his body slammed against the wall. Coralline’s desk rattled, her bedside table quivered, and several books tumbled off her shelves. “Something’s attacking me!” he bellowed. “Help, Coralline, HELP!”
The gray tin under his arm, Izar rang the doorbell for the fifth time, keeping his thumb pressed to it until his nail whitened. From the entryway in which he stood, decorated with a glass foyer table and a porcupine-like spiky ball balanced precariously atop it, Izar could hear the bell echoing to the other side of the door. Was she asleep? Or was she not home? But where could she be in the middle of the night?
He’d never arrived at her penthouse unannounced before—it felt a little like arriving for dinner at Yacht without a reservation—but he’d had an impossibly tumultuous day and would feel steady only when he held her in his arms.
Footsteps pattered on the other side of the door, soft as reindeer on snow. The door opened a wedge. Izar stared at Ascella with open-mouthed astonishment.
The lids of her frost-blue eyes shimmered with sultry shadows, like an early-morning sky topped with swirls of smoke. Her lips were as crimson as poppies—it was the same lipstick she’d worn during their dinner at Yacht. She wore a low-cut powder-blue slip that ended at her thighs, with a slit rising up to the hip on one side. A matching silk robe covered her loosely, then tightly, as her fingers knotted its sash at the waist.
“Were we supposed to meet here tonight?” Izar asked, chagrined. “Am I late?”
“No. You’re not.”
“Good.”
Izar stepped inside Ascella’s apartment, closed the door behind him, and wrapped his arms around her. She smelled of lavender, the fragrance sweet and purple, delicate and subtle. “I’ve missed you more than you can imagine today,” he said softly.
“Er, thank you—”
“How come you didn’t call me after the oil spill?” he said, his voice a gentle reprimand. “Didn’t you hear the news smearing all the channels, spouting poison at Ocean Dominion?”
“I did hear it. I’m sorry, but I’ve been busy with Tarazed all week. Abstract hosted an exhibition for him this week—”
“I know, I know. You told me. Never mind. Let’s not talk about work now.”
Izar ran his thumb over the third finger of her left hand, the finger that would soon wear a ring mined by Castor from the depths of the ocean. He leaned forward to kiss her but pulled apart abruptly at the sight behind her. Forgetting her momentarily, he strode farther into her living room.
There was her glass coffee table that he recognized, with an icicle-shaped quartz vase standing in its center like a glacier in a transparent sea—Ascella loved diamonds, and quartz and crystals were as close as home decorations could get to diamonds. Behind the coffee table was something he didn’t recognize: a purple-and-black painting, five-by-six feet. A series of jagged black strokes over a violet canvas, it made Izar think of a massive bruise. As his scar marred one part of his jaw, he felt that this bruise marred one part of her home, which was otherwise white and glassy, much like her complexion.