For the Taking (12 page)

“I wasn’t expecting that you would! Or that
I
would!”

“I’m not just talking about time. I’m talking about emotional focus. This marriage was a political strategy, but I think we’re both in danger of forgetting that.”

“Oh, so you’re actually reminding me not to do anything silly like fall in love with you?”

“Something like that.”

“Isn’t it a little arrogant of you to assume that such a reminder is necessary?”

“Arrogance is a fault I’ve been accused of before.”

“I’ll bet it is!” Her control broke like a dam across a flooded river, and her anger gushed out in full spate. It was a magnificent sight, though Loucan didn’t want
to dwell on the fact. “And you think
you’re
in control enough to keep your body’s needs separate from the involvement of your heart, but I’m not?” she said.

“No, Lass, I—”

“Oh, right,
right!
I get it!” She huffed out an indignant laugh. “You’re so fabulous in bed that any woman—especially a virgin—who gets a taste of your performance is going to be your love-slave for life. Good one, Loucan!” Her sarcastic praise bit hard. “I guess it goes with the territory. A man who is arrogant enough to believe that he can lead an entire nation out of twenty-five years of sporadic, destructive war is going to have no trouble believing every woman he meets is secretly pining for him.”

“You haven’t—”

“And since I’ve been very open about wanting you, I must be totally desperate. It couldn’t possibly be that there was something very magic and important about acknowledging my female desires after so long. Because let me tell you something. You don’t know me or understand me nearly as well as you think you do, King Loucan!
I am so angry with you
!”

Without giving him a chance to reply, she whirled around and vanished into the cabin.

“That went well,” Loucan muttered.

His hands were gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles had turned a sickly green. The back of his neck felt ready to snap with tension. He was willing to bet that she’d never had an outburst like that in her life. For a woman who’d kept her emotions so cool and controlled for so long, it was pretty impressive.

Impressive enough to raise some serious questions.

Most importantly, did she mean it? She was such a unique combination of strength and vulnerability,
and he didn’t know which quality he’d just witnessed. Her vulnerability? Was lashing out simply a way of hiding how much he’d hurt her? Or had he just seen proof of her strength? Maybe she was right. Maybe it was pure arrogance to suggest that her sensual response to him would bring with it an emotional involvement too deep for him to match.

Loucan couldn’t remember when he’d last been this uncertain about something so important.

Below deck, Lass was talking to the mirror.

“So, Lass Morgan, is this a learning curve, or a descent down a very slippery slope?”

Thirty-three years old, and she’d never lashed out at anyone this way before.

It felt… She paused to consider.

Embarrassing? No. Sad? Absolutely not.

It felt fabulous. She was tingling all over, hot-cheeked, alive,
angry
at Loucan and extremely pleased that she’d told him so.

But people got angry at the ones they loved. Was she in love with him?

How could she know? She had no way to make comparisons. It would have been very easy to let herself float along in a cloud of rapture. Loucan could make all the decisions and all the moves. Loucan was strong, brave, intelligent, trustworthy. Loucan did wonderful things to her body, and sheltered her in his arms afterward as if she were a lost lamb. At his side, she need never think or struggle or work or doubt again.

“But Cyria didn’t raise you that way,” she told the pink-cheeked, glittery-eyed Lass in the mirror.

For all Cyria’s faults, she’d never encouraged Lass
to be weak or dependent on anyone. It wasn’t something Lass intended to experience now.

Going to the boat’s small galley, she tossed some garlic and fresh shrimp in a pan with melted butter, found the last packet of pasta in one of the storage hatches beneath the bench seats and put a pot of water on to boil. Although they’d added to their food supplies with fresh treats from the sea, their stocks were getting low.

“Pacifica.” Lass tried the word on her tongue. “Tomorrow we’ll be in Pacifica.”

It didn’t seem possible. Pacifica was hardly a real place to her anymore. Instead, it was a combination of random memories like snatches of film, some of them wonderful, others disturbing. She would have remembered more, she was sure, if the most nightmarish memory of all hadn’t haunted her so much. For twenty-five years, she hadn’t
wanted
to remember Pacifica in any way.

