Izar’s fingers fumbled with his baby’s-ear shells, turning and twisting but unable to get them out of their buttonholes.
“Let me help,” Coralline said impatiently.
Perching next to Izar on the settee, she commenced with the top-most shell, at his collar. Her hands traveled steadily down his chest, one shell after another, and her flush traveled steadily down her face, coming to encompass her neck and throat. She’d never unfastened Ecklon’s buttons before, nor had he ever unfastened hers. It was the sort of simple but domestically intimate act she’d always associated with marriage.
By the time Coralline had undone Izar’s buttons, her face was fiery. She avoided Izar’s eyes, but he was smiling.
He slid out of his waistcoat. His chest was finely sculpted, and his shoulders were broad, she saw, each one as wide as her whole hand. But his right shoulder had a bruise over it the size of Pavonis’s eye and the color of a purple sea urchin.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded.
“You had plenty to occupy your mind,” he said, his indigo eyes pondering her.
Coralline didn’t want to think of the morning. Nor did she want to think of the fact that Izar had seen her mostly undressed, in her slashed corset. Rising, she shifted to the dresser, grateful for the slight distance that the movement created between them. When she returned, it was with a neutral expression and two jars of salve.
With her fingers, she dabbed his shoulder with horned wrack salve, a pale-green paste. “This will reduce the pain and swelling,” she explained. Then she turned his hand over and examined it. The gash along his palm still remained, but it was less pronounced than at the time she’d discovered him, yesterday morning. She applied the olive-brown balm of toothed wrack salve to it. When he turned his hand over, she saw that his knuckles were red and inflamed, the skin across them chafed. She applied toothed wrack salve carefully to each knuckle, asking, “Is this from the fight with the two brothers?”
“Partially.”
“What else?”
“I broke the mirror in my room last night.”
“Why?” She looked up at him.
“I didn’t like my reflection.”
Assuming he was joking, Coralline started to laugh, but she stopped when she saw that the set of his lips was serious. “Humans legs are hideous,” she said. “We merpeople are so much more beautiful. Why would you dislike your reflection?”
Izar threw his head back and laughed. It was the first time Coralline had seen him laugh. She found that his merriment changed his face, softening his jaw, vanishing his scar, making his indigo eyes sparkle like violet opal. It was no longer a harsh face, but a handsome face.
Covering her salves with their lids, she made to rise, but his hand wrapped around her wrist. She glanced at it sharply; the fingers unraveled. “Thank you for cutting me out of the fishnet,” he said.
“You don’t need to thank me. By saving you, I also saved myself.”
He gave her a quizzical look. She could not explain it to him, nor even properly understand it herself, but after the morning assault, she’d felt herself a victim, and after she’d cut him out of the net, she’d felt herself a victor. By wresting him out of the net, she’d lifted herself out of her temporary daze of powerlessness.
“You saved me as well, from the two brothers. Thank you for that.”
“That was my fault,” Izar said, a shadow crossing his face.
“How so?”
“I saw them looking you over last night and should have confronted them then. Had I done so, this morning would not have happened. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Coralline said. “You couldn’t have known their intentions. But if it makes you feel any better, I have a confession to make, too.”
“What?”
“I was planning to leave you behind this morning.”
Izar shook his head, as though to clear out his ears. Now it was Coralline’s turn to burst out laughing.
“Pavonis and I were planning to leave Bristled Bed and Breakfast before you woke up. But then, when those two brothers appeared, I decided to wake you up by rattling the desk against the wall.”
“Well, I’m glad for that!”
“I have another confession to make,” Coralline said, in a more serious tone, “and a favor to ask.”
“Anything.”
“I have no carapace left. I forgot my pouch in Tang Tarpon’s home. May I borrow some carapace from you?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”
“There’s no need.”
“But I will.”
Coralline returned the jars of salve to her satchel, then swam to the bed and crawled under the blanket.
Izar now understood why Coralline had given him a strange look when he’d offered to sleep on the settee. A settee no more resembled a sofa than would a stone bench with armrests. It was also far too short—his head lay on one armrest, while much of his tail dangled out over the other. He turned to look at Coralline, to the far side of her bed.
He knew he shouldn’t—he even clasped the armrest to prevent himself—but he found himself rising from the settee. Watching Coralline’s form with acute attention, he moved toward her vertically, slowly, like her seahorse, his tailfin flicking so lightly that, even had the floor been covered with sand, not a grain of it would have stirred. When he neared her bed, he paused, tried to dissuade himself from approaching any more—if she were to wake up, she would be alarmed—but he could not keep away. He came to hover just over her, his body horizontal, parallel to her own.
Coralline was lying on her side, with her tail curled up, the equivalent of knees pressed into the chest. Her blanket was pulled up to her chin, and her long hair draped over it like a cape of dark velvet. Her shades—her black hair, her bronze scales—formed his favorite pairing of colors, Izar realized, because it was the pairing of colors of Ocean Dominion’s insignia.
He had come within a hair’s breadth of killing the two mermen who’d accosted her. He would have killed them had she not stopped him. But why should he have been so upset? What did she even mean to him?
She and he were opposites in every way. She was a healer, he a destroyer. She was driven to rescue; he was driven to raze—he, Antares, and Saiph were called the Trio of Tyrants after all.
He smiled to remember her promise to pay him back for the carapace she borrowed from him. In Menkar, he had more money than he could count. He would have even more once he launched Castor.
Oh, how his Castor would light the ocean on fire! Whenever he and Coralline had entered a settlement—Purple Claw, Hog’s Bristle, Rainbow Wrack—Izar had looked down at the seabed and thought: Perhaps here—no, here!—would be a good place to launch Castor. But his thought exercises had been largely hypothetical. From his studies of the ocean floor, he knew that each and every settlement of merpeople would be a good place to launch Castor.
As soon as he returned to Menkar and created his army of Castors, he would become rich—so rich, Ascella would regret her affair with Tarazed. Gold and diamonds—he’d wanted to collect them from the bottom of the ocean for her. But what was it that he’d so loved about her? he asked himself for the first time.
He found himself comparing Ascella with Coralline. The differences between them were like day and night: Ascella, with her pale gold hair, Coralline, with her dark locks; Ascella, with her eyes of cold frost, Coralline, with eyes of the flowing ocean. In appearance, Ascella was like a rose, immediately noticeable; Coralline was more of a lily, simple but beautiful.