‘I’m in love with Kel. He’s the only one that I want to be with—and I will get back to him.’
‘We’ll see. I’d prefer not to argue about this now.’
‘It’s not an argument, Derwent; it’s a vow.’
He gave her a brief smile. He didn’t believe her, not even a little. ‘Quite so. Now, moving on to the second item on our agenda…’
As evening fell, the yacht slid between the sunken towers of the cathedral in the old city of Cadiz, now lost beneath the waves. Meri looked over the side. A poem about Francis Drake, Elizabethan attacker of the port, sailed into her mind. Drake he's in his hammock an' a thousand mile away, (Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?). She couldn’t recall the rest. There were no sunken ships and sleeping captains that she could see. The grey waters gave nothing away but they had to be passing over the old harbour and streets that had once lined the seafront. Cadiz had been abandoned, visited only in the summer months by scuba divers. The sea had stormed inland and carved out a new island where once had been the plains below Jerez, the ancient city in southernmost Spain famed for its sherry. As that great nation of Spain crumbled back into its old kingdoms of Aragon and Castile under the combined pressures of climate change, desertification and mass migration, the island had broken off and quietly declared itself independent, official name the Isle of Jerez, the true name only known to a few. Atlantis had been established in its old position at the exit of the Mediterranean, past what used to be called the Pillars of Hercules. This was the little kingdom they expected her to rule as head of the secretive government that led the Teans as well as the ordinary Spanish folk of the region.
‘Ready, Lil'chick?’ Ben had been keeping his distance since Kel left because he knew she blamed him in part for letting Kel slip away. Her faith in people had taken a severe battering.
‘Not really.’
‘You’ll do fine. Francis, Mabel and I have faith in you.’
‘Meaning the others don’t?’
‘They could do with some persuading.’
‘I don’t feel like persuading anyone about anything.’
‘Meri, I know you’re sad…’
‘Sad doesn’t even begin to cover it.’
Ben sighed but wouldn’t be swayed from what he’d been storing up to say. ‘…But you really have to make an effort, for us, if not for yourself. We’ve stuck our necks out for you with the council. They almost gave up on you when you wouldn’t be shaken over Kel.’
‘I wish they had given up.’
‘They would never have let you go, Meri. They just would’ve carried you here tied up. This way, you get to walk in and have some say over the direction events take.’
‘I thought I was escaping a Perilous prison but I’ve just run into a Tean one, haven’t I?’
‘Not if you’re clever. You can reverse the trap, get them dancing to your tune.’
‘I don’t feel like dancing.’
Ben cracked his knuckles. ‘Then, Meri Girl, you’d better stiffen those sinews.’
Things had to be bad if he was quoting Shakespeare. Ben was fond of the stage and auditioned, unsuccessfully, for a number of small parts when he was younger. The reminder of that unlikely career made her smile for what felt like the first time in an age. ‘And what then? Summon up the blood?’
He grinned and ruffled her hair, pleased she’d made the connection. ‘Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.’
‘Henry V?’
‘It felt appropriate as you are about to storm a castle heavily out-numbered. You can count on Francis, Mabel and me.’
She patted his big paw where it rested on the rail. ‘I know. I suppose it’s time to grow up.’
‘That would be a good idea. I have heard a few mutters about sulking.’
Having her heart ripped out was not a sulk. ‘That’s nice of them.’
‘They don’t know you and they don’t know your boy. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’
She shrugged. She understood that Ben was relieved that Kel had gone. They would never see eye to eye on that. ‘It’s not over yet. Let’s do this.’
They’d found her a rose pink dress to wear. It was exactly the kind of gown that would be picked out by a council of men who thought they knew what every girl would like but were way off target. Only brides who wanted to put their bridesmaids through humiliation would choose this particular shade. At least the cut was flattering: a dark pink slip with a lighter lace overdress. Meri amused herself for a moment thinking what Sadie would make of it. Her comp-punk friend would’ve made a puking gesture and immediately accessorized it with a black leather jacket, fishnet tights and screaming red boots before leaving the house. Meri had to make do with delicate silver sandals.
