After dealing with the infuriating eel, who had demanded no less than three layers of packaging for the water-tight bottle of potion Joe gave him, Ursula immediately reminded Joe of his missing hemocyanin order and sent him after Krill with strict instructions not to return empty-handed. This time, Joe had left the cavern without complaint. Between his concern for Krill's absence, and an itching need to put as much distance between himself and that arrogant eel as possible, he welcomed the order as a chance to escape.
It wasn't the first time Krill had gone for ingredients alone, but with so many unfamiliar faces in their waters, and Archetuithis season making the outer ring unsafe at night, it was best to go out in pairs until the danger passed. Dragging his collection pouch, Joe drifted tiredly through the seaweed gardens that marked the Atlantean borders before the dropoff. This sale day had been the culmination of a month's work, and yet this one work day had felt like a month on its own. Joe was sorely tempted to fold himself in the kelp beds and sleep, if only for an hour, when he caught sight of a flash of red following him through the leaves.
"I can see you, Ariel."
The water rolled smoothly over her tail as she flipped through the last of the seaweed and joined him in his clearing.
"You don't usually," she giggled in her usual way, but didn't quite meet his eyes, swimming just a bit above his head.
"Only when I'm looking for other things," he rebutted, debating on pulling her down to a less-dizzying angle. "What are you doing out past the borders? Isn't it 'forbidden' for you to—wait, where's your guard?"
He kept his lip from curling when he brought up Adin, but Ariel didn't seem to mind—or notice.
"I slipped past the guards," she said, sounding pleased with herself. "I wanted to bring something to you without being watched. And Joe, I—are you alright?"
"I'm fine," he said, gritting his teeth to wake himself up, suspicious that she was keeping such a distance. Ariel was usually comfortable swimming right up to him—too comfortable for her own good, sometimes, and while he was always careful to protect her wishes, this flightiness wasn't like her. He inspected her face from the brief glimpses she gave him of it. Her cheeks were puffier than usual, and the veins in her eyes had run red, as though she hadn't slept either. Though she smiled at him, it felt forced. He reached out to her, and instead of taking the pearly papers she seemed to be trying to offer him, turned her face in his fingers to see her better. "I'm just tired. The question here is why are you here? Did something happen?"
Her smile wavered as she pulled back, and a voice in his head warning him about propriety made him let her, though the worry didn't fade.
"I'm fine," she shook her hair around her head firmly, and brandished the papers at him more firmly. "Look at these. I've brought you invitations to the lunar ball. There's even one for Krill!"
He raised a silvery brow at her evasion, but humored her all the same, examining the date on an invitation. "That's three days before the eclipse. I have a lot of work to finish before then, and Krill…" Joe didn't mind being cutting and sarcastic to Ursula, or any of his customers, for that matter, but with Ariel, he tried his best to preserve her feelings. However, from his experience in his travels, a royal ball full of condescending citizens was only an opportunity for abuse for a cecaelia as small as Krill. "I'm not sure how much he'd enjoy this sort of thing," he finished lamely.
Her disappointment was immediate, and more severe than he'd expected, but for once she managed not to rant or argue.
"Please, Joe," she pleaded instead, looking at him properly for the first time. "There are things happening at the palace, and I'm not sure if we'll be able to do something like this again, so if you could come…even just for an hour…"
This was also suspiciously unlike her. Ariel usually presented rational arguments, or tried to sway him with excessive reminders and reasons why he 'might' enjoy it, but for once, she didn't seem to have the energy for any of those things. Her simple plea moved him more than any of those things would have, and again something was nagging at his overworked mind—something wasn't right.
"I'll try," he said tiredly, watching puzzled as her brow furrowed, and then fell limp. She nodded, giving him another of those strained smiles. "Ariel, if something is wrong, you can tell me. There might be something I can do."
"Nothing—nothing is wrong," she said, her smile, if possible, growing even tighter, and Joe couldn't help but feel there was some underlying not yet clause to her claim. "Just come if you can. I'll wait."
Whether it was the fatigue or an urge to get her home before the sun set and the city borders got much more risky, Joe heard himself agreeing:
"If it is at all possible for me to be there, I will," he said, hoping that Ursula's demands wouldn't make things impossible. "But you haven't really told me; are you alright?"
He knew his concerns were likely unfounded. The little princess had all sorts of guards to protect her, and her father wielded the trident of the oceans. Nothing above or below would have much of a chance of hurting her, and yet, at his question, she resumed her flighty swim above his head, and he knew there was something she wasn't telling him.
"I really am fine," she said too quickly. "If you're there, then everything will be fine."
Seeming to have taken his answer as a 'yes,' Ariel swam a happy loop above his head, and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. If he hadn't been so wretchedly exhausted he might have had something to say. Joe always kept a distance from Ariel, and not just for the sake of her reputation with the guard she was required to have with her when she left the palace—though that was a rule she often ignored.
