“That was insane,” Vesma said as she shook her head. “How did you survive that?”
“I had to. Simple as that.” I placed the core in my pouch. “We should find the king and tell him what happened.”
Vesma frowned. “Maybe learning that his daughter was kidnapped by a guild member will wake him from his stupor.”
“Doubt it,” Kegohr said. “What’s that?”
I turned to where Kegohr was pointing and saw a procession coming toward us. A pair of palace guards with long, curved swords led the way. Behind them, eight muscular servants carried a palanquin on which King Beqai sat. A ceremonial scepter laid across the king’s knees. Labu and his companions brought up the rear. A cluster of guards, scribes, and other palace officials lingered behind the prince and stared at me.
The palanquin came to a halt in front of me, and the bearers set it down. Beqai looked around with his familiar air of distant tranquility. None of the carnage around us seemed to bother him. The ruins of the temple, the dead tidal wyrm at the edge of the pool, the toppled statues, and the gore that soaked my side? The old squid-man didn’t even blink.
“Your Majesty.” I stood and bowed. Vesma and Kegohr followed suit.
King Beqai nodded, and his seaweed hair rustled across his chest and shoulders. He peered at the wyrm’s corpse, and his mouth twitched on one side for a moment. A jolt of anticipation raced through me. Had he finally woken from his slumber?
“Where is my daughter?” he asked.
I clenched my fist at the thought of Cadrin and how he’d taken Kumi. We needed to go after him. Now.
“She was taken,” I said. “Kidnapped by Cadrin of the Resplendent Tears Guild. We would have gone after them, but he used a lure to draw the tidal wyrm and cover his escape.”
Beqai’s tentacles flared out around him. He gripped the arms of his seat as he leaned forward. Thunderous waves of fury rippled through his whole body.
Then he stopped, leaned back with closed eyes, and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, his serenity had returned.
“I am sure that all will be well,” he said.
I stared at him. Beqai lived in willful ignorance and refused to let the chaos and the violence of the world intrude upon the reality of peace and meditation he desired. Some of the courtiers around him shifted uncomfortably or gazed at their own feet, but none showed any sign of speaking up.
“Your Majesty, your daughter is gone,” I said. Then I remembered another important detail of our trip. “The Depthless Dream has been taken as well. Cadrin and his people stole it and turned the temple into a trap for us.”
“Blasphemy,” Beqai whispered.
Anger flooded me. “And a number of the temple guards locked us inside the inner shrine.”
“It cannot be. My people are loyal to me.”
I found it hard to believe that a populace would be loyal to a king who so clearly shirked his duties to them.
“Your Majesty, we can’t allow them to get away with this.”
But the king’s meditative state washed over his features once again. “I was like you once,” he said with a vacant stare. “A young warrior, bold and eager, constantly looking for opportunities to prove myself. When one’s blood flows with the tide of youth, it brings a deep current of certainty, a conviction that what you believe is absolute truth. But I have seen the truth of battle, and it is a place of chaos. It is easy to confuse the patterns seen in those crashing waves.”
“I’m not confused,” I snapped. “I saw it with my own two eyes—Cadrin holding a trident and dragging Kumi away. The others saw it, too. And if the Depthless Dream is as important as you say, then that’s probably the one Cadrin had to your daughter’s throat.”
I’d assumed that this would draw some sort of response from the king. I’d hoped for fury at Cadrin and a change of views. Or, at least, for the old king to wake the fuck up. Instead, he remained still and just smiled at me from the comfort of his throne.
“We have to rescue Kumi,” I said. “No one kidnaps a princess with good intentions.”
“Let us not scour the mud flats before the tide has passed.”
“What?”
Labu stepped forward to take a place by Beqai’s side. “My father means that we should not act until we can see what is happening. As anyone familiar with this region and its way of life would know.”
Fury at the impotence of these royals washed away the aches of my fight with the wyrm. Kumi’s own father and brother didn’t seem to care as much about her safety as I did. Labu even preferred point-scoring against me to looking to the safety of his own flesh and blood.
“We’ve got to do something.” I watched Labu, his face expressionless. He’d seemed smitten by Cadrin, willing to do anything to win the other man’s favor. Could he have had some hand in the disaster that had come to Qihin City? I couldn’t exactly accuse him without proof, but someone had ordered the temple guards to lock us inside the shrine. And an order from a prince would be obeyed.
I banked the thought for later as the king shifted a little on his throne. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to know that he would, at least, do something about his daughter and the stolen trident.
“And we will act,” Beqai replied. “I will send Labu to the Resplendent Tears guild house to see whether Kumi is there and ensure that she is safe.”
“She won’t be in any danger,” Labu said. “Even if she has been taken against her will.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked. It seemed odd that Labu would be so confident about how the guild might treat his sister, and it further confirmed my suspicions.
“Taking Kumi is a bold move for
