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Ripples Part One

And I will sing you a song after you fetch me my last meal
If I want to

In the empty throne room, the boy's too bold and bright for her pallid world. He stands there like he belongs - his shoulders back and his head high, and his eyes meeting hers fearlessly - even though nothing but her hollow heart belongs in this prison, this tomb.

She likes that in him.

His audacity amuses her, a breeze blowing over the ashes of her life to rouse a glow. And he's so familiar - so achingly familiar. The tangled gold of his hair reminds her too much of old loves: often she wonders if he'd let her touch it, run her curled and cramped fingers through it. Probably he would, she thinks, if he thought it would win him favour or power.

Power; it's always what they want from her, the few who are clever enough and brave enough to find her. They want her secret; her deathless existence. Some flinch back from her, eyes wide. Her appearance frightens them.

She hasn't seen herself in many years, but she knows herself to be a monstrosity. Her hair is fraying, remaining only in clumps. It clings to the folds of her skin, though even that has begun to slough off and putrefy. Sores run along her forearms, screaming red mixing with sickly grey-green.

So you're back again, she says, her mental voice as strong and musical as it was in her prime. She no longer speaks aloud, her voice withered as her body. My beautiful one, my acolyte. No tribute this time, I see.

His eyes flash, a startling lagoon blue. Untouched by time, she could plunge into his stare, drown herself in his youth and his vivacity. She chooses not to; she is not sure he would survive the experience. For all his poise, there's a fragility to him she alone can see.

"You wrong me," he answers. In the graveyard silence, his voice is irreverently loud. His steps deliberately heavy as he walks towards her, slap-slap on the stone, making his presence quite clear. "But then - everyone does. Why should I expect you to be any different?"

Bitterness does not suit you, she remarks evenly, watching the ugly twist of his features. Leave it to those more practiced at it.

His eyes sweep her, taking in every gnarl and twist of her frame. "Give me a reason not to be bitter."

She laughs soundlessly, her fingers rattling on the throne. You're brave, child.

"I know," he answers coolly, not a trace of a tremor in that silky voice. Silk on her ears, wrapping her in his youth, his lavish indifference of how good it is to be young, strong, beautiful. To have all she does not and never will.

The envy barbs her voice, and he griamces, his fingers massaging at his temples as if it will take away the sting of her power. Take care not to confuse bravery with arrogance. The first will keep you alive. The second will get you killed.

A quick lash of her power, and his back arches, his mouth streches wide so she can see the line of his teeth - his knees give and he is on the ground, his heavy breathing muffled by the stones.

His face is sullen, but he holds back his anger. "I'm still alive, aren't I?" he says in the gentlest voice, control making his eyes a lagoon frozen, cooled - and she is impressed.

You will be more than that soon, she murmurs.

A flashing smile - oh, an echo of another's, for a moment she too is young and beautiful, and waiting for the music to begin so she can dance and dance and see that smile endlessly-

But it vanishes, another illusion shattered by the starkness of reality. His face becomes shuttered by that minute, near-perfect control.

Her gaze drinks in the tiny lines and bends of his muscles as he gets up

"Thank you." So polite. So careful. Yes, he will do.

She beckons him close, and he obeys, lying to himself that it is necessity rather than obedience that weighs his steps. His pride may undo him, as it undid her long ago; in him, she sees uncanny flickers of herself, in that lazy walk, that casual smile - even kneeling, his head remains unbowed, staring up at her.

You know, she murmurs softly, reaching out a hand to caress his hair idly. Yes, it's as soft as she thought, bristling just a little under her cramped fingertips. The times are changing, boy.

"The times always change." She half-smiles at the coolness in his voice, his surety in himself.

Wrong, she wants to say. Time loops in on itself over and over, we repeat the days of our life in spirals and circles, curling around our old mistakes, wrapping them in new errors, new slips - we climb the same slope only to slide down it again on different pebbles.

Something of her thoughts must have shimmered in her face; his eyes flare, fierce and almost fiery if not for the pure aquamarine flecks that mark him as water's child, always water. "If nothing changes, how am I here now? Why are you helping me if you think nothing will change?"

She thinks of all the others who came to her. So many over the long scrape of the years, children and men and women. Part of her heart says nothing can change, nothing dead can change, but the other part....

Because I have to hope, she answers finally, and cups his face in her hands.

Because hope is all she has.

~*~

Morning burst onto Ryar's Valley like an aspiring starlet, in a blast of gold and glitter. Light snagged on the lake and danced dawn into daytime, flung away the stifling dark and replaced it with flurries of shadows, and shimmering heat.

It woke Delphine Thetis from a nightmare, and strangled the scream in her throat.

Old nightmare.

New face.

Her mind mulled it over sleepily, recalling the last fragments of the nightmare before it faded into insipidity. But too much of it was gone already; only flashes remained like burnished bones.

A bloody cross.

The roar of fire, the smothering smoke.

And eyes - striking, unswerving eyes, that caught with a copper and inhuman sheen. Metal flat, yet more expressive than anything she had ever seen. His eyes...

Yes - him. That much she knew.

A polite rap on the door and her father ambled in, knocking away the last scraps of her dream. His glasses sat askew on his nose as they invariably did, and a cup of tea steamed in his hands.

"Coming to the evening swim tonight, idleness?" he teased. "Your mother says Don Ivan will be there, and she adds he's quite the catch, eh?" He waggled his eyebrows at the pun.

The horrifying thought of Poseidon Ivan, so touchy-feely even a limpet would denounce him as desperately clingy and far too slimy to share anyone's rock, dashed the dream from her.

Not another night spent trying to remove his wandering hands. Phi ground her teeth, cursing her mother's single-minded determination that Poseidon Ivan was perfect for her teenage daughter.

"Dad, I'm not interested in Don. He thinks he's the biggest fish in the sea."

The eyes as misty grey as her own were wry, and he shrugged, putting the drink down on her bedside table. "Teenage ego, love. Your mother's determined to match you up with some lad. We're only a small pod, and she wants you to snaffle some eligible bachelor." He winked. "Just like she did."

"Not Don." Phi flung open her curtains sharply. "Not ever. And if she doesn't like it, she can go fish."

"Good one," her father said, nodding solemnly. Bad jokes were a Thetis trademark, though some of the other merpeople seemed to find it vulgar. "But Don's not as bad as you think - he's a good lad, with a kind heart. You might even find you change your mind about him in time. Now come on, love, you'll be late for school, and I know you don't want that! You've got that maths test this afternoon, haven't you?"

She pulled a face. "Thanks for reminding me. Last day of school and I have an exam. Now I really want to get up."

"Will crumpets tempt you?" he asked hopefully, with the little winsome smile that nearly stripped the years from him, if not for his silver hair. He had greyed early, as so many of their people did. "I even bought some raspberry jam."

Phi brightened.

"We can go through differential equations while you eat," he added, and rushed out of the room before she had a chance to hurl anything after him.

Another day. Another goddamned day of trying to hide it from her family, hide it from her friends, hide it from the world. Trying to conceal the shameful secret and her weakness, all born from her nightmares. Her nightmares that had once been real.

Too real.

She looked at the sun streaming like honey through her window, and heard the fluting trills of the house martens that nested outside her window. Far off, the distant hum of Mr Wallis down the road, mowing his lawn like he did every Monday, still drunk from the night before, and the fragrant scent of cut grass reached her.

Even the damned can enjoy summer, Phi thought, and smiled.

~*~

"God, he's such a babe." The wistful sigh was Celia Slone, who was plaiting her dark hair again, fingers moving deftly. "Look at that body - just look. How am I going to survive a whole summer without it?"

Phi ignored her, too absorbed in trying to find something she could eat without feeling like the entire percussion section of the London Symphony Orchestra had organised a rehearsal in her stomach.

"You'll cope," she said absently, wriggling her shoulders in the tickling summer heat. "Did anyone tell them lettuce isn't a vital ingredient of curry?"

"Curry!" The Asian girl flung her hands in the air. "Our beautiful, hot, charming gym teacher is standing over there, and you're worrying about curry?"

Phi lifted her eyes from the highly dubious contents of her plate to see the amused grins of her friends. "Cee, he's twenty three. He's engaged. And he gets furry."

Her friend countered almost instantly, the hawkish eyes dancing. "He's experienced, he understands commitment, and...and..."

"Go on," prompted the lanky, grinning boy half-asleep on Phi. He lifted his head off her legs briefly to widen the mocking navy eyes. "Tell us how dating a guy who eats intestines can be good."

"He eats lots of protein," finished Celia triumphantly. "Hah, see, perfect in every way. Please, Finn, tell me you don't want to just cover him in ice- cream and lick it off."

"I don't, actually," Finley Farrier said dryly, rolling onto his back so he was looking up at Phi. "Mr Jubatus and ice-cream...uh, no thanks."

"I'm more a fudge sauce man, myself," put in Riose Orage from his unabashed sun-bathing..

Finn only shook his head briefly, and carried on. "But if we're talking about my darling Delphine here, now..." He reached up to give her a smacking kiss on the lips, dragging strands of her russet hair through his fingers longingly. "Ice-cream or no ice-cream, she's the most tempting thing in my eye-line."

Considering the other things filling his view were the sky, Riose and an overflowing garbage can, Phi didn't attribute too much to that.

"Unhand me, you ruffian," she declared, wriggling out of his grasp like water slipping through his hands with just the faintest grin threatening her pokerfaced expression.

"Or what?" he flung back, sitting up in an eerily fluid action to snag her wrist in his hands. His playful, wide smile was as outlandish as the flaming red hair - wherever he went, the witch would stand out.

"Or I'll set Kirsty on you," she deadpanned.

He let go. "Dear god, please don't. She only has to look at me and I'm a puddle of terror on the floor." One hand placed over his heart, Finn was back into theatrical mode and gazing at her with soulful eyes. "I fear, my lady fair, even you could not bring me back from that. Though..." He coughed, arching one eyebrow into the tangle of spiky hair. "A kiss from your divine lips might."

"A kiss where, exactly?" she enquired, and could only grin in delight as a faint flush spread up his pale skin. For all he liked to play the maverick, Finn was positively bashful.

It was an archetypical summer day; the air simmering, thrashing the earth into a forge. Everyone was enjoying the heatwave.

Celia Slone had her ultra-healthy lunch of chocolate cake and crisps spread around her like a sacrifice, sighing with bliss at every spoonful of the mousse that was the coffee-cream of her skin. Just as heavenly was the sculpted face of Riose, his strange slanting eyes half-closed.

Phi had long ago had her hopeless crush on Riose, and just as quickly gotten over it. However, she couldn't help but admire the elegant carriage as he sat, back perfectly straight, hands on his knees, soaking in the heat. His mouth was set into the faintest of smiles against his golden skin. Vampire - and proud of it - Riose never even pretended to humanity.

"Stop teasing him," the vampire advised now, without opening his eyes. "And Finn - just screw her and get it over with."

"Well!" she gasped.

"Oh, come on..." Riose did open one eye, the ocean colour startlingly bright against the wavy dark hair. "We can all feel the chemistry. Entertaining though this constant will-they-won't-they game is, and it always gives us something to gossip about behind your backs, it gets tiring. And besides, I've got twenty bucks on you two making it before next Thursday, so hurry up, already."

"Last of the great romantics." The new voice had a husky purr to it, and Phi looked up to see the slinky figure of Joana Katter bend down, one hand on her hip and the other stroking Riose's jaw. "What do you say to your potential dates? Come on, baby, I've got a bet riding on me riding you?"

"Jeez, Jo," muttered Celia through a mouthful of crisps. "You're getting as bad as him."

The girl laughed, and crumpled down onto the grass. "Nah, I'm the one he's got the bet with and I could use some easy money. And Cee - quit ogling Jepar, okay? He may be your hot gym teacher, but I have to hunt with him."

"Tell her about the intestines," begged Finn. "Please, please, make her shut up about him."

Jo slanted him a wicked look from those lime-green eyes, the neurotic citrus colour that screamed her wild nature out to the world. "I haven't seen his intestines, darling."

"You know that wasn't what I meant."

She only chuckled. "Sorry Cee, but it's hard to want a guy when you seen him gulping down raw liver."

Phi couldn't stop the grimace - vegetarian by choice, if not by nature, the thought of her Nightworld friends hunting made her stomach churn. It had been that way ever since she had been taken for a meeting with the local Pack as a child; aged eight, and too trusting, she had never forgotten it.

After all, it haunted her dreams every night.

"Now, now," Riose chided, but gently. "Don't pull that face, Delphine. Different strokes for different folks."

"I find that it's pretty much universal below waist level," chipped in Jo, with a curling smile of her icy-pink mouth. "And don't you go starting anything, Riose. You know how Phi feels about us pouncing predators - and we respect that."