Now, for the first time, she tried to bring the images back.

The palace. There was a palace, only her own royal clan were not the only people who lived there. In her memory, it resembled a luxurious shopping mall, with a warren of concourses and atriums, hundreds of suites of rooms and miraculous displays of color and light.

And there were gardens, weren’t there? Farm gardens, which still grew some of the earth-dependent foods that the ancient Pacificans had prized. She had the idea that those foods were getting rarer, that this was part of the old knowledge that her father had kept under his own control and hidden away. Did it really
make sense to treat knowledge as a commodity? Or as a weapon? Wouldn’t it ease tensions between the different factions if it could be available to everyone?

Caves. She remembered caves, too—some of them as luxuriously fitted as wealthy homes on land, others more primitive, and distant from the central palace.

Lass drained the cooked pasta and tossed it with the shrimp and garlic sauce, then went up to Loucan on deck. She was tempted to stand there, far away from him, with her arms folded and a dagger-sharp look on her face, but she overcame such a petty reaction and moved close.

“I’ve cooked dinner.” She touched her hand briefly to his forearm as she spoke, and felt the sun’s heat on his skin, and the fine golden silk of sun-bleached hair. “Pasta and the last of the shrimp we caught this morning. Can you come below and eat? Because I have some questions.”

He flashed her a sharp glance, in which she was sure she detected a glint of curiosity and respect. Damn straight, he should respect her! He could be curious, too, if he liked. There was nothing mysterious about this.

“About Pacifica,” she added. “I want to know what it’s like there now.”

He nodded. “Yes. You’re right. You need to, don’t you?”

“I should have asked you days ago.” But even so recently, she hadn’t had the courage. Now, suddenly, she did. And she had an announcement to make, as well. She wasn’t going to give Loucan the key, until she’d thought more about how the archives in her father’s secret chamber should be used.

Loucan held Lass’s hand as they crossed the coral reefs.

For the first ten or fifteen miles, they were stunningly beautiful, an unbroken, shimmering mass of color and movement. Lit by the strong rays of the tropical sun, the water was a pure, translucent aquamarine. It was like swimming through liquid gemstones.

At first, Lass found it impossible to believe that this paradise was the setting for the nightmare that had haunted her for twenty-five years, but then they reached a place where the color and composition of the rocks changed, and there were several barren stretches where the coral had been destroyed.

With her heart beating faster, Lass turned to Loucan and asked, “What happened here? It’s so ugly!”

Only when she’d said it did she realize that she hadn’t spoken any words. She’d
signed
to him. It was the way the mer communicated underwater. She hadn’t thought about it in twenty-five years, but now, when she needed it, and as her memories were activated by the growing familiarity of what she saw, it had come back.

“The fighting,” Loucan signed to her in reply. “The guerilla elements of both factions have adapted the mer technology for creating energy out of phosphorus. They use it for explosives now.”

Last night, he’d told her about the sporadic outbursts of fighting. It resembled what she’d read and seen on the news about the troubles in Ireland, with each side taking revenge against the other side’s violence until many people lost sight of the original grievance.

Last night, he had also entrusted her with all four sections of Okeana’s key.

“You’re right. You must be the one to break the seal,” he’d told her. “With me beside you. Until the right moment comes, no one will know you’re in possession of the key. Few people in Pacifica even know it exists, or understand the value of what your father locked away.”

“Joran does.”

“Yes, unfortunately. Hide it in your bag of belongings when we leave the boat, and find a secret place for it once we’ve housed you safely in Pacifica. We’ll both know the right moment, I think, when we must go together to unlock the seal.”

Lass hadn’t been fully compliant on this point. She’d left two parts of the key on Loucan’s boat. The others she carried in the woven sea-grass bag that trailed beside her in the water as they swam.

