“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Altair and Kuda cried together.
Coralline could not help but smile, despite the shots ringing outside. Pavonis had earlier known Altair only as Minion, and now here he was, protecting Altair’s children. Naiadum, meanwhile, was watching the birth of the seahorses with wide, mesmerized eyes. Coralline warned him again to remain close to Pavonis, then she slipped back into Kelp Cove.
Castor stood at the center of the arena. Trampled by his feet, two hundred chairs were now in splinters, their fragments so fine that they resembled broken shells more than slate. Castor’s head swiveled, and his eyes found her. The insignia over his chest rotated slightly. She knew he would shoot her, yet her gaze was riveted by the scar across his jaw. She felt as though she was looking at Izar, and, though it was a monstrous side of him she was seeing, she could not bring herself to turn away.
A sharp click sounded. A bullet tore out of Castor’s navel. Coralline found herself pushed out of the way. Regaining her balance, she turned around to thank her savior. The person was Rhodomela, but the veins in Rhodomela’s neck were standing out, and blood was gushing out from a hole in her black bodice, diffusing through the waters like a pot of overturned ink.
Izar awoke with a start. He touched his indigo scales and the gills fluttering along the sides of his neck; everything was as it should be. Looking around him, he saw that he was hovering midway between the surface and the seabed. The first time he’d transformed into a merman, when Coralline had found him, she’d told him it was strange that he’d been hovering midway between the surface and the seabed—it had made her think he was neither merperson nor human, for merpeople tended to sink when unconscious and humans tended to float. Izar realized now that he was midway between the surface and the seabed because he was both merperson and human.
He raised his arms over his head and swung his tail side to side, rising steadily through the waters until his head crested over the waves. His vision adjusted easily to air, for he had been human just a short while ago. Alshain’s trawler formed a dot in the distance—Deneb was returning to Menkar. Izar turned his head to look at Saiph’s ship, Vega. The bronze-and-black insignia of Ocean Dominion glistened on its side, a fishhook slashing the letters O and D in half. Izar had had the logo painted especially large on this vessel, so that all, near and far, would know the coat of arms to which the ship belonged.
Dipping his head back into the water, Izar swam toward Vega, figuring that Castor would not be far from the ship that had brought him. His head crested again only when he reached the ship’s shadow. He was about to toss his tailfin into the air and dive down, when a voice stopped him: “Son!”
His face slackened, all tension in his shoulders released—such was the effect of the voice of his father.
Turning around, he squinted in the direction of the voice. In the shadow of Vega floated a little dinghy, approaching him rapidly. Antares was rowing it, his head tufty, his face flushed, his steel-gray eyes beseeching. “Don’t believe anything you may have heard about me!” he called. “None of it is true. I’ll explain everything. Come to me, my boy!”
Izar felt sick and hollow, as though an empty punch had landed on his stomach. He’d believed everything he’d been told about Antares—by Zaurak, by Osmundea—but now that he was looking at his father, he could hardly believe any of it. For twenty-five years, Antares had raised Izar as his son, caring for him, protecting him; at the very least, Izar owed him a chance to explain.
Izar’s tail slashed through the water as a knife cuts bread. He arrived at the dinghy more quickly than he’d thought, having forgotten the power of his tail. But he wished he didn’t have a tail—he wished he were the man his father recognized. He wrapped his hands around the boat’s rim and extended his head over the water, while keeping his neck submerged, so his gills could continue to breathe.
He felt something in the water near him, as though someone was arriving, and he looked down. Whoever it was seemed to have shifted, such that he couldn’t see anyone. He looked up again at Antares, to find that Antares’s eyes had darkened to the gray of storm clouds and were glaring at him, the brows together. His hand darted forward, grabbed Izar by the neck, and lifted him out of the water. “All the wealth your Castor creates will belong only to me and Saiph!” he yelled.
Even if Izar’s gills had not been flattened against the sides of his neck, he would have been unable to breathe. His father wanted to kill him. He had known it theoretically, in what Zaurak and Osmundea had said, but to see it, to feel it—it was paralyzing. He hung in the air as passively as a sack of potatoes.
Antares’s other hand gripped a knife, its steel blade glinting like a mirror. It slashed toward Izar’s neck.
Another hand appeared at the same time, this one from the water, clasping a half-shell; Osmundea leaned toward Antares and stabbed him in the heart.
Antares released Izar and the knife, such that both fell into the water. Upon gulping two deep breaths through his gills, Izar rose over the rim of the dinghy and looked in. Antares lay dying on the floor of the boat, unconscious, the half-shell protruding from his ribs. Izar’s blood stilled in his veins, and he found himself gasping, crying, not for the loss of Antares as he saw him but for the loss of Antares as he had thought him.
“I couldn’t save you from him last time, son,” Osmundea said gently, “but I’m glad I was able to save you this time.”
“Izar!” a voice shouted. Shading his eyes with his hand, Izar looked up toward the bow of Vega. Saiph was glowering down at him from the rails, his charred-kale eyes blazing.
“I’ll never forgive you for this!” Saiph screamed. “I’m going to kill Coralline today, and I’m going to kill you soon after. Every day of the short remainder of your life, you’re going to spend looking over your shoulder.”
Izar’s tailfin flicked up in the air like the flukes of a whale, and he dived down into the ocean alongside his mother.
Coralline sat concealed among the holdfasts of kelp, her tail extended in front of her, Rhodomela’s head on her lap.
The bullet had torn through Rhodomela’s ribs, on the left side. Coralline’s hand pressed into the area to try to quell the flow of blood, but it dribbled out steadily from between her fingers. She wished there was something she could do, but a bullet to the chest, so close to the heart, was fatal, she recognized instinctively. All her life, Rhodomela had spent saving others, but now that she needed saving, no one could save her.
Her tail was bleaching fast. There was a particularly stark quality to the bleaching—the black scales were not fading to intermediate shades of gray, then white—but were switching suddenly from black to white, one scale after another, as though they were being rotated. There was something beautiful about the white scales—just as there was something beautiful about a bleached coral reef—but there was also a ghastliness to it.
Rhodomela’s lips parted, a whisper emerged. Coralline bent her ear to Rhodomela’s mouth. “I see you’ve conquered your fear of blood,” Rhodomela said. Her eyes twinkled, then turned soft and smooth as a salve, as she continued, “I would be proud of you if you were my daughter.”