The roiling crowd outside the palace was growing. Two days since King Triton's death had brought the expected initial upheaval, but soon after, all expectations had been wildly exceeded. Oh, Ezra certainly had expected mourning, wailing, and the general gnashing together of coins as the merchants, tradesmen, and nobles made their scrambles for opportunity in the tax-free time of no leadership, but he had not expected the mobs. Or the riots. Or the attacks on the palace.
However, what he expected least of all was that none of those things were remotely connected to the king's death.
Ursula had not yet responded to his invitation, and considering the unprecedented anger of the Atlanteans outside, he could only guess at why she hadn't come.
"Sebastian!" he bellowed, hunting down the crab, who to his minute pleasure had at least had the sense not to leave his perch near the dead King Triton's stony bedroom.
"...Yes, King Ezra," the crab said in a quiet, sort of subdued voice once he reached the outside doors. With a few limp flutters of his legs, Sebastian exited the room, stalky eyes glazed over with salt. He blinked blearily up at Ezra, as though trying to place why he might be in front of him—or still in the palace at all.
Ezra had no desire to watch the merman king's body fade into sea-foam over the next few days, but Sebastian had kept a vigil over the process that would have been admirable to Ezra, had the deceased been anyone else.
"The people are nearly out of control. The kingdom is becoming dangerous," he spat.
"They be….they are mourning," Sebastian said distractedly, looking as though he very much wanted to return to the King's side. Ezra grit back a scoff. This was no time to offend the crab, particularly as he needed his seal of approval for what he was about to do.
King Triton had left power to a transient chamberlain, which was normal of most kings; however, most kings wouldn't have been idiot enough to give the right to transfer the Trident of Seven Oceans to a crab. A CRAB! He'd be soup already if it weren't for that. and at the wedding, he'd cook him for legs as a celebration as soon as the people—distracted by a royal wedding, descended into peace. His peace. Oh, there was so much could give so much to this kingdom of only fate would budge over and let him do it!
"Is mourning enough reason for you to let the citezens attack each other? Their own protectors? The palace? How long will you let this go on, Sebastian?" then he added, when Sebastian gave no appropriate reaction, "Is this the sort of situation under which you desire your king to make his passing?"
He nearly retched letting the words come out of his mouth, but the light seemed to return somewhat to Sebastian's eyes.
"You want to take the trident so soon after the High King's death," Sebastian said accusatorily.
"I want to save as many lives in this transitory period as possible," Ezra said, willing a trustworthy smile over his features. The effect was likely ruined somewhat by his pointed teeth, but he didn't much care. "Or have you been oblivious to what has been happening outside your own palace gates, Advisor to the King?"
"The high king was not without heirs," Sebastian said weakly. "The princesses will assume their own place—"
"The princesses will of course do their duties, but have you forgotten that I am a joint heir with his eldest?"
So close to the cusp of his plans coming to fruition and the kingdom was dissolving between his tentacles. He'd gotten rid of the last two princesses—Sephina was hiding under her sister Seline's fins from her association with the Depths, probably over that repulsive and inappropriately unhidden crush on a palace guard of all things. Seline was already taken to the Arctic, housed in her future kingdom to grieve. Then, his dear Adriatta waited for him obediently under the influence of the pendant. Though he longed for days when those measures would no longer be necessary, Triton's daughters were no longer threats.
There was only the matter of Ariel, the final hole in his bucket—but that would be solved in a matter of days, and after the last few encounters with the prince, he doubted Ellian would have the spine to challenge him for a throne. But just after those little problems solved themselves, the riots had started, demanding his attention. The shadows seemed to nip at his feet as he passed by them. Scorning him. Threatening him. Laughing at him.
Blinking up at him in that slow, irritating way, Sebastian didn't seem to have another argument for him, but looked as though he very much would like to.
Ezra rolled his eyes. "If you have reservations, crab, so be it. I would let your people destroy themselves, but I cannot, as they are mine as well. Yes, I want the trident, but as you know if any other rightful challenger arises, she may take it from me. These are temporary measures. Necessary measures, if you must know."