 "You always assume I'm going to start trouble," grumbled the lamia. "I'd just like to point out that every single piece of trouble I have been in has been down to Finn."

The redhead gawped. "Moi? I'm innocent as the night is long!"

"Sweetie, it's summer," murmured Phi, ruffling his hair. It was soft to her touch, falling naturally into tiny spikes. Just like petting a cat, she thought, and decided to keep it to herself. "And you did suggest dyeing Don Ivan's clothes while he was showering."

They all grinned at the memory.

"Helping him come out of the closet. I swear, I thought pink was his colour," protested Finn. He batted his eyelashes. "Turned out angry puce was though. I've never seen so many veins ready to pop in my life."

"You've never met Ross then," Riose drawled softly. Phi knew he had had a less than conventional childhood as the brother of Therese Orage. Part of that had included some time spent with the notorious assassin Ross, apparently.

"Happily not." The witch was silent, but only briefly. Finn was never quiet long. His tone was light, airy almost. "So, Phi, when's the wedding?"

"Soon as Brad Pitt's divorced," she said flippantly. "What are you on about, Finn?"

"Don Ivan? You and him on a bicycle made for two?"

Baffled, she looked around at her friends. All of them were watching her; Jo's lime-sharp eyes were intent, and Celia had stopped eating her junk food. This was serious.

"Do you all know something I don't?" queried Phi.

"We all know your parents and his have been having lots of long, intimate meetings," admitted Finn finally. He wouldn't meet her eyes anymore, the fiery head ducked. He plucked at the glass blades nervously. Not a good sign.

"Don's been strutting around." That was Jo, her voice mint-cool, a little ring of disapproval on it. "Saying that he's going to be the next pod leader. Wants your dad's job, darling. And my guess is he thinks your dad's daughter is the best way to get it."

Riose cleared his throat quietly, tact for him. "Phi - he's been saying things about you. Personal things."

The little... "Like what?" she snapped, her smile fixed and so tight it hurt.

The lamia bit his lip, some of his languid poise melting away. The ocean eyes were incredibly gentle, as only Riose could be. "Like...you have a thing about men in black T-shirts. And you have a scar on the back of your knee. And...um..."

He stuttered into silence. Cool, possessed Riose silenced?

"Phi," murmured Celia, raising one finger warningly, "stop looking at Riose like you're thinking seriously about giving him a knuckle sandwich. He's just telling you how it is."

She tried to tone it down. Unfortunately, the twisting viper of rage inside her was drooling venom. "Do carry on," she said flatly.

"Don says..." Very carefully, Riose moved his knees up to shield his chest and other more vulnerable areas. "You're a good lay."

Bastard. Treacherous, lying bastard.

"Of course I am," she said through gritted teeth, "but I can assure you that Don Ivan doesn't know that."

"I'd like to second that statement," Finn put in quirkily. "But I can't, because my lovely Delphine won't let me touch her sacred person. Phi, Phi, all this trouble could have been avoided if you'd just let me hopelessly slaver and worship you."

"Is now really the time for levity?" Celia rapped Finn's knee with a bar of chocolate, her hawkish eyes serious.

He shrugged. "Just trying to lighten the atmosphere."

"I like it dark," growled Phi. "It'll hide the horrible way I'm going to mutilate Don when I next see him."

Jo laid a light hand on her wrist. There was real strength in it though, actually holding Phi down. "Phi! It's just a rumour. And I thought you didn't believe in violence."

"I don't," she said severely. "But I can't bear the thought of everyone who knows me thinking I'm some sort of...of painted Jezebel.!"

All four of her friends looked at her, human and witch and vampire and shapeshifter, people she'd known since her childhood here, who stuck with her through the good times and the bad.

Finn snorted with laughter, and that set the lot of them off. She sat, pokerfaced, while they sat there chortling.

"I'm not laughing," she announced ominously.

Celia composed herself first, even if her lips still quirked at the corners. "Oh Phi, you're not that way, and you know it. Don't be silly."

"I'm not being silly," she said, although she was starting to feel it. "I'm angry. I'm not Don's and I won't ever be!"

"You're wrong there, I'm afraid," said a butter-smooth voice behind her, and Phi froze.

Oh no. Just what she needed to complete the day. Poseidon Ivan himself.

That certainly stopped her friends' laughter, she noted grimly, as she turned to face him.

He was stood right in front of the noon time sun, so it blasted out around him like a cloak of fire. It turned his pale blond hair to a rich, melting gold that clung close to his heart-shaped face, and bordered the tilted, certain lagoon-blue eyes with careful art. She knew those eyes could darken to a flat, metallic ink when he was angry, the eyes of a shark.

He had the soft bronze skin of a Mediterranean, turning to a dark gold where his nose and cheekbones had been grazed by sunlight. And he was tall; Phi knew from weary experience that he had to bend down to kiss her, just as she had to reach up to give him a hefty smack on the jaw. Only his hands gave an indication of what he was; there was frail webbing a little too high on his fingers, and he walked like someone used to shifting ground.

Don smiled almost gently at her. "It's all been agreed, Phi. The contracts are signed, and the whole pod knows. We will be married."

"Over my dead body!"

He tapped his thigh thoughtfully. "Hopefully not. Why are you so against this, Phi? I'll be good to you, you know. I have been good to you."

"Because you're arrogant, and annoying, and I don't love you?" she suggested shortly, astonished that he even had to ask. Arranged marriages? She wasn't some useless child to be married off.

He shrugged. His voice was warm as steam rising. "You'll learn to, Phi."

Phi's glare could have melted diamond. Her friends, she noticed, were pretending they couldn't hear any of this. "No, I won't, Don. I'm not keeping a contract I wasn't consulted about."

His smile flashed, like a flying fish flinging itself from the waters. "It wasn't just a contract, Phi. You won't be breaking this one - and I won't be breaking it either."

"I will," she threw back, her fists clenched and tight on the ground. She thought she felt the itch begin in them, and her breath caught. Not now. Please, not her weakness, not now when she most needed strength. "It's been done before - my mother broke contract with your father."

"Ah, yes. So she did." He gazed up at the sky, and she thought maybe a frown grazed his features. "That did occur to our parents, you know. Rebellion is a bit of a trait in your mother's line and well...neither of us are quite the saintly paragons they were hoping for. No one wanted another farce. So..."

His head lowered in one graceful roll, and his face was blank as an eggshell. Beautiful; oh yes, but smooth and almost discordant.

"They swore in blood, Phi," he told her, not a flicker betraying what he thought. "So you see, if you break this oath, your parents and my parents die."

No...

"It's true," he said, and shrugged, a little wry smile tipping up his mouth. "One way or another, we will be married. Get used to it."

They couldn't have, her mind chattered. They wouldn't have been so stupid. Dad knows I don't like him.

But he wants what's best for the pod. And Mom...Mom's always wanted me to marry Don. They probably told themselves they were doing me a favour really. I'm sure they made some pointless justification before they took my life away from me.

They took away my life.

She never even noticed Don was gone. She didn't notice anything, except that she was getting up and people's voices were clanging in her head like plates smashing. Brushing past the hands that reached for her with comfort, blind to everything except this horrible truth, she ran away.

She ran away, not caring where she went.

Unaware that might matter more.

And I'd sell my soul to any wide-eyed devil.

Ripples Part Two

Spit me out into the Mississippi
Who can love my many selves;
The wife, the bitch, the Rapunzel
The one who cries, and calls for you
The one who is always alone.

Phi ran blindly, veering around people and objects. Desperately, she ignored the sick feeling curdling in her stomach. In her wake came the fraying edge of nervous laughter along with the odd call from worried classmates.

Locked in a life she didn´t want with Poseidon forever.

Yes, she ran. Earth slipping by, impact pounding up the balls of her feet, giving motion to her suddenly static life.

Where could she go?

Phi only knew she wanted – no, she needed – to get away. Not the lake. Some of the pod might be up there, and they would be sure to tell her parents their daughter was acting crazily.

Not the Black Dahlia. It was Friday, and that meant Cougar Redfern, ultra-cool owner of the chill-zone by day and nightclub by dark, would be in. He wouldn´t tell her parents, but he might tell too many other people.

Instead, she ran into the school building, through the wide low corridors, past clusters of people who knew nothing, cared nothing that her life was splintering about her as if hacked by an axe.

She heard footsteps behind her, heard people shouting Don´s name with a mixture of amusement and encouragement, and knew he was following her. Of course – he didn´t want his new toy doing anything stupid, did he? He didn´t want his perfect election gimmick doing his campaign any damage.

In the frightened, animal core of her heart, she knew her bolthole. Into the east branch, and past the hall where the choir were rehearsing.

Most of the pod would be there; the merpeople were known for their enthralling music, wound about with the bewitchment of voices born in song, ringed by melody from their first conscious moment.

His footsteps seemed further behind her. Maybe he had given up.

And then she came to the narrow corridor, smelling of wood polish and resin, cosily lined with wooden doors. She dashed into the nearest, slamming the door and leaning back against it. The music rooms were small, intimate little places where private lessons took place and Phi had spent days here, fingers coaxing songs from the mellow old pianos, the keys rippling under her touch. Time, running through scales again and again, learning to project her voice, to breathe properly.

Phi didn´t care if Don was following her. She only knew if he came in here, into her shelter, she would fly at him, hit at him. Anger was white-hot, side by side with the nauseous fear.

She knelt down and laid her arms on the piano stool, not letting the tears flow. No, she wouldn´t cry. This wasn´t going to happen, she wouldn´t marry him, so she wouldn´t waste her grief. And quietly, she laid her head on her arms, and prayed the itch in her hands would not begin.

So many happy times spent here.

And this single, terribly painful one, obliterating them all.

~*~

He'd seen too much.

Yes, he'd lived too long, been trapped too long. The world that had once been all flares and fireworks, dazzling and blinding him to all else, had become mere ashes. No longer beguiled by the power of it all, he saw now the cage surrounding him.

Zeke had existed all these years, passed from person to person like a package; an intricate gift, but a thing to be given all the same. He had existed, but he had barely lived. Once, he had tasted escape like the first drop of a fine wine; but it had turned to poison on his lips, turned to the bitterness of betrayal.

And so he remained a possession.

Her possession, now.

So angry, she said icily. He did not need to look up from where he knelt, head bowed, to know her eyes would not be focused on him. He knew she saw in other ways, he knew her blind gaze stripped away the layers of flesh around him until only his soul stood before her, naked, shuddering and frail. Even after all this time, my dear? Why do you chafe against your duty?

Because I never thought this would be my fate, he wanted to spit back. The flames raged in his heart, licking out along his blood and if he'd been able, Zeke would have let them race through his body, consuming every inch of him until he only burned, until he was only the heat and the harsh beauty of fire.

Because I thought there was more than this.

But all he said was, "I don't know."

So throaty, her laugh - a young woman's laugh, shaking an old woman's body. Fight it if you will, childling. It changes nothing; kick and scream and sulk, but you are mine, and you will be mine until these days are just a whisper in the wind, and these people chewed into dust.

The thought was terrible. An eternity, bowing to this decaying crone, carrying out her will with the fire burning ever hotter inside him as the world dimmed further and further until one day he was the only light left in an endless darkness.

Am I so cruel? she said sharply, slowly rising from her throne to lay one crooked and withering hand on his forehead. Her back was hunched now, though he remembered too easily the days when he had been the beautiful toy of a beautiful mistress, when she had vowed he should be her companion and not her slave; when freedom had been a sweet expectation, not a distant, dying hope.

But then the Burning Times had come.

Have I ever hurt you? she demanded, moving to grip his chin. Her fingers were weak, but her magic put false strength into them until he could not look away, and he feared the truth battered against his gaze for her to see. His hopes shredded to smoky tatters; their past stood between them like a sharpened blade.

"Yes," he answered squarely. "You promised me freedom. You gave me this."

Her fungus-soft, rotting lips curled into a cold smile. I will not argue this again. Promises soaked in wine are rarely kept, and never meant. You are too dangerous to let go. This world is not meant for creatures like you. You proved that with your little - slip.

"One mistake," he breathed, the grief only fanning his anger and injustice. "Oh god, you know why I did it, you know! I only wanted-"

I know what you wanted. There was something close to sympathy in her voice. I wished for the same, once. But time has taught me otherwise. The world is too weak for us; we were born in times of fire, and we cannot live in dust. When the world burns again - yes, then I will set you free.

"And when will that be?" he shouted, his voice cracking like a whip in the empty cavern. "The dragons are asleep, the Drax are destroyed, the witches are nothing but a shadow of what they were. Even the Furies are children playing with sharp toys!"

Her fingers stroked through his hair, strangely soothing. Soon, child. Sooner than anyone knows. Gently, she drew him to his feet, her magic threaded through that fragile, bird-slight body.

