Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [94]
And Sasha didn’t even have time to blink, didn’t have time to react to the crazy way their eyes lit up when they saw him.
One moment, he was standing there staring up at the captain. In the next, he was swarmed by three of the sailors who had been arguing with the captain who let go their holds to leap over the rail to grab him, plus another three or four more who had come up from behind.
They seized him. He fought desperately against them, but they had their sea legs and he didn’t, and there were two of them to each of his limbs and a couple extra besides. Even though the tangled knot of him and his attackers was tossed around on the deck every time the ship heaved over, they still had him.
He looked up once and saw the captain, still at the wheel—totally ignoring what was going on below, his eyes fixed on the sea in front of him.
There would be no help coming from there.
The mob surged toward the rail, reeling drunkenly as he continued to try to fight. For a frozen moment, he was held up above their heads, illuminated by a dozen lightning bolts.
Then he was over the side, hitting the cold water with a jolt. It hit him with a shock, or maybe it was a real shock—the jolt of a lightning bolt snapping into the sea too near him. It paralyzed him, he gasped and went under and got a lung full of seawater. He tried to struggle to the surface and cough it out, but he couldn’t find the surface, and his coughing only brought in more seawater. He had felt fear before in his life, but never like this. This was terror. His lungs were on fire, black and red flashes took up all of his vision, and he felt everything slipping away even as he clawed and fought and clung to life with a frantic urgency, and all he could think of was surviving and Katya—
Then something stuffed a ball of seaweed in his mouth. He felt hands on his arms and legs, and without knowing why, he chewed and swallowed the weed.
The water in his lungs somehow seemed to turn to air. He heaved in great shuddering breaths as he stopped struggling and sank, slowly, into the cold, cold water, into the peace of the deep, away from the terror of the surface. The red and black cleared away from his sight.
That was when he wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off drowning, for he was surrounded by seamen, both with fish tails and with two normal legs, and they were all armed to the teeth. They all had spears with barbed points as long as his arm, and all of those spears were pointed right at him.
He swallowed. Smiled feebly.
There were no answering smiles.
He sat…well, half sat and half floated…in a room in the Palace of the Sea King. There had been no doubt in his mind, even though his captors had spoken not a word to him, that the enormous, fantastical pastel confection he was taken to was a palace, and who would have a palace like that except the Sea King?
The room to which he had been brought, after much swimming through what he could only call “gardens” and in and out of corridors, was as plain as the exterior was embellished. Four white walls, one door. Two armed guards inside, two outside that door. No windows, but there were huge seashells mounted on the walls that glowed. By now, he was getting used to arcane lighting, he supposed; he scarcely spared them a glance. He’d been brought here long enough ago that he was beginning to get bored.
From terror to boredom…well, perhaps he shouldn’t be complacent. It might just be that the Sea King really had been angry with the owner of that ship or its captain, and he had just been the convenient sacrifice. After all, how could the Sea King have known that he was on that particular vessel, much less have found out about him and Katya?
Unless, of course, Katya had told him….
But still, the course of his journey from the Jolly Sturgeon to here was far from predictable. It made no sense for the King to have known….
Then again, there were all manner of spells for scrying and finding….
But then, why