Ezra must have looked particularly murdersous as he said that, because Sebastian replied: "Only I can remove the trident from the king's hand."
"Oh, I know that, my dear crustacean," said Ezra, smiling widely, glad the crab was at last on the right track. "And your king cannot fully pass until you have done so. Is that not weighing on your shell?"
Sebastian said nothing.
"So it is," he hissed sweetly. "I can see that you're not yet convinced, but if you would accompany to address the people, perhaps if you are still reluctant to give me the ability to actually fix your citizen's problems whilst the princesses are indisposed to grief, you can at least assist me in calming them before they tear down this palace stone by stone."
His aim there, at least, was accomplished. Through a series of silent grumbles that were clearly deriding him, his associates, and whatever lies he'd been telling him, Sebastian followed him toward the upper floor.
Since dawn the gathering around the palace gate had been getting louder. As Ezra donned the crown of the fallen cecaelian people, and straightened his chained doublet and decoy pendants, it didn't escape him that there was no choice in what he was about to do.
The servants scurrying about the palace scattered in his wake, and without pause, Ezra bared his teeth and threw open the upper balcony door.
The view outside the palace reported what was left of the palace guard forcing citizens of every tier away from the palace walls. The lot of them that was left after Ellian's crusade was hardly enough to keep them from storming through the inner gater, and Ezra found himself silently cursing the eel prince for what felt like the millionth time that week. His only satisfaction was the sight of the crab out of the corner of his eye, his little mouth dropping open, and his beady little eyestalks popping up in disbelief.
When the rabble saw him, the noise turned from "protesting" to "deafening."
"Ezra!" the people shouted.
"He's up there!"
"Hiding safe in the palace!"
The tone of the crowd turned decidedly more violent, and the guards were pushed to the brink keeping them away. They seemed to sense this, and, incensed, pushed harder.
"Forward," Ezra muttered to his own men, who had been awaiting his orders just outside the palace's primary entrances. They surged on the seething masses immediately. At the sight of the cecaelian soldiers, whose length spanned at least twice that of the palace guards, the crowd backed down, quieting just enough for Ezra's voice to be heard over it.
"Citizens of Atlantis! Today, as I stand before you, our beloved kingdom, forged through generations of blood, has witnessed an unprecedented transition. Our High King, after his noble battle through the illness he has long struggled with, has gone from us."
A murmur went through the crowd. Doubtless, the king's condition of the past few months had been hushed by his men, but he knew from experience that would only have made the gossip travel faster.
"Indeed it is a tragedy that leaves a void in our hearts, and it is only natural to mourn for a king who has guided us for so long." Ezra adopted a stricken look. "However, I stand before you today to assure you that even in these uncertain times, the spirit of this kingdom will endure, its traditions will persist, and its prosperity will flourish."
"Flourish?" yelled a parrotfish.
"Nothing can flourish!" said one angry old tang.
"The kelp farms are diseased and the tilapia shoals have dispersed."
"Building supports are crumbling!"
"My guppies have gone missing, and none of your pathetic guards have done their duties to find them again! It's been—" here one small marm hiccuped. "It's been days! Anything could have happened…"
She was too quiet to be heard over the roiling that was picking up around her, but Ezra's sensitive ears heard her all the same. He hoped the crab was listening.
"My people, I hear you. Corrosive coral is eating away at your structures. They will crumble if you are not helped. A murk enchantment is eating the plants. The magic in the currents woven to keep your livestock has decayed. Your young ones are getting lost in the murk the lack of cleansing in the tides has created. In a matter of days, the sea creatures themselves—ourselves—will become weak to the malevolent magic the kingdom is no longer protected from. Surely you can all see that this is the work of a dark sea-witch, and the result of a lack of the trident's protection."
As expected, his words granted the crowd some of the answers they were looking for, but made them much more concerned.
"Sea-witch?" he heard the mutterings grow. "Unprotected? It makes sense…the king is dead after all. What will we do?"
