Bound by Sin (16 page)

“Very well. Have it your way,” he muttered to her. Then he led the way to his rooms. Sitting on the floor was a small trunk. He pointed to it.

“Take that, boy. You will be in charge of my belongings. If anything happens to them, it will be your head. Understood?”

“Yes, my lord,” he said, and with all haste he went to fetch the trunk, lifting it with a small amount of difficulty but managing without complaint in the end.

Jaykun turned to Jileana. “I need to say goodbye to my brothers and manage this news about the finia. Shall I meet you at the docks?”

“No. Not the docks,” she said with a shake of her dark head. “The cove.”

“The ship is anchored near the cove? Why does it not just come to the docks?”

“All will be explained. Just meet me at the cove.”

“Very well, then,” he said, reaching to ring her about the back of her neck with one strong, demanding hand. He jerked her close and seized her mouth with his, laying claim to her in front of the other male, making certain Dremu knew who owned her affections at that time. He tried not to examine the proprietary impulse too closely as he let her go slowly, taking in the smile she gave him and feeling the better for it.

Then he took his leave of her and headed for his brothers in the dining hall, the servant following steadily behind him.

“Well, brothers, I am off. Do I look the diplomat?” he asked, indicating himself and the finer than usual clothing he was wearing.

“Every inch,” Dethan said.

“Jaykun, I must protest again,” Garreth said. “Now is not the time for you to leave.”

“No, it is not ideal,” he agreed. “But if I do not go now, I will not be able to until the summer when you return, and by then I hope to be laying siege to Moroun or perhaps one of the cities on the far continent. No. Now is the better choice.”

“Methinks you are thinking more with other parts of your body than with your brain,” Garreth said with a frown.

“Enough!” Jaykun said, slamming a fist down on the table. “I will not listen to you and your half-conjured ideas as to my motivations in this. Just…just manage this city for the next few days. That is all I ask. Please.”

“You know we will,” Dethan said soothingly. “Whatever your reasoning, we are here for you, willing to do whatever is necessary. Now be off with you. All is in good hands here. You can be assured of that.”

“Thank you, Dethan,” Jaykun said with a sigh. “Garreth, forgive my temper.”

“You do not like to be questioned. You never did. Which is no doubt why I always questioned you,” Garreth said with a chuckle.

“No doubt,” Jaykun agreed, smiling. “See you in a few days, brothers! Try not to foul up my city in the meanwhile.” He turned toward the door, caught sight of Dremu, and belated remembered to tell his brothers about the finia. “Oh, and you should know that it is the finia behind the attempts on our lives.”

“How do you know this?” Dethan demanded.

“This boy overheard the fortunary giving commands,” he said, nodding to Dremu.

“I thought the finia was under guard,” Garreth said.

“I allowed her limited visitors,” Dethan said. “I thought the fortunary would be harmless enough. It isn't as though he were her vizier or her head of guard. I see now my error.”

“It is not our way to imprison the leaders of the cities we conquer,” Jaykun said. “They are usually harmless enough without gold or armies or advisors.”

“Usually. Perhaps we have been too lax with our methods,” said Garreth.

“It has worked for us in the past,” Dethan said. “The finia is the exception, not the rule.”

“Very well. The finia's life is forfeit. And the fortunary will fare no better. Are we agreed?” Jaykun said.

“We are agreed,” Dethan said. “Now you best get going. You need to be on that island before dusk.”

“I am well aware,” Jaykun said dryly.

“And no dallying on the ship! This is a diplomatic mission! Some comportment please!”

Jaykun rolled his eyes and turned his back on their laughter, heading out of the castle and toward the cove.

T
he sun was quite low in the sky by the time Jaykun and Dremu reached the cove and it was making Jaykun nervous. There was no way, he thought, that they would make it to Serenity in the hour before dusk and also be able to find a safe place for his curse to come upon him. The island was just too far, and given the wind of the moment, they wouldn't travel fast enough. The last thing he needed was to be on a wooden ship when the curse struck. It would immediately be burned to cinders and ash.

He would simply have to tell Jileana that they could not leave until after juquil's hour. She would not like it—for some reason she was in a desperate hurry—but there was nothing to be done about it.

As they approached the cove, he peered out over the water in search of a ship. There were none to be found anywhere on the horizon. No dingy was rowed in and waiting for them. All he could see were the rocks of the jetty and a colony of seals and morari sunning themselves atop them.

