Page 76 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

I smiled to think how short I’d make forever.

Now that the princess saw I was merry-not-sad, which was the same as good-not-evil to her, she took me on a tour of the garden. I’ll get back to what a terror Renata was in a moment, but I want to tell you what was in that garden. First of all, and as I’ve said, water. Several long troughs, silvery with reflected sunlight, stretched out against the shocking greenery of the lawn and under flowering trees.

“These are emerald-fish from the south. See, they dressed like me today!” she said, pointing at a school of lovely small fish that darted this way and that. The pool was so pretty, bordered in handsome white limestone, that I swear it gave me thirst to look at it. I saw that the sky in the pool wasn’t just silver but now showed the unforgiving sun emerging from the cloud that had been shielding us from it. I squinted, then felt my cheek being pinched. Hard.

“Pay attention to me!” Renata said and grabbed my hand and pulled me along behind her. “I’m going to show you my favorite. Besides Hasp.”

Against one wall, and under a sort of dome of rough but mostly clear glass, I saw a pond bordered by rocks. And against the glass, I saw a thing that made my heart skip in my chest with bad old memories.

It was the suckered underside of a tentacle.

I jumped back from it, as you might had you ever seen a kraken sink a ship and make bloody meals of those aboard, as I have.

“Don’t jump so, scaredy-mouse. That’s just Master Quiggles Silversides.”

“You name krakens here, do you?”

“Not a kraken, silly. Krakens are big and wicked. Quiggles is quite nice, and not so big as they. He’s a cuttlefish. Not the same thing at all!”

I looked down into the dome, feeling a cold sweat under my arms.

Sure enough, down in a sort of grotto, I saw a pair of too-smart yellowy eyes looking back at me like lamps in the blue near-darkness. It was much smaller than the thing I had seen on the Gunnish Sea, perhaps the size of a donkey. Still, nothing you’d want to wrestle with in the shallows. Unlike the kraken, this creature had a bigger body—or is it the head?—relative to its tentacles, which gave it an almost scholarly look. The shape of the body or head was different, too—more triangular. With frills, like. And this thing was pale whitish rather than black, though, as its name would suggest, it had a dusting of a silvery color to it as well.

“Wave at him, he’s friendly!” the princess said, so I raised my hand and gave it a little shake.

“Why’s he so white?” I asked. “I’ve never seen squidkind so pale.”

“Because he’s from the Sunless Sea, west of here. It’s mostly underground.”

Now the single tentacle stuck to the glass peeled itself off, the suckers letting go one by one, and wriggled back and forth. It also cocked its—head? I’ll just say head—in sort of a posture of curiosity. I drew closer to the glass so it could get a better look at my face. It flipped some of its arms up so I could see its wicked black beak, and it opened this at me, then closed it. Now it pointed a tentacle at me. Opened and closed its mouth at me again. Pointed. Got it. I opened my mouth and showed it my black tongue.

Now it used several of its tentacles to mark the glass with viscous stripes that seemed to glow.

“Stop that, Quiggles!” she said, kicking at the glass with a hard leather shoe.

The creature withdrew its limbs and sank back away from her.

“I hate it when he marks up the glass so I can’t see!”

As if it understood her, it now spat a spurt of water against the glass, clearing the shimmery marks.

“That’s better,” Renata said.

Now a booming voice sounded in the garden.

“Bazleya!” it said, which I would come to learn meant Princess.

“Oh piss-and-shit,” the huge little girl said, grabbing me by my arm like I was a doll and pulling me behind her. “We have to go see Daddy.”

I went along, hating her and my life generally, but I knew something she didn’t know.

Those were no random stripes the creature had smeared on the glass. They were a language. And as I can understand any words written, I understood these.

When the cuttlefish saw my black tongue, it knew something about my provenance.

HASP—NOT HASP? It said.

It knew I was like Hasp but not.