“You, too,” his father snarled. “You’ve had your own candidates!”
“You told me it was safe. You said they’d never find out!”
“Leave it! It doesn’t matter. We have to decide what to do now. Where we can go. To be safe . . .”
Alicia stood in the doorway, cackling like a witch. “There is no place to be safe, Prince Thumsort. They’ll find you, and they’ll find Duke Edoard. I know who set this in motion and believe me, she’ll find you all.” Then she fell to keening as though she could not stop, a hideous noise that drove the rest of the guests out of the house, into the dangerous night.
* * *
When Genevieve leapt from the serpent rock, she and Dovidi fell as one, as one entering the waves, arrowing downward as the light faded behind them. She drove them deeper with thrusting legs. The child struggled, freed his limbs and swam with her, kicking with his tiny feet even within the circle of her arms. The pudgy folds at the sides of his little neck swelled, then opened. Seeing this, Genevieve gave a great gulp of relief, and the almost invisible lines that circled her own neck opened to let the fringed tissues inside extrude like a great, frilly collar that drew the oxygen from the water flowing through it. She blinked and transparent lids lowered to protect her eyes. Oh, it had been so long since she had done this. Only that once since mother died, before she went to Havenor. So long since those endless exercises in the pool beneath Langmarsh House. So long since Mother went away.
Dovidi moved his jaw with a clicking noise, like a question, and she turned her head in the direction he was staring. Almost touching them were scores of skeining dolphins, weaving patterns in the water, talking among themselves in a series of snaps and pops, their cheerful faces and bobbing bodies encouraging their descent. As they went deeper, the dolphins were replaced by black-and-white orcas with great teeth in their smiling jaws, and then by bigger creatures yet, huge whales, some with pointed heads and others with great, broad faces above enormous mouths. Beyond these familiar shapes were others she could not recognize, deep dwellers of races she knew nothing of, huge and writhing, with multiple eyes, the leviathans of Haven.
The sparkling blue changed to bright sapphire and that darkened to lapis and that to purple and that, soon, gave way to an ebon realm of endless space glittering with living galaxies, with luminescent constellations moving and spinning in the dark as they hummed and clicked and sang. As they went deeper yet, the water began to glow, and they looked down upon a golden continent, the largest of all the sea shapes, one that shone with its own light, the great golden creature Genevieve had seen in Merdune Lagoon, now rising toward them, turning beneath them, to bring the tip of its huge dorsal fin within reach of her hand.
She grasped the apex, like grasping the tip of an ornamental spire at the top of a great tower above a vast city. Her eyes swooped down across the creature-scape of the being, a distance so great that she could not see its end. Behind her, the mighty tail waved in powerful thrusts that drove them deeper yet. She should have been swept off, but she was held to the surface of the fin as though glued to it, surrounded by an intention that would neither let her go nor harm her while she stayed.
Inside her a half familiar discomfort built as something shifted, as an inner pressure built to match outer pressure, as air bled from certain cavities, releasing inert gases. The pools at Langmarsh had not been deep enough for this, but she had been told to expect it. She looked intently at Dovidi to see if he felt any distress, but his tiny hand rested easily beneath hers on the great fin and he chortled at their going.
The sound of his joy released her. All her anxieties fell away like weights dropped from a diver’s belt, leaving her free in the great ocean. Here was where she belonged and where she had been meant to come.