"Indeed, he said gravely." Ezra held his hands up in a gesture of peace. "As an expert in these matters, and as the rightful king to your eldest princess, it is a providence of mercy that I am here at this time, prepared by the advisings of King Triton himself to aid you in these times. I vow to—"
"Why should we trust you? Sea-witch? That means your people are the reason we're in this mess!" the same cantankerous old tang yelled out. If he'd heard such insolence in his own territory, Ezra would have had him silenced, but for now, he was asking the right questions—namely what he would have to answer to persuade not the crowd, but the crab that he deserved the trident.
"Atlantis must learn to stand united in its diversity!" Ezra repeated the age-old plea that the fringes of his society had repeated to him since birth. Though he'd never really believed in it, he put every ounce of force he had into the command, and the crowd heard it. "Engaging in finger-pointing is not my first prerogative, rather, it is to assuage the people until your princesses are returned, or returned to themselves. Until then, I will heal your waters, and restore your peace—"
"You can't!"
"We know you don't have the power for it!"
"Where are the other kings? Summon them!" demanded another.
Hundreds of tiny voices took up the chant when the shoals before him latched onto the idea.
Even the crab surely couldn't fail to see the turn of the tide of the crowd. There wasn't time to wait for the other kings if he wanted the kingdom to stay in one piece physically. Corrosive coral? Who would be mad enough to introduce the stuff into a city? It was dangerous, and produced from dark magic. Even he would need help to fix it. And did the crab really want an inter-kingdom dispute over Atlantis? Ezra shot a sideways look at Sebastian, only to find that the little coward had gone!
Ezra fought the urge to back into the palace to regroup. There would be no recovering if he backed down from the crowd now. Now that the crowd was moving again, he saw creatures in it that he didn't expect. There were cecaelia there. There were sea-snakes as well that he hadn't seen since he'd driven a very different mob away from his own territory years back—and they were smiling. With a sinking sensation in his tentacles, he saw the signs. Ursula was usurping the kingdom's lower classes, and if she was, she was doubtlessly behind the dark magic diseases—only where had so many of them come from. He couldn't believe she'd managed something like this in only two days….unless she'd had help.
Then, he noticed a different sentiment moving in the crowd.
"I heard the hero of the lance had returned."
Ezra's sensitive ears picked up the murmur from a suspiciously warty old grouper on the fringes of the crowd. She seemed entirely unconcerned with the mobbery, sitting on her rock, and knitting on a hideous pink sweater nearly as nubbly as her skin.
"I did too, they say he turned up in the depths just after the king's death."
"It's a sign."
"This is the time for a hero. We need one now."
Ezra was affronted. The hero of the lance? To be sure, he didn't have it yet, but after so many years, the one to save his kingdom would be him. It was in his blood. There was no question he'd obtain it once he had the means with which to search for it. This murmuring bothered him far more than the petty complaints of peasants.
He needed to say something. Anything. But the rage he felt at the crowd's assumptions curled his tentacles beneath him and seized at his tongue. After so many years of service. So long to have spent planning and cowering before Triton, and now there was another contender to his title? It was outrageous. It was unpalatable. It was foreseeable.
Quite suddenly, he was gripped with a desire to wring Echidna's throat, devil or no.
Lied again, had she?
Just then, the crowd went entirely silent, a motion so sudden, so deafening, it managed to break Ezra from his seething.
Searching for the reason for their silence, he thought for one heart-freezing moment that the hero of the lance had appeared, until he noticed that every head in the crowd was not searching for some figmintive hero, but was instead focused on a point just behind him.
Sebastian had reappeared, shuddering under the great weight of the trident.
Ezra's mouth fell open just a hair. It had been removed from the king's hand. Anyone could take it now, and the crab, though he refused to meet Ezra's eyes, was shoving it toward him.
He took it.
The moment Ezra's fingers touched the enchanted gold, his blood fizzled with a feeling of magic foreign to his system.
He hoisted it in the water above his head, earning him absolute silence from every popping face present.
It was his.