Meri studied the heels. She’d never mastered the art of walking in them.
‘Hold in your stomach and butt and take small steps,’ said Leah, gathering up the clothes Meri had discarded.
‘Been to princess school have you?’ asked Meri, doing as her maid advised and finding it did help.
‘I like fashion.’
‘What do you think of this then?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Yeah, I thought so. Maybe you could take charge of my wardrobe for me? If they have their way I’ll be in pinafores and plaits before the end of the week. It wasn’t a good look on Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road so I doubt it will be any better on me.’
Leah stopped in the middle of the cabin, a damp towel trailing. ‘You’d make me Mistress of the Wardrobe?’
‘Sure. Why not?’
‘Because it’s one of the most prestigious positions in the household.’
Meri straightened the lace over the slip. ‘Leah, if you promise to be on my side rather than the council’s then it’s yours.’ It was time she started recruiting her own supporters.
‘Absolutely. My loyalty is to the Tean Crown not the council.’
‘Then the job’s yours. First task, get me some decent clothes for my duties, please. If I’m going to be this princess they all expect, I want to do it dressed in clothes that give me confidence.’
‘Thank you, miss.’ Leah bobbed a curtsey.
‘Do you have to do that?’
‘What?’
‘Curtsey.’
‘It’s expected.’
‘But not when it’s just the two of us?’
‘All right, miss, I won’t curtsey when we’re alone.’
‘Good. I suppose it’s too much to ask you to call me Meri?’
Leah looked horrified at the idea.
‘Forget I asked.’
5
A launch with a wooden cabin and brass fitments beetled out from port to take Meri across to the landing stage. It looked like something a Hollywood starlet would travel in fifty years ago on the canals of Venice to attend the film festival, that was when the lost jewel of the Adriatic still functioned as a city. She took a place on the cushioned seat at the stern. On a distant hill she could make out the town of Jerez but, nearer to her position, there was a complex of white buildings, some half-sunken on the new beach.
‘What is this place?’ she asked Francis as the boat bounced across the choppy water to the shore. Ben was coming in the next shuttle with her belongings. The council members had gone ahead to prepare the way for her arrival. Francis and his wife, Mabel, had volunteered to come with her.
‘It used to be a hotel complex and leisure village but the sea took over.’ Mabel, a generously endowed red-head with a penchant for layered skirts and sturdy boots, looked at home on this smaller boat, much more relaxed than she had been on the yacht where she had kept out of the way of the council members. The few times Mabel had called on Meri in her cabin, she had come in her capacity as onboard medic. After checking on Meri’s healing gunshot wound, she had made herself scarce. ‘We use it now as our docks. There’s a Tean Sympathizer settlement here, one of the largest in the world.’
Meri could now see the converted barges and pleasure
boats that formed a floating home for the Sympathizers, those whose blood was not ‘pure’ enough to count as true bred Tean. Meri had her doubts about the system. It sounded too much like the language they’d used in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century to decide who was white and therefore free, or had enough black heritage in them to be a slave. What was blood or race really but an accident? People were people. Still, here the boat-dwellers were of their own volition, clustered as close to the centre of Tean culture as they could get. Like Leah, they all had a devotion to the Tean past that Meri couldn’t yet understand.
‘How do you keep this from your enemies?’ Meri asked.
Mabel shrugged. ‘With so many people on the move thanks to climate change, few pay any heed to the little gatherings like these. They think we’re Gypsies with our peril-coloured flags and make-do-and-mend ways.’
Meri hugged her knees in a most un-regal position. She could see a couple of teens playing tennis on what had once been the flat roof of a ten-storey hotel, the area lit by solar lamps. A net had been rigged to stop them losing too many balls over the side. Nice to see someone having fun. Hearing the launch approach from the yacht, the players both stopped mid-game, exchanged a word, then waved with their racquets enthusiastically. Meri waved back.
