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  There were shouts of ‘No!’ and ‘Yes!’ simultaneously, while I wiped the disgusting spit off my face.

  ‘But he is to have the first child. Perhaps it’s meant to be?’ shouted a woman from within the crowd. Others nodded in agreement.

  ‘It’s a sign,’ a man shouted.

  ‘Marko doesn’t even wear his crown,’ shouted another, and again more heads nodded in agreement.

  ‘And he hasn’t visited the markets to try our produce in months. Maybe it is time for a new king,’ said a man whom I recognised as one of the grocers from the markets.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I shot back at him. The man pretended he didn’t hear me. I turned to face the crowd. ‘I’d rather a king who is too busy looking after his city to try the local produce than a murdering, cruel man who likes to cut women up and toss their bleeding bodies in the alleyways of the Underworld!’

  Svetla’s brothers lunged at Damir. One managed to punch him in the jaw before they were both wrestled to the ground by guards.

  The crowd turned mad as some swore fealty to the new king and others to Marko.

  ‘Lauren!’ I shouted. ‘You can’t do this.’ I seized her hand and tried to drag her away from Damir, but he severed my grasp and shoved Lauren behind him. ‘She’s pregnant with my baby, and if you stress her out I’ll…’ he paused and licked his lips, ‘well, maybe not kill you; but I’ll hurt you plenty.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid; she’s my sister,’ said Lauren. ‘You wouldn’t dare hurt her.’ She frowned at Damir and dragged me to the side of the house and away from Marko and Jonathan, who were engaged in battle with Damir’s men.

  ‘Lauren, you have to stop this…stupidity. Damir cut up a girl and threw her in an alleyway like she was rubbish. The man is sick, and has a weird thing for mermaids.’ I shuddered. ‘I don’t know how you can even stand to kiss him, let alone have sex with the guy!’

  Lauren narrowed her gaze. ‘You’re just jealous because I’m getting all the glory and it looks as though I’ll be the one bunking it up in style in Marko’s room—the royal room—with Damir.’

  ‘Marko!’ I abandoned Lauren and bolted to the front of the cottage, where Marko and Damir lay on the ground wrestling each other with their bare hands. Several guards, including Jonathan, hovered above them, blades drawn, ready to help their king—whoever that was.

  In the end it was Sylvia who bent down and placed a dagger first to Marko’s throat and then to Damir’s. Both brothers, their breathing laboured, stared up at their sister as though she’d gone insane.

  ‘Damir, release Marko. Marko, release Damir.’

  Marko’s eyes were dark and full of hurt as he stared up at the woman who had mothered him since he was a baby—the woman who was now holding a knife to his throat as though he meant nothing to her.

  ‘Damir, rise up.’ He did so, and it suddenly became clear to me that it wasn’t Damir who was calling the shots. Sylvia was the one in control.

  ‘We have a new king!’ she announced to the people.

  The crowd cheered. However, less than a minute later, several fights broke out. It was then I realised that there were more guards than only Jonathan and Robbie who still sided with Marko, and they weren’t going down easily.

  After watching on with a sick, amused grin, Damir soon yawned. ‘Leave the wretched and follow me home,’ he ordered his men, and they, along with Lauren, Sylvia and all the other sheep in the city, left us behind.

  Silence seeped into the air around us as the cheers and singing began to fade down the hill and away from Robbie’s cottage.

  Marko, still on the ground, stared up at the sky, his expression frozen in shock. He looked broken, like a branch torn from a tree, snapped and then tossed to the ground.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I groaned at the stupidity of my question. He’d just been stripped of his crown. Of course he wasn’t okay.

  He continued to stare at the blackness of the Pacific Ocean above us, his breathing laboured and his eyes faraway.

  ‘What should I do, Marko? Tell me.’

  He rolled onto his front and held his head in his hands, his back rising and falling. I didn’t know whether to put my arms around him or let him be.

  ‘Marko!’ Jonathan came running from the cottage, his eyes wide.

  ‘We’ve found Robbie, and he’s hurt!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  MARKO SCRAMBLED TO his feet and ran to the cottage, bursting through the door. I followed close behind him.

  Tears came to my eyes when I spotted Robbie.

  Lily, her long, wispy hair hanging over her face like a golden veil, was bent over, untying the ropes that bound Robbie to the chair.

  His head was hanging forward, and blood dripped down his cheek and trailed down his neck—from his ear. Bile rose to my throat, but I swallowed it down, along with all the bitterness I felt for my sister right now. How could she allow this to happen to Robbie?