The trident sent fizzling sparks into the water above him at his command, but Ezra could immediately sense that something was wrong. It wouldn't respond to him the way Echidna's pendant would. Or his own magic. Or any magic. Fortunately, none in the crowd seemed to notice, instead watching him in expectant silence.
"I vow to heal your waters," Ezra repeated solemnly over the heads of his new citizens. "I further vow to accept any challengers to the crown with an open invitation. Your princesses may still make their claims. Until then, let me be your protector, Atlantis."
As though any challenger would dare while I hold this.
There was no cheering. There were no smiles. Instead, the riotous crowd simply dispersed, unwilling to become challenger to the trident. Even Sebastian left him up on the balcony, still unwilling to look up to his face.
Ezra was gripped with an unspeakable rage, turned, and flung himself back into the empty upper receiving room of the palace. His palace.
"That was not how that was supposed to go," he snarled to the first shadow he saw once he'd reached his private quarter. Adriatta lay in her magically-induced sleep on the massive clamshell bed at the far corner, and other than the faint stirring of aerating bubbles streaming about the room, there was no movement within. Even so, he knew Echidna would be listening.
"What did you expect, little king? Or I suppose you are a bigger king, now…" Echidna sounded inordinately pleased, and the sound of her pleasure only served to greater irritate him.
"The hero of the Inkthral Lance has appeared, and you didn't think to tell me?" he snarled at the shadow above the doorframe. It spoke back to him as blithely as though it were the center of the room. "That lance will be mine. I was to be their hero. And someone else found it first?"
"Of course he hasn't," Echidna sighed, seemingly from all the shadows in the room collectively. "Don't get your tentacles in such a twist. The lance is still safely in Fate's hands, or I would have seen it. There is no alleged hero, and the lance is just a bit of old wood. Nothing like what you have in your hand."
She almost purred it, and Ezra tightened his grip on the trident. The water in the room heated a degree or two at his anger, but then fizzled out.
"Then why do the people think he has? And why then does the trident not respond to me as it did Triton?" he demanded.
"So suspicious…It will once you've taken full control," she responded, her voice darting beneath the furniture in the room. Ezra snatched uselessly at a shadow behind the door hinges, but his fingers came away with nothing but empty water. "For now I suspect it does not fully recognize you as its master. That, or it simply conflicts with your magic. But…you did say you had royal blood, no? Then it should be no problem."
For the first time a seed of doubt crept into Ezra's mind. He was directly descended from Inciratta. Was he not? Just now, though, he didn't dare ask. He didn't want Echidna to know if he wasn't…and suddenly, he wasn't so sure.
"No," he bit out. "It shouldn't."
"Again. What did you expect?" She seemed to laugh at him, still clearly quite pleased with how things had gone, and he could see, could tell, that she was either missing something, or was holding something back.
"I expected you to have warned me of the potential insurgence. Of the rumors. Or that Ursula, one of my own people one of the witches I know you watch had begun to
"Does it really matter?" Echidna said evasively. "You have the trident. You have the crown. Now you can at last deliver to me what I'm due." Her voice drifted from the shadow beneath the entry doorway to hide under the bed, and then at last echoed at him from the mirror above Adriatta's empty vanity table.
He followed it, seething.
"You didn't know….did you?" Ezra hissed, raising the trident as he would a spear, although he knew it would do no good against a voice or a trick of the light; however, he was angry enough that he didn't particularly care, and leveled at her face in the mirror. "And what you don't know can interfere with our plans. Can. It. Not?"
She rolled her eyes at him, her image drifting around the pane of glass. "Whether or not you deliver, regardless of what forces there are, is not my problem."
It was as good as an admission.
"Oh but it is, since you clearly need me to succeed. What else has eluded your notice, do you think?"
That seemed to strike a note with her.
"This wedding must go off without a hitch," Echidna snarled before he could make any further accusations, all hints of pleasure gone.
"The wedding?" he scoffed, placing himself on the stool. "Might I remind you that that was not part of our deal. Believe me. I've read your fine print often enough."
"You will not succeed if it doesn't," she said simply.