‘Your first royal wave,’ said Francis with a wry smile at Mabel.
Meri suddenly felt self-conscious. ‘Did I do it right?’ The British king and queen had a strange hand twist they’d developed over the centuries to reduce wrist strain—no laughing matter when your job involved daily waving sessions.
‘Don’t ask us,’ said Mabel. ‘You are quite able to decide your own wave, I’m sure.’
Francis lit his pipe, the first he’d been allowed after the non-smoking yacht.
‘I’d prefer to decide much more important things than that.’ Like when she could bring Kel back to her side.
‘Start small and build up.’ Francis leaned back with a sigh of contentment, an old white-haired dragon puffing at the skies.
‘Well, I’m not really into this public waving thing. I think I’ll just act as normal. You’re hardly going to be putting me in front of masses of people, not if you want to keep my presence here a secret. Waving will be at a minimum.’
‘See: I said you’d be able to decide.’ Mabel gave her a nod.
Arriving at the landing stage, Meri stepped straight into a welcoming party. Francis and Mabel held back, probably conscious that they were outranked by those gathered. A lady with severe grey hair cut short around her ears bobbed a curtsey to Meri. She was wearing a black sparkling evening jacket that seemed oddly frivolous compared to her expression.
‘Miss Marlowe, it truly is a pleasure to meet you at long last. I’m the prime minister of Atlantis, Rayne Caspian.’
‘Dr Caspian, delighted to meet you.’ Meri held out a hand. Francis had already warned her that the doctor of political science from Harvard was one of her key contacts.
Rayne shook her hand with a glimmer of a smile. ‘Not protocol, but I expect we’ll get to that eventually.’
‘I realize I have a steep learning curve ahead.’
‘The Atlantean royal family didn’t encourage people to touch them in case they used their power against them.’
‘We can do that?’
‘Full-blood Teans could.’
‘I thought it was only fatal against Perilous?’
‘Concentrated UV isn’t good for any human tissue. It’s just a little more spectacular in the way it kills a Perilous.’ Rayne showed her to the waiting electric limousine; Meri followed, still reeling from the new information given her almost casually. What was new to her was obvious to those around her, raised in Tean culture. It was more than disconcerting: she could kill anyone with a touch. What other vital bits of information did she not yet know? The problem was she didn’t know how to ask when she had no idea where her blind spots lay.
Note to self: ask about glowing eyes and deadly touch, thought Meri with a wry laugh at her own expense.
‘Bernard will be your driver and bodyguard while you are here,’ continued Rayne, ‘but hopefully on Atlantis you won’t have much call for his services as a guard.’ She gestured to the short but stocky man in a chauffeur’s uniform.
‘Miss.’ He tapped his cap.
‘Bernard.’ Meri wondered what she was going to do with all these people who now looked to her to occupy them. She slid into the rear seat. There was oceans of room even with Rayne next to her. She rubbed her palms nervously on the fabric of the pink dress. She could kill anyone with a brush of her fingers? That was just…creepy. She had it under control, didn’t she? Why hadn’t she been warned?
Silently, the car started the climb up the hill.
‘I hope you’re rested?’ asked the prime minister. ‘We thought to start immediately with a reception but if you need some time to yourself, I can delay the proceedings.’
‘I’ll be fine. On the yacht, I’ve done nothing but rest.’
Rayne picked at the velvet of her evening trousers, removing a tiny speck. ‘I understand you’ve been distressed the last few days.’
‘You could say that.’
‘No one will bring it up. They are under strict orders not to upset you.’
Bring up that she had been abandoned, or at least forced apart, from Kel? Her instincts were screaming at her to go after him but she couldn’t see a way to escape as yet. Meri swallowed. ‘Thanks.’
‘This must all seem very peculiar to you.’