  Tears distorted my vision, and I wiped them away. It appeared as though Robbie had been beaten across the side of his head several times, so hard that his right ear was almost unrecognisable. This is what Damir must have done to Marko when he was little. Beat him so hard that he’d lost all hearing in one ear.

  ‘Rob?’ Marko knelt down in front of Robbie and tenderly raised his chin so that he could meet his eyes.

  Robbie raised his head, but said nothing and kept his eyes on the floor.

  I took a cloth, dipped it in a jug of water and handed it to Marko, who, with a gentle hand, pressed it against Robbie’s wounds. Robbie gasped and jerked away, his muscular arms straining against the ropes, which still bound him across his upper chest.

  ‘Here, I’ll do it,’ said Lily, and Marko handed her the cloth before he withdrew a dagger from his side and proceeded to cut the rest of the ropes. When they fell away, I helped Marko remove them, tossing them into a pile beneath the dining table.

  Though he was now unbound, Robbie’s posture remained rigid, from his jaw down to his feet.

  ‘He used his boots,’ Robbie said suddenly, his voice low and gravelly. ‘I had two daggers; he had no weapons, and he still won.’

  Marko crouched down beside Robbie again.

  ‘But you can’t see well, Rob; Damir is the lesser man for fighting—’ He stopped, his cheeks flushing.

  ‘For fighting a blind man; yes, I get it.’ Robbie snorted and brought a hand to his face, his fingers slowly inching towards his ruined ear. ‘And now I’ve got another handicap.’ He winced at the pain, the corners of his eyes tearing up. ‘What’s next? Maybe I’ll fall and smash my nose and lose my sense of smell.’

  Marko sighed and stared at Robbie with shining eyes.

  ‘If you don’t stop talking like this I’ll cut out your tongue and you’ll lose your sense of taste; got it?’ He shook Robbie by the shoulders. ‘You are more valuable than Damir and all his men put together. You’re my best guard and best friend and always will be.’

  Robbie sighed and closed his eyes, his face contorting with pain.

  Lily had finished cleaning the wound, and tossed a now blood-red rag onto the nearby table.

  ‘Is there some medicine in the cupboards somewhere? Something to numb the pain?’ I said, coming to crouch beside Robbie, and recalling his training in medicine and how he’d looked after me when I’d first arrived in Marin and was experiencing terrible side effects from the travelling drugs.

  His dark eyes flickered down to my face. ‘Miranda, I didn’t know you were here.’

  I found his hand and squeezed it. ‘Tell me where to find the medicine.’

  He squeezed my hand back. ‘There is a cupboard above the stove. Take two tablets out of the glass jar with the letter T scratched into the lid.’ He smiled weakly. ‘Thanks. I’m glad you’re here.’

  ‘No worries.’ I squeezed his hand once more before heading into the kitchen and retrieving the tablets he wanted. He gulped them down with a half glass of water I’d poured from a fresh jug.

 
; ‘What about treating the injury? Should we apply a disinfectant? Or bandages?’ My eyes flickered over his ear for a second, and my head felt light at the sight of the dried blood and the split, exposed flesh. I swallowed down the urge to be sick, and gripped the arm of the chair to steady myself.

  ‘Lily knows where they are and how to do it—’ He paused and his unfocused dark eyes moved around the room. ‘Lily?’

  ‘She’s…’ I looked towards the corridor where Lily had disappeared to have a cry in private. ‘Lily?’

  She hurried into the room, her eyes bloodshot and her face red and puffy from crying. Stroking his cheek, she said, ‘I’m right here, Rob.’

  I realised then that she viewed Robbie as more than just a friend, had always done so, and wondered if he returned her feelings. Last year, when I had asked him, he’d implied they were close friends only. But now, watching Lily gently dab Robbie’s wound with antiseptic, cradling his head in her hands and kissing his forehead when he cried out in agony, I wasn’t so sure.

  ‘So where is Damir, now?’ Robbie asked, after Lily had dressed his wound.

  Marko pulled out a chair and plonked himself down, stretching his long legs out before him and rubbing at his eyes with the palms of his hands. A thin red line marked his neck, where Sylvia’s dagger had been. Just to see it made my own neck sting.

  ‘At his castle,’ Marko said in soft, faraway voice.

  ‘Speak up, Marko,’ said Robbie, leaning forward in his chair and pointing to his bandaged ear. ‘I’m like you, now—partially deaf.’

  Marko looked up, his eyes glazed with tiredness. ‘Right,’ he said, and cleared his throat. ‘Damir has gone to his castle.’ He snorted a sigh. ‘Since they want him so badly, I’m in half a mind to let the city have him. They’ll see what sort of a king he is soon enough.’

