King of the Sea (2)
A negotiating party had been assembled to conclude a trade agreement with Sirakos. I would lead the talks, Uld would stand as my escort, and Lucian and Groll would serve as counselors.
Those four made up the entirety of the delegation. We pressed the whole operation forward in strict secrecy — too much fanfare, and the royal family was bound to move to sabotage us.
We were nearly finished with our departure preparations when Groll stopped by my office.
"What is it?"
"...Lord Iden."
Every trace of the Harpoon King's beastly ferocity had vanished from him. Scratching at the back of his head, looking thoroughly at a loss, he spoke with a sheepish air.
"I'm dreadful sorry about this, but might I trouble you with a rather difficult favor?"
"Let's hear it."
I laced my fingers together and leaned back at my ease. A personal grievance from the Harpoon King himself? Now that was entertaining.
"You see, I've been kept in the capital this whole while. On account of the Maritime Affairs Bureau, my lord."
"That's right."
"And it seems my wife is furious with me over it."
"...Is she, now? Didn't you ask her leave before going off to tend to business abroad?"
"That's what I thought too. But it appears Mariel saw it differently."
"Why? Is she ordering you to give up the sea?"
"Quite the opposite. She's digging in her heels about coming along. Says if we're bound for Sirakos, she'd be of use."
Groll looked like a man ready to wedge his enormous frame into a mousehole, if only one would open.
"I'm truly sorry. I never meant to breathe a word of it, but somehow she caught on, and one thing led to another..."
I laughed. I had already suspected Mariel was the sharper of the two.
I had never ordered him to keep the mission from his own wife in the first place. If I'd meant to run information control that airtight, I would never have developed Miren Port or opened our gates to pilgrims.
"So it's true — Mariel was royalty of Sirakos?"
"That she was, my lord. My wife's true name is Mariella... Mariella Ibelurin. Ibelurin is her maiden name."
The Ibelurins were the house behind the largest shipping company in the Kingdom of Sirakos. Mariel had been its eldest daughter, and the inheritance had been set to fall to her.
"Tell her to pack her bags."
"R-really, my lord?"
"If we're to steer these negotiations in our favor, having someone who knows their high society inside and out can only help."
Groll's chest sagged with relief. He must have been worried sick that I'd refuse to take Mariel along.
A hopeless romantic, through and through.
And Mariel impressed me anew. I found myself genuinely curious what secret she'd used to put a leash on a great pirate who had once ruled the open seas.
Our own ship was still under construction, so we planned to board a passenger liner at Sores, a city in the empire's northwest, and sail into Sirakos from there.
The tickets had been secured by Adras, head of my intelligence bureau, who was lying low in the capital.
Two days later, every member of the delegation gathered in the courtyard of the ducal residence.
Since we had to pass as wealthy travelers, Uld wore a dress instead of armor. It was black, and it set off her hair beautifully.
And since we had to hide that she came from the North, the dress bared the line of her shoulders, cut thin enough to flatter every curve of her figure.
"They said this is the fashion in the capital these days, so..."
Uld's face burned scarlet, and she couldn't bring herself to lift her head.
The Dao has a saying: xianfeng daogu — the bearing of an immortal, the bones of a sage. Unpacked, it means that transcendents carry an aura all their own; put more plainly still, it means a pleasing face is an aid to cultivation.
Millions upon millions of possibilities, spun from countless threads of fate tangled together like an unraveled skein.
Ascension is the realm born when those threads pile up beyond counting. To reach so distant a height, an appearance that wins hearts is not a choice but a necessity.
Which is to say, trace back the reason any great Daoist first took up the path, and the answer you find might simply be: because they had a pretty face.
"It suits you."
She truly was beautiful.
It was common knowledge that a complete rebirth remade a person's features, but even before hers, Uld must have been a beauty apart.
"Do you truly mean that?"
Uld blinked rapidly, as though she couldn't believe her ears.
"I do. I moved in high society for many years myself, and never once did I meet anyone as beautiful as you, Lady Uld."
Mariella put in from beside her.
"Th-that couldn't be... I'm nothing but a girl who knows how to swing a sword. I haven't the grace or the polish of a proper noble lady..."
Uld's voice shrank smaller and smaller.
"You're no slouch yourself, Mariella."
I complimented Mariella in turn.
My research had turned up her old epithet: the Blue Pearl of Sirakos. Renowned as a beauty from girlhood, she had never wanted for suitors.
Which was why, at first, I'd assumed I'd simply misjudged the woman. Back when I was freeloading rainbow lobster off her, Mariella had been every inch the rustic housewife.
But the woman standing before me now was a noblewoman graced with both poise and refinement.
True, ten years of savage sea winds and punishing labor had left marks no one could wipe away. Yet the gulf between 'Mariel,' worn down by housework in a hovel of a home, and 'Mariella,' who had chosen to follow her husband and confront her own past, was immense.
"Forgive me for troubling you with my willfulness, Your Grace."
Mariella bowed deep at the waist.
"There is nothing to forgive. I made this decision after weighing what you have to offer. And please, spare me the ceremony. In rank, you and I stand but a single step apart, do we not?"
"I set down my rank long ago. These days I am simply a woman who boils lobster in a small fishing village. I am content with the life I have — but if there is aught I can do for my husband, I will not hold myself back."
