He Left My Daughter With His Ex, So I Left the Sea King novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Harbor Test
Melina finds her daughter waist deep in the harbor under the hand of her partner's ex, in front of the whole market, and her partner tells her not to make a scene. She walks out, and hears the ex say the one thing that stops her.
By noon on market day, my daughter was waist deep in the harbor while forty strangers watched.
I saw her from the top of the quay steps.
Her curls were plastered flat and her lips had gone blue.
Ligeia crouched on the harbor wall above her with one hand on Zoe's shoulder.
Nobody in the crowd moved.
They were fishwives with baskets and boys with crates of sardines, and every one of them was waiting to see what happened next.
That morning had started so well.
Zoe had begged for a year to see the mortal market.
She had never been above the bay in her life, and she asked my partner so many times that he finally laughed and promised her one full day.
She had been awake since before dawn, hopping on one foot by the hall gate with her coin purse in her fist.
Then the hall's steward came running with news from court, and his face closed.
"Something has come up," he said.
He kissed the top of Zoe's head.
"Ligeia knows every stall on the quay. She'll take you, and I'll meet you there."
Zoe looked at me.
I nodded, because I trusted him.
Ligeia arrived with a basket of figs and a smile.
She had been Kyros's lover once, long before me, and for four years she had been nothing but kind to us.
She braided Zoe's hair on the gate steps and told me I looked tired.
"Go and lie down, Melina. I'll bring her back sunburned and sticky."
She asked Zoe two questions while she worked the braid.
Had she ever swum in deep water, and did she like it?
Zoe said yes, in the hall's pools, and Ligeia said, "Wonderful."
At noon a note came to my room in her neat hand.
Zoe is having a lovely time. Don't worry about a thing. L.
I read it twice, and then I went up anyway.
Now I went down the quay steps and into the harbor in my shoes.
The water was slapping hard against the wall and breaking white around the ankles of the men standing at the edge.
Around my ankles it went flat and still.
I did not notice it then.
I was looking at Zoe.
She grabbed my neck with both arms and coughed harbor water onto my collar.
"Mama, she let go."
"I know. I have you."
"She said I'd swim."
Ligeia stood up on the wall and spread her hands to the crowd.
"There you are, Melina! She's perfectly well. Kyros agreed, you know."
She said it sweetly, to me and to the whole quay at once.
"Every child raised in his house is tried by water before her tenth year. It's the old law. I only did it kindly, where there were friends watching."
"Tried," I said.
My voice came out low and steady, which surprised me.
"You put my daughter in the sea and let go of her."
"I held her until she was ready."
"She was nine years old and she coughed up half your harbor."
A fishwife in the crowd muttered something and shifted her basket.
An old man in a fisherman's cap pushed through the front of the crowd and I knew him at once.
Stavros had found me on this beach ten years ago.
He climbed down the steps without a word, stripped off his coat, and put it around Zoe's shoulders.
"Take her up to my loft," he said.
I was already turning toward the stairs when the sky above the quay went the color of slate.
The first drops hit the stones.
Then the crowd parted, and Kyros walked down the quay with rain running off his dark hair.
He did not look at Zoe first.
He looked at me, and at the people watching me.
"Melina," he said. "It was a swim. Don't make a scene in front of the town."
I stood in the shallows with my daughter's wet face against my neck.
"You said you would take her."
"Something came up."
"You said it to her face. She waited a year."
"I said I would meet her. Ligeia was there. She was safe."
"She was held under the water."
"Briefly. It's the law, and it had to happen sometime."
Zoe lifted her head off my shoulder.
Her teeth were chattering, but her voice carried to the back of the crowd.
"He's not my father, Mama."
Kyros went still.
"He's just Lord Kyros," Zoe said. "He didn't even come."
Nobody on the quay said a word.
The rain came down harder, and I understood that it was his.
He had never once raised his voice to us, but the sea followed his temper, and the harbor had started to heave.
I looked at the man I had slept beside for four years.
He still hadn't asked if she was cold.
So I took my daughter and left.
I climbed the steps with Stavros at my back and did not turn around.
Behind me, through the rain, I heard Ligeia's voice drop low and quick, meant for his ears alone.
"Kyros. She was under for a full minute, and she came up asking about her shoe."
A pause followed, and I stopped on the top step.
"She breathed down there," said Ligeia. "You know what that means."
Kyros did not answer her.
He did not deny it either.
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