“Your attitude toward Ecklon is also unfair. You are taking his virtues for granted simply because he is too humble to flaunt them. By taking on a personal case, Ecklon risked his professional reputation to protect yours; by marrying you, he is not only going against his mother’s wishes, but is jeopardizing his personal reputation. To the people of Urchin Grove, it does not matter whether you actually murdered someone—you will always bear the taint of an accused murderess. And with your desmarestia-sea-oak solution, you’ve triumphed over medical convention but have failed miserably when it comes to marital convention—everyone is now calling you the Queen of Poison. The law may be forgiving, but the marriage market is ruthlessly unforgiving.”
“What do you want from me, Mother?”
“I want you to marry Ecklon.”
Coralline thought of telling her mother about her death prognosis. But she wasn’t quite sure she believed Mintaka’s curse anymore, or at least not the abbreviated time frame of it. You will die soon after the light dies, Mintaka had said, but who knew what the word soon meant for stars, given that their life span ranged from millions to billions of years? Also, how would Coralline die? Urchin Grove was not Hog’s Bristle; it was not overflowing with loiterers and dagger wielders. The greatest danger in this village were darts of gossip. Unfortunately, she might be alive for a while yet, Coralline admitted to herself. She’d hoped death would prevent her from having to make a decision about marrying Ecklon, but she herself would have to make the decision.
“I haven’t told Ecklon about him,” she whispered.
“Good. You did well to have kept the human a secret.”
“But I don’t want to live a lie.”
“Happiness is a lie, darling. It’s something carefully cultivated, mindfully pruned, like the algae in a garden—seeds of truth can ruin it all. Happiness is like the corset you’re wearing—many strings must be tightened to keep it in place. Take comfort in the knowledge that time is the greatest of all healers. One day soon, when you wake up in Ecklon’s beautiful Mansion, you will smile at Ecklon next to you, and you will remember the human as having been no more than a distant dream.”
28
Past and Future
Izar stepped inside his Invention Chamber, his hands balled into fists before his face—Serpens or hired men could be anywhere, lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce. But all was still. That said, it was clear someone had been here.
Long, new shelves had been carved into the walls and loaded with sheaves of iron and magnesium, as well as belts of bullets, which formed narrow, comet-shaped cylinders. And the floor, which had been hopelessly cluttered before, streaming with Izar’s mementoes of his inventive work, had been tidied. Izar looked upon the space as upon a forest that had been razed. He felt as though robbers had come into his home, and, though they had not stolen his things, they had decided to make the place their own—the greatest theft of all. There was now a coldness to the Invention Chamber, a methodical aspect, a rigidness and regimentation; Izar was looking upon the first steps to mass production, he knew.
He would have to kill Castor. He had known it the moment Saiph had said it would be Castor who would kill Coralline. At that time, there’d been a distance to Izar’s knowledge that he must commit murder, a distance of both time and space, and Izar had refused to think about it. Now, he acknowledged to himself that to kill Castor would be to kill a part of himself, because the robot was an extension of himself. He had endowed Castor with his own vices—apathy, violence, even the scar along his cheek.
Izar raised his eyes to Castor’s home, the bulletproof tank of water. But the tank was empty. Castor was gone. Saiph must have had him loaded onto a ship—perhaps they were on their way to Urchin Grove already.
His spine suddenly weak, Izar keeled over, his hands on his knees, his eyes staring unseeingly at the floor. He listened to the rasps of his breath. His exhalations made him think of smoke—the smoke that would soon spout from Castor’s arm. He would do his best to try to get to Coralline before Saiph, but there was something he had to do first: save the ocean from his creation. Saiph was clearly planning on building an army of Castors, but he wouldn’t be able to if Izar destroyed this Invention Chamber, if he destroyed Ocean Dominion itself.
He strode to his shelves of combustible chemicals, clear and colored, gathered over the years from all corners of the world. He snatched a pail off a hook and emptied the contents of all the flasks into it. The pail became only half full, but Izar knew it contained the power to burn down the entire building, from the underground all the way up to the thirtieth floor. It was still early in the morning, the workers had not yet arrived, but, just in case, Izar pulled the handle of the fire alarm on the wall to ensure there would be no casualties. A strident sound like that of a police-car siren started blaring all around him.
Grabbing a set of matches off a shelf, he lit a match, admiring the golden phoenix in his hand—a tiny blaze capable of toppling a behemoth.
Kelp Cove was a large, circular arena ringed with a forest of thick, long, bright-green fronds of kelp, which acted as a curtain. Two hundred chairs sat on the pearl-white sands, facing a white gazebo with twirling pillars. Waiters wearing crisp white waistcoats erupted regularly from a kitchen along the side of the arena, bearing platters of devil’s tongue, the red algae laid in finger-sized bundles on triangular limestone plates. The waiters also carted decanters of wine, which shimmered in various shades of green.
“I hope the service is up to your caliber,” Epaulette said to Abalone. The comment was in reference to Abalone’s complaint about the waitstaff at the engagement party.
“It is,” Abalone said stiffly.
Epaulette wore a red corset, as though she was bleeding to death at her son’s wedding. Her silver-gray eyes held a matching wounded expression.
Coralline saw that two plump mermaids were rapidly approaching her, Abalone, and Epaulette: Sepia, Abalone’s best friend, and Telia, Sepia’s twenty-five-year-old daughter. A baby was squealing at a deafening pitch in Telia’s arms.
In an effort to avoid all of them, Coralline dashed away from her mother’s side and started roaming about Kelp Cove alone. At her engagement party, she’d been intimidated by the presence of a hundred guests; at her wedding, there were twice the number, many of whom had seen her in handcuffs, but she felt indifferent to their stares. A whisper floated over to her ears:
“Ecklon saved his bride, but look at how ungrateful she looks, the Queen of Poison. Her lover must have dumped her, so she’s with Ecklon again. I wish Ecklon would marry me instead! Maybe he’s changed his mind about her, maybe that’s why he’s nowhere to be seen just before his own wedding—”
Pretty, purple-tailed, with an aquiline nose, the mermaid broke off upon catching sight of Coralline. Ordinarily, Coralline would have bolted away, pretending to not have heard, but now, she looked at the mermaid coldly before resuming her meander.
Where was Ecklon? she wondered. He was clearly not with his boss, Sinistrum Scomber, as he had been at their engagement party—Coralline could see Sinistrum grimacing by himself toward the perimeter of Kelp Cove. At her engagement party, when Ecklon had been late, Coralline had feared he’d had a change of heart; now she hoped for it.