Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [97]
Sasha looked at the half-dozen smiling faces that pointed their snouts in the King’s direction and bobbed their heads with excitement. “Ah, sir, these are dolphins—”
This was the first time he had ever seen dolphins up close. They were bigger than he had thought, and very agile. Their eternal smiles were quite charming. From time to time one of them would leave the enclosure to go to the surface to breathe, and it was breathtaking to watch them shoot away so gracefully, and return just as quickly. The graceful grey bodies, wonderful to watch from above the surface of the water, were astonishing from below.
Thanks to the dragon’s blood, he could understand what they were saying, too. “Me! Me!” “Pick me, Majesty!” “No, me! I’m fastest!” “I’m strongest!” “I’m both!”
“Exactly,” said the King, and looked over the choices. “Bow-wave and Spinner, if you please.”
“Awwwwww.” There was a disappointed chorus as two of the dolphins separated from the pod and presented themselves for harnessing. Both bowed to the King, then nudged each other like a pair of teenage boys before settling. The King waved away any help from a young Triton who came swimming up belatedly to serve him; as one of the two dolphins went to pluck a second harness off the net wall, the King harnessed the first. Then he fed both dolphins the same seaweed balls that Sasha had eaten.
“Just hold onto these handholds on the harness here and here. Then you lay yourself along Spinner’s back like this—” The King demonstrated, and awkwardly, Sasha tried to copy him. “Now take us to the Champions, lads.”
There was no warning; with a powerful surge of his entire body, the dolphin shot forward.
Sasha hung on for dear life. It was a good thing he had strong arms; he was not so much riding as being pulled along. The sea floor shot past, and then, abruptly, dropped away, and they were in a place he could not even have imagined—beneath the surface of the deep sea.
First a mortar, then a Goat, now a dolphin, he thought, with a combination of bewilderment and irony. So what do I ride next? A dragon?
As the water rushed past him and he did his utmost to keep from interfering too much with the dolphin’s powerful undulations, he had to laugh a bit at that thought. No, that would be a bit much. Even for me.
He had never been aware of just how serene—and just how empty—the wide sea really was. He and the King and the two dolphins appeared to be suspended in a zone of endless milky-blue water. From where they swam, you could not see anything of the bottom, the water went on into the distance with no horizon. He cast a glance upward. The surface was visible only as rippling reflections. With no landmarks to go by, he couldn’t tell how fast they were actually going. It might have been faster than a galloping horse, they might have been crawling. The pressure of the water moving past told him “fast,” but his eyes told him nothing. Neither he and the King, nor the dolphins, had to surface for air because the dolphins at least were under the same spell that he was, allowing them to breathe water instead of air. As for the King—probably the Sea King could already breathe water, just as his daughter could.
Then something dark loomed in the distance, and it was coming up fast—
And they were in the middle of life again.
The dark thing was a rock wall rising up from the deeper sea floor, and life clung to every crack and ledge of it. Kelp and other seaweeds, sea fans, some coral, lots of barnacles and shellfish. He spotted crabs and lobster scuttling about, and plenty of fish flitting in and out of the kelp patches. This, it seemed, was their goal, for the dolphins shot to the surface, taking their “riders” with them.
Sasha spasmed in a cough, spat a little water, and was breathing air again. The two dolphins spouted a blast that was more water than air, and did the same. All four of them bobbed in the