The much bigger, and more important reason was that he could never say when Ursula was using her scrying pearl to watch him. She already had reason enough to be interested in Ariel's astrological skills for how they helped her business, but if she knew that Ariel was a soft spot for him and Krill, there was a good chance that she could be used as 'motivation' if Ursula ever got it in her head to push them to work harder. As the restrictions from Triton got tighter over the years, and Ursula got more angry over how her own business was being restricted, there was also a chance that Ursula would think to use her against the high king—and order Joe to help her do so.
Joe had a few friends among the reef fish, the merchants, and even a few in other kingdoms, but none ever brightened his day or provided as much novelty as Ariel. In the first year of knowing her, she provided him with surprising tales of her adventures among the reefs, and even helped him get to know the Kingdom's outer ring when he'd arrived in Atlantis—although at the sight of her guard, the citizens seemed highly pressured to hide the worst parts of the area from her, and he didn't blame them. Later, when Krill joined himself and Ursula living in the cavern, she became very important for his upbringing as well, providing Krill with a connection free of disdain and danger, and the much-needed occasional lesson in manners.
It was because of those reasons, and all the years of careful distancing that the kiss took him so off-guard. In his tired, overworked state, he didn't see it coming. Didn't resist. Didn't jump back. In his surprise, he could only stare dumbly when, just as suddenly as she'd appeared, Ariel darted off in the direction of the palace.
As the waters darkened around him, Joe could see his surroundings clearly, but had gone so long without rest, he knew his attempts at finding ingredients, let alone Krill, would be useless. It took all of his willpower to move to a nearby crevice in one of the outer reefs to sleep, hoping nothing too dangerous found him in the night.
Joe awoke to voices, which made him instinctively freeze until he realized neither of them were Ursula's—then again, neither of them were Krill's.
"It starts in three hours!"
"Why are they starting it so early in the day?"
"Who knows with those royals? The princes probably want to show off for the princesses. I heard they'll be announcing engagements tonight."
"Already? I didn't think the princesses had even left Atlantis yet. How could they have met?"
"Don't ask me the details, but I don't envy the one who gets married off to the arctic."
There was an ungainly snorting sound. "Will he even want her once she's frozen her fins off?"
"Hah! No return policies on princesses, I hear. That eel was handsome, though! He's bound for Triton' youngest. She has all the luck…"
Joe didn't care what the gossipers had to say, but he certainly wasn't in the mood for a run-in with strangers out on the reef. He waited until the voices passed from overhead to venture out of the coral enclave he'd tucked himself into. Two seaweed-green tails of the unnamed Mer disappeared through the kelp, and by the sound of things, no more were coming.
Just the kelp-bed weeders, then, he thought with some relief.
When he'd heard them discussing palace gossip, he'd assumed they'd been guards, and while he was perfectly within his rights to be here, he dreaded the inevitable wasted time that would come of low-ranking guards making themselves feel important.
Joe started as he saw how much sunlight now streamed through the leaves. It had been months since he'd slept all the way through the night, and to have slept well into the day was very unlike him. It was just another sign that he couldn't keep this up. Joe's contract with Ursula was nearly out—only a year or so more. He was already taking on more orders than she. Thanks to Ursula's recent experimentation in darker magic, it wasn't just the rumors that were driving customers away. At this point, only the truly desperate would seek her out personally. If it hadn't been for Joe, they wouldn't have made ends meet in over two years. He'd been boiling the seaweed at both ends, and this…He'd fallen asleep outside, unprotected, in the middle of a known tentacle-hunting season. It was breathtakingly stupid.
He groaned inwardly. He needed to pull himself together just long enough to survive until the end of the contract period. There really wasn't long to go. Then, he could take Krill as an apprentice and get them as far from Atlantis as their tentacles could take them, and set up shop—somewhere warmer, with less teeth.
Peering around the kelp bed, he ran a hand over his head with a yawn, scrunching his face when it came away with two pieces of paper that had lodged in his hair. Eyes narrowed over the pearly script, Ariel's request the day before came bubbling back into his memory.
He would have to make his apologies later.
Krill may have returned to the cavern already, but without the hemocyanin, he would have been turned right back out again, which meant that either way, Krill might have spent the night outside the cavern as well. While Ursula's orders could wait, finding Krill could not, and there just wasn't time to return Krill home and make it to the inner palace from this place in the second ring.
Joe stuck to the shadows of the kelp farms as he headed toward the last blue crab habitat he'd spotted with Krill. His path led him through a labyrinth of towering kelp forests, their long fronds swaying gently with the currents. The second ring contained farms of kelp, long-stranded sargassum, and creepvine, all carefully cultivated to contain the red and blue algae blooms that fed so many of Atlantis' citizens. The kelp created a serene yet mysterious atmosphere, the dense strands providing cover as he made his way back into the third ring, tracing the path Krill should have taken.