"The wedding must go through…." he growled. "Fine. And where, then, is our requisite princess and royal imbecile?" he snapped at Echidna's image on the mirror face.
Echidna's teeth bared in a horrible smile.
The dungeons were kept away from the palace proper. When Poseidon had ordered them built, he had at least had the foresight to keep dangerous criminals well away from where they might complicate things in the palace. He'd also had the sense to keep it close enough that there would not be a reason to spread guards too thin across the kingdom, nor give any lengthy journeys with opportunities to escape. It would have taken Ezra only an hour to swim the distance on his own, but as he now had the trident in-hand, he wasn't about to make a solitary journey.
"Let me give you something to cheer you up, Advisor Sebastian," he said, rather magnanimously, as his men prepared the high king's carriage. "Don't you think the kingdom needs something to rally behind? Something happy? Surely the king would have wanted all of his daughters provided for as soon as possible. I've just had word that Prince Ellian has managed to rescue the Princess Ariel from her kidnapper."
Sebastian's shell lifted just a little, and it was so amusingly obvious how much hope he had at those words.
"Returned, my…king?" the crab forced out. Calling him by his title would be a habit he'd have to gain—if he lived long, that was.
"Returned." Ezra nodded, giving the trident a test sweep to avoid meeting the crab's gaze. He was so far beneath him. "As you are familiar with the duties of the Chamberlain to the King, I expect you to arrange a royal wedding for the morrow. All things considering, I expect the princess and prince will be eager to get going before anything else happens. Of course, it would be wrong of me to let them go without a proper sendoff. Not to mention, I am sure the people will miss their princess badly so soon after the loss of their king."
Something told him the crab didn't dare argue with him, but he all the same sensed the barest hint of defiance in the say his eye-stalks twitched.
There was no reason for his defiance, however, but Ezra recognized the look all the same.
Perhaps he knows something?...no matter.
"Oh, don't look at me like that, crab," he dismissed with a pointed wave of the trident that since his speech hadn't left his fist. "I saw your work at the ball. A wedding should be a small feat for you. I give you full authority over palace staff in my absence," Ezra said, knowing full well that Sebastian already had that sort of authority, but it was good to reinforce all the same.
"Absence, your majesty?"
He resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the crab, his royal upbringing the only thing keeping him from a full-blown display of contempt. It was as though the crab had been replaced with a parrot fish for all of the independent thinking he was managing.
"Absence. I am to spend the rest of the day inspecting just what we;re dealing with in terms of magical damage to the kingdom. I will keep my vow."
"Perhaps two days, your majesty," the crab said, now sounding thoroughly panicked. "The invitations alone would usually take me a week—"
"Then forego them in favor of criers," Ezra cut. "I am leaving. You wouldn't have me make the people wait for solutions longer than the days they already have?"
The crab shook his head slowly, and wisely offered no more argument.
The high king's carriage pulled up before the gates, fully prepared.
The opulence of the vehicle defied any practicality a carriage might have had in the kingdom. Its purpose was to draw attention to the power of a king. It's frame was built from enchanted seashells, all inlaid with a glistening golden filigree. Everything from the craftsmanship of the beautifully carved driftwood doors to the luxurious balancing system and sea-silk-lined cushions radiated wealth and power.
The royal team of sleek black selkies huffed and stomped, impatient to move. They were strong enough to produce a speed that might even rival his own if they hadn't been tethered to so heavy a load.
"Take the rest and head for the central prison. Don't enter until I arrive," he said quietly to one of his personal cecaelian guards. It was a quiet command, he told himself. Not muttering. King's didn't mutter.
His guard heard his muttered command and immediately motioned to the others to follow him, hopefully raising no suspicion as they darted away.
Although he knew his journey would be above suspicion considering the return of the Aegean Prince, he didn't want the whole kingdom to know his aim just yet, and ordered the driver to take him first to the epicenter of the corrosion the mob had informed him of.
"Forgive me, your highness, but the corrosion is…everywhere," the sea-horse driver, with his driving-whip tail reported.
"It can't be everywhere. Not yet. This sort of corrosion takes time to develop."