"Soon," he echoed dully. Soon. Empty words, promises of tomorrows that would never be.

Soon was all he had left.

~*~

“I don´t believe it.” Finley Farrier thumped his fist on the ground. It didn´t help; all he got for his troubles was aching knuckles and a small dent in the grass. “I thought it was just rumour. Just bloody rumour.”

He´d only brought it up so Phi could laugh it off, thinking it nothing more than flotsam Don Ivan was spreading to boost his already stratospheric reputation. And instead...instead, it was true, and sweet Phi, his partner in crime, would be lost under that arrogance and coldness.

Finn didn´t like Don Ivan much.

“An arranged marriage?” he said scornfully, desperately, filling the awkward silence because no one else would. “C´mon, we´re in the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth. Phi´s sixteen. She´s way too young to be getting hitched...” But he knew he was only trying to convince himself; he´d been brought up too well in the ways of the Nightworld to miss their ambition, rooted in tradition.

“Not in the pod,” Riose said mildly. The lamia´s face was drawn, his usual indolence vanished under tense muscles and clenched fists. “They´re still singing the same songs they sang when Ryar ap Sangager made them; they´re still keeping all their old customs. They´re about the only people who do now.”

“They can´t hold her to it,” said Celia, furious. She was tearing at a crisp packet, shredding the shiny foil over and over until Riose reached out and gently stopped her. “That´s – that´s barbaric! No one can make her do anything she doesn´t want to – it´s illegal.”

Finn and Riose exchanged glances. Both of them came from old Nightworld families, from the old enclaves that were locked away from the world.

“Human law doesn´t apply here,” Finn explained quietly, a small tight knot of anger balling in his stomach. “When it comes to marriages, the Nightworld is...strict, Cee. We´re a dying breed now, and the old families are doing everything they can to survive.”

“But – she can go to the police,” protested Celia. Her brown eyes darted from one of them to the other, anxious. “Or the Elders. Aspen said the Elders care a lot more now than they did when he was in school...”

Jo laughed sourly, the sound wrenching the air awkwardly. “The police? Cee, you know human laws don´t mean anything here. And the Elders…they don´t care. They care about Aspen and his friends, because they´re powerful and they´re dangerous. But us? All they want is for us to act like good little children – do you think they care who Phi marries? Who else is left? No one who gives a damn.”

“That…may not be true,” said Riose slowly. There was a look on his face Finn had never seen before – and with a shock, he placed it. Fear. “There is someone.”

“Yeah?” Jo raised one eyebrow, leaning forward almost accusingly. “Who, genius?”

Riose said it so quietly, Finn almost didn´t hear. “The Furies.”

All of them shut up, and Finn felt his skin go cold. Despite the heat of the day, goosebumps rippled up his arms.

Jo flinched back from him, pale. “Don´t say that word here!” she hissed. “You bloody imbecile, what if someone hears?”

Goddess bright, the Furies.

Celia looked from one face to the other, her lips tight. “What do those monsters have to do with anything?” she said tautly.

Like all of them, she had heard the whispers that rattled around from time to time; the Demon Fury had been seen on the mountains, climbing, climbing, climbing. No one knew why, but there were murmurs of strange rituals, of the Pack wailing of loss and horror in the empty night. People said someone from Pursang lived here; that K´Shaia had bribed the Elders to let them bury their dead and theirs secrets; and maybe it could have been dismissed as the trivia and tripe of a small town, if not for the persistence of the rumours.

“Nothing,” Finn said, his eyes on Riose. “I seriously hope.”

“Something,” the lamia answered. He drew his knees up to his chest, arms secure around them as though it were a chilly day, not the seething summer. “This isn´t something Phi can get out of, guys. Blood-oath…god, I though that had died out. Someone wants this marriage badly.”

“Several someones,” Finn snapped, the thoughts turning in his head like kaleidoscope patterns. Shifting, sorting – clearing. “Phi´s parents for one.”

“No…” Celia began, but her voice faded. Human though she was, she´d seen too much of the Nightworld through her sister´s fiancé, the one-time assassin, now doting parent and local mechanic, Aspen Martin.

“You think anyone could make Phi´s dad do anything he didn´t want?” he demanded. “You were there when those Pack idiots thought they´d slash his tyres. He took on three of them, and they were armed.”

“Yeah,” the human girl said softly. “And her mum – well, you know.”

There was a brief, respectful silence. Phi´s mother was the last of a dying breed; a prophetess, whose words guided the pod and who had helped all of them over the years. A dying breed – because prophecy was a poisonous gift, taking life in exchange for clarity, and Phi´s mother was slowly wasting away, refusing to deny her gift in case the pod suffered. And more than anything, she wanted a solid future for her child; they´d all heard Phi being chided, albeit it gently, for her lack of interest in the pod boys.

“She´s always wanted Phi to marry a nice Nightworld boy,” Jo said, a bitter twist to her mouth. “And her dad wants to leave the pod in good hands. I think...when Phi´s mum...when she dies, her dad won´t want to stay around. That´s what I heard some of the pod saying.”

“If he thinks Don Ivan counts as good hands, he´s blind,” Finn muttered. There was a mutual, agreeable silence.

“I´m going after Phi,” Riose said quietly, getting to his feet in an unusually awkward motion. There was a tension to his back and shoulders Finn hadn´t seen since they´d gotten into that fight with the Pack boys.

“Fine,” Jo said. “But leave the damn Furies out of it. She doesn´t need scaring to death.”

Those turquoise eyes were chillier than they had been in a long time. “Don´t tell me what to do. I know more about the Furies than any of you.”

“And how is that?” The shapeshifter was pushing Riose; always dangerous, but Finn knew she was just trying to push her own anger away somehow, if unwisely.

He and Celia exchanged one glance of perfect understanding. “Drop it,” she said sharply. “Jo, Riose, you aren´t helping. Phi first, petty arguments later.”

“Who says it´s petty?” demanded Jo, her face taut with the beginnings of primal, animal anger.

Good idea, Finn thought, gesturing Riose away with a flick of his fingers. Get her attention onto us. We don´t set her off the way Ri does. They´re both just too damn wrapped up in their secrets.

“Me,” he jumped in, and leaned forward to give her a smacking, circus kiss on the mouth. “But I like you that way.”

“Stop that.” But something eased in her eyes, softening into chartreuse green. “You can´t just keep kissing people to solve all your problems.”

“It works, though,” he countered, and gave her a wink. “Go on, be mad at me now.”

She snarled, but there was no real force behind it. “You!”

Celia offered her chocolate solemnly. “Calming you down isn´t quite as fun as baiting Riose, but it´s less likely to get us all killed.”

He nodded. “You two really do rub each other the wrong way.” Understatement. Riose and Jo were almost always arguing, when they weren´t making ludicrous bets and dares against each other. Sometimes Finn thought they were just too, too alike; other times he was cowering under the nearest shelter as they fought out their differences.

“He´s so...” The wildcat waved her hands as if trying to explain the sheer baffling complexity of Riose, and settled for making a throttling motion with her hands.

“We know,” chorused the witch and the human, and with a dexterity that came from defusing too many of these situations, Celia said, “But he´s nowhere near as annoying as Michael Richardson...”

“Oh god, tell me about it!” Jo said, and the two of them were off.

Close call, Finn thought, lying back on the grass, and hoping that Riose could say something to help Phi. Just not...

He shivered, cold despite the smashing heat of the sun.

Please, just not the Furies.

~*~

Inside the prison of her body, she roams, restless. What life she has remaining glows in her memories – there, at least, she is no crumbling crone, but a beautiful glimmering thing, a courtesan of grace and beauty. A courtesan who had the misfortune to choose the wrong side in the war, and who, for her foolishness, was punished.

Once, she remembers, with a pain so familiar she barely feels it, she was Avy ap Sangager, and she was one of thirteen shimmering sirens.

In those days, the world was a place of passion and brilliance, volatile as her temper. Was she as cruel then? She can remember being powerful, and ruthless, but her weapons were her charm, her intelligence, and her sensuous, dangerous beauty.

The beauty is gone; her charm with it. Now she holds them only with fear, and the promise of power where once there was the promise of sex, or love if they were fool enough to believe that.

Once, she too had been lulled by that child´s dream. Love. She had burned with it, been consumed with for centuries, hungering for a man who had wanted only to be the first to taste the intensity and ardour of Sangager´s siren. He had taken her, and used her, and cast her aside when he became bored, and when her pleas did not draw him, and her outrageous behaviour did not draw, and he resisted her entrapment, she gave up, and her desire shivered into shattered pieces.

She knows he hates her; her beautiful pet, the most precious gift that first uncaring lover ever gave her. Zeke – the name she gave him, this quiet boy of flickering violence and old, persistent yearning – was made, not born, and so he is a rootless, drifting thing, held to the world only by her hold over him. Long ago, thinking it a surety and not naivety, she promised him freedom, in those times when she loved him.

He was safe to love then; her toy, she told the court and the world, and made no mention of his solid, warm presence in the empty nights when she ignored the fractures on her heart and tried to remember her hope and her innocence. In her way, she still loves him, but knows that there is no room for love and vengeance to exist side by side.

The years have left him untouched; his eyes are still that wonderful shade of copper, gleaming with resentment where once there was affection, and his hair is a tight mass of bronze curls. Something in the way he stands reminds her of that first lover; do all the fireborn move so, striking sparks wherever they travel?

He will always be slight and slender, but he will never again believe her. Yet her plans are real; in Poseidon Ivan, she sees the first hints of salvation, sees her own old cunning and knows he can be useful. She has what he wants – and he, little though he knows it, he has what she needs.

She will be beautiful again, and all who look upon her will love her.

And this time, there will be no mercy.

~*~

She didn´t know how long she stayed in that small room, clinging to the piano stool, locking herself away as though delaying the world would somehow miraculously slow and stop it. The bell for lessons droned, a lone and distant bee to her ears, and she remained, pretending she was numb with shock but knowing in truth that she was splintering like ice under the sun, sure that she would scream and shatter.

She tried not to think about it, but funny, so funny it forced jagged giggles from her, the more she tried not to think, the more the thoughts beat at her aching head, thump-thump at her temples, small sharp slashes in her chest.

Phi was so immersed, wrestling with this demon polyglot of pain and fear and denial that she didn´t hear the soft snick of the door.

Until Riose hunkered down in front of her, she didn´t even see him.

“Phi?” he said in a gentle, too-husky voice. His elbows rested on his knees, his hands limp between his spread legs yet he didn´t move an inch, as comfortable in that awkward position as he would have been on a feather bed.

She had expected someone eventually, but had thought it would be Finn, desperately flirting and cracking jokes – maybe hugging her and leaning his head in the crook of her neck in that shy, childish way he did when he ran out of words. Or Celia, trying to make it all okay with bluntness and chocolate. Not Riose, who avoided confrontation and all those messy, thorny emotions.

She looked right at him, wondering if her eyes showed the fissures that yawned in her mind. “Riose.”

Small, skewed smile, calm as ever, but fading away. “Figured you´d be here.”

“You´re the smart one.”

The lamia´s face was solemn now, the clear blue-green of his eyes never wavering from her. “How bad is it?”

For a moment, Phi only stared back, not knowing how to tell him that she saw him through iron bars. The echo of her future prison, the pearly-white cage of her unwanted marriage slammed around her, constricting her throat. “Very bad.”

“You really didn´t know,” he said, not as a question but as a simple fact. He reached over the warm plastic cushion of the stool, to pull her hair, same way he had the first day they met at kindergarten. Usually it made her smile. Now it made her throat throb painfully. “Gods.”

“They don´t listen,” she whispered.

He blinked, just once. “You sure?”

“I can´t marry him, Riose. I just can´t.” No matter how hard she tried to force the panic down, it rose to edge her voice, to make her hands tremble angrily on the seat. “He scares me…I don´t even like him, how can they expect me to love him?”

“I don´t know.” He leaned forward, sliding onto his knees so they knelt opposite each other, face to face, blood to water. “He scares me too, Phi, and I don´t even understand why.”

She shuddered. In her dreams, Don still stood there, laughing and forcing down her head, his hand stone on the back of her neck, smell of fresh blood and old ordure all around. “I didn´t think anything could frighten you.”

“No?” An odd note in his voice caught her, and for the first time, Phi really focused on his face. It was impassive – it always was, Riose unfailingly won their games of group poker – except for the tightness about the corners of his mouth. “I´m a better actor than I thought, then.”

“Oh?”

“Did I ever tell you about my sister?” he said quietly. His eyes met hers, flares of silky aquamarine swirling about his irises, riptides reaching out to grab her and drag her. “Therese?”

“Never.” She half-smiled; it was all she could muster. “What´s so terrible about her?”

