After the Sacred Whale Betrayed Me, I Contracted Poseidon novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: One Hour
Her mother cuts her off on the Hall steps while her sister Tuva takes the whale, and at the harbor Ilsa feeds the snake until he becomes a man, and a summons arrives for a duel at dawn.
Ilsa walked out of the Hall with a dying snake cupped in both hands.
She did not run, because three hundred people were still watching her back.
Behind her, the Archmage was speaking quickly about rules and consequences.
Then Tuva's clear voice rose over his.
"If my sister doesn't want the Sacred Whale, I'll take him."
Ilsa kept walking.
She heard the soft gasp of the crowd as Tuva stepped forward, and she heard the Archmage agree.
Of course he agreed.
The Hall wanted its whale bonded before noon.
Tuva was twenty, pretty, and had never won a duel in her life.
Ilsa did not turn around.
She knew how that story ended, because it had ended her.
The great doors swung shut behind her, and the afternoon sun hit her.
"Ilsabet."
Her mother stood at the top of the steps, her velvet skirts gathered in one fist.
Hesper Cronstedt was forty-six and head of the Cronstedt house, and she did not shout in public.
She hissed.
"Go back inside and take it back."
"Say you were nervous."
"I wasn't nervous, Mother."
"The whale was chosen for you," Hesper said.
"It was settled years ago."
"It was always going to be you."
Ilsa stared at her.
There was a flicker in her mother's face, quick and ugly, and it was not anger.
It was fear.
"What was settled?" Ilsa asked.
"Nothing."
"You are being willful, and you are embarrassing this house."
Hesper looked at the snake.
"And you have bonded a dead thing."
"If you walk away from the whale, you walk away from the Cronstedts."
"I will not have my name spent on a shoelace."
It was the same word Tuva had used, and Ilsa almost smiled.
"Then I'll go," she said.
Her mother's mouth opened and closed.
Ilsa went down the steps and nobody called her back.
The harbor was ten minutes away, downhill through the fish market.
She made it in six.
The snake had stopped moving in her hands.
Don't stop, said the voice in her head, very faintly.
"I'm not stopping."
Down the stone stairs at the end of the pier, the tide slapped green against the weed.
She knelt on the bottom step and lowered the snake into the water.
It floated limp on its side, and her stomach dropped.
"Come on," she whispered.
"I picked you in front of everyone."
"You don't get to die on me."
Water is not enough, the voice said.
I am a bonded beast.
I eat from you.
"Then eat," Ilsa said, and held out her wrist, with the new mark coiled on it.
The snake's head turned slowly.
Its mouth opened and two small fangs closed on the inside of her wrist.
It did not hurt the way she expected.
Heat poured out of her arm, bright and strange, as if someone were drinking straight from her pulse.
The sea around her hand began to glow.
The snake swelled, and kept swelling.
Ilsa fell backward onto the pier with a man's weight landing on her knees.
She blinked.
He was kneeling on the stone steps, soaking wet, and entirely naked.
He was tall and lean, with black hair plastered to his forehead and sea-green eyes.
Down his ribs ran a row of round bare pits, pale against his skin.
His mouth was still on her wrist.
He lifted it slowly, and she felt the pull of his lips go all the way through her.
"Sorry," he said.
His voice was the same rough voice she had heard in her head.
"I am not good at this yet."
"You are a man," said Ilsa.
"For the moment."
His hand closed around her forearm, and the glow in the water flickered.
"It lasts while you touch me."
"If you let go, I am a snake again, and not a lively one."
He did not seem to want her to let go.
Ilsa did not seem to want to either.
His palm was warm, which should not have been possible in a body that had been dying ten minutes ago.
"What do I call you?" she asked.
"Oren."
The corner of his mouth moved.
"What do I call you, Mage?"
"Ilsa."
"Ilsa," he repeated quietly.
"You are the first person in a long time to look in the cage."
"You looked."
"I looked," she said.
"I should have looked a lot sooner."
Boots rang on the pier above them.
"Ilsa!" Bryn Tallow came pelting down the stairs with an oilskin coat flapping.
She was a harbor tide-mage with freckles and a broken front tooth, and she stopped dead halfway.
Her eyes went to the naked man, and then to Ilsa.
"I said I'd bring you a coat after the ceremony," Bryn said faintly.
"I did not expect the ceremony to bring me this."
"Coat," Ilsa said.
Bryn threw it, and Oren wrapped it around his shoulders without letting go of Ilsa's arm.
"This is Oren," Ilsa said.
"My beast."
"Of course he is," Bryn said.
A gull screamed, and a running boy in Hall livery came skidding to a stop on the pier.
He held out a sealed scroll, bowed hastily, and fled without waiting.
Ilsa broke the wax with her free hand.
The writing was the Archmage's, thick and black.
Refusal of an assigned beast requires a Trial of Beasts.
Her opponent would be the Sacred Whale himself, at dawn, in the Great Arena.
If she lost, she lost her license, and the Cronstedt seat with it.
Her new opponent's mage was named below, in a fine hand.
Tuva Cronstedt.
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