Arms of the Ocean Ch. 12

"Keep this up and, yah, I promise no release for you," the lady grunted. She surged with renewed strength for several seconds then released.

All Yis could hear above the droning was the woman's ragged breaths. After a while of nothing, curiosity won out and Yis twisted around to face her nightmare.

The black lady leaned against the far wall, hunched over and huffing. Her hood tilted out of place and a tiny bit of blue showed at the top of her cheek.

"Answer me this and I'll set you free, would you object to me killing you now?" said the woman. It sounded like a question.

Yis looked away. She didn't like animals that she couldn't see the eyes on. People were no different. How did this one know where she was?

"You and your friends are fast becoming more trouble than you're worth."

===

"We need to make our move," Glade commanded. She leaned over the table, around which they sat, and almost tipped Blondie's glass.

Trym didn't answer. His voice was focused on the bowl of stew before him. The coarse chunks of beef, carrot and cabbage in a gravy too thin. Soldier food. And, true to its nature, the soldiers at the mess-hall tables around him were devouring the meal with relish. Animals.

"They'll be fog in a cloud if we wait any longer," the Taigin woman insisted.

"Probably are already," Blondie added.

Still Trym said nothing. He had bigger things to think about. Certainly his companions were correct, but they could simmer a little longer. For now, this hunt. If he had to put it in terms of scent, he would have described it off-putting.

The girl is what really threw him. Where did Yis fit into things? Why would she be accompanying Sirens that she hated, supposedly, and why hadn't her periodic absences bothered them. The only explanation was one that Captain Havello had already stumbled upon and one that Trym had thought of earlier still.

Yis was playing them. She had to be. An incredible performance but a performance nonetheless. That revelation would have been more than sufficient to call this hunt off if there weren't quite so many Sirens on the line. At least four, he guessed.

"Hey! You awake?"

Trym felt a nudge from Blondie before the Neynas went back to addressing Glade.

"I hate this about Ralta. You can never tell if they're daydreaming or nodded off completely."

"I'm awake," Trym growled as he pushed his companion's hand away. "And the two of you are right so this is what we're going to do about it. Once I've finished forcing down my breakfast, we'll start organizing our little hunting party. Then we head south with nothing more to follow than sand grains in a gale. We start where the north sea meets the south and work our way along the coast until we hit Kalatish. It can be someone else's problem if they're further down than that."

"That's a long way and a lot of ground." Glade clasped her hands under her chin.

"Well, with any luck they'll give us a trail of bodies to follow. Otherwise we hope our friend makes a return." Even as he said this, Trym couldn't help but wonder whether Yis planned to bring them to the Sirens or the other way around.

===

Malicious made a wave of her hand as she approached the room with her prisoners. The locking ward in the door disengaged and she pushed it open.

She already knew the coast was clear. The Taigin sat against the far wall, fiddling with those rusted chains. Probably pondering whether or not they could be used for some sort of escape. They couldn't. Meanwhile, the Chayli seemed to be busying himself with a kind of unarmed combat practice. He stood in the corner nearest the board that had once shackled him. His hands jabbed at the air as he twisted and shuffled short distances on his feet. The Sirens, of course, hadn't budged. The trials of imprisonment were present in everyone's faces as they looked up at Malicious. Or perhaps it was something more...

"Tell me the story of that girl," Malicious commanded. "Leave nothing out."

The aqua-haired Siren, in the cage furthest, flowed to her bars and grinned as she stared out. "Yis? Where to begin? These two found her living in the woods far to the north. We don't know how she came to be there but one of her parents being a Siren must have had something to do with it."

"What else?"

"Nothing, she isn't very talkative."

Malicious would have liked eyes at that moment so that she could perform some sort of distasteful expression. A glower, perhaps. All her empty brow-creasing earned was another grin.

"Why? Is she proving troublesome?" the Siren asked.

"I have her under control for now."

"But she isn't the assistant you desired, ah?"

Malicious folded her arms and turned her voice to the Taigin. "You, does the girl speak common? I need to communicate with her."

For a moment, the Taigin didn't seem to realize that the spotlight now fell upon him. He jolted suddenly and his left hand departed from fiddling with the chains. "Huh? Common? She— I mean, no. She's never understood anything I say, just Siren words."

Malicious nodded. Having dealt with so many Sirens in the past, she'd grown quite confidant in her ability to perceive lies. Not so much from the water creatures, for they were especially sharp. But no land-dweller could hope to slip one by. This Taigin's clumsiness looked far too real to be an act.