He had always deftly changed the subject; after a while, they had simply stopped asking. No one liked that dangerous softness to his voice when he mentioned his family, a little serrated edge to his smile that said if the subject didn´t change, his mood would, and for the worse.

There was an odd sound, a squeaky scrunching noise, then a pop. She looked down, startled – Riose´s fingers had punched right through the leather of the stool, clenched tight. He gave an awkward laugh, snatching his hands back.

“She´s…”

He took a deep breath, his face so open, so vulnerable that it didn´t seem quite like Riose at all; it was a small sting to realise how little she really knew about him.

“She runs K´Shaia.”

K´Shaia? Everyone in the Night World had heard of the three deadly mercenary organisations; K´Shaia, Pursang and Nightfire. Elitist and icy, they were treacherous as winter currents, carving blooded trails into the Night World. Their brutality was legendary, their cruelty renowned, and their leaders notorious.

Most common were the tales of the Grieving Fury, popular at wakes and funerals, some sweet and subtle angel of death, who drifted through the world. She was a smoky shrouded woman of no description; nothing except huge sad eyes that would make you weep as she killed you and mourned you. Pursang´s sorrowful queen, haunted and horrific.

The stories of the Demon Fury were shared around campfires, among children with a taste for gore; most evil of the three Furies, he was not so much man as monster, beautiful beyond dreams and barbaric beyond nightmares. His eyes were the blue of fire´s deepest core, and he smelt of copper and ice. Nightfire was his, and he ruled it with blood and iron and fear.

But if Riose´s sister ran K´Shaia…but that would make her…

“The Viper Fury,” he confirmed, pain twisting his mouth at the edges, and she felt a kinship with him.

You and I, she thought, both made what we ought not be.

“She isn´t real,” she whispered, unable to believe it; even the rough shadows of his pain could not convince her.

She remembered the pod girls telling stories of the Viper Fury, a vengeful angry siren, when summer stretched out the days into slow haze. K´Shaia loved poison best; they were subtle murderers, dabbling in politics with strangling fingers. And the Viper Fury; she was a Romany princess, haughty and temperamental. One kiss could be the silken brush of heaven, or the slick venom of death.

“Oh, she´s real.” Riose tipped up her face, and with that gentlest of touches, she glimpsed what he had really wanted her to see; what he had really meant to say. “They´re all real, Phi. Every last one. They have names, and faces, and they really aren´t that different from us.”

“You…you know them.” It was a fact, not a question; she saw it in the angry flush beginning to crawl over his cheekbones, and felt it in his trembling fingers. “All of them?”

“Every maniac who can swing a chainsaw.” He smiled weakly. “I was...I was theirs, for a long time.”

The words didn´t quite make sense. “Theirs?”

“I used to recruit for Nightfire,” he explained softly, turning his head away to look at the wall. A Romany prince, she realised, startled as she saw the graceful arches of his skull in profile. Oh yes – hadn´t he mentioned once, dryly, that his family had been nomadic, roving hunters. Brother to a princess and a Fury.

She believed him then. “Is that where you used to go in the summers?”

“Yeah.” He swallowed hard, the words coming from him slowly, as if it stung him to speak. “Blue – the Demon Fury – took a liking to me. He and Therese were always hanging round together when they were kids. They used to live on an enclave, you see, but my mother left to come here when I was a baby and she took me with her. I think...I think I was very lucky that I left there.”

It was bizarre hearing him refer to the Demon Fury like an old friend. Everyone knew the Demon Fury had no friends, and no compassion.

“How did they find you?” she asked, her own hurt dimming under curiosity.

“My mom. She was engaged to a boy from K´Shaia before she met my dad, and they always kept in touch. She asked him to find Therese. Well – he went one better and recruited her.”

“She kept in touch?”

Riose half-smiled, at last looking at her. “You sound surprised.”

“I...” The whole thing sounded preposterous. “Why would you want to? The Furies are monsters, Ri. They´re campfire horror stories.”

His smile quivered, died, and aghast, Phi realised what she had said. “Then I guess I must be a monster too.”

“I didn´t mean…”

He shrugged. “I know. There are monsters there. You can´t do what they do and stay…you.” Old turmoil churned in his eyes. “But...they´re still just people. Therese is still my big sister, and she takes me to the cinema every now and then, y´know? She´s a sucker for Disney.”

Phi giggled, despite herself.

“They´re very human sometimes, Phi,” he said solemnly. “And – I just wanted to tell you, that if it comes to the worst, if you can´t get out of this...they might help.”

Her amusement vanished, replaced by chilly shock. “Why would they help me?”

“Because they know all about traps,” was the startling answer.

Riose reached out and took her hand. His skin was cold, clammy, and she understood suddenly how scared he must have been that his life here would be gone.

She squeezed his fingers lightly. “Thank you, Ri.”

Relief in his face, yes, it had cost him to tell her. “I thought you ought to know.”

“I hope...” Just thinking about Don Ivan made her skin creep, as if it was trying to shiver itself off her body like a snakeskin. “If I talk to Mom and Dad, they´ll understand.” They had to. They just had to.

“Try, Phi,” he advised softly. “I hope they´ll listen.”

And yet – something in his voice told her he didn´t think they would. That surprised her; Phi was close to her parents, and unusually in the traditional world of the pod, they were modernists.

“If not though...” He leaned over and gave her a soft kiss on her forehead. “They´ll ask a price, Phi, but the Furies may help.”

Privately, she thought it would an icy day in hell before she went willingly to the Furies. But some of the bleak horror had gone, and she was grateful to Riose for that.

“Now come on,” he said briskly, his mask firmly in place. He hauled her up, throwing a friendly arm around her waist. “It´s sunny out, and Celia is going to be very upset that the one person who´ll listen to her lust after Mr Jubatus isn´t there.”

With a groan, she let him guide her out. “It´ll all end in tears.”

“In a harassment order, more like,” he quipped, and they made their way back out.

I've got a piece of my heart on the sole of your shoe
I've got a little bit of thunder trapped inside of a cloud
Oh, Mississippi
Come and wash my pain away.

Ripples Chapter Three

You're always waiting on the tide
It's time you decide.
I walk down long roads that seem to have no end at all.

 When Phi got in, the first thing she saw was her father, peeling potatoes over the sink. He was back early from work, and she knew what that meant. Her stomach filled with leaden tiredness. Her mother was ill again.

 He glanced round. There were lines on his face that hadn't been there five years ago, but then the illness hadn't been so bad then. Now her mother was getting weaker and weaker, and suddenly she was spending more days in bed than out of it.

 "Hello love," he said, and raised a smile. "Your mother's overdone it again."

 Phi growled. "Why won't she learn? Can't you make her stop?"

 Scrape, scrape of potato skins coiling into the sink. "Don't you think I'd stop her if I could? But it's her gift and she chooses when to use it. Whether I like it or not. Go and say hello, she needs to ask you something."

 And whatever it was, Phi knew when she saw her mother, a translucent ghost among the flowery sheets, she wouldn't be able to refuse. She never could. Sometimes she wondered if her mother knew that, and always guiltily dismissed the thought as spiteful and childish.

Slinging her bag and folders down in her room, Phi crept along to her parents' room. She poked her head around the door and sure enough, Marie Thetis was propped up in the big bed, so small.

 Phi knew that each time her mother told the future of others, she lost a piece of her own future in exchange - no profit in prophets, her mother would quip, as though that made it better. But so much foretelling had sapped the flesh from her bones until her skin was a thin veil.

Once the same fiery colour as Phi's own, her mother's greying hair was loose around her shoulders. She was shrinking away, wilting like the last violets, and soon there would be nothing left of her but memories, lingering on the air like some faint, ethereal perfume.

 Phi banished that thought. No. Her mother would hold on.

 "Hello sweetie," her mother said, and put down the book she was reading. Her fingers were trembling, but both of them pretended not to notice. "How was school?"

 Her anger was hard to hold on to.

 "It was - the usual. Jo was being a loudmouth. Riose was being all mysterious."

 "Celia eating chocolate," her mother said dryly. "Goodness knows where she puts it. That girl should be the size of a killer whale by now. As it is, she's getting squishy around the edges."

 "You can't say that!" she squeaked.

 However fragile her body, Marie Thetis could have stared down Medusa with those steel-grey eyes. "I can say whatever I like, darling. I'm entitled to my opinion - you don't have to agree with it."

 But I do have to obey, the treacherous thought crept in. "Dad said you wanted to ask me something."

 "Yes." Her voice was gentle. "Amelia Thelasso passed away last night, and the funeral's tonight. Your father's performing the ceremony, but I was supposed to be speaking the rites, and...well, that won't be happening now." A self-deprecating lift of her eyebrows. "I'd like you to stand in for me."

 "Me? Really?"

 The merpeople's last rites were an ancient tradition - from as far back as the Burning Times, it was said, and they were spoken each time they poured another pod member's ashes into the lake. They were never buried, always cremated, in a solemn reminder of their beginnings in a burning world.

 "Please. The...'old barnacles', as your father insists on calling them, tell me I should be handing over some of my duties to you now you're of age. The rites are part of that."

 Because you won't be around to speak them much longer, she thought with a bone-deep sorrow. That's why the old ones want you to teach me.

 "You have to stop looking," she said abruptly.

Her mother's lips tightened. "Phi, don't start this again."

 "No, I mean it," she insisted. "Everybody else manages to survive without knowing the future. Why should we be different? We'll get by, mom, you know we will. If Cassie Atlantis wants to know what sex her baby is, she can go to the doctor like everyone else. And if Mr Travers wants to open a shop, he can find out if it's going to be a success the hard way."

 "Why take the risk?" her mother countered, as she always did. "Ryar ap Sangager gave us the gift to be used, not to sit idle. It's just unfortunate she didn't realise the toll it would take on us." She smiled weakly. "But the pod is the better for it."

 "We're not," she blurted. Why couldn't she see? Why couldn't she leave the pod to take their chances? They weren't sheep in need of a shepherd; they were the merpeople, and they would learn the tides of life just as they learned the ocean tides. "Me and Dad, we aren't better. You're k-killing yourself, and I hate it!"

 She inwardly cringed at the stammer - she had wanted to be cool and logical, not a crying child.

 "Darling." The pity in her mother's voice was almost unbearable. "Your father understands. He wants what's best for the pod - and we want what's best for you."

 "Well, let me decide!" she snapped, her intention of staying serene disappearing like a sandcastle under the surf. "I can make my own choices. I don't need you to - to arrange my life."

 Marite Thetis let out her breath in a ragged whoosh. "Is that what this is about? Don?"

 "I don't want to marry him." God, what an understatement.

 "It's for the best. Not just for the pod, Phi, but for you too. I've seen it." The surety in her mother's voice was absolute: I have leafed through your future, and chosen your path, and all will be well if you just nod and smile and obey.

 "How can it be best for me?" she demanded. "I loathe him. I've never liked him, you know that - Dad knows that!"

 "I know you aren't...fond of him." Her mother raised her eyebrows as if it was some churlish whim. "But I've seen it. There's such happiness in store for you, but only if we arranged for you and he to be married. I saw change - yes, darling, many changes, and that's never easy, and a journey deep into the earth...and fire. Cleansing fire." She frowned at that; creatures of the waters, the merpeople had a natural wariness of flames. Except for that last unfelt balefire. "A time of reflection, and mourning."

 For you, no doubt, Phi thought silently. She had lived with the fact for years now; her mother would die, and she and her father would be left to grieve. It was a dull, constant knowledge, as though she had been sunk in mourning since she fully understood the cruelty of prophecy. She lived her life as if lost in smoke, a dark shroud that would rise from her mother's pyre all too soon.

 "A transformation." Her mother reached out and took her hand, her fingers thin and wizened. "And happiness, darling. Everything we've wanted for you. Try to understand."

 "It doesn't matter what you've seen," she said fiercely. "He's not for me, mom. Let one of the other girls marry him - they all sigh over him anyway. Let me decide."

 "And who in the pod will you marry?" he mother demanded with a flash of anger. "You don't really talk to any of them. Look at your friends, darling! Humans, vampires, a wildcat - and she's not so far away from savagery, no matter how prettily she smiles - and that witch! Not a pod boy among them."

 "You never minded before." She drew her hand back from her mother, feeling hurt, wounded in some place she hadn't known she was vulnerable.

 "When your father suggested it might be nice if we encouraged you to have some - diverse - friends, I didn't complain," her mother said tightly. "The pod *is* too insular sometimes. Goodness knows they can be self-involved. But I thought you'd turn to your own kind eventually. Instead, you spend more time with those - landlubbers - than any of the pod."

 Phi couldn't stifle an incredulous laugh. "Did you just call my friends landlubbers?"