When he exited the dense foliage and made his way over the rockier portions of reef, the shadows thickened, and he started to see several horseshoe crabs skittering about the rocks. The odd thing was, though, these crabs were undisturbed. His keen nose could find no hint of blue blood in the water, as there would have been from Krill's sloppy attempts at bleeding the crabs. He coasted over their sandy habitat peacefully, with no tentacles other than his own in sight.
Joe's head felt like it was full of bubbles, and yet something nagged at him. Though there was no sign of Krill's usual wandering, nor any sign the creatures here had been disturbed, there began to be a horribly familiar scent in the water that sent prickles up his spine.
"Where did you swim off to, Krill?" he hissed, peering sharply over the rocks and toward the source of the scent—a place where the rocky reefs dropped completely off into shadows.
Moving far more silently than the chatty mermaids from earlier had, Joe followed the scent over the reefs, and just past the outer dropoff, where something dark red flailing below the ledge caught his eye.
Thinking it was one of the squid nests, Joe quickly backed away, but the scent was far from what he remembered from shipwreck cove, and the sticky red water kept wafting through the currents his way.
Somehow, already knowing what he would find, Joe crept closer, descending over the lip of the drop-off.
"No, no, no!" he growled, speeding up toward the tangle of tentacles wafting in the shadows.
Krill's body wasn't moving, except for his gills that flapped in the current drifting up from the abyss. His face was covered in scratches, and sticky dark fluid oozed from a wound in his stomach, and where three of his feet had been hacked from his body. Joe cursed. He'd seen other mer die from less, but all the same gritted his teeth and lowered an ear to Krill's chest.
He held his breath, willing his ears to discern between the pounding of his own hearts, and the faint sound coming from under Krill's ribs. Joe blew a relieved stream of bubbles when the distinct thudding of at least two of Krill's hearts met his ears. He cringed when he saw the broken tip of a squid-hunters' spear, painted a gaudy orange, wedged in Krill's side just above his third heart. The wound was high enough that his attackers would have seen that Krill was Cecaelia, and not a squid. He wasn't even the right size. Joe bit down another growl. Whoever had done this, it had been intentional. If Krill didn't have three hearts, he'd be dead. The idiots didn't even know how to kill him, let alone kingdom law. Krill was a properly papered citizen, even if he did leave them at home more often than he should…
Gathering Krill into his arms, Joe felt every one of his years under Ursula, and every moment in Atlantis like lead sinkers weighing down his limbs as he gently moved him back to the cavern.
"Ursula!" Joe bellowed when, panting, he burst through the tangled kelp at the back of the cavern's throat. "Ursula, stop your filthy imbibing and get out of that room!"
There was a muffled slamming sound, and what sounded suspiciously like a bottle shattering against the door as Ursula slithered out of her hole.
"It has been some time since you've dared talk to me like that, boy. You're lucky today turned a profit. Watch your tone, or I'll have you—my, what have we here?"
The way Ursula looked over Krill's limp form was probably supposed to be her look of motherly concern, but through her fermented brine-touched eyes only managed to look as though she'd just found something rotted in her cupboard.
"If you don't heal him, you'll have lost your errand boy, and you won't see a profit like today for the next century," Joe growled. "Heal him."
Instead of snapping-to, as Krill or Joe would have, Ursula floated lazily over the body, a picture of unconcern.
"Testy," she chuckled.
Joe could practically feel the seconds of Krill's life slipping through his hands.
"Now!" he yelled, trying to keep the desperation out of his face in favor of commanding presence, or even threat, and evidently failing miserably,
Ursula put a hand to her head at his noise, and swirled annoyedly over the cauldrons to the cupboards. Joe nearly bit a hole in his lip when he saw her reach for the bottles of hangover cure, instead of the healing ingredients.
"Oh, do stop shouting," Ursula chided, taking a deeper swig from one of the crystals than necessary. "He needs a flesh-mender, a blood thickener, and a week of sleep, and he'll be better than new. Whoever did this clearly doesn't know how to kill a Cecailea. Imbeciles. Probably got him caught in a squid-hunt or something equally frivolous."
Ursula waded through the room to Krill's body, and Joe could see the moment she saw what he did. Taking in the broken orange spearhead now leaking blue copper poison into the wound, the placement, and the scratches on his face, she hissed angrily.
"Not so frivolous, then…" she snarled, raking one curved hand over her rubbery black waist.
Joe winced when she reached down and ripped the hook from Krill's side. Krill gave a small shudder as a fresh spurt of poisoned blood floated up from his side. Once the weapon was free, Joe recognized it too.
