The Wild Mermaid Page 11

  Cora knew her every movement was fake but had to hope she danced naturally. Her heartbeat was racing, but she shielded her thoughts, focusing on the song as they swam. She’d been a vapid, happy mermaid once, and she could playact it now.

  She avoided peering at the guard station for the duration of their swim, but when they reached the gazebo, she finally dared to glance their way. The guards were watching them, but as Maestro had guessed, they were more amused than concerned. They didn’t leave their station and she turned back to the gazebo.

  Maestro had taken them to one that was furthest from the guards. The marble structure had icons cut into it, and vines wrapped around pillars, shrouding a seaweed-bed within.

  Maestro laid Sarina down, and she curled into the fetal position. “Just give me a few minutes…” She closed her eyes and her breathing slowed.

  Maestro settled against a pillar a few feet from Sarina’s already-asleep form. Cora sat beside him, near enough to whisper.

  “How long do we have?” Cora asked.

  “Sarina can take a short nap,” Maestro replied. “And then we need to go.”

  “Will Sarina be okay?”

  “In time. Right now, she’s in shock. Sarina took decades off her life, and her body has changed in many ways. She needs to adjust. If she had more patience, maybe I could have—” Maestro stopped. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “What’s the plan?” Cora asked.

  Maestro didn’t have an answer ready. His eyes darkened. “I don’t know yet. I need a moment to think.” They grew quiet.

  Cora considered the garden, her gaze lingering on the underwater-lilies. There were many different plants, but most of the flowerbeds near them were varieties of underwater lilies—the Queen’s lilies, if song-legend could be believed. Plants like these didn’t grow in natural waters, but magic made it possible here in Atlantis. These flowers had become her special project, and a long practice of careful breeding and cruel selection had not only allowed the lily to grow underwater but to thrive.

  At least, that was what the hymn Green Queen of the Garden suggested, the lyrics casting the Queen in a compassionate light.

  Cora studied the flowers. She could see that they were similar, but the varieties they possessed were extreme. Some only bore a few bold petals while others exploded in multitudes of foliage. Some were as small as her pinky, while others were as large as her hand. The colors themselves varied: some like a rainbow and others bi-colored. The petals of one were pearly white—Was that one transparent?

  The possibilities seemed endless—beautiful ornaments to be created by such a queen.

  Their silence had grown long. “What’s the quickest way out?” Cora asked. Maybe she could find a way to be helpful.

  Maestro laughed but his tone was biting. “The carriage, the one Davit was going to get.”

  “There have to be more ways in and out,” Cora said. “A balcony, somewhere, a window we can use to escape.”

  Maestro shook his head. “I designed this castle. The ways in and out are either enchanted or patrolled. Whatever remains within the Queen’s fortress isn’t meant to escape. If we wanted to leave without detection, we needed someone to help us, like Davit was going to…” He drifted with thought.

  “Is there anyone you trust?” Cora asked.

  “There are some mers I could ask, but there is no one I had more confidence in than Davit.” Maestro paused, his gaze drifted to a nearby wall. “At any rate, this garden is a good place to start. Its location is central within the palace, and it connects many different wings. There are even secret passageways.”

  “Secret passageways?” Cora asked.

  “There’s one right there.” Maestro nodded toward the wall he was staring at. It was not far away but in direct view of the guard station.

  “Where does it go?”

  “To the recital hall.”

  Cora’s thoughts raced with excitement. “The recital hall opens to the ocean! We could escape that way.” The idea of the open ocean made her long to spin.

  But Maestro sighed, seemingly unimpressed. “The hallway might be overlooked, but the recital hall will be well-guarded…without clipped fins, we’ll be caught. If only… You’ll have to move fast.”

  “We’re not fast,” Cora admitted.

  “But is there a way to be faster?” He asked himself. Then his gaze grew distant, his mind clearly whirring with ideas. “I’ve got an idea. It’s not great, but—”

  “It’s something,” Cora said. “We can keep thinking. What about—”

  “Someone’s here.”

