She straightened with effort and shifted slowly to the dresser. Fumbling through the contents of her satchel, she pulled out the most conservative of the bodices she’d brought with her: a heavy, durable scarlet piece with elbow-length sleeves and a high, rounded neckline. She donned it numbly and buttoned the column of large beige pitted murex shells that ran down its center.
She stashed the remains of her sky-blue bodice at the bottom of her satchel. She wished she hadn’t worn Ecklon’s favorite bodice today; she wished she’d worn anything but. Propriety and tradition were important values to Ecklon. What would he think if he saw her now? Certainly, if his mother, Epaulette, ever came to learn of what had happened, she would insist on canceling the wedding. Coralline clutched the rose petal tellin shell at her throat anxiously.
She glanced at herself in the mirror. Her shoulders looked as stiff as though pins were embedded in the blades, and her face looked stricken—and struck. An angry gray smudge was forming beneath her right earlobe, a souvenir of Eliphus’s backhand across her jaw. Coralline wound her hair into a long side braid and curled it up over her ear to conceal the mark. She was fortunate there was no blood anywhere on her, for Pavonis would otherwise detect something to be the matter as soon as he saw her. She couldn’t bear to tell anyone, not even him. Only Izar would know, because he’d been there.
Coralline started to slip away from the mirror, but a glint on the floor caught her eye. Eliphus’s dagger. She bent down to pick it up, discerning her reflection in it as a faint, frowning wedge. She rotated the dagger between her fingers. It was such a simple implement—just larger than her hand, its hilt carved of sandstone—but whoever held it wielded power. She’d made the mistake of leaving her home without a dagger; she wouldn’t make the mistake of leaving this dagger behind. If ever she were assaulted again, she would not hesitate to kill. She was accused for murder; if necessary, she would live up to the charge.
Coralline often knew how ill a patient was as soon as the patient swam through the door; Ecklon often knew how difficult a murder case would be as soon as he swam through the door of the murder scene. This would be a difficult case, he recognized, as he swam through the door of Tang Tarpon’s home.
His gaze roved over the half-dozen empty decanters of wine forming a semicircle on the floor. His attention then shifted to Tang’s bookshelf. Ecklon had read two of Tang’s murder mysteries, The Vanished Whelk and The Under-Minister’s Assassination, and he’d liked them, finding them to be full of uncanny surprises and unexpected twists.
Tang’s body was no longer in the living room—it was being examined by the Forensics Department of the Under-Ministry of Crime and Murder—but the smell of his blood lingered. The murder-mystery writer had, ironically, become the subject of his own real-life murder mystery.
Most people wanted to have an interesting life, but Ecklon also wanted to have an interesting death—a death of the sort for which a detective like himself would be required. He wondered whether Tang had felt similarly; probably not.
Ecklon slipped away from the bookshelf and looked about the small, shabby space. His gaze dropped to the murder weapon on the floor, a dagger with a serpent-encrusted hilt. He collected the dagger, ran his hand over its hilt. He had a passion for daggers, as did many at the Detective Department of the Under-Ministry of Crime and Murder. He was attentive to the style of dagger carving, just as mermaids were attentive to the style of their bodices; he evaluated dagger blades on the basis of their shine and sharpness, just as mermaids evaluated fabrics on the basics of their sheen and softness. The merman who’d owned this serpent-encrusted dagger seemed to have a passion for daggers as well.
Ecklon would begin his murder investigation by interviewing dagger carvers in an attempt to learn the identity of the owner of this dagger. Dagger carvers were often ancient mermen, for dagger carving was an art that was becoming lost over time—a shame, in Ecklon’s opinion. The elderly age of dagger carvers meant two things: Their memories were often weak, and they may have sold a dagger decades ago, making recollection of the purchaser difficult. But Ecklon would have to try nonetheless. Once he had an identity, it wouldn’t take long to find a motive, he knew from experience. Placing the serpent-encrusted dagger carefully in his satchel, he extracted his own dagger.
His dagger had been designed by the most elderly dagger carver in Urchin Grove, an eighty-five-year-old merman with arthritic hands, and it featured an eagle ray wing across the hilt, because his muse, Menziesii, was an eagle ray. He had not told Coralline, but, soon after their wedding, Ecklon planned to return to the same dagger carver and have a new dagger designed for himself, one encrusted with the precious olive-green gemstone peridot in the branching shape of coralline algae. That way, Ecklon would think of Coralline every time he wielded his dagger—and he would wield it always to protect her, to protect them.
He remembered the day he’d tried to teach her how to wield a dagger. After some half-hearted flicking of her wrist, she had handed his dagger back to him, making some comment about a scalpel. He had put his dagger away patiently, deciding to try to teach her again after they were married. He carried a dagger and a pair of handcuffs in his satchel at all times, to defend and to intercept, respectively; it was imperative to him that his wife know how to wield the former and stay out of the latter. His boss, Sinistrum Scomber, had alluded to that when informing him of Coralline’s murder charge.
His enormous nose wrinkling, Sinistrum had handed Ecklon a scroll from the Constables Department of Hog’s Bristle. Ecklon had read it and, after a stunned silence, announced, “I’m going to be the detective on Tang Tarpon’s murder case.”
“That’s a bad idea,” Sinistrum had said with a grimace. “Credibility comes from neutrality, and you have no neutrality in this case. Whether or not your fiancée is a murderess, I suggest you refrain from murdering your career for her.”
“Now that I’m tenured,” Ecklon had said, in a sharper tone than he’d intended, “I can choose my own cases. And I choose to investigate Tang Tarpon’s murder.”
“Don’t make me regret my decision to tenure you!” Sinistrum had snapped. “Unfortunately, though, you’re right that I cannot stop you from choosing your own cases and, in this case, making your own mistakes. Who will you choose as your associate detective?”
Detectives usually worked in pairs, a lead and an associate, because, when criminals learned the identity of a detective, the detective’s life was often under threat. Two detectives working together offered the advantage that, if one of them was murdered, at least the other would know the specifics of the case. But Ecklon did not want to share this particular case with anyone, because he did not want to share Coralline with anyone.
“I’ll work alone,” he’d said. He had then burst out of his chair, pushed past Sinistrum, returned home, and hurriedly started to pack a satchel. He’d tried to deflect his mother’s questions, but she’d read the scroll he’d placed on his dresser, from the Constables Department of Hog’s Bristle.
“You have to cancel your wedding to Coralline!” she’d said. “Think of the terrible headlines in Urchin Examiner and The Groove of the Grove once it becomes public knowledge that she’s a murderess.”
“Coralline is not a murderess, Mother,” he’d said, without looking up from his satchel.
“The truth matters in your profession, son, but nowhere else. In the eyes of society, it does not matter whether or not Coralline actually committed the murder—an accusation is as good as a conviction.”