 "That's what they are." Marie Thetis leaned forward from the nest of pillows, her breath becoming hoarse at the effort. "They are not of us, Phi. They never will be. We are the first shapeshifters; we are the beginning, the purest, and the only ones unsullied by the Burning Times. Ryar ap Sangager made us to protect the last hope of the witches, and we kept faith. The ocean tried to swallow us up, Fireblade came to hunt us down, but we survived." Her eyes flicked from side to side, and she whispered the next word. "K'Shaia was created to destroy us, and we survived. How do you expect your friends to understand that, or anything of what it means to be mer?"

 "That doesn't make us *better*!" she said angrily, trying to disregard the chill sliding along her spine like someone had dropped a lump of ice down her back.

 K'Shaia were made to destroy us, and yet Riose sends me to them to be saved.

 "It does, darling," her mother said calmly. "We are a race apart."

 "Because we've kept ourselves apart!"

 "Your father's words." Impatience there, even as her mother sagged back onto the pillows. "I've never argued his reforms, even when I didn't think them wise, but I think I let him have too free a hand with you. But he agrees with me that Don is the best possible husband."

 "Have you listened to anything I've said?" She wanted to scream, but made herself speak calmly, the first ghosts of tears pricking at her eyes. She had thought - she really had - that they would understand. "I don't love Don. I don't even like him. He's rude, he's arrogant, he's cruel-"

 "Is this over that little incident when you were children?" Her mother pounced. "He's grown up."

 "Great," she threw back. "Now he's just a bigger bully."

 "Rubbish. You've never given the poor boy a chance."

 "He's had all the chances he's getting from me." Her temper was beginning to spiral out of control. An emotional firestorm, her father had always said, wondering how such rage, all heat and blistering, had ever surfaced in her. "I won't marry him."

 "Will you condemn us both to death, then?" her mother snapped. It was unkind, and it was deliberate; Phi saw that with a distant, numb shock. "Does our oath mean nothing to you? Does our pod mean nothing?"

 "No one will harm you," she said scornfully. "Our pod?"

 The merpeople abhorred violence; Phi couldn't even remember the last time there had been a fight. It simply wasn't in their nature. There was no rage in their melodic laments, no hurt in their hymns, nothing but joy, and contentment, and reverence.

 "You're naïve, daughter of mine." Marie Thetis closed her eyes, but when she opened them, they were as determined as ever. "We will discuss this later. Go and get yourself ready for the funeral. I expect you to do your duty for the pod. All your duties."

 The tears still stinging at the edges of her eyes, Phi went into her own room. There would be no changing her mother's mind. That left her father. She wouldn't give up hope yet.

~*~

 Poseidon Ivan returns not as a supplicant, but like a conqueror, with a swagger in his step, but a low, slow ire in his eyes. She recognises anger so easily; she has felt it all her life, that lash of injustice, of fulfilment denied.

  What is wrong, child? she inquires, her voice silky.

 Any ap Sangager can hear his teeth grinding at very edges of her magical senses. "Delphine is going to be difficult. I don't think she'll play the dutiful daughter this time."

 Few daughters are dutiful, she replies, remembering her own wilfulness; how often she flouted Sangager's authority. Her brothers would wager with her to see who could enrage him furthest; they used to measure it by the colour of his face, she recalls fondly, and she always won. We just take care to appear so.

 He blinks, as if it has not occurred to him that she too was somebody's daughter. "Her parents are soft. She runs around with vampires and humans and they don't seem to care. If she persuades them to break the contract-"

 Did you not suggest your father made them swear blood-oath?

If he has disobeyed her-

 "He jumped at the idea," the dolphin says coldly, pacing the room in quick steps. "He's still so damn bitter that Marie turned him down for Daniel Thetis. Thirty years and he still isn't over it." His expression tells her that perhaps this shark in a dolphin's skin has suffered for it.

 Then where is the problem, child?

 His eyes flare with scorn, the pure turquoise colour of arctic pools, though it is not aimed at her. "He won't hold them to it. Thetis has led the pod for nearly twenty years. Marie is their beloved prophetess, saviour of their dreary daily routine. If my father kills them...but he won't."

 Inside the cramped confines of her heart, she is laughing. Squeamishness is not new to her; she has always had the stomach for the necessary cruelties, but there were once those of her family who did not.

 Then find someone who will. If your darling's parents believe the threat is real, I think you'll find no matter how they love their daughter, they'll make sure she keeps the promise. In fact, little shark, I think you already know the people you need.

 It dawns in his eyes slowly, ugly as a battlefield sky. "Yeah. They'd do it." His smile is savage, a promise of the malice in him that she will nurture and tend like a gardener of Hades. "But what about Phi? She just isn't intimidated by anything."

  He speaks as if he knows; probably he does. His is a character of small petty deeds that she will craft into great and devastating ones. Like the moon tugging at the tide, she will turn him to her purpose.

 Then we must distract her, Poseidon. We must find someone who will cause her so much trouble she will forget her own. And this - this is where I will lend my aid.

 He frowns, but from the shadows beside her throne, where he crouches like a royal fool once might have, Zeke stands.

 They stare at each other, her two weapons; fire and water, and she feels the dislike reverberate between them. Natural opposites, the dreamer and the doer, and she knows how to exploit that enmity as she does every beating emotion.

 He will explain, she says simply to the dolphin. But you should hurry, child. Don't you have a body to weep over?

 He glances at his watch and swears, waving Zeke to follow him with an impatient hand. "I'm late. You'll have to wait until the funeral's done, but if you hide yourself near the lake-"

 "I know a place," her pet says mildly, surprising her. Is that where he spends his nights, staring at the waters? Have the fires in him truly burned out - no, no, she remembers his defiance, his anger. Something still simmers, insignificant though it is. What then, fascinates him there?
 
And then they are gone, and she is alone again, to drown willingly in her memories.

~*~

 After dinner, Celia cut through town to the spacious house out on the edge of civilisation. Unlike most of the buildings, it was new, a pale blue that glowed in the ramshackle street.

 She stepped up and rang the doorbell, mentally wincing as 'Wild Thing' played out in jangling chords.

 The foxy, mistrustful face of Aspen Martin, her sister's fiancé, peered round the door. "Hello wench," he said, beckoning her into the hallway, "It's been a while."

 "This place is a tip," she informed him, stepping gingerly over heaps of mail. "Mom said she's visiting next Thursday, so you might want to tidy up before then."

 "Oh god." The vampire sounded horrified, as well he might. Her mother treated him like a delinquent she was particularly fond of, and determined to make into a civilised person. "I'll call a cleaner."

 The living room, like the rest of the house, was appallingly cluttered; when he'd lived with her family, fear of her mother had kept Aspen's mess under control. Now, unleashed in the bachelor pad, it was vast and uninhibited; plates were piled everywhere and pieces of car engines littered the floor.

 "Who is it?" a voice rough as raw velvet called from the kitchen. "Aspen, can you take the brat? He keeps - no, you little monster - trying to eat my damn coffee!"

 "It's Celia," the vampire shouted back. "Make yourself comfortable, Cee, I'll go and get Zane."

 She swept the detritus off the boys' long, squashy couch, clearing space. No one quite knew what had passed between Aspen and the sister he almost never spoke of, but the result had been Aspen coming back from wherever he called 'home' with Zane.

 Celia had always thought she adored children until she'd met Zane Martin, whose penchant for biting, kicking, and squirming was rivalled only by a set of lungs that would have made Pavarotti weep and promise to lose half his body weight if he could just have half their capacity.

 Her surrogate big brother came back in and it was easy to see that Zane and Aspen were two peas from the same malformed pod. Same strange, dual-changing eyes; same childlike smile, same dark hair.

 "Aunty C!" squealed Zane, promptly kicking Aspen so he was free to toddle over and bite her on the leg before she could think to stop him.

 "Ouch!" Little bastard.

 "Oops..." Aspen grabbed him, settling the boy on his lap. "Sorry, Cee. He's been feisty all day."

 She rubbed her calf, grimacing . "Well, he didn't draw blood this time. How've you been, big bro?"

 As ever, the endearment brought a smile to his face, too gaunt even after years of her mother's brisk but loving regime. Aspen was all edges and bones, slight but gracefully built. Those bizarre eyes, sliding from hue to hue at every moment, were more self-assured now than they once had been.

 "Overworked," he said dryly. "Between Zane and the garage, I haven't had a moment's peace."

 "No one in this house has," came the biting tones of Vaje Chusson, one of Aspen's delectable housemates, who strolled out of the kitchen holding two cups of coffee and wearing nothing - oh, lovely - but a towel. "Hey, Cee. Cap-perfect-cino. Just how you like it."

 "Coffee and you half-naked?" she quipped, enjoying the way Vaje instantly hitched his towel up. "What did I do to deserve this?"

 "Your obsession with nudity isn't healthy," the coyote shapeshifter muttered.

 "Neither is your obsession with coffee," she retorted, taking the mug. It smelled wonderful, thick and rich as molten chocolate. "But I don't see you cutting back."

 Vaje glowered at her, and just to infuriate him, Celia ogled him from towel to damply curling hair and wolf-whistled. Looking incensed, he shot out of the room as if the hordes of hell were after him.

 Aspen's chuckle broke the silence. "You're an evil, evil girl. So what's the occasion? Not that I mind the visit, you're welcome any time."

 She took a sip of the cream-crammed, sugar-loaded, caffeine-saturated slice of sin that was Vaje's coffee and sighed, feeling the heat curdle into her bones. Delicious. "I want to know about the pod."

 "The real locals," he remarked. "Does this have something to do with your friend - Phi?"

 "In a way."

 "Well, they're the biggest group of shapeshifters in town-"

 "Isn't that the Pack?" she interrupted. It was a rare day when she didn't see at least one group of ragtag werewolves sauntering down the main street, overconfident and territorial.

 He shook his head. "You'd think so, but the pod's easily ten times bigger. They're just less visible. There must be two or three hundred of them about. They founded the town - and the Thetis family's led them for as long as anyone living can remember."

 "They started as pilgrims," Vaje mentioned as he stomped back in. His body was sadly hidden by a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms that had seen better days. "How's your Nightworld history, Cee?"

 "Virtually non-existent," she said with a hapless shrug.

 "Typical," sighed Vaje, perching on the arm of the sofa. "Well, around thirty thousand years ago there was a massive war between the dragons and the witches - the Burning Times, we call it, and it's the reason why some of the shapeshifters get treated so badly. Towards the end of the war, a dragon princess called Ryar ap Sangager, who betrayed her own people to fight for the witches, made the dolphin people to take away some of the witches' children. Brave lady."

 "They have some weird quirks because of it," put in Aspen. "Rather than being born, they were made, and so their powers are..." He searched for the word.

 "Immaculate," supplied Vaje finally, his voice strangely soft. "They've kept their blood pure over the years - Ryar made so many of them, they've rarely intermarried. Arranged marriages are a key part of life in the pod, though it's becoming more difficult to enforce." His eyes were piercing, and unnervingly blank. "That is why you've come here, isn't it? Because of Phi and Don Ivan?"

 How had he known? "Yes...but..."

 "I have some friends in the pod," he said, and flashed a charming, crooked grin. "They think Marie Thetis pushed for this marriage, and they think she's wrong to do it. But they're old now, and their opinion doesn't count for much. And god knows that woman's stubborn as hell."

 "The grapevine's got Ivan down as Daniel Thetis's successor," Aspen said mildly, "and the prophecies have been saying it for years. Though prophecy's a double-edged sword, and it's tearing that pod apart while they think it's saving them."

 That philosophical statement was so unlike Aspen that she stared. For all his shrewdness and local knowledge, Aspen wasn't much given to social commentary, and his wry expression said he knew it too. Glancing over, she saw Vaje wearing a similar astounded expression.

 "When did you start channelling Confucius?" Celia leaned over to prod Aspen, careful not to touch the sleeping Zane. "Fess up, big bro, those aren't your words."

 Aspen inclined his head. "Maybe not, but Iry Lupine knows what he's talking about."

 Iry, the irascible lone wolf who lived deep in the Ghost Roads was half-legend, half disappointing reality. Longevity hadn't aged him much, except for splatters of grey in his hair and a tendency to paranoia. Someone had told her he'd been around for nearly two hundred years.

 "How is the old maniac?" Vaje enquired dryly. "And why were you talking to him about the pod?"

 "Still healthy, and leaving bear-traps in the garden," grumbled Aspen. "And he talked to me about it. I was just painting over the rust on that banged up Chevy he's so fond of. He thinks they're overusing their prophets."

 "You don't have to be a genius to know that," said the coyote, his mouth curling so the tiny burns on his cheek pulled tight and shiny. "I went to see Marie Thetis on behalf of the Elders. The woman's dying - no, she's killing herself, looking into the future over every damn decision."

