Page 40 of Renegade Kingdom
“What is it?”
Hadrian laughed. A short, sharp sound with no real humour in it. “A reason not to go swimming.”
Then he walked away.
I stared after him, then back at the water. The ripples continued their steady pace alongside the ship, unconcerned with whether or not I was watching. As I stared, I caught the faintest suggestion of something beneath the surface. A shadow, darker than the water around it, that seemed to go down a very long way.
The bear rumbled with something that might have been amusement.I like him.
“You would.”
I stayed at the railing for another minute, watching the thing in the water, before deciding I needed to tell the others. The idea of going below deck with something that size lurking beneath us didn’t sit right. Every instinct I had said to stay above the waterline, where I could see it coming, where I could fight if I needed to. Not that I had any idea how you fought a sea creature from the deck of a ship. My combat experience was entirely land-based, and the bear’s instinct when faced with deep water was to get out of it as fast as possible.
The bear laughed at me.
It was the laugh that did it. I pushed away from the railing and forced myself toward the hatch, descending into the ship’s interior just to prove the bastard wrong. My skin crawled the entire way down. Bears were not meant to be on water. Bears were not meant to be inside floating wooden boxes on water with sea monsters following them. This was fundamentally, categorically wrong.
The bear’s laughter grew louder.
I found the others in Rhidian’s old cabin. Maps covered every surface. They’d been spread across the desk, pinned tothe walls, laid out on the floor. Alyssa was leaning over the desk, tracing routes with her fingertip, her brow furrowed in concentration. Dean stood behind her, arms crossed, frowning at the parchment like it had personally offended him. Maddox sat in the corner with a second map spread across his knees, marking locations with small pins he’d found somewhere. Ryder was cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by papers, a leather-bound journal open in his lap.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“Depends on your definition,” Alyssa said without looking up. “There seem to be routes to where Fizzle says the Fifth Court should be, but they all go through the Wildling Forest. Every single one.”
“There’s no avoiding it,” Dean confirmed. “It sits in the centre. We could aim for the shortest road through the forest but we’d be adding three weeks to the journey by going around the northern edge. If we take the most direct route we could cut through in two, maybe three days tops.”
“Is it really that bad?” Ryder asked, looking up from the journal. “We went into the edges before and we were fine.”
“The edges,” Fizzle muttered from his perch on the windowsill, where he’d been so still I hadn’t noticed him. “The edges are where Nymeria’s control is strongest. The deeper you go, the wilder it becomes. The creatures want to be close to her. They protect her, and there’s nothing more that they despise than the reason why the realm is falling apart, than the fae.” He ruffled his feathers, settling them with a practiced shake. “But Nymeria will protect you. She wants you there.”
Alyssa straightened, crossing her arms. “Nymeria has clearly lost control of the realm, Fizzle. We can’t rely on her protection anymore. You already said she was weakened. You don’t know if she still has any control over the creatures out there.”
Fizzle made a sound that might have been a sigh or might have been irritation. With him, it was hard to tell. His feathers ruffled again, and he turned his head to look out the window with a pointed air of someone who’d made his point and had no intention of making it again.
“Speaking of creatures,” I said. “You’d better hope she does still have some control, because something massive is following us in the water.”
Every head in the room turned to me.
Ryder’s face drained of colour. “How massive?”
“Thirty feet of visible disturbance on the surface. Could be bigger underneath. Probablyisbigger underneath.”
“And you’re just mentioning this now?” Dean pushed away from the wall, his hand instinctively going to his hip where a weapon should have been.
“Found out approximately four minutes ago. Hadrian knows about it. Called it ‘a reason not to go swimming’ and then walked away.”
“Helpful,” Alyssa muttered.
Ryder swallowed visibly. “I’d have preferred it if you’d kept that to yourself.”
I shrugged. “You’d prefer to not know there’s a sea creature probably half the length of this ship swimming alongside us?”
“Yes. Absolutely. Ignorance was working perfectly well for me.”
Despite everything, I felt the corner of my mouth twitch. Ryder’s ability to find the humour in terror was either his greatest strength or his most effective coping mechanism. Possibly both.
“Can we deal with it?” Maddox asked, ever practical.
