Deepwater King by Claire McKenna

Author:Claire McKenna [Claire McKenna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-05-04T17:00:00+00:00

Book Two: Maris

THREE DAYS BEFORE THE STORM

12

Three Days Earlier

In her limestone office in the highest tower of Maris, Queen Bellis Harrow-Riven held a glass to her lips but did not drink. A tea-flower bloomed in the amber water, opening from a hard leafy knot to a thistle-bloom of violet and blue.

On the back of her pale, powdery neck was a black chevron, the shape of a fish scale, or a tooth. A marriage tattoo, the mark she’d been given when she aligned herself to Jonah Riven. The marriage which had saved her life.

Ozymandias Absalom stood behind her, rocked back on his heels and waited for instruction. The monarch of the Sainted Isles stood both shabby and resplendent in a seed-pearl and lace wedding dress. The musty dress was ten seasons old and at least three sizes too large for her, an engineering miracle puffed up with steel hoops and plesiosaur bone that was forever in danger of catastrophic collapse.

Over the Queen’s shoulder a bull’s-eye glass window let in some light but was impossible to see out of. Each insert was crazed from both the milky afternoon light and the constant acidic etch of the sulphurous atmosphere.

Maris Island, the southernmost of the Sainted archipelago, was the tip of a still-active volcano and on the constant verge of eruption. Like the Queen who had made the small steaming rock her home, it bubbled and complained but never quite boiled over.

That time was coming to an end, Absalom thought. There had been too many seismic rumblings from his monarch to ignore what was about to happen.

Only three inserts were missing in the window, enough to give Absalom a slice of sky and pale, dusty courtyard. Down in the fortress yard the prodigal husband swung a hammer upon an iron wedge into a slab of yellow rock the size of an ox-wagon.

From the moment she had brought Jonah Riven here, Bellis had put the man to work. Over the course of a season the sea had slipped from his lean body, the forced labour binding him in a casement of flesh and muscle, anchoring him to the yellow ash of Maris.

‘How many people are under my command now, Mr Absalom?’

‘By my latest census, just shy of two thousand, nine hundred and eighty souls, Your Majesty.’

‘Quite a lot, for this place.’

‘It is.’

‘Did you know when I first came to the islands, I could rouse barely a fifth of this army, and then only for a little while? I first went to Equus, such an industrious place. But my loving people on Equus soon lost their sense of direction. I could not hold them. They were lost to me. Then they turned on me.’

With a toss of her head she swallowed the boiling water, tea leaves and all.

‘Was the brute Miah Anguis who gave me this scar.’

Bellis pulled down the high neckline of her dress, showed Absalom where the pink jag across her throat ended, the scar puckered from stitches that had gone in hurriedly. Though

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