 "She won't stop," she told them, her voice husky. The change in Mrs Thetis had been horrific; last time she'd gone for dinner, Phi's mother had been a pale, shimmering skeleton, ageing before her eyes.

 "Stupid bloody woman thinks the pod will fall apart if she doesn't tell them what the weather's going to be tomorrow," snarled Vaje, glaring down at his coffee. "God knows why she doesn't just look at the lottery numbers for next week - then she'll never have to worry about them."

 "Iry said prophecy isn't meant to be used friv-frivol-" Her big brother rolled his eyes, and looked at Vaje pitifully.

 "Frivolously." Vaje shrugged. "It isn't, though the fire and earth-based seers don't suffer like the dolphins do."

 "That's true..."

 Celia was starting to realise just how little she knew about the intricacies of the Night World - of her best friend's daily life. Had she just not paid attention? She was confused, unbearably so, and it must have been mirrored on her face.

 "See," the coyote explained to her, "prophecy was originally a power that only the most powerful dragons had. In the Burning Times, they gave it as a reward to faithful minions. Fireblade gave the Jubatus family the gift, though they see in fire rather than water. When Hael made the first witches, they saw in smoke, though over time, they've learned other mediums - anything with air in will work. But Ryar gave the dolphins prophecy to protect them, and I think she was afraid it would be misused, so she made sure it had a price."

 "She didn't think about people like Phi's mom, then," muttered Celia.

 Vaje grunted. "Who the hell does? I walked in, and the bloody woman had made me coffee just how I like it, what a waste of her gift, not to mention her fragging life, and then she thanked me for naming my third child after her. My third? I don't even have one!" Sudden, fleeting sadness crossed his face, and was gone just as swiftly. "Not anymore."
  
"Want mine?" offered Aspen thoughtfully. Celia had to restrain a giggle at the appalled look that suggestion got.

 "Zane's not a child, he's the living proof of Murphy's Law," Vaje told him. "Anything else you want to know, Cee?"

 "How do you break blood-oath?" she said.

 From the heavy silence in the room, she realised they hadn't known that bit of information.

 "Explain." There was a thunder-headiness to Vaje's voice, and she was at once very aware of his inhumanity. "Fast."

 "Phi's parents and Don's swore blood-oath on their marriage contract," she said, and at the look on Vaje's face, quickly jumped over the back of the couch.

 "They WHAT?" he shouted, his enraged face appearing above her. "Celia Slone, tell me this is some kind of joke you and Riose thought up!"

 "Don't scream," she heard Aspen say, as she stared into Vaje's smouldering bronze eyes, which had an alarming red tint to them. "If you wake Zane, you're singing him to sleep, and until you've done thirty renditions of the Teletubby song in the style of Frank Sinatra, you've never known pain."

 "Don't be fatuous," rapped the coyote, all his attention still on her. "God, you are serious, aren't you."

 "Is it that bad?" she said, poisonous fright setting in. What had Phi gotten into? She had thought it was Night World politics - that it was just an ordinary situation wrapped up in the Night World's jargon and archaic laws, breakable as any other. Vaje's reaction said otherwise.

 "Blood-oath. God."

 "No one does it anymore," explained Aspen patiently, as she clambered up from the floor. "Well, except the Furies."

 That was twice today that she'd heard them mentioned, and both times in similar circumstances. Celia could count the number of times she heard their name whispered before on the fingers of both hands.

 The Furies aren't like anyone else, she told herself. Even to the Nightworld - even to these fatal, alien creatures, they are a race apart, and they are feared.

  "Did you...ever run into anyone from the Furies when you were..." Celia waved a hand, trying to think of a polite way to put it. "In that line of business?"

 She knew Aspen had been an assassin - it had slipped out in a drunken confession one night - and it explained an awful lot that she hadn't understood when he lived with them. His late-night visitors. His trips away. His complete inability to watch horror films without criticising the psychopath's knife technique.

 Celia knew it as a fact in the same way that she knew that Pluto orbited the Sun; a dim, distant thing that didn't really affect her life, interesting to think about, but not quite real, somehow.

 Vaje's eyebrows shot up. "Martin...have you been telling the nice girl porkies?"

 There was a definite red tinge to Aspen's face. "Not...really."

 "What's going on?" she said guardedly, looking from one to the other.

 "I..." Her big brother rubbed the back of his neck. "Kind of used to be involved with the Furies."

 "Involved how?" Her mind couldn't take it in. Aspen couldn't have worked for the Furies; that was stupid. How could anyone so, so gentle, so timid, so very...careful, her mind supplied. He's always careful, like he's afraid something he does might make us leave him. He's so afraid of being alone.

 Maybe it wasn't just self-doubt that made him so wary. Maybe it was because there were things he had done that would make them leave - not merely leave but flee from him.

 Oh, no.

 He was shaking, she saw, and she saw the old, lunatic fear crashing back into his eyes like it had when he'd wake up screaming from nightmares that he wouldn't talk about. When he spoke, his voice was a child's voice, uncertain. "I used to urn Pursang."

 Celia stared at him, disbelieving. "Oh no."

~*~

 Almost all of the pod had turned out for the funeral, dressed in mourning finery; not black, but the heady blue of their last resting place, of sky and sea and maybe oblivion. They stood in their families, children hushed by parents, forming a loose semi-circle around the jetty of the lake as the funeral pyre blazed, the fire popping loudly in the summer evening.

 One face, though, was noticeable by its absence. Don wasn't here, and Phi felt glad of it, even as part of her recognised how unusual that was. Unlike her, he played the part of dutiful son to perfection, with flattering fawning to his elders, glowing like some handsome angel among the dark, lithe merpeople.

 His father was there, a large, imposing man with a halo of thinning hair that had darkened to gold as he aged, and would soon become the premature grey of all the merpeople, and a mouth lined and twisted. Laurent Ivan was only here because her mother was not; even after thirty years, there was a stiffness between them Phi could not fail to recognise. Beside him, his wife gripped his arm fiercely, as if she thought he would tear away from her, a plain, compliant creature who shadowed him feverishly.

 "Not long now," her father murmured. He'd gone out of his way to greet the Ivans, but Laurent's reply had been perfunctory, mere feigning. "Thank goodness the wind's blowing onto the lake."

 The odour of the pyre, smoky and thick, mingled with the pungent herbs the body was liberally swaddled in, could not quite mask the underlying aroma of burning flesh. It was not uncommon for the close family to arrive after the balefire had died, but today the Thelassoes were all here, heads high.

The pyre was smouldering gently when she realised Don had crept in; he was stood beside his father, looking appropriately solemn, theirs the only two blond heads in the entire pod, and that intense stare was fixed on her.

 No one could quite explain how Don had sprung from his parents; though Laurent was handsome in a rough, rugged way, and his wife had a certain washed-out prettiness, neither held a candle to their son. He had the best of both his parents, and the blessings of some divine artist beyond that, and he shone out in the pod like a sunlit idol.

 There was a delicacy to his features that was almost androgynous, as if great care had been taken smoothing out the planes of his face, drawing the generous curve of his mouth with simple grace, painting in those ocean eyes with deftness. And he moved with surety, always, with immense and unshakeable self-confidence that made eyes trail after his strut.

 She stared back steadily, hoping he could read what she was thinking. Not you. Never you.

 I will sell my soul to the Furies and all their dark, bloody horrors before I give myself willingly to you, she vowed. I remember your words, and I remember your childhood playthings.

 His voice, always shockingly gentle, eased into her mind like he might slide into her bed, smooth and naked of all his ambition. Don't fight me over this. Don't be a fool, Phi.

 You'd rather I marry one? she slung back flatly, as the last pallid webs of smoke drifted over the lake, and her father stepped forward to gather the ashes. Why did you agree to this?

 His lips turned up fractionally, the studied detachment of an observer. It was necessary.

 Her father was speaking then, commiserating with the family, and she broke off to listen to him. She had liked Amelia Thelasso, who'd never hesitated to speak her mind or howled with laughter at the pod children's pranks, and she deserved respect.

 "...it's good to see so many of you here," her father finished. "Amelia was much loved, even by those of us who got bruised shins from her infernal cane."

 "She only gave you a whack when you were impertinent, boyo," grumbled Amelia's husband from the crowd, a grizzled figure. That was the way of the pod; interruptions were allowed, and everyone invited to share their memories.

 "Odd," her father remarked with a roguish grin. "I seemed to have permanent marks."

 "That's because you were always impertinent." The old man cackled, and pointed a finger at him. "You and that other whippersnapper...Laurie - thick as thieves, the pair of you, and always causing trouble. You here, Laurie?"

 "For Amelia - of course," called back Don's father, his voice cool. "Her cookies were famous."

 "For being dreadful," one of the pod called cheerfully, and the next hour was spent reminiscing over her life, each person listened to, and often laughter rippled up through the air, and if tears were mingled with it too, there were plenty of hands to comfort. The children sat around, often bored, while the teens listened politely, even if they had little to say.

 Finally, her father beckoned her, and the pair of them walked onto the jetty with slow ceremonial steps, he holding Amelia's ashes, she with the fluttering of wings in her stomach. There was complete silence about them, and she felt the weight of gazes on her, both burden and honour.

 The waters were ruffled by the breeze, wavelets topped with foam that was turning orange in the fading sun, and carefully her father scattered the ashes into the lake. They drifted, silvery pieces darkening to grey, bobbing out, sinking, dissipating into the water.

 She glanced at her father, and he nodded.

Her heart stung with bitter pain as she realised that they would do this again, he and she; the two of them would stand here, and scatter another woman's ashes onto the waters, and say again the same words. She needed no prophecy to tell her that.

 Let that day be distant, let it never come. Please.

 She began, quiet at first, that premonition of sorrow lending a poignancy to her voice she hadn't known she could feel. "Your journey was long, and has seen its end."

 Behind her, the pod took up the words, voices combining into one low chant.

 "May the ocean take you to its deepest heart," she said simply, thinking of Amelia, and of her mother, who seemed as one in that moment. "Fly in its storms, sleep in its tides."

 The water sloshed, as if in reply, spraying lightly against the base of the jetty, and her people echoed back the words, her father's voice clearest beside her.
 
 She found unexpected tears clinging to the corner of her eyes, and blinked them back, forcing her voice to be clear and strong, carrying easily back to them. "And may the waters bring you back to us on the crest of every wave, until we are one."

 "Until we are one," they said in unison, and there was a long hush after, before people filed down the jetty one by one to say their farewells. The family were the last of the procession, and aged, half-blind Mr Thelasso last of all, refusing to lean on anyone.

 "That was well done, girl," he told her kindly, dabbing at his eyes. "Very well done indeed."

 "Thank you," she said, and surprising herself, gave him a kiss on the cheek.

 "Careful now," he warned, giving her a leathery grin. "You'll give an old man a heart attack, making advances like that."

 She laughed, despite the solemnity of the occasion and he nodded, as if for a job well done.

 "He's right," her father murmured when they were last two on the jetty. "You did well, Phi. I'm proud. Most of us are going to the Thelassoes for a quiet coffee and some not-so-quiet nostalgia. Are you coming, or heading home?"

 She gazed over the waters, that brief moment of humour gone. "I...think I'll stay here for a little while."

 "All right," he said, and gave her a hug. "Don't be home too late."

 "I'll look after her," a dry voice said, and Don Ivan stepped onto the jetty, elegant in his dark blue suit, the colour of shark-skin. "I want to talk to Phi anyway, Mr Thetis. We have some things to sort out."

 Her father raised his eyebrows. "I'm sure you do. Tell your father it was good of him to come tonight."

 "I'm sorry he didn't come to Danielle's funeral," the dolphin said unexpectedly. There was an expression Phi hadn't expected to see on his face; regret, lovely and ethereal. "I tried to convince him, but...he...Mrs Thetis..."

 "I know," her father said heavily. "Don't worry about it, Don. It's all troubled water under the bridge. Goodnight kids." He roused a strained, but credible grin. "Don't do anything I'm going to find out about."

 Oh my god, he's treating us like a pair of lovebirds. The thought was ghastly.

 The two of them were alone, and she was afraid.

You never wanted time to end, to let my life offend
It's time to realise what lies deep inside your holy eyes

Ripples Part Four

I don't have to make this mistake,
And I don't have to stay this way
If only I would wake.

For a moment, there was silence between them as her father's footsteps faded away. The evening light slanted down onto Don, lending a warm glow to his skin and swirling, drowned shadows to his eyes. She trod down hard on her fear, her jaw tense with determination.

Poseidon Ivan wasn't a dolphin. He was a shark – she saw that hunger in him, demanding, always wanting more.

"I won't marry you," she told him.

He rolled his eyes, as though she'd made a bad joke. "Don't be so immature, Phi."

