And he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her.
Something opened within Gryshen. She felt herself unfolding like one of the dozen flowers he had placed on her. The only crown she had ever wanted.
And she was in a way she had never been, free and happy and unafraid.
The crushing pressure released, the grief swam away, and only this remained.
Gryshen let herself smile as he cupped her face in his hands, let herself bury her head in his chest. They wrapped themselves around each other, dropping like a stone into the water.
Something within blossomed, then lit aflame. And in the swirls of flame and water, lips and eyes, teeth and hands, she released completely.
It took longer than it should have for her to hear it—the piercing signal, a warning cry.
Jeer burst into them, which for a moment was comical, until she realized she couldn’t see the narwhal.
“What is it?” she signaled, as if he could answer. The white whale just turned swiftly, and they followed obediently. There was no sign of Feln as they made their way back toward home. Even the fish that had been swirling about moments before seemed to have vanished. Gryshen kept looking out behind, trying to make out a shape of a horn, something. In the now darkening water, as they swam deeper toward home, she spotted something. Actually, she smelled it first. The narwhal’s blood.
She had smelled it before, as a babe, when one had been accidentally speared on a hunt. She remembered watching them lay it on a table, the hunters helpless as it writhed and seized, a weapon pierced straight through its head. The fragrance was strong, musky, and metallic.
Like now. The blood began to trail toward her like smoke, not billowing out the way it usually did. Then she saw her narwhal coming up after, like the blood was a kind of leash. He appeared all right; there seemed to be a small, jagged gash that barely punctured his skin, like a . . . shark bite.
And the fin that followed, pointed like a hoisted sail, confirmed the sinister realization. She turned to warn Coss, but he was gone. In a moment he had moved behind the narwhal, letting out a series of low calls.
“What are you doing? You have no weapon!” she cried. But he was not listening.
To her horror, he threw himself on the back of the great white animal, gripping that blade of a fin, continuing to trill out those low notes. Gryshen suddenly recognized the shark as the single-eyed beast the Rakor rode in on. The shark turned violently from side to side, and Coss seemed to have lost his grip on the fin. Gryshen’s mouth filled with water as she opened it to cry out, but it was as if she lost the ability to make sound. The shark’s eyes remained eerily dull as his huge head tilted upward toward the lax.
Then Coss stretched his copper arms upward, turned them in, and plunged his fingertips into those vacant eyes.
He kept digging, pushing into the brain, tugging at the skull. Gryshen couldn’t look away.
Here was the warrior. Here’s where the legendary barbarism of his pod came out—not with ceasids, no, with dangerous beasts. She wondered if she should be more disturbed, but she couldn’t feel it. The relief was too great. Coss was all right. He was better than all right.
She was free. She could feel safe forever, as long as she was with him.
They were close to the cavern now, and others had been alerted.
Jode was one of the first to appear. He couldn’t keep from looking impressed when he saw how very dead the great shark was at the hands of this one iloray.
“Nice work. A little messy with the skull and sinew, but—”
“Next time you single-handedly tear apart a huge fanged beast, you can show me how to properly dismantle its head.” Coss smirked.
“Right.” Jode waved to two others to help them carry the body back.
“Feast!” they called gleefully as they swam.
Coss had remained for a moment, patting the narwhal, who seemed better. The wound was releasing less blood. Jeer waited by her, as if to be sure.
“And what about you?” Coss dropped that inescapable gaze back on her. “Are you all right?”
Gryshen nodded dumbly. She continued nodding until she wasn’t sure how long she had been doing so, and made herself stop.
Coss grinned again, put his arm around her as naturally as if they always did this, and together they swam with the white whale and narwhal back to the stables where Sodaren was waiting, fretting.
“I KNEW I should have stopped you. I had a bad feeling about this.” Word had already spread to the beastkeeper of their peril and Coss’s daring battle with the shark.
It was so strange to Gryshen, who was just thinking she could hardly remember what feeling bad felt like.
Then she brought her mind back to double-check on Feln.
“She’ll be okay, Sodaren? See her wound, right there?”
Sodaren kept pausing between lightly pressing around the bite to shake her head admiringly at the lax.
“Oh yes, it didn’t go very deep. It’s almost stopped bleeding. Some algae salve should fix her right up,” she assured Gryshen. “Are you all right, Princess?”
Gryshen was about to bob her head like a seal again, but it was time to force out a signal.
“That’s a relief, thank you, Sodaren. Are you coming to the meal?” She did her best to sound normal.
“Oh yes, yes. They are supposed to have four different large fish, in addition to . . . shark.”
“Right. Of course.”
The beastkeeper expertly applied ointment to Feln, while Gryshen rubbed the beast’s forehead and gave her a small kiss.
Sodaren waited for Coss and Gryshen to swim into the main opening, and then trailed behind them.
The whole pod was at the feast that night, celebrating Coss’s daring catch of the shark. By the time it got back to Gryshen, the story suggested that the shark was ten times his actual size, even though anyone taking a moment to look at the creature laying across the table could see that storytellers were taking liberties.
She just sat and listened to the tales all around her, wearing a smile she couldn’t take off. Her appetite had finally returned, something she didn’t know she had lost. Happiness filled her, a return that her father noted immediately.
“It’s good to see you like this, Gryshie,” he murmured beside her, as she took a second helping off the fin. “I suppose you were in greater need of a break than I realized.”
“It was just what I needed, Daddy.” And she couldn’t help but dart her eyes to the one opposite her, the one who wore a grin through all the commotion, who nodded encouragingly as Jode told the story for him, adding embellishments and pausing in all the right places. But while his head was turned to face Jode, his eyes kept going back to Gryshen.
Morfal wasted no time using this adventure as opportunity to brag of his son’s might and its reflection on their own pod, emphasizing his boy’s killer instinct.
“Well, we can all agree that Coss is very brave,” her father said after Morfal’s boasting.
Gryshen was grateful, grateful that he saw this, that he made it about Coss’s courage, rather than whatever ugliness Morfal tried to twist it into in hopes of intimidation.
“And then he bit the eyeball out! One steady chew.” Jode was shameless now with a jaw-dropped, squealing audience of little ones. “And the shark, seeing him with his only good eye, knew he was finished.” He brandished a shale blade in front of them, as if this was the weapon used.
Jode was officially another admirer of Coss’s. That warmth inside of Gryshen remained, as her belly filled. She felt it pouring through her limbs. When the white whales began swirling and sounding out a tune, and Coss immediately took her hand to dance, she didn’t even notice the deadly glares the other leens gave her. She wouldn’t have cared if she had. She had a place to be now, and it was here, hand in hand with Coss, wherever that led. Forget Morfal, forget her father’s droning about decorum, forget Bravis’s constant nervous watch, the only eyes that mattered were the ones that pulled in her heart now, the ones that sank her every time.