The driver only shook his head.
"Then perhaps take me to where it started," Ezra ordered.
As it turned out, where things had started was suspiciously close to his destination. He shuddered as his carriage began to be hailed by more and more mer-men, maids, and heads-of-shoals alike. It was almost as though something knew he would have to come this way.
"Your majesty, your majesty!" cried a gaggle of mermaids as he passed by a particularly busy piece of reef. The coral was wilting, and parts of it showed the sort of extreme infection he'd only seen before in his mother's gill-rot just before she died.
Disgusting, he seethed, as the group approached his carriage, blocking the way.
It was inevitable. He emerged from the carriage.
"I will keep my vow," he repeated his pledge, raising the trident toward the disease.
As he summoned the magic to mend the torn coral and kill off the disease, a sensation like wrestling a cuttlefish wriggled its way through his mind and limbs.
It took an embarrassingly long time to mend the reef, and when he'd finished chanelling the trident's power, he felt as though his inner core had been sapped instead of the enchantments from the trident; however, his efforts paid off.
"Thank you, Your Majesty!" the gaggle of young maids cried, leaving way for several other demands on his attention.
Ezra was asked to mend building supports, re-weave current barriers, heal mer-men that seemed on their deathbed from dark curses, and banish shoals of tilapia that had gone quite feral.
Each time he drew on the power of the trident to serve the people, the effort grew easier, but still drained him more than he'd ever seen it do to Triton.
After the dozenth attempt, Ezra began inserting more 'show-and-dance' than actual help into the incidents. He found himself shooting red sparks from the trident's tip toward the indicated trouble, and announcing that any magical mischief being caused would be taken care of by the next morning. So many of them knew next-to-nothing about magic that he hardly had to lift a finger. The eclipse overnight would undo much of Ursula's magic, and the kingdom should be largely back to normal without his having to strain.
Practically childs' play gaining these people's trust, he thought to himself, his arrogance mounting each time he made the promise. So little effort for so many people.
He did this over and over again, until he ran across one of his own.
"But…your majesty, these charms were woven against the eclipse. None of them will be undone by it," said a timid, matronly cecaelia whom he met not far from the dungeon walls.
"Impossible," he dismissed with the authority of decades of training. "I'm old enough to have seen two other eclipses like this one. Every current and curse had to be rewoven. I wouldn't worry."
"I beg your pardon, your majesty," the matron said firmly, "but Ursula's apprentice has been fixing his magic to work with the moon for some years now. Our magic is no longer affected by its cycles."
What?
"And this…this was done by Ursula's practice?"
Real worry worked its way through his hearts, and chilled its way through his veins.
"Surely not."
"It has been so for many of us," said the matron. "That is the reason that so many have turned to the power of the trident to undo the the regular citizens might not know this, but the cecaelia can taste the flavor of her magic on the currents ever since the previous High King's death."
So that was why the curses were so blasted difficult to undo. Why they strained at him even with the power of the Trident in his hands…
If Ezra's drive to see Ellian and his 'catch' hadn't been strong before, it was pulsing through his being now. Ursula had figured out how to undo the magic's connection to the moon's cycles? Impossible. Poseidon himself would have struggled…and then something slid, slimy and murky, into place in his head.
With a regal nod to the much-improved mood of the citizens, Ezra disappeared into the privacy of the carriage so quickly the force of his tentacles nearly propelled him out the opposite door.
He snatched the pendant from his neck.
"URSULA!" he barked at it, forcing his own magic to retrace its path to her scrying pearl.
He made his demands several more times before her creeping smile slid into view on its surface.
"You summoned…Your Majesty?"
There was no respect, or impression in her voice. Rather she managed to make his new title sound like the filthiest of insults.
"Ursssula," he hissed back, all pretense of regality or magnanimity gone. If he had the woman before him, he would be wringing her thrice-cursed neck. "Do tell me why, after my very generous offer, after the position you could obtain, the power you could finally wield amongst our people—in this kingdom you have so long despised, why you have chosen now to sabotoge me."
