“I’m sure that’s true.” Cartari looked quite serious as he spoke, soft green eyes wary, but I wondered if there was a joke beneath the surface. With him, there always was.
“We shall just have to convince them that treatment will be different moving forward,” the Princess said, “I will be in charge of making sure they are taken care of, healed, and protected. They will be—”
“Commander!” A sailor came running up to us, just as the ship was picking up speed, spray blasting our faces. “There is a dispatch from Capital City. You must respond to it immediately.”
“We are underway on an important mission, sailor.”
“The King insists.”
I looked from the Princess to Cartari as the ship left our harbor and headed to the nesting grounds. I shrugged apologies and followed the sailor into the cockpit to hear the message that was so urgently relayed.
Captain Gorgin had held a meeting the night before with six other pirate Captains, who held command of a total of twenty-five ships. A rightful armada. They had set sail toward Bristola’s main port and two of our other cities this very morning. Kajo was sending twelve more sets of Special Operations troops, four to each of these cities. I was ordered to ready my Navy immediately.
It was an official declaration from the Beast King: we were at war.
Nine
Ceritha
Axis conferred with Cartari for about five minutes when he came back from the cockpit. I busied myself with some breathing exercises at the starboard-side railing, tasting the salt spray on my lips. Would he tell me? What kind of partnership would this relationship be? What right did I even have to ask that when, deep inside, I knew I still planned on finding a way out of it?
That sailboat, though… what a gorgeous gesture… and what a gorgeous little boat. I would have fun on it. He really seemed to be trying. Still: keeping secrets from me, like whatever important message he had received from the King just now, was not the best way to start a relationship.
I shrugged. He was the Prince of an entire realm. There was no reason for him to share things of substance with me. I needed to earn a place on his boat, too.
I saw him coming out of the corner of my eye and took a deep breath. The electricity from our kiss before still echoed through me. I didn’t know where it came from, why it was there, or what it meant, but it was getting hard to ignore.
“How far is it to the nesting grounds?” I asked as he came to stand next to me. He tore his gaze away from the bobbing horizon and looked at me. There was a mask over his eyes now, a look that said there was so much more that he wanted to say aloud, but just couldn’t.
“Another thirty minutes or so. Not far.”
“You don’t need to go back home?”
Axis shifted slightly and laid a hand on the railing. “There’s nowhere else I would rather be. Truly, Princess. The most pressing issue facing my realm, and our entire planet, is the blue flu. We need to figure out how to fix that for our sea creatures and for our Curans, and Bordash, as well. There is nothing more important.”
His voice had risen high over the crashing of the waves against the boat, but that did not negate the seriousness of what he said, and I believed his sincerity.
The thirty minutes passed in silence between us. A few times, he turned to me, as if he had something further to say, but the wind whipped away any words. I was reluctant to communicate telepathically; I didn’t want to reignite anything further. Last night’s chilling call out to him while I had been daydreaming of us making love had been enough of a reminder that there might be something deeper between us… Something deeper that I had always stood so solidly against.
We slowed as we reached the nesting grounds, which were deep water-level caves in a small volcanic island that rose up from the ocean’s depths. We would anchor far out from it and take a smaller sailboat into the grounds. A sailboat that the firefins could capsize, if they wanted, but that would allow us, allow me, to reach them from. We were not going armed, as these Curans typically were, and we were going with the trust that my message through Rensi had spread.
As if he were waiting for us, Rensi sped through the water and jumped over our little sailboat as soon as Cartari, Axis, and I were seated inside it, before we had even freed the sail.
“That’s him,” I said with a smile. “That’s the firefin I spoke to last night.”
Cartari and Axis traded a glance, but I didn’t care if they were dubious. There were even those on Serpul who didn’t believe the more gifted telepaths could communicate with animals. I was about to prove them wrong.
As we sailed closer to the overhanging coves of the nesting grounds, more firefins appeared in the waters, circling our boats, occasionally spin up out of the air. They were all the deeper scarlet color than the firefins I was accustomed to. A thirty-foot long queen reared up at the head of our boat, forcing us to heave-to, her four-wing fins spread out as she elevated from the water, hissing water at us, a shrill piercing screech making us halt. She hung there a moment, then dove back into the water.
Before we could move forward, another firefin lunged up and over us, shrieking in the same pitch as it flew above. Suddenly, from all around, the shrieking grew to an alarming level and echoed off the cove walls.
We covered our ears and hunkered low in the boat, as if warding off an attack. Axis was communicating with someone telepathically, probably the fearful sailors far behind us on the ship, wondering if we were under attack.
“Ceritha, do something!” Axis shouted at
