Vengeance Throne (The Callistra Chronicles #2)

THREE

Chapter Three

Before the border guards on the southern-west edges of Eo pulled in a foreign Seelie vessel, Circe was already dragging her own tiny boat into the waters of the eastern coasts, toward the direction of Wan.

Of course, the undine settlement wasn't in Wan itself. Though the archipelago that lied south of Calva was known for being favoured by the undines, travelling there would take a full day at most, and Circe knew there had to be a settlement that was far closer. Otherwise, she couldn't have come across a few of the group's members so easily when she was a fanciful child.

Circe clenched her fist, breathing out with a whoosh of magic that fuelled the small rowboat. It was simple at first. With a flick of her fingers, the head of the boat started slicing through the waters and clearing a path as if there was an invisible string ahead tugging her along. However, when the waves turned treacherous, beyond the borders of what Eo claimed, Circe could do nothing except grit her teeth and concentrate. She was draining herself, that much she knew, but it would take far too long to use a paddle and manually row herself that far out.

The night was slowly bleeding into day, hints of red peeking into the edges of the sky.

"Red sky at morning, sailors take warning," she muttered to herself. She watched the landmass behind her carefully, waiting for the exact moment that Medeis became a pinprick and disappeared along the horizon. That was the approximate distance Circe had mapped out. She hoped she was right.

Circe cut off her magic and allowed the boat to stall. A rogue wave immediately tried to push her off course. Water seeped into the interior, and Circe was grimacing, shaking out the dampness in her shoe, before realising she was about to get wet anyway.

With a sigh, Circe summoned an air bubble around her head. Then, crossing her fingers for luck, she dived off the boat into the icy waters.

It was a greater shock than she had imagined. For the first, startling moment that she was submerged underwater, her most primal thought was to check that her air bubble covered her neck, ensuring her necklace was dry. If it wasn't, the chain would start dripping water down Pasiphae's neck, trying to open a connection with its twin piece.

Circe's fingers closed around metal. Her necklace was safe, and she could breathe evenly.

She gave a strong kick, and swung her arms until she had manoeuvred her body to point downward—preparing to venture deeper into the ocean nose-first. Within a few strokes, she was swimming in the pitch black.

"This is fine," she muttered. "It's calm. It's relaxing. It's—"

Suddenly Circe stopped swimming, and the current tried to push her body upright again. Despite seeing nothing save the swirls of sand that flew by her face, all the hairs on the back of her neck were standing straight. She waited a second more, and then, on an instinct that went beyond her conscious thought, she threw herself to the left, her body bending low.

She felt a hiss of something quick and sharp pierce through the water, close enough to her arm to leave a stinging sensation behind.

A rod? A spear?


Circe clapped her hands together, summoning a flash of tangible energy. Though it drained her entirely of magic, it lit up the scene before her, revealing two undines hovering a distance away, their expression stunned and blinded by the sudden light.

Undines were large creatures by nature, needing blubber to keep them warm underwater. Though Circe knew this, her first thought was that these two appeared more like majestic sea animals than another anthropomorphic species operating on the same intellectual level as witches. They had wholly black eyes, the solid colour flashing phosphorescent in her burst of light before the undines squinted in suspicion. Whether they were male or female or neither was hard to distinguish—their long tails flicked in the water like the end of a serpent, the scales extending up, up, up the body to the line at their necks, where gills were situated.