  Lily, who was in the kitchen stirring what looked and smelled like herbal tea or a remedy of some sort, dropped her spoon, the sound causing everybody to snap their heads in her direction.

  ‘Surely you won’t give up that easily, Marko,’ she said, retrieving the spoon and tossing it into the kitchen sink.

  Marko’s face reddened slightly and a flash of anger illuminated his eyes, making them appear as grey as steel, but the anger was gone as quickly as it came.

  ‘It’s not a question of giving up but of accepting fact. The people of Marin don’t want me.’ He turned his eyes to the ground. ‘If I have to use force and brutality to bend them to my will, then I am no better than my brother.’

  ‘But it can’t be over,’ said Robbie, shaking his head and then wincing with pain. ‘We took Miranda from her family last year in the hope that Damir wouldn’t get his hands on your crown and endanger the people of Marin. We took her, Marko. Fighting back is honourable and just, compared to what we did back then.’

  ‘He’s right,’ I said. ‘Fighting back isn’t being brutal like Damir, it’s what is right. There are too many innocent people at risk here.’ Anne sprang to mind immediately. ‘Now that Damir is king, who knows how many women he’ll hurt or kill to satisfy his mermaid fantasies?’

  Like Lauren.

  A wave of nausea rolled through me. My legs worked the kitchen floor while my heart raced in a panic. ‘I have to get Lauren away from him before he hurts her or the baby.’ I paused and looked at Marko. ‘If there is a baby.’

  Lily took the pot of stewing herbs off the light-crystal-powered stove-top and set it on the kitchen bench. ‘Whether there is or isn’t a baby doesn’t matter. They have at least a few months before she needs to start showing to prove anything to the people. But we don’t have that kind of time.’ She came to stand beside me and lightly nudged my arm with her elbow. ‘We’ll get her back, Miranda; don’t worry.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that. You’d have to drag her from the castle kicking and screaming,’ said Robbie in a knowing way, his cheeks blushing. ‘She won’t be leaving Damir anytime soon. I overheard them making plans for their future together.’ Robbie frowned. ‘Though it’s hard to believe, Damir was gushing about the baby. And he mentioned something about taking Lauren up to the mainland, so that she can visit,’ Robbie’s eyes wandered around the room until they finally landed where I stood, ‘so that Lauren can visit your grandparents, and tell them you’re both safe.’

  He shrugged his naked shoulders, one of them already purple with a deep bruise. ‘But then the man excels at lying. It could have been an act.’

  I sucked in a deep breath and nodded.

  ‘Okay. So we need to plan our attack before they leave for the mainland.’

  ‘Attack?’ Marko half smiled and met my gaze with raised brows. ‘With what army?’

  As if on cue, there came a knock on the front door. I half expected there to be hundreds of people standing there, ready to take on Damir and Sylvia, but when I answered the door I saw it was only Jonathan standing on the welcome mat, alone.

  ‘I don’t mean to intrude. But we need to house the few guards who stayed on before they desert us for the comforts of the castle.’

  ‘So there are others?’ A quick glance over his shoulders into the darkness showed me no-one.

  ‘Eight including me,’ he said, leaning forward to poke his head through the door to nod at Marko. ‘They’re wandering around the greenhouses, getting restless. I figured a good meal and a drink of wine would settle them.’

  Robbie gripped the arms of his chair and attempted to stand, but was too weak to do so and collapsed back into his seat.

  ‘They’re welcome to stay here, Jonny. We’ve got the room. The cottage is small but there are sheds and lots of land, and the greenhouses.’

  Marko sighed dejectedly, and nodded at Jonathan. ‘I suppose eight is better than none.’ He scraped his chair back and stood. ‘Excuse me for a moment; my head is killing me.’

  Lily followed Marko and, from the sounds of their conversation, directed him to the spare bedroom to get some sleep.

  ‘I’m going to get Anne,’ said Jonathan. ‘And bring her back here.’

  ‘Take somebody with you, and be careful,’ I said, before holding my palm up to stop him. ‘Oh, hang on.’ I turned to Robbie and touched the back of his hand to get his attention. ‘A man named Blake has been looking after Anne and hiding her from Damir. Is there something we can give him, to thank him? A bottle of wine, maybe?’

  ‘There’s plenty in the bottom cupboard of the wooden credenza over there.’

  Lily came into the room at that moment and swooped down to select a couple of bottles of red, handing them to Jonathan.

  ‘These are the best ones. Robbie tries to hide them from me,’ she said