He Left My Daughter With His Ex, So I Left the Sea King novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: The Harbor Goes Dry

I had lived beside that harbor for ten years, and I had never seen its floor.

It lay open in the noon light, grey and shining, all the way out to the reef.

The fishing boats leaned on their sides in the mud.

Fish flapped in the shallows that were not shallows anymore.

Half the town stood on the quay in silence, with buckets and nets, and a child was crying somewhere.

"It's been going since dawn," said Stavros. "It didn't come back at the turn.

The old men say they've never seen it. The water's not gone out. It's been called."

"By who?" I said, though I knew.

The answer came up out of the mud.

Every tide pool on the flats gleamed at once, and a woman's voice spoke from all of them, soft and warm.

"Good people of Port Karyos."

A fishwife next to me put a hand over her mouth.

"I am sorry for the inconvenience," said Ligeia. "I hold the tide-key of this bay. I have held it for three hundred years, and the court has taken my seat but not my key.

The sea will stay where it is until the court gives me what I am owed."

"What are you owed?" shouted a man in the crowd.

"A queen who was already dead," said Ligeia pleasantly. "If Halia walks into the open sea at the reef, I will bring the tide home.

If she does not, I will not, and your boats will rot, and your children will go hungry.

You have until the evening tide."

The pools went dark.

Nobody spoke.

Then, one by one, the heads on the quay began to turn toward me.

I had never in my life been so looked at.

"You don't have to do it," said Kyros, very low.

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