"I'm sorry? Wanting some control over my own life is immaturity?" She wanted to punch him, dig her fingers into his skin and watch him bleed. Instead, she pulled in her anger, packed it tightly into barbed words. This battle would be fought with wits, not flesh.

"You've known the score your whole life," he told her simply, sitting himself down on the thin grass by the lake. He leant back on his hands to stare up at her. Tipped up, his face was sweet, an angelic lie. "Everyone in the pod has arranged marriages, since the dawn of time, right up to our parents. Don't tell me you weren't expecting this."

But I wasn't, she thought. I thought things were different. Look at my friends, look at my parents – they broke their arranged marriages.

Her mother's words echoed coldly in her mind. How can they possibly understand what it is to be mer?

And it had all been illusion, nothing but another facet to her education, an extended class trip to the real world. Before she was reeled back into pod life, hooked and twitching.

He must have read her expression, because the corners of his mouth leapt up. "You really weren't, were you? My god, you are naïve. A Thetis daughter? The blood of the seers? Phi...did you really think they'd risk the gift slipping away?"

"I don't have the gift," she whispered. Nothing but the dreams that scorched her nights, promises of flickering fire, and a pair of copper eyes that stared at her from a mask of bruises. "I never have-"

"But your children might," he pointed out. His smugness stung her like nettles, brief and wicked. "They tell me I'm the most powerful shapeshifter the pod's seen in decades, which has a certain ring of truth to it. And you – well, you're no seer, and you've got that nasty little streak of temper-"

Phi wondered if he knew she was crushing that particular vicious streak down so hard that her head rang with the effort.

"-but you've got a voice like no other, and they reckon you'll have power too, if you ever dare to find it."

"Most of the pod have at least some choice," she informed him with icy precision. "I'm not marrying you just so you can use me as your claim to the damn throne."

"Your father's no king." As he squinted up at her, she wished she could better read his gaze. It was fierce with ambition, yes, always that – and other, unidentifiable things too. "But I won't deny that marrying his daughter would give some...comfort to the old barnacles who seem to think I'm not made of the right stuff. The Thetis stuff, in this case."

"Everyone knows Dad's had you lined up to succeed for years," she said shortly. Her temples were beginning to throb, panic beginning to spiral up under her ribcage, but she had to be in control. "You don't need to marry me for that. God, just marry one of the others – Sophia, or Grace, or any of them, they all slobber over you. They worship you just the way you like."

"Wedding you will win the opposition." His fingers scrunched into the ground with worrying force. Phi found herself staring at his hands, because the expression on his face was awful – a shifting, shuddering rage that he held back with demonic control. She had seen that expression only once before, and she had hoped never to see it again.

"What opposition?" she said scornfully. "There's no one else-"

"There's you."

That was...stupid. Crazy. "What? I've never wanted to lead!"

"That's exactly why the old barnacles say you should." He spat on the ground. "Oh, never where your mother might hear, but your father listens, and I can see him turning it over. They say you understand life outside the pod – that you'll teach us to live among the town, not apart from it. Little Phi," he mimicked in a quavery voice. "Ivan's daughter, she's a good lass, smart, a bit headstrong, aye, but she'll do well for us."

"I can't help what they say," she whispered, stunned.

No one had so much as hinted anything to her – and she would have run far and fast if they had. She went to the evening swims, and sang as joyously as the others, but she preferred to chat with the old barnacles, because they were like her – they had outsiders for friends. Mr Thalassoe loved to tell how he'd had to fight a handsome werewolf to win Amelia's heart, and old Mrs Arryn would relate the most scandalous tales about the three witches she used to run about with.

"It's nothing to do with me," she insisted.

"Yeah, you would say that!" Don's eyes were vicious needles. "You don't give a damn about our pod, you're only there because you have to be! You don't care about their problems because you think your land-locked little friends are so much better. All I want is to make our pod strong, for our people to be as proud as we were, but they want you."

He was breathing hard, and she almost felt pity for him. She wasn't as popular with their own generation as he was; she didn't care much for her parents' peers, who were strait-laced and strict, but the elders, yes, she did love them. Her own grandparents were dead, and so the barnacles had made her theirs, the grandchild of them all.

"I don't want to lead," she said very slowly, enunciating each word so it was a precise stab. "The pod is yours. But I am not. Never."

"This is non-negotiable," her unasked-for fiancé informed her. "Even if you don't want to lead, those griping old barnacles will cause trouble. Do you think we can afford to be divided? The Pack is growing, and they have one thing we don't."

"Lice?" suggested Phi.

He muttered something under his breath that sounded like a heartfelt wish to throttle her. "Killer instinct. They want our lands. Your father's kept them at bay with a promise here and a warning there, but they've got a new leader, and he's not the pacifist Donna was. I know how to fight them, but I need everyone's support. And that means I need you."

"No, you need to stop treating the elders like an inconvenience," she snapped. "Maybe you should listen to what they have to say."

"Those doddering idiots?" Don said with the boundless scorn of the young, who never dream of their own dotage because they know it cannot possibly happen to them. "One or two of them have their wits left, but most of them just live to gossip and make trouble."

Despite the fact there was an element of truth to this – Mrs Arryn had been known trip handsome young men into the lake in a sort of DIY wet-T-shirt contest – she couldn't help but think him a fool. Didn't he see how her father sought their opinion, didn't he know that the pensioners were the ones who paid the lease on the lake, who negotiated with the Ryars Valley Elders?

"You'll have to win them without me.” She would not be his toy. Not so long as the oceans swayed, and the sun moved, and her heart beat.

"In case you've forgotten, there's blood-oath resting on this." His mouth curled into a satisfied sneer. Not an angel now, but a diabolical mockery, sizzling with rage. That calm had squirmed from him like an eel, baring the ambition beneath. "No one can help you worm out of that."

"The Furies can," she said before she even realised the idea had solidified in her mind.

Shock splashed across his features. "You're mad!" And then disbelief collapsed into ridicule, and he laughed, a rich, deep sound. "You silly little bitch, they won't lower themselves to help you – if you're lucky, they'll send you weeping back to me. Or they'll just kill you."

"It's a risk," she said. “And I´ll take it.”

She glimpsed the beginnings of belief in his expression. "Destroy yourself then," he said, with a too-casual shrug. "And when they send you back to pay the price of breaking oath, remember this: if you help me, Phi, I will be good to you. I will be the best husband I can."

And you've just shown me what little joy that will be. What a drab life I would be snared in, playing courtier, servant, courtesan to your needs.

"And if you fight me," he continued, the threat easing into his voice with a riptide's swiftness, "you will find out I can be...unmerciful."

"I found that out a long time ago." She matched his cold tones, word for wicked word. "We are done. Go away."

To her silent wonder, he did.

And she did not see the small nod he gave as he passed the rushes, or feel his quiet satisfaction of a job well done. He had been fair, he could offer her no more than that. Even if she went to the Furies-

Don shook himself. But she wouldn't. Of course she wouldn't.

~*~

Celia spread her hands, looking from one face to the other. "How, Aspen, how could you possibly run Pursang? I mean, you can't even set the VCR!"

"Don't think we didn't use to ask that too," grumped Vaje.

Aspen only shrugged. "I don't think there's anyone only the planet who can program a VCR. Not even your mother," he added with the respect that most people had for Celia's competent, yet ferocious mother.

"But...I mean, you're so..." She searched for a nicer word, and came up empty. "Dumb."

"You don't need to be Einstein to know which end of a knife you stick in someone," said Vaje. "Though you're right, he is the dippiest person who's run Pursang, and I've seen a few in my time."

That time was some six hundred years, a number she still couldn't grasp when she looked at him. Only a certain strange turn of phrase gave him away. Oh yes, and the fact he had once beaten Shakespeare in a drinking contest.

"I was just there at the right time," Aspen said quietly. His hands were trembling around his sleeping nephew. "They thought I'd make a useful figurehead, you know? Young, not too bright, easily led. And they were right – only it wasn't them doing the leading. You can thank the Demon Fury for that. He taught me a lot. Eventually, I could lead them, and I was good at it."

There was a hint of pride in his words. She wanted to think him monstrous, but couldn't. This was Aspen, soft and sweet as whipped cream, who worshipped the ground her sister walked on, who woke up sobbing sometimes, and maybe he was someone else's long-lost nightmare, but not hers. Never hers.

Vaje wrinkled his nose. "Yeah, you were good. You were just what we needed – new ideas, a bit of flash and dazzle to make people remember just why the Furies aren't to be messed with."

"Thank the Demon." Aspen smiled thinly, his pupils misty blues and greys, rain-soaked skies. "He made me what I was."

And who made you the mess you are? Was that his handiwork too? No...I think not.

"But the Furies are the best," she said without thinking. No, it wouldn't register; she had dimly grasped both of them killed for money, but in her mind, it was all justified, it was somehow – warranted. She'd imagined them destroying the cruel overlords, the rapists, the monsters who fitted her secure world only when they were locked tight and lifeless into the grave.

But the Furies...they killed and tortured for anyone who could afford their deadly impartiality.

"No," Aspen said in a voice that made her spine chill, a slow and prickly sensation. "We're the worst."

His hands had stopped trembling, and his face was set – unreadable – and then she looked into his eyes, and what she saw there terrified her.

That wasn't Aspen. That wasn't anyone she knew. That wasn't even anything living. Those eyes dropped away like the abyss into Hades, slick with indifference, and empty, so empty she thought someone had bled out his soul and left only this great jagged hollow.

Oh god, oh god, is this what he really is? How did I miss it? It was all an act – I was fooled, supremely, superbly fooled and-

She didn't know she was cowering, until Vaje's hands closed on her shoulders. He'd moved behind her while Aspen – no, while the Fury – held her captivated, frozen by his inhumanity.

She screamed.

"Easy." Vaje's hands were warm as his voice, and she craned her neck, half-afraid his face would be the same glassy horror. But there was just his usual sceptical smile, so comforting Celia wanted to cry. "That's why he ran Pursang, Cee. The best are cold. Or they can at least pretend to be. Aspen, stop it, you've scared the hell out of her."

Sweat was beading under her arms, sticky on her shoulders.

"I meant to." Aspen's voice held a hint of defiance.

She didn't want to look at him, but made herself. Normal once more – Aspen's querying eyes, always asking, always needing, human and desperate. Not empty, but full of a thousand trivial emotions.

"You had to know," he said softly. "Tam could never handle it, Cee, but you – you're like your mom. You can handle anything."

She nodded dumbly, not believing him. Vaje was gently stroking her shoulders, as if she were a quivering kitten. Worse – it was making her feel safe.

"You need to know what you're going to be dealing with," he said, and that made a small, panicked spark leap through her misty fear.

"Dealing with?"

"Dealing with?" echoed Vaje, rather more loudly. "You do not mean what I think you mean!"

The vampire gave her a shaky smile. "You want to know how to break blood-oath, right, Cee?"

"Phi needs to know." Her lips felt tingly. Was this shock? "Which...which Fury were you?"

"We didn't have nicknames when I-"

"He was the Lunatic Fury," cut in Vaje. "And this, Martin, this is madness!"

Aspen looked put out. "The Lunatic Fury? No one ever mentioned that to me."

"You were certifiable at the time. Think we were stupid enough to say it to your face? On a good day, you'd have tried to garrotte something, possibly even the person who said it if you were in a saner mood. And you can't break blood-oath, Martin, we both know that."

"Wrong. It's been done. There's a record of it."

"Since when do you read records?" snapped the coyote. "I spent fifty years working on the archives, and I've never seen anything of the sort. That question's come up before, and no one breaks blood oath!"

Celia felt like an unfortunate piece of prey caught between them; though Aspen was talking to Vaje, his rainbow gaze was pleading with her, begging her not to be afraid of him. But she knew – and he knew – that fear would always be there now, remembered even when unfelt.

"It's not in the main archives. The head of Pursang has a...private collection, and it's required reading. It's been broken, twice, but I can't recall the details. I'll need to ask To-the Grieving Fury if I can borrow them."

"You know the Grieving Fury!" she squeaked, and cursed herself. Of course he did.

"She's a good woman," insisted Vaje. "And she'll help. If there's one thing she knows about, it's being trapped in a relationship you don't want."

"But she'll ask a price," said Aspen, mouth set in a grim line. "And she'll ask it from both of us, Cee. That's why you need to understand about the Furies. If you think I'm dangerous, try crossing the Grieving Fury."

"You said she was good," she pointed out.

"She is," her big brother muttered. "But she's one good woman trying to fight the rest of the Furies. She plays for the greater good – and sometimes that means sacrifice. Of herself...and of us."

"I get it," Celia told him, even though later, she would think that she hadn't understood at all. He had said price, and she had thought: money, or time. He had said price and meant: one way or another, you will pay.