  Then Cora heard the metallic clamor of armor. Someone new had entered the garden. She looked from the corner of her eye and swallowed the gasp that tried to escape her lips.

  Triton had arrived.

  Chapter Fourteen:

  His Masterpiece

  Henz and Janh flanked Triton as the three of them approached the guardhouse. Triton moved without caution, clearly recovered from his altercation with Maestro.

  Cora discovered she was gripping Maestro’s forearm. She felt the flush rising in her face, and despite everything that she now knew, she still fought an internal desire to please Triton. She managed the instinct to announce her presence and leave with him, to follow wherever he took her. He would praise her, telling her that she was such a good mermaid…

  “We need to go,” she gasped. “I can’t—Triton’s glamour is so powerful.”

  Maestro placed a hand over hers. “Stay strong, just a few moments longer. Can you wake Sarina?”

  Cora nodded and moved to Sarina’s side. She stroked her arm, “We need to go,” Cora whispered.

  Sarina’s eyes snapped open, and she pushed herself to a seated position, but despite her best attempts to display awareness, Cora watched her sway on the spot.

  “They’re talking, distracted,” Maestro said. “We should leave now while we have the chance.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Maestro pointed to the wall, the one he said was a passageway. “Swim fast, keep going, and trust me that you’ll get through.” Then he pulled Sarina up and began supporting her again.

  Cora hesitated.

  “Go!” Maestro commanded.

  And she did. She raced for the wall, outpacing Maestro and Sarina.

  Maestro muttered, “Sing quick, you’re made of bricks.”

  She heard calls from the guards behind them but didn’t turn to look. They had been spotted.

  Yet Cora didn’t stop, didn’t brace for impact. The wall appeared terribly solid. She was going to slam into it—

  She swam through it instead, turned around, and saw the wall was still there, behind her. She was in a corridor.

  Maestro sprung from the wall a moment later, Sarina by his side. “Sing slow, that’s your woe,” he cried the moment they passed through.

  Cora heard bodies slam against the other side of the wall. Tentative, she reached a finger forward and touched it, confirmed it was solid.

  She heard voices on the other side. Arguments.

  “Who was that?” one guard complained.

  “How did they know that passage?” The other added.

  “It’s Maestro and the mortals,” Triton said. “I can tell.” He said it so definitively that Cora shivered. “Do your job and open the passageway. We need to follow them!”

  “Let me go check the book…” a guard replied. “The passphrase will be there.”

  “A book?” Triton worked to hide his rage, but Cora heard it.

  “It’s in the guardhouse. Do you seriously think we can keep track of all the passageways from the gardens?”

  “Do you at least know where that connects to?” Triton asked.

  Nobody responded and Triton groaned. Their voices grew distant, they were farther away. Cora found she was holding her breath and sighed it out.

  They were safe. For now.

  Not that it would take them long to check that book, to chase them down the hall…
/>
  Maestro and Sarina were already swimming further down the corridor. Cora raced after them, and then followed slower in their shadow. They moved as fast as they could, but Sarina was certainly slowing them down.

  It was a small, narrow hallway, but despite its size, it was magnificent. Murals covered the walls, their details both vibrant and realistic. Cora couldn’t help but admire them as she swam by. Even her racing heart didn’t stop her…because there was something uncomfortably familiar about the art.

  The same merman was depicted again and again in the paintings. Someone she knew to be none other than the Queen’s Great Architect, Melusine’s infamous immortal, and Cora’s Maestro—Meryn.

  “They tell a story,” she realized. The earliest painting featured Maestro as a winged human, but the tone of the work grew dark as it showed the transformation of Atlantis. Cora now swam past a series of images depicting mermaids grieving a ruined city and then reached the beginnings of construction in the following panels.

  She paused before a particular frame.