"That will be all." Malicious turned on her heel and strode from the room. She only spared Vyla a passing glance but something looked off about the Siren. Whatever it was, it could wait.

This home had taken more than a year to craft, even with the magically-aided movement of earth and rock. But the time had been well spent and Malicious had all she needed. Rooms for her subjects, rooms for her experiments, rooms for business and for pleasure. Sometimes the purposes blurred.

Presently, Malicious made her way to the room that Yis waited in. An observatory above the exit. Occuwards around, or outside, her home were light threaded to glass panels embedded in the stone so that she could watch her prisoners or the pond. The walls in here weren't so bare as all the others. This room looked more a home than the cell of a dungeon.

The girl sat curled in one corner. She had her arms wrapped around her legs and her face buried beneath. The glass panels had scared her coming in. That the fear hadn't faded only reinforced Malicious' suspicion that this was the right thing to do.

"Child," Malicious whispered as entered.

Yis glanced up, her eyes still reddened with tears and her face flushed with misery. She flinched immediately and pressed further back into her corner as her features re-contorted.

"Let's get you outside." Malicious held out her right hand, palm up, and curled her lips into a friendly smile.

No hand rose to greet Malicious' own. Yis twisted her head away and hid behind a curtain of dirty hair. With an exasperated sigh, Malicious shuffled across the room to her stone desk, carved from the rock, where several panels were built in. Her voice crept across the glassy surface. Seeing the images contained within was never easy when you didn't rely on light. She had to focus for several seconds before the secrets, that her occuwards observed, surfaced.

Four prisoners in their cell. Nobody in the halls or experiment rooms. Nobody lurking in her bedroom. All business as usual and nothing of note around the pond outside. Unlike earlier. How surprised she had been the day before to find Sirens and land dwellers mingling like friends. But what an opportunity...

"Come here, girl." Malicious turned around and beckoned towards the wild Chayli.

Yis watched with those curious eyes and it looked as if she would go back to cowering. But curiosity, it seemed, proved the more powerful voice. She hovered up from the floor, rising so high on her breeze that the air blades on her back almost scraped the ceiling. Then Yis floated delicately across the room.

Once the girl hovered overhead, Malicious pointed to the panel that showed the pond outside, then to Yis. Panel and Yis, panel and Yis. "Shall we go outside?" she asked.

Yis cocked her head and frowned. Perhaps fear still clouded her thoughts.

"Yis." Malicious pointed at the girl, then the panel, then began waving her arms as though she were a bird. "Fly."

The wild Chayli's eyes widened and much of the fear faded from them. She nodded frantically. "Teb, teb, ros uuse."

Malicious didn't need to know Siren to understand the girl's approval. This time her hand was taken when offered. With a gentle pull, she led Yis from the observatory.

Downstairs the warding spell was brushed aside and Malicious threw the lever that opened her home, causing a section of wall, inside the cave, to fold inwards. All the while Yis jumped at this and that, hovering behind on the absolute limit of held hands. Together they skirted through the lichen and grime-coated crevice that led outside.

The leaves from the wall of fig trees were gently whispering in the breeze that managed to reach them through the dense canopy that surrounded. Hardly anyone stumbled upon the place. You had to fly almost directly above to see it from the air and the woods surrounding were so thick and tangled that it would be simpler to burn everything down rather than navigate it.

The second they were beneath the speckled rays of the sun, Yis pulled herself free of Malicious' hand and hovered out over the pond. She glanced back once, looking at the cave rather than her captor, before flying away.

===

"I have set your 'friend' free, though she didn't seem inclined to wait for the rest of you."

Ronav snapped out of his wakeful dreaming at the polite, yet ominous, voice of Malicious. He'd been on the verge of dozing off, despite the stone floor. Was it night outside already? Or perhaps the magical sleep had messed around with his internal hour.

"She's not really much of a friend of ours, I will admit," said Zeerae. The Siren presently lay on her back outside the bars of her cage. Boredom had been hanging over the room like a fog, of late.

"I don't even know her," Nimtith chimed in.

"Only because you scarcely know any of us, my dear. Not to worry, once our most gracious host sees fit to set us free, we'll have plenty of time to get better acquainted," purred Zeerae.

Ronav stifled a smile at the Chayli man's visible discomfort. For Nimtith there had been almost as deep a plunge into the sea of uncertainty.

Such thoughts reminded Ronav of the similar discomfort that Vyla had been in upon her return. Even now the Siren sat in her cage, her back to the room. He wanted little more than to walk over there and demand she explain everything. If there really were no Southsea Sirens, why were they on this journey? Ronav partly knew the answer but he didn't want to admit it. It seemed too strange, too contrasting with every preconception of Sirens that he had ever had. But in this confined room they had none of the privacy that he desired.

Later, Ronav thought to himself as he looked at the raven-haired woman. As soon as we're alone, you explain everything. No more hiding or running away. This time he meant it.

"She's a strange creature," Malicious said to herself and present company. "I would have liked the chance to study her."

"I think you'll find her story more depressing than it is interesting," Zeerae murmured to her cage.

"You failed to tell me something?"

"Nothing certain, but I have been wondering why a girl who appears to loathe Sirens as much as she does would also choose to isolate herself from her own people."

A silence took over as everyone mused on Zeerae's words and the implications behind them. Ronav was the first to speak.

"You think the two points are connected?"

"Oh undoubtedly. More so that I had thought at first."

"So what's the answer?" Nimtith asked. "Why's she the way she is, I mean."

"As I said, I've nothing certain. I won't say until I do."

"She will return?" Malicious asked in her polite, yet stern, tone.

Zeerae shrugged. "It's not the first time she's abandoned us."

===

Temperatures like these never made flying easy. The biting wind ripped through Yis' fur clothes as though they were non-existent. She had tried to put up with it as best she could but the morning sun had yet to warm the air sufficiently and she had been forced to fly slower.

Not long now. Yis had made sure to memorize the landscape during their journey. The big lake that they had been near loomed on the horizon. All she had to do was fly a little bit further.

The problem of finding Trym also hung over her but Yis forced that thought aside for now. A problem for the future. Besides, he had said that he would light a fire. It wouldn't be so easy to see during the day, but she would find it. The smoke would give it away. It had to.

Not long now.

===

"...and, for obvious reasons, this expedition shall be led, in part, by our Siren hunting guest." Captain Havello indicated to Trym who nodded to the soldiers present but didn't move. "Now I know you've heard it three or four times already but I'll say it again, anyone who moves out of sight of their entire squad will be treated as an enemy until their identity can be— Farn, what are you doing?! Stand at attention!"

A Chayli, who had been crouching down at the back of his squad, shot to his feet and saluted.

"That is exactly what we're trying to avoid! Nobody should be slinking off or purposely avoiding line-of-sight with their allies! What in the void were you thinking, soldier?!"

"Sire! Adjusting my left bootstrap, sire!" Farn shouted and saluted again.

"Well you've left our sight now, haven't you! You know the drill, start hovering!"

Farn blinked but soon began floating several feet above the ground. Five seconds had been the agreed-upon duration and Captain Havello counted them out loud.

"Alright soldier, that's enough. Back to attention, so long as your bootstraps aren't carving into your ankles too deep!"

Farn nodded and remained rigidly still as Captain Havello went back to running through the expeditions critical details.

Trym couldn't help but smirk to his comrades at the exchange. Really it hadn't been necessary. The half second that Farn had been on the ground wouldn't be enough to change shape and vanish. Where would he have even vanished to? Besides, Trym had had his voice on the soldier and the few other Ralta present would have noticed too.

Hearing the Captain's spiel for the third time in a row was a thought that Trym didn't rush to meet. He skirted off to one side, his comrades in tow, and found one of the braziers with which to warm his hands. Several had been lit around the garrison's courtyard to fend off the disgusting morning. Why did Sirens have live in the north sea. Couldn't they swim south where the sun warmed the land as often as clouds marred the sky around here?

"The captain could stand to demand more discipline of his soldiers," Glade muttered as she and Blondie took a place around the flames.

Trym nodded but spoke otherwise. "These parts are quiet compared to the east and west. Ka's sun guard keep the biggest trade roads safe for merchants. It isn't Havello's fault that his town happens to fall in the right place."

"In common please," Blondie suggested.

"These soldiers are eager for action, that's all. Don't judge them until they've proven their worth in the fight."

"Eagerness isn't always a plus."

"True."

Silence crept over the trio. If an absent conversation in the backdrop of the captain's barking could be called 'silence.' A breeze chose that moment to pick up and the fire struggled against it. A breeze despite the courtyard's walls.

Yis landed near the brazier and only Trym managed not to jump.

Hello my little fishing line, Trym thought as he turned to her with welcome arms. Do I hold your handle or your hook?