A little farther on, Lass recognized the place, just ahead, where the reef ended and the water suddenly became much deeper. Almost home. There was a back entrance to the vast labyrinth of the air-filled palace just near here, with rooms where the mer would rest while they shed their tails. This was where, as a child, she would often begin to think of something to eat, and toys and stories and bed.

Now, as then, she might be less than a day away from seeing Saegar and the twins. A radio message they’d received last night on Loucan’s boat communicated that they were on another boat heading here from Hawaii.

Her anticipation crowded out bad memories as the familiar stretches of coral passed beneath her.
I’ve done it,
she realized.
I’ve swum across the reefs with
out panicking and falling apart. I’ve rediscovered the beauty of it, instead of the terror. This was where I first learned to love beauty. My mother taught me, and it has stayed with me despite everything that happened after. Her death wasn’t the only legacy I took when I left Pacifica. When I see the beauty of the mountains behind my house, or the perfect shape of a ceramic bowl, it comes from what she taught me.

Lass felt as if she’d just found some very precious possession she had thought was lost forever.

A moment later, Loucan slowed, and she realized there were some shadowy figures in the water just ahead. Mermen. Several of them, and a couple of mermaids as well. They made a sign that meant nothing to her, but Loucan clearly recognized it.

“They’re friends,” he signed to her. “A patrol. But I’m surprised they’re this far out. I would have expected to find them closer to our headquarters.”

It was so strange to be surrounded by other mer. The signing between them and Loucan was fast and fluent, and Lass had no hope of following it. When they began swimming rapidly through the water as a group, she had to ask him, “What’s going on?”

“Problems,” he explained. “And a disappointment for you, I’m sorry to say. You won’t see your siblings here, after all. Or at least, not yet. They’re waiting on their boat until it’s safer. The patrol leader, Carrag, has been in touch with them. He’s been a supporter of mine for a long time, and he’s advising us to go cautiously as well, but I’m not sending a message like that to those who believe in me. I won’t be frightened away from Pacifica.”

“Nor me,” Lass answered at once. “Not any
more.” She knew the words pleased him, although he said nothing. “But why isn’t it safe now?” she asked.

“Joran has taken over part of the palace—Okeana’s former throne room and the suite of rooms surrounding it. From a strategic perspective, that’s not very clever of him, as it’s a hard place to defend, but symbolically it’s important, and he knows that. Effectively, he’s declared victory. He’s broken both of the pretended alliances he’s made with each of the other factions over the years, and gone out openly on his own. He’s got supporters, but hopefully not as many as he thinks. Joran dropping his cloak of charm and concern for Pacifica’s good may unite the Swimmers and the Breathers in a way that nothing else could.”

He used the names for Okeana’s faction and Galen’s that Lass had almost forgotten about until he’d mentioned them last night. Still they meant very little to her.

“Meanwhile, Kai and Phoebe and Saegar aren’t here,” she signed. She couldn’t immediately overcome her disappointment and drag her focus from the concrete, personal sense of loss to Loucan’s far more objective and statesmanlike concern.

He gave a crooked smile at her forlorn, clumsy gestures, and signed to her, “That’s what you care about in all this? Your siblings?”

She didn’t attempt to defend herself. “Yes! The rest is too abstract for me right now. I don’t even know where we’re going. If Joran controls the palace—”

“A tiny part of it. You’ve probably forgotten how huge it is. For hundreds of years, it was the whole of Pacifica, and only once the process of mer transformation was fully understood and perfected did we
start occupying or constructing air-filled undersea caves farther afield. That’s where I’m headquartered, in a whole network of caves that we’re heading toward now. When we get there, I’ll need to go into council to talk about this new situation with Joran. Selkia and Nacre will look after you.”

He gestured to indicate the two mermaids in the patrol group, then slowed and turned to look at Lass. For a moment, she thought he was going to say something more—something personal—with those strong yet surprisingly graceful hand movements she was quickly relearning. But in the end he only chopped them through the water in a gesture she didn’t recognize, and swam quickly on.