‘Just a bit.’
‘I knew your parents; Blake rather better than Naia.’
Meri’s interest sparked and caught alight. She noted that Rayne didn’t claim to be a friend. ‘Wow: someone who knew my parents! What were they like?’
‘They were good people. Your father and I were colleagues for a time when we both taught at Berkeley. I was one of the few who knew where you were living. We had other heirs then so you were under a looser watch. You were only fifth in line.’
She would have to find out what happened to these other heirs, but not right now. The Perilous had probably got to them. ‘Why didn’t you come for me when it happened?’
‘I didn’t know immediately. I tried to find you all when I realized Blake had stopped contacting me on the two-monthly cycle we had agreed, but your guardian did a good job of hiding you. Under instructions from Blake, no doubt?’
Meri nodded.
‘I searched the States. It didn’t even occur to me to look in England. Your parents had no connections there that I was aware of, no family.’
‘We didn’t change my name—there was a trail if you knew where it started.’
‘Not when I had concluded that you’d died with them. It was only months later when I dug up some evidence from the people at Mount Vernon.’
‘I thought only the Perilous knew.’
‘And it would’ve stayed that way but I had someone hack the CCTV. My suspicions were raised when I found that the staff were very reluctant to speak about the incident. The footage suggested you went in the river and no one thought a four-year-old would survive that and the gunfire. The Perilous had tried to keep it quiet because they’d lost so many and were clearly the attackers. If the normal authorities got involved, there would’ve been charges.’
‘I wasn’t there. What you saw was a decoy.’ Meri had seen the same images herself a few weeks ago during her ‘trial’ at Ade’s house. ‘Mom and Dad hid me in the barn of the show farm.’ She could still remember the prickly heat of being buried under the straw, the warning not to make a sound, the terror that the horse stabled there would step on her. She hadn’t known then that was the least of her worries.
The car didn’t take the road to the old city of Jerez as Meri expected but turned west, back towards the coast. Bernard took a right-hand fork and passed through iron gates that hummed open as soon as they approached.
‘Is this a palace?’ asked Meri.
‘Your ancestors bought a c
lifftop villa many years ago and rebuilt it to Atlantean standards. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.’
They came through the trees to climb steeply up the drive. A white house crowned the hill, terraced gardens leading down to a rock face that dropped into the Atlantic. It reminded Meri of the pictures she’d seen of the Roman emperor’s summer palace on Capri.
‘Do I get to chuck messengers I don’t like off the cliff?’ she joked.
Rayne raised an eyebrow. Perhaps the jest had been in poor taste.
‘Sorry, just thinking of Tiberius.’
‘You aren’t far wrong with the comparison but where do you think the Romans got their ideas of architecture from? This is a copy, not of Tiberius’ palace, but the original one on Atlantis.’
Meri couldn't help feeling a tingle of pride in the achievements of her ancestors. ‘How do you know what that looked like?’
‘From our records and the revelations of underwater archeology.’
‘Underwater…you mean, you’ve found the original city?’
‘Contrary to what you may have been told, we never lost it, Miss Marlowe. Plato recorded the position accurately and we have kept others away over the centuries. It wasn’t until recently that technology made it possible to dive there. Our teams have only just started bringing up Atlantean treasures and excavating the city—it’s in many ways our nation’s one great unifying project. That’s where we recovered most of the artefacts you’ll see in the palace. That reminds me.’ She handed Meri a small jeweller’s box. Inside was a ring with a peril-coloured stone set within a white gold band shaped like two hands clasping or cradling the gem. ‘Wear it on the ring finger of your right hand.’
‘What’s the stone?’
‘A very rare diamond. Please try not to lose it.’
Saying that definitely jinxed the stone. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t take it. I’m going to lose it if you entrust me with it.’
‘Its absence will be noted if you don’t wear it tonight. The council agreed you should have it as a sign of our good faith in your candidacy. It’s symbolic.’