After the Sacred Whale Betrayed Me, I Contracted Poseidon novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Beast
Reborn on the morning of the Contract Ceremony, Ilsa refuses the Sacred Whale in front of the whole Hall and picks the dying snake from the reject cage, then hears it say it has an hour left.
The last thing Ilsa remembered was cold water closing over her face.
She had looked up through it and seen the man who had pushed her in.
He was standing on the ledge of the Marrow Trench, wiping her blood off his knife.
Then she opened her eyes, and she was kneeling on the marble floor of the Hall of Contracts.
Her lungs burned.
She dragged in a breath and the air tasted of lamp oil and sea salt.
Three hundred people were watching her from the tiers above.
It was the Midsummer Contract Ceremony, and she was twenty-two years old again.
"Ilsabet Cronstedt," the Archmage said.
He stood before the great salt pool at the center of the Hall, in his grey robes.
"You are the finest tide-mage this Hall has trained in thirty years."
"The Hall therefore gives you its finest beast."
The doors at the far end opened, and a man in a white coat walked in.
He had fair hair and blue eyes, and he smiled at the room.
Everyone knew who he was.
Caldrion Hask was the Sacred Whale, four hundred years old, who wore a man's body for ceremonies.
No mage in a century had been offered him.
Ilsa had been offered him once before, and she had said yes with tears of pride in her eyes.
Her mother sat in the front tier in dark velvet, nodding.
Her younger sister Tuva sat beside her, glowing, already planning how to brag about it.
Caldrion stopped in front of Ilsa and held out his hand.
His left hand.
It stretched wide, the fingers spreading.
Ilsa had seen that small motion a thousand times in six years and never once understood it.
Now she understood it completely.
"Take my hand, Ilsa," he said gently.
"We are going to do great things."
She remembered the cores she had carried to him, one at a time, for six years.
She remembered his mouth on her forehead the night she turned twenty-eight, and then the blade.
Ilsa stood up on her own, and she did not take his hand.
"No," she said.
The word rang off the marble.
The Archmage frowned.
"Mage Cronstedt, this is not a request."
"It is the Hall's highest honor, and it is already written."
"Then write it for someone else," Ilsa said.
A murmur went through the tiers.
Caldrion's smile stayed exactly where it was, but his hand slowly closed.
"You are nervous," he said kindly.
"I am not nervous."
"I am declining the Sacred Whale, and I am saying it in front of everyone."
Tuva stood up in the front tier with her mouth open.
Her mother's face had gone white.
"Ilsa, sit down," Hesper called, in the voice she used for the servants.
Ilsa did not look at her.
She turned and walked away from the pool, past the guards and the gold-lettered plaques.
Behind the last pillar stood the reject cage.
It was a rusted iron box where the Hall kept the beasts nobody wanted, the sick and the stunted and the old.
Every mage had walked past it for years without looking inside.
In her first life, Ilsa had walked past it for six years.
Now she crouched in front of it and looked.
There was a snake lying on the straw.
It was grey-green and no longer than her forearm, thin as a bootlace, with scales gone dull as old pewter.
Down its belly ran a row of round bare pits.
It was barely breathing.
Its eyes were open, and they were the clear deep green of the sea at noon.
They were looking at her.
"That one," Ilsa said.
Somebody laughed in the tiers, and then a hundred people laughed.
"That one is dying," the Archmage said, appalled.
"It is a spirit snake, a runt, and no use to anyone."
"Then it will be easy to give me," Ilsa said.
She reached through the bars and the snake did not flinch.
It slid onto her palm, weighing almost nothing, and cold as the bottom of a well.
Tuva's laugh cut over the rest.
"You threw away the Sacred Whale for a shoelace."
"Mother, she has lost her mind."
Caldrion came and stood over her, still smiling, though something in his eyes had turned flat.
"You will crawl back," he said, very softly.
"They all do."
"Not this time," said Ilsa.
She pricked her thumb on the cage's iron latch and pressed it to the snake's head.
The old contract words came up out of her like a song she had sung for six years.
A thin line of light wrapped her left wrist and settled there as a tiny coiled mark.
The snake shivered along its whole length.
Then a voice spoke inside her head, low and rough and astonished.
You chose me.
"I did," Ilsa whispered.
Take me to water.
The voice was fading, and she felt it slipping through her fingers.
I have about an hour.
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