  While the artist had captured Maestro’s appearance, they had also given him a sense of confidence and grandeur that Cora had never seen from the actual merman. His shoulders were square, his chest walled with strength, he smiled—nothing like the shoulder-hunching, constantly disgruntled merman that she knew as Maestro.

  In this painting, he stood on a stage—the recital hall—a soloist was beside him and singing for the audience. White lines abstractly whirled center stage, winding and connecting the lifeforce of the soloist to the crowd.

  It was a familiar scene, Cora herself had sung upon that stage. Yet, she couldn’t look away from Maestro’s—no, the Architect’s—no, Meryn’s—magnanimous form. The artist placed him at the focus of the panel, and like the other murals, he was the hero of the tale.

  While Maestro had never lied to Cora about who he’d been or what he’d done, the murals allowed her to finally see a connection between Maestro and the merman who’d made Atlantis powerful.

  She didn’t feel angry, although that would have been justified—his masterpiece had killed more mortals than Cora could comprehend. Maybe he had been changed by Melusine, but he had continued in the role of Maestro, enabling ongoing practices instead of undermining his Queen.

  Maestro saw she had slowed and acknowledged the murals for the first time. “I had assumed everything had been destroyed.” His fingertips brushed against the next painting in the series.

  “Why did you stay on as the Queen’s Maestro?” she asked him, doubting him. “Can’t you see you’re still helping the Queen? I still don’t understand.”

  “Cora, stop it. We need to go.” Sarina was right. Triton and his guards would soon learn the passphrase and begin chasing after them. But Maestro didn’t move.

  “It’s…a lack of faith,” he finally admitted. “When I was the Great Architect, I believed in my Queen. As the infamous immortal, I loved my Melusine. But the Queen ripped my fin apart, and now Melusine is dead. When I was neither the Architect nor the immortal—I was Meryn, a nobody with faith in nothing. So I became Maestro.”

  “But you could be more,” Cora insisted.

  “In time—”

  “—which we don’t have,” Sarina interrupted.

  “No, we don’t,” Maestro agreed. Yet his finger lingered on the painting a moment before he turned and began leading them down the corridor. “We don’t have very long at all.”

  They swam further along the hallway, and voices grew louder behind them, signaling that Triton and his followers were on the pursuit.

  Cora worked to keep a level head and singsonged under her breath, “Dancing druids dare to destroy, defacing dirt and devastating dwellings.” Anything to drown out the sounds of Triton’s voice.

  They rounded another corner, and Cora was relieved to see a door at the end of the hallway. They were almost at their destination.

  Cora raced for the door but hesitated before opening it. “The recital hall?” she asked.

  “Backstage,” Maestro added. He opened the door, peeked to the other side, and pulled the door wide open. “Guards will be posted to the back of the auditorium, where the courtiers’ entrance is. Once they see us, we won’t have long to act.”

  Cora barely remembered backstage—the recital was like a blur in her memory—but now that she saw the space, she realized there wasn’t much to recall. It was a dark room with a heavy curtain that separated them from the auditorium.

  Maestro helped Sarina to the side of the stage and assisted her as she lowered herself against the wall.

  Maestro handed her the satchel he wore. “Once we’re in sight, get to the stage as fast as you can. Cora will help you from there.”

  Sarina accepted the bag, her gaze glazed over with exhaustion, but she blinked it away and nodded.

  Maestro signaled to Cora for help, and together they shifted a riser, placing it in front of the now-hidden door. Maybe it would bide them some time.

  Then Maestro pointed to the corner, where a device was shrouded in shadow. “Cora, I need your help moving that to the center of the stage, in front of the soloist’s chair.”

  Cora swam to it, eager to assist, but stopped when she realized what it was.

  A horn. For retirement.

  It wasn’t the same one she’d seen in the storage room, and while this one was larger and more ornate, there was no denying what it was.

  “What’s your plan?” Cora demanded of Maestro, her stomach twisting with fear.

  “Just help me get it to center stage.”

  “Why do we need this?” She touched it and shuddered with the contact. This object had taken so many lives.