As he entered the cove, he saw Jileana standing there waiting. She was completely naked, holding her dress folded in her hands. Jaykun sucked in his breath at the sight of her. He had truly never seen anything so beautiful in his life. Her skin was warm and dark, her long hair streaming down her back in a silky black cape. He balked at her nudity, however, in front of this other man. He walked up to her, shielding her from the servant. But luckily for him the boy had averted his gaze and was nervously trying not to look at her. Good, he thought. He didn't want this Dremu to look at her. He didn't want anyone to look at her when she was like this.

But she walked around his shielding body and presented her dress to the boy. “Put this in the trunk as well,” she said.

Dremu hastened to do as she asked, dropping the trunk on the sand, opening it, and shoving the dress inside.

“You are not going like this, are you?” Jaykun demanded.

“We do not wear much in the way of clothing in Serenity. It is too confining and drags us down. You may want to remove your clothing as well.”

“I will not! I'm not going to present myself naked in a foreign court!”

“As you wish,” she said simply. “Dremu?”

“N-no, my lady. I-I am fine like this.”

“Very well, then,” she said breezily before Jaykun could work himself up over her inviting a servant to get naked with her. “Let's go!”

Then she ran into the water.

Jaykun just stood there and stared after her, at a total loss. Where in the eight hells was she going? Did she expect them to swim all the way to Serenity?

“Come on!” she called out gaily.

“Jileana, what in the eight hells are you doing?!” Jaykun shouted out to her.

“It's here. Under the jetty. Come on!”

Under
the jetty? Jaykun wasn't sure he had heard her right. But sure enough, she dived downward.

That was when he began to realize there was a lot more to this than had been immediately apparent to him. Things began to click: Finding her naked on the beach. The way she had said he couldn't get to Serenity by ship. The way she had treated everything like a new and wondrous experience…as if she had never experienced the world before. The fact that there had always seemed to be something a little…otherworldly about her.

He suddenly began to strip down, disrobing faster than he ever had before in his life, throwing his clothing and boots at the hapless servant, who stood quivering at the water's edge with his trunk.

The instant Jaykun was naked, his heart racing with a combination of fear and excitement, he plunged into the water and chased after her. When he reached the place where she had dived down, she popped back up, her hair slicked back and a laughing smile on her face. The water was cold but not frigid and he felt very exposed being naked with her.

“What are you?” he demanded of her.

She smiled again. “The Krizans call us
prava.
But that is a derogatory name. You would probably call us selkies. These are all my people.” She indicated the seals diving from on the rocks, entering the water and swimming down beneath the jetty. “Look. See?”

She dived under the water and he watched as she swam around him, her long woman's body suddenly changing shape into that of a sleek seal. She surfaced again croaking out a happy sound, dived back under the water, circled him again, then came up as the woman he had come to know.

“Beneath the water, built into the jetty, is the portal to my home. To Serenity. You have to swim down and through it. Come on, Dremu!” she shouted out.

Dremu stood uncertainly at the water's edge, holding the trunk in his quaking hands.

“B-but the trunk, my lady!”

“It will be as nothing in the water,” she said.

Then she lifted a hand, rotated it in a circular motion, and the trunk became light as a feather in Dremu's hands. Stunned by this magic, and swept along in the current his life had been caught up in, he found himself splashing into the water. He had to follow. He had to. He was finally going on an adventure, an adventure no one else would ever be able to lay claim to.
His
adventure. It was an amazing thing…It was better than gold.

Jileana waited until Dremu and the trunk had joined them.

“You will be able to see the portal straight away. It glows. Just follow me through it!”

She dived down and the men had only two choices: follow or go back to shore. Of course, each for their own reasons, they chose to follow her.

Jaykun felt as though his life had suddenly become completely surreal. He should really give this some thought. He shouldn't merely jump in without thinking of the consequences. But, he realized, that was exactly what he had been doing ever since he first met Jileana. Jumping in with both feet and letting himself be swept away with hardly a thought to the consequences. It was probably because his life was so written out for him already. He had a role to play and no choice but to play it. He was slave to the whims of a goddess. At least in this small thing he was able to make a free choice, to choose to go or not to go. Oh, he had cloaked it in the cape of diplomacy, telling himself it was still in Weysa's best interest, but in the end…in the end, it had been about what he wanted. And what he wanted was her: Jileana. He didn't know how long he wanted her, but he wanted her now to the exclusion of all else.

He gave the briefest thought to his brothers. But he pushed that concern aside as well and dived down beneath the blue waters.