Later, she would rue those words.

"I'll ask her, then." His eyes dropped. "You'd better get home, Cee. I'll give you a ring as soon as I know."

"Talk to Riose," said Vaje unexpectedly. "He's – got family in the Furies. And try not to judge him for it."

Compared to the rest of the evening's news, that was a glass of water to the face after standing underneath Niagara Falls.

A thoughtful nod from Aspen – she saw him, then, in a new, icier light. Not the barely-grown child she had thought, but a man torn, struggling against what he was trained to be and what he wanted to be.

Tam doesn't know, she thought. She knows about the nightmares, and his ferocity, but the part of him that died for the Furies? No.

Her older sister had so little idea what her fiancée could be – he was protecting her from it, and yes, protecting himself too. God, how hard it must be for him. He was trying to turn himself into a dreamy ideal – a father, a husband, a brother – to fill that emptiness with the clumsy clutches of humans, trying so hard, terrified of failing.

It was difficult, but she made herself cross the room and kiss Aspen on the forehead. "Take care of yourself and the brat," she advised. "And you still owe me dinner one night, okay?"

"Okay." Gratitude poured through that word.

~*~

She wore her memories like a tiara, the only decorative and lovely thing left about her.

Many had wondered what she was, how she survived the leisurely scrape of time, even sagging and sour as she was. They guessed her age in a casual lottery, falling far short, bar the one, maybe two who had some inkling of what she once had been.

Avarice, they whispered, and thought she was named for her sin, not that the sin had been named for her.

Avy burned with wanting; she always had. The brilliant and beautiful drew her, in any form. She drank in the elegance of philosophy with a greed that startled her tutors, and spent summers roaming to the edges of her father's kingdom, eating up the lands. She stalked down men who caught her eye, and honed her wit on them. If they were promised to another, well no matter, what she wanted – she would have.

And if she saw a piece of jewellery that attracted her magpie´s love of glitter, well, she plucked it from its owner, and wore it for it for the minutes it kept her attention. Nothing really held her, for there was always more to lust for, so she left a trail of discarded toys in her wake, made tawdry by her very touch, though she knew it not.

To give in to Avarice became a murmured code among her people, and they used it of the men she took to her bed as easily as they did of the fashions she stole and spawned.

Only one had ever really held her, but he, elusive as morning mist, had eased from her loving grasp. She had never really possessed him, and so she yearned for him still.

Fireblade had always evaded her, the only man to use her as she had used everyone after him. He had been her father's Champion, the foremost warrior and advisor to the court. Treacherous, powerful, charismatic, he was admired by most, and feared by all.

He had been Avy's first consort – no casual matter among the dragons, for whom their first sexual experience was the first full flowering of their powers. And he had abandoned her, shunning her offer of marriage, his words curt and cruel, trimmed with laughter. The ridicule had wounded her deepest of all.

“Darling, darling,” Fireblade had said with a sham of care. “Did you think this was about love? You´ve lived in your father´s court all your life – surely you know that it´s about power, and you just don´t have enough.”

In the end, he had gifted her Zeke; 'a little something of myself to keep you satisfied', his note had taunted. She had crumpled it in her hand, and wept.

And then, because she was a princess, and proud, she held up her head, and found something else – everything else – to want in his place. It never sated her, but left her ever-searching, voracious, greedy to regain what she had lost.

When war had come, she had lost something more. In the midst of her slack, decomposing skin, the scars were no longer visible. The places where her three horns had once sat.

They said dragons were immortal; that to remove the horns was to make them human. It was not true. Removing the horns split them from their natural power, as one might pluck the teeth from an alligator, and killed their ability to hold one shape – and their youth - but they retained their extraordinary lifespan. And so, when the war had severed her from her horns, she had not been killed, or forced into slumber, nor had she taken her own life, as had so many; she had lived on, resolute.

Zeke was but one of her possessions then, a wisp of woodsmoke she kept shut in a lantern. Her light when she needed it; heat in the cold nights, more flame than flesh. First of the djinn, locked within his lamp.

And she was not powerless. Far from it. She had lost her natural power, but as witches did, she could learn to use stores of magic. They used gems, plants, the ground itself. But in the aftermath of the war, she had found something far darker, and oh, deliciously powerful.

She had kept her severed horns, and the power remained in them, though she could no longer reach for it. It had to be coaxed with ritual and words, and so like a child, she learned her craft all over again. And in those frantic years after the war, as the last of the dragons fled before the encroaching witches, she began to harvest her own people.

Communities existed; she would stumble across them, produce a name and a tragic story. For a while, she would live among them, earning their trust, selecting the strongest. Men most often, who would fall to her charms. Seduction needed no power; it was a gentler kind of magic.

And when she judged the time right, she would lure her chosen one away, wait until they slept, and cut off their horns for her own. Their bodies, she left for the scavengers – by then, she was moving on, in search of her next crop.

The centuries had passed, and she felt herself age, if more slowly than humans, horrified at the brittle weakening of her body. But she had her little bag of horns, a clatter of power, and so she slowed the onset of time however she could.

In ancient Africa, when her body was still young and smooth, they announced her a god's daughter, and wed her to a shaman. In Egypt, she ruled as a temple priestess, grey haired but taut and tanned, while in Greece, they called her Medusa, and claimed that spotty upstart Perseus slew her. By the time the Britons built Stonehenge, she was Saille, the willow-woman, her skin rough and flaking as bark, her voice barely there, and in Rome, her last brush with civilisation for aeons, she was a harpy, croaking death from her hideous, shrivelled form.

All the while, she clutched her power close, and searched for a way to restore her youth and beauty. Once she had wanted a thousand trivial things. Now she wanted just one, and her aching, screaming heart beat for it.

At last she had found a way.

She would be Avy ap Sangager, siren, seductress, wonder, and her beauty would blast through men's eyes to rupture their hearts; they would die from her glory, and die happy. And revenge...served so cold that frost rose from it, that would be divine.

And all it needed was one small deed.

The walk has all been cleared by now
Your voice is all I hear somehow
Calling out winter
Your voice is the splinter inside me
While I wait.

Ripples Part Five

She was born from water, but Zeke thought that right now, she was drowning.

Delphine Thetis was a taut stream of motion; her fingers scrubbed furiously through her hair, that deep russet colour that made him think she should have been born from fire, some smouldering, shimmying thing, born to slither through the dreams of men, to light low flames along their nerve ends.

"Bastard," she was saying, voice choked. "Bastard, revolting, scheming, noxious bastard."

It was an apt description of Poseidon Ivan. Zeke had seen a dozen like him – things glutted on power, but still hungry, seeking out Avy and her ancient legend. Each before him had failed her; still she decayed, still he was her prisoner. Yet this time, he had sensed some spark of interest in Avy – there was something different about Don, something Avy wanted from him.

And now, the possibility of freedom ached sweetly along his bones.

In return, one small task: to distract this girl, to trouble her, to ensnare her with the djinn's silky promise of wishes fulfilled.

And no matter how much he liked her verve and ferocity, he would still tangle her up in chaos and hand her to Don. What was this small gesture against his freedom? He'd been trapped for thirty thousand years, what was one brief lifetime against that?

He should distract her now. Start a small fire – the reeds were dry and crispy, it would take only the scantest breath of power to set them alight. Sneak away; pretend he'd seen the blaze. He should-

Wait...what was she...?

She was stripping her clothes off, balling them up so puffs of dust rose as she flung them onto the ground. Baffled, he watched her instead, her unwitting striptease nudging all other thoughts from his mind.

Part of him felt obliged to avert his eyes – the other part, glorying in this unexpected voyeurism, drank her in. The wide pale curve of her shoulder, slanting into a swimmer's body, solid and toned; she was built for power, not grace, without the slenderness he might have expected from someone still growing into her shape and herself. Still, the sight of her sent flares rippling under his skin.

She stepped awkwardly down to the lake, moving as if her body was an ill-fitting glove she struggled to fill.

And then a thought struck him with the force of an avalanche. Horror bloomed in his heart, shortening his breath.

How many nights had he come here, to hear The Lady of the Lake? What if...what if this girl, Delphine Thetis, what if she was the delicious, despairing siren he had come here so often to hear? How could he weigh his freedom against hers?

It can't be her, he tried to tell himself. Look at her. She's so ordinary – barely more than human. Where was the rich power that wound about his lady's voice? He had felt it many times over, the tropical prelude to her lullabies and arias.

And then her feet slid into the water, and a change drew over her.

Delphine Thetis stood differently, he saw, straighter, holding herself with pride and ease. The light haloed her body, glowing out to silhouette the arch of her hips and the ride of her breasts, as the prickly heat under his skin became lust, bubbling like caramel.

And though the hair that she tugged free from the loose ponytail was russet, and not moon-pale, it could have been another woman standing there, one of the few to treat him as more than a gifted animal.

She too had stood under the moonlight, but before the ocean, coaxing it back to her, only to let it roll free again, breaking the waves with a haphazardly blown kiss. The only time she had been truly carefree.

Ryar ap Sangager, dragon princess and Water Drax, had loved the waters too, had moved like this girl.

There was a new elegance to Delphine Thetis, and as her steps sank her further into the lake, it seemed to him that she belonged there. Thigh deep now, her fingertips trailed in the lake, spreading wavelets behind her like a train, the last pieces of sunset sliding golden down her shoulder blades, curling over her buttocks and onto the waters, turning the folds into gilt.

His entire chest was parched, drawn tight and terrified. What if it was her? How could he ever hurt her? In these last months, his siren had been the only thing to keep him from burning himself up in one last towering inferno, the last escape remaining to him.

"Delphine," he whispered, tasting the name, trying to put together the glimpses of her face. Pale eyes, a stubborn mouth, but mostly, he tried to reconcile her with that voice, spinning flimsy dreams in the core of the night.

He crawled from the rushes like a dog, his eyes reflecting coppery iridescence, unaware of the swaying fog that rose from his body like heat haze.

Like Ryar, but not; he felt the hints of the Drax's power in every one of the merpeople, strongest when it wound about their evening songs, a shivering blue mass on his senses but still nothing more than a pale shadow compared to the full-throated glory of Ryar, singing like her soul was emptying into her words. No one would ever be quite like her...the mer were, as he was, a ghostly echo of their maker's power

Can you make people like me? he had asked Ryar, once. You're Drax too.

I could, if I wished, she answered, healing the bruise on his face. His last beating from Fireblade had been ferocious, leaving him barely able to move. Though they would be water rather than fire. But I would not, unless the need was desperate.

Why not? he'd asked. Anything to take his mind from the relentless thumping of his pain.

It would be cruel, she answered. They would have only fragments of my power. And they would be like no one else living. More than human, unlike witches, less than dragons – other, alien, neither man nor beast. Belonging with water, as you belong with fire, but bound to the land by their human needs. Why make something so broken, so outcast?

He had turned his face away from her cool fingers. Why indeed? he'd said softly.

And thirty thousand years on, he remained the only one of his kind. But desperation had come to Ryar ap Sangager, and she had made these merpeople in the wicked clutches of war, hoping someone might evade the slaughter. They had prospered, free and unscarred.

Every fibre of his body twanged with dreadful anticipation. Sing, he pleaded silently, prove me wrong, let me hear you.

But she did not; instead, he felt the brief lemony taste of her power, just a faint echo of his siren, as all the merpeople were. Somewhere in the lake, a mermaid swam, but not the one who haunted him so desperately. He felt a muted, sad relief that Delphine Thetis was not his lady, yet now he had no excuse to spare her.

He was fire, beautiful and treacherous. This was nothing more than his nature, the placid call of his destiny.

But somehow, he couldn't shake the feeling that Ryar would have been disappointed with him.

~*~

She had no voice tonight. Tired of this slow struggle against her family, the affectionate chains that chafed her more desperately than ever, she could only sink into the waters and let the drifts carry her. Back and forth, until they took her to the smooth white coffin that lay at the deepest point of the lake.

It was the reason the pod had remained here for so many years. The stone was rounded at the corners, its sharpness washed away long ago. Waters had shaped it as Don and her parents tried to shape her now; to smooth the unwanted edges of her, until she was pliant and pleasing.

And if they succeeded, she would become just as dead, her bones couched in a rattling shell. Dead and obedient, that was all Don wanted.

They thought that of you too, didn't they? she thought to the woman who was surrounded by stone walls. They thought you would let them use you, and for a while, you did.

But then you fought back. You rebelled, and you saved an entire race from annihilation. You made us to protect the witches and you sacrificed yourself. I only want to save myself, but isn't that enough?

She expected no answer. Ryar ap Sangager was long dead, only clouded fragments remembered by a few dusty scholars and the merpeople. They sang her history in their hymns and so she lived on. Still, circling the tomb gave her some hope, some way to fight what peopl