  “I’m going to sing into it,” Maestro said. “I’m going to retire.”

  He was planning to die. Cora tried to squeal in protest, but he talked over her.

  “I’m going to sing into that horn,” Maestro said. “You and Sarina are going to swim to the Queen’s box. Then I can give you all of my lifeforce, and your fins will heal. You’ll have the strength of an immortal rejuvenated, and with that, you’ll be able to outswim the guards.”

  “But why you?” Cora asked. “You can’t die—I can’t let you give up!” She pushed the amplifier deeper into the corner, further away from Maestro and his terrible, frightful plan.

  “Cora, stop.” He rested a hand over hers. She stilled and turned to look at him. His eyes were bright with emotion—He was scared. “It’s not my best plan, but it’s all I’ve got. Either we do this or get captured.”

  “But why you?” her voice cracked as she swallowed a sob. Cora wanted to escape, but to lose Maestro… He had been the kindest of anybody. “Why not me?”

  “Doing this correctly will take precision, and I’m more experienced than any of you. The probability of success is best with me…” he drawled out the words, repeating the logic. “I think it’s what Melusine would’ve wanted. I am the past and you’re the future.”

  “What?”

  He didn’t elaborate. “This is heavy, help me.”

  Cora did it. Together they rushed the device to center stage. She tried to process all that was happening, but it was impossible.

  Soon, too soon, they reached the soloist’s chair. Cora needed to grab Sarina and leave Maestro behind, but she lingered. She looked at Maestro, searching his face, desperate to discover the words she couldn’t find.

  He grabbed her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I have faith in you.” He kissed her roughly on the forehead.

  “You could have had faith in yourself,” she blurted. The words felt terrible on her mouth, inappropriate in every single way.

  “I’ve made my decision. Don’t let it go to waste. You had to know there was little chance all three of us would escape from here. Now go—leave while you and Sarina still have a chance.”

  Cora hated every word he said but… She darted forward, kissed him forcefully on the lips, and turned away.

  Sarina was near. Cora pulled
her onto her shoulder—

  —crash—

  The sound of someone breaching the backstage door.

  “What are you doing?” Someone shouted from the courtier’s balcony.

  Cora darted into the auditorium, swimming up and toward the center. Her eyes were locked on the gigantic seashell, fixated on her destination and goal.

  Cora swam. She moved her fin as fast as she could. Her tired muscles ached and complained, but through her focus, she could barely feel it. Just over halfway—

  Something, someone, jerked her back.

  Cora pushed Sarina forward and turned around. A guard had grabbed the end of her fin. He gripped it and pulled himself up, climbing her body until he had caught her waist with one arm and the satchel with his other hand. Several droplets of physic tumbled into the seaweed-beds below.

  He leered at her, smiling as he realized he had her in his grasp. He reached another hand, preparing to grab her neck—

  Cora exhaled and then cursed. Deathbreath.

  She screeched.

  It’d been reflexive—she’d barely thought!

  But now the guard was limp. He moved so strangely in the water. Cora prodded the empty place within her, where she had spent her lifeforce to kill another…

  “Cora!” Sarina cried.

  Cora looked to her and saw she would soon reach the Queen’s box. Cora looked to the stage. No other guards had neared Maestro. The one who attacked her must have taken the lead.

  Cora lunged forward but something caught at her waist. The strap to her satchel was still in the hands of the guard’s body. She reached for it—

  Its wrappings came loose.

  The satchel fell from her. Physic tumbled, drifting downward. She grasped at it, but everything slipped through her fingers.

  She debated darting, grabbing what physic she could, before returning to Sarina. But she heard the guards’ shouts and knew there was no time.

  So she left the physic behind.

  Cora raced toward Sarina, joining her in the Queen’s Box. She barely had time to turn back to the stage before Maestro began to sing.

  He perched, proud on the soloist’s seat, and despite his few jewels, he had the confidence of a king. Within moments, his body began to change, his shape losing definition until he was translucent.