The water was not crystal clear, not like he had seen in his travels along the southern continents, but it was still clear enough for him to make her out as her sleek body dived down and swam along the rocks. The rocks turned to coral almost immediately as they swam downward, and it was only a short distance before he made out the glow of the portal. Excitement coursing through every last one of his veins, he swam down along the peach-and-russet-colored coral, swam through a school of little fishes, and then came to a halt in front of an archway of rock and coral that glowed blue along its edges, each end of the arch rooted in sand on the ocean floor. As he watched, several seals swam through the portal, disappearing in a bright flash of light. He could see them swimming away on the other side.

In fact, on the other side the water was a completely different color. Or rather, it was much clearer. The coral was a different color as well. It was red and tan. Schools of brilliantly colored fish were darting around, disappearing from view when they should have just been showing up around the other side of the archway. Jaykun was curious as to what the portal looked like from the back, but he had been holding his breath for quite a while and his lungs were beginning to ache. True, he could not die from drowning, but it would not be a pleasant sensation to drown over and over again. Besides, Dremu was not so fortunate.

Almost without thought for them, Jileana swam through the portal in a brilliant flash. Then she stopped and waved them onward. Figuring he had only two choices, to go forward or to go back, he decided to go where the most appeal lay. He swam through the portal.

It was the strangest sensation…almost like touching lightning. Only not as violent as he imagined that would be. Also, the temperature in the water was radically different from one side of the archway to the other. It was much warmer on this side. The moment he crossed through, he saw Jileana dart upward, her body moving so fast it was amazing. He followed her readily, very much in need of taking a breath. He only spared a glance backward to see the servant swimming through the archway, the trunk dragging behind him in one hand. Everything within it should be wet, ruined, and heavy, but the servant was pulling it along as if it weighed nothing at all.

He and Jileana broke the surface of the water together and drew in breath. She waited for Dremu to surface. He did, spluttering and gasping. She laughed with delight.

“You did it! You both made it! Wonderful! Look! There's Serenmitazahmiktubarinaty! My home!”

She pointed to a sheer cliff only a short distance away. The inlet was like nothing Jaykun had ever seen before. It was a city constructed of fossilized coral, honeycombs and caves leading from surface to surface, level to level, from high at the top of the cliff to down at the water. Even from a distance he could see people climbing up the cliff walls in order to go from one level to the next or, in some cases, simply leaping off and diving with hurtling speed into the water below.

Jileana began to swim toward the coral city, her streamlined body moving fast. It was clear she was happy and eager to get home. The trunk was floating in the water, the servant clinging to it desperately, as if his life depended on it. Jaykun had to give him credit for his bravery. There weren't many men who would jump into a situation like this unprepared and unarmed. He still couldn't believe he had done so himself. But if he hadn't, he wouldn't be seeing all he was seeing, experiencing all he was experiencing…and he wouldn't have traded this moment away for anything. He had never felt so alive, so brave and daring, so strong in the face of his fear of the unknown.

“Come along, little fellow. We best be following her,” he called to the servant. “Can you manage with that?”

“Y-y-yes, my lord!”

“Very good! Our adventure awaits!”

Jaykun took off after Jileana. She was like a fish, darting from one place to the next, until they reached the clear blue-green waters of the inlet and were only a few feet away from the place where the coral cliffs met the water. That was when he saw that the caves and cubbies continued below the water's surface and the water was teaming with people deep down, beyond where he could see. The coral beneath the water was not fossilized, dead and dry; it became a living, breathing jungle of life that teemed from its every pore.

And every last one of the population was either naked or wearing the briefest bit of clothing to cover their sex. The women were all bare breasted, the men bare chested.

Jileana swam to the nearest cave and led the men inside. There were shelves immediately to the left and right, and Jileana hauled herself out of the water and onto a shelf. Jaykun followed suit. Then he looked around to see about half a dozen eyes staring at him in surprise.

“Jaykun, these are my people.” She introduced them with a wave of her hand. “This is Kino,” she said, pointing to a darkly tanned, leathery looking older woman. “Kino has been serving my family for generations. Dremu, you will stay here with her and she will help you get our belongings to the upper level where I live.”

“Oh, mistress,” Kino said, tsking hard. “Your fadder be sorely mad wid you. You know he don't like da idea of you goin' to da Overworld. No, mistress, not at all. He told you no go, but you go anyway. He be hoppin' mad.”

“I figured as much,” Jileana said with a sigh. “But I will deal with that later. First we must see my mother.”

“She no much happier wid you dan your fadder is,” Kino said with a raspy little chuckle. “You done steamed quite a lotta people, you done.”