Composed and dignified — almost too fine a woman to be left boiling lobsters.
"I confess I'm envious. Perhaps I ought to have taken up piracy myself."
Lucian quipped.
"It's not too late even now, Lucian."
We divided ourselves between two carriages. Once we crossed the borders of the duchy, foot traffic thickened in a hurry. To slip past prying eyes, I had laid an art of dulled perception over both carriages.
We reached Sores on the tenth day. From the moment we entered the city, Uld couldn't close her mouth.
"Wow... it's magnificent."
The liner we would board was a luxury sailing vessel called the Palace of the Seas. Uld stood spellbound by the sleek grace of her sails.
"Welcome aboard, my lady."
Sailors in crisp white uniforms bowed courteously from the deck. The passengers, it seemed, were not nobles alone. Among the commoners were plenty who had made fortunes in trade to rival any lord's. The luxury liner business, evidently, courted precisely that new money.
Uld marveled without pause until the very moment we reached our cabin.
I found it adorable, and a little wondrous. I had adapted to life as Iden Esterji in no time at all, but she seemed utterly incapable of growing accustomed to this kind of life.
The cabin was a four-berth suite: a common room at its center, with two-person bedrooms opening through doors on either side.
"We'll take separate rooms."
I said it while hanging my hat on the rack.
"I'll take the left."
Uld wasn't paying my words the slightest attention.
"Something weighing on you?"
"Oh — no, nothing."
She started and denied it at once.
"A thought just came over me, that's all. What right do I have to be enjoying luxury like this...?"
"You're a Grand Master-class Awakened. Fiancée or not, you could have had anything you wanted — money, a title, whatever your heart desired."
"...It isn't the money."
"If not the money, then what?"
"You, Lord Iden," she said, in a voice small as an ant's.
"...What?"
Her words had been so faint that even at my level of perception I'd barely caught them. Uld's face flared scarlet, and without so much as finishing her sentence she bolted into the next room. The room she fled into was, of course, the left one — the very room I had just claimed for myself.
The Palace of the Seas was to make a full circuit of the archipelagos off the Pelion Empire's northwest before anchoring at the port of Sirakos. For the whole of the voyage, parties and concerts followed one another aboard without pause.
While the blessed feasted and made merry, I shut myself in my cabin with Lucian, Groll, and Mariella, holding meeting after meeting. Our chief subjects: how to win over the King of Sirakos, and what we would give and what we would demand in return.
Morning of the fourth day.
Having taken breakfast in my room, I set out for Lucian's cabin for our meeting, as on any other morning.
But something felt off. The air was strangely unsettled.
"Kyaaaaah!"
A woman's scream tore through the ship, high and ragged. From the upper deck.
And it wasn't only the scream. Men came thundering about in a panicked rush. The urgency was palpable. I changed course and made for the deck.
The moment I stepped out onto it, the captain's voice rang out, rich and booming.
"Please remain calm! The wind has merely paused for a moment!"
I looked about me. The sea was uncannily still — so empty of waves it might have been a lake. With the wind gone utterly dead, the ship hung motionless, as if nailed to the spot.
"All is well! These waters are notorious for their fickle winds!"
The captain's shouting accomplished nothing. The passengers fluttered about like startled chickens. The crew, for their part, were already in full panic, scattering in every direction in search of anything that might serve as a weapon.
Was a patch of dead calm really worth this much of an uproar?
The fundamental question rose in my mind.
"Lord Naiden!"
Lucian came running from the opposite deck. Naiden was my alias — Iden turned on its head.
"The mood up here is ugly. Some of the crew are lowering boats from the aft deck."
"Lifeboats?"
"Escape boats, my lord. For the VIPs. There's a whole crowd of them gathered — every one dressed like nobility."
I swept my gaze across our surroundings. I couldn't imagine where they meant to row in the middle of this boundless ocean, but one thing was clear: the situation was dire enough to try.
"First we need to know what we're dealing with."
With a jerk of my chin, I gestured toward the lower deck.
"I'll handle things up here. See to the documents."
"Understood."
The papers we had drafted aboard were not the sort that could ever be allowed to leak. Lucian hurried below.
In the meantime, I cast about for someone worth questioning. I started with a passenger nearby — a clean-cut man in his mid-thirties.
"The King of the Sea..."
The man murmured it like someone in a trance. His gaze wandered somewhere beyond the placid horizon.
"Who is this King of the Sea?"
I asked in the register most befitting my assumed station.
"You don't know the King of the Sea?"
He seemed genuinely astonished.
"I'm not from these waters."
The intelligence Groll and Mariella had provided dated back ten years, and the reports my bureau had compiled covered nothing but Sirakos's politics and economy.
"A pirate."
A pirate.
If that was all he was — some lowly sea raider — then it made sense no report had ever reached my desk.
"Not just any pirate."
The man said, his voice trembling.
"The one who stops the waves."
"Stops the waves?"
"Exactly as I say. A great pirate with a three-million-bhat bounty on his head. A nature-type Awakened who commands the water itself."
Far off along the horizon, a black flag rose into view.
"...Death is coming for us."
The man said it in a voice drained of all hope.