"I did wonder when I would capture your attention again, My King," she said, entirely unconcerned by his rage. "Tell me. Where is my apprentice."
"Is that what this is about? Has the boy died under your care? If so, Ursula, I have nothing to do with the boy's death, I assure you."
"Oh, but you very much did," said Ursula, unconcerned. "Or, you would have, had I let him die."
"And what was the price of that?" asked Ezra. That sort of magic would have come at an enormous cost.
"A pittance for me, but a price far too high for you."
In spite of himself, a shiver went down his spine. He remembered Ursula had already tried her potioning. Although it couldn't have been a devil's deal…Echidna would have known….
"If the boy lives, then why is Atlantis suffering the wrath of a sea-witch. It is you, I presume," he said, with just a touch of uncertainty. It was still quite unfathomable to him how one witch could possibly have had the magic, or even the reach to wreak the kind of wreckage she had managed two in under forty-eight hours.
"So good of you to notice. Though I was hardly subtle."
"Indeed," he spat.
"Then I repeat. Where is my apprentice," she said, more specifically."
"How am I to know?" he barked. "Call off your magic. It's doing neither of us any favors."
She ignored his demand. "I only assumed you would know, seeing as your precious snake has returned to your kingdom. If he is back, then he must have come across Joe."
"How did you know he was back?"
"Hard to miss half the king's guard dragging their sorry tails above my territory," Ursula snapped, the airy tone she'd used thus far dissolving. "So I'll ask just one more time, Ezra. Where is my apprentice?"
"I truly don't know, Ursula," he lied. "If he was with the princess, and that imbecilic eel had half an army with him, there's no telling what's happened. Perhaps he's still down there, if he was ever there at all. I cannot return your boy to you, Ursula, because I do not have him, but help me take the city. I will make it well worth your while. Move into the city proper. The palace if you like. Use this time to seize a position."
"Oh, but I've already taken the pieces I wanted, Ezra," Ursula purred, though there was an angry edge to her tone that told him she was keeping her rage under control just as much as he. "I lead the ghettos. I have the slums. The merchants, the farmers, the keepers. All of them are at my mercy. How about a counteroffer, Ezra? Give me the prince or I will raze your kingdom to the ground."
He heaved a falsely weary sigh over hte pendant. In truth, he couldn't remember a time he'd ever been more alert. "It has to be mine before you can tear it down, and with your reputation, you won't get one brick more of it than you already have."
"Such bravado…" she plastered that annoying smile back over her lips. "I am not the only force that operates in this sea. As your power rises, so too will forces that oppose you. You would do best to cooperate."
"Don't patronize me," he snapped. "I'm well aware of those…other forces. You know very well why I can't simply hand over the Aegean prince to be murdered—much as I'd like to, believe me. And as for your apprentice, rumor has it he's doing just fine for himself. I am trying to cooperate with you, Ursula!"
"Oh, indeed, I've heard the rumors as well. The hero of the deep? How that must rankle, Ezra, particularly when he has more royal blood than you, Ezra not that he'll ever know that. I've never wanted him to turn out like you."
No. He certainly won't.
"Who is he, really?" he demanded.
She only laughed.
"If you ever find out, Ezra, it will be too late for you and your reign, but you are right. My fight is not with you. I only want the prince. Return him, and I return your kingdom's peace."
Royal blood. He's undone the kingdom's magic ties to the lunar cycle. He's lauded as the new hero. The fate of this boy-apprentice was becoming an easy decision for Ezra.
"Attack the prince in his own kingdom, Ursula, but not here. And not under my banner," Ezra deflected once more.
She scowled, and he could hear the promise in her answer.
"No."
"Then we are at an impasse," he stated. It wasn't a threat. In truth, he greatly regretted it.
"So it would seem. Pray you don't meet Joe. Pray he is no longer alive. He will tear you apart," she said with an untoward amount of relish.
Her face vanished from the pendant abruptly.
Summoning the selkies, he wasted no more time on the pleas for help from those who surrounded his carriage. He drove them straight through the dungeons' black gate.