"The eel," he whispered.
Ursula hurled herself back to the cabinet and while examining the spearhead, began throwing detoxifying ingredients into the cauldron.
"That arrogant little snake," she snarled under her breath, dumping half the contents of the cabinet on the floor. "Cheating me of my errand boy once he's used us for his own gains…Where are the crab entrails? Where!?"
Laying Krill inside a patients' shell, Joe retrieved the missing entrails from a pile of vials Ursula had tossed to the floor.
"Why don't you let me find the ingredients. Just tell me what I have to find," he said—anything to keep his murderous urges in check. Krill didn't have time for that.
"Limpet feet. Selkie fur. And, do I use the gigas pearl? It's expensive…"
Before she could make up her mind about whether Krill was worth the ingredient cost, Joe had thrown them all into the cauldron. He stirred as Ursula did the actual magical legwork, and when the chanting began, hoped that she hadn't drunk so much brine that her power was tainted. When the lumpy brown mixture of guts and powders began to glow a pure blue, however, he admitted to himself that even at her worst, Ursula was a master of her craft.
At last, she waded over to Krill, and poured the mixture, still sizzling into his wound.
"Now all that's left to do is wait!" Ursula said with a satisfied sigh when Krill began to breathe more deeply, and the poisoned flesh started to pull together on its own. He didn't wake, but slowly, a healthy lilac tint returned to his cheeks, and the black oozing from his side slowed. "I, for one, would like to hear exactly what he was doing where those bottom feeders could spot him."
"You know who did this to him," said Joe. It wasn't a question. Though it was hard to forget a customer as arrogant as the orange eel the day before, Joe knew nothing about him, and it would be difficult to find a single merman with that description alone. For once, he wanted to get to him before Ursula did.
"The eel prince, what's his name!" Ursula growled, as though it was the most obvious thing in the ocean. "King Ezra recommended him to me, so I thought that at least he knew when not to cross a cecaelia…evidently not. I'd have that boy on a hook if he weren't ever so recently under Triton' eye. Who knows, maybe his princess will spurn him before he manages to use that potion, and I'll deal with him quietly."
The possibility of vengeance put a dull light in her briny gaze, and Joe's eyes narrowed at her. "He was a prince? Of course he was royalty…" said Joe, watching Krill's progress. Though there was no telling when he would wake, Joe felt the tiniest bit of relief cool his anger as Krill made visible progress—but only the tiniest bit. As his faculties returned to him through the murk of his earlier panic, he began putting together what she'd said with what he'd heard earlier, and suddenly, the situation wasn't much less grim than before. "The love potion we gave the eel yesterday. It's intended for one of the princesses?"
"A princess, a mistress, does it really matter?" Ursula huffed. "With Triton's protection, he'll get away with this like the little whelk he is"
"Which princess?" Joe asked, but with a sinking feeling in his gut, the conversation he'd heard in the reef's earlier flooded back through his thoughts. He already knew.
Ariel was going to be brainwashed before she had a chance to get to know her future 'suitor,' and with a horrible pang of guilt, he realized that he'd made the eel the potion to do it—without question.
"Agh!" he cried aloud. While he didn't usually have the power to interfere with Ursula's personal work, he tried his best to make sure that deserving clients didn't get tied into horrible contracts, or that they at least felt as though there were other options. When he was younger, he'd had to turn a blind eye to some of her darker endeavors, but as his skills grew, he knew how to sabotage the worst of the potions she made. However, he hadn't. Now, Ariel, his friend against all odds, was slotted to pick up the tab for his error. Kind Ariel, who helped him in more ways than she knew, keeping Krill out of trouble, keeping him from some of his jaded fatigue, and guarding his existence from becoming too dark with the way she saw the world.
His decision was made before the fullness of the consequences could play themselves out for him.
"If I'm caught, I'll deny any connection with you. You'll be safe from Triton," he said quietly, reaching for the bag of basic potions he kept near the door and fastening it to his waist. Making an effort not to bend them, he moved the invitations to the palace ball where they wouldn't fall out or get further wrinkled.
"You don't mean to say you're going after the snake?" A nastily amused crawled its way over Ursula's lips. "Is that for justice for your dear family?" She put a hand on her chest, as though proud of his anger. "...or is it for your princess?"
"Don't let him die." His blood fizzled uncomfortably, as giving Ursula an order was very close to a breach of his blood contract with her. If he got any worse, he might forfeit his life—or his soul, depending on how Ursula felt about his contract with her at the time, and he didn't want to give her any time to either realize that, or give him an order to stay.
Fisting a hand around the pouch at his waist, he bulleted out of the cavern and towards the palace, praying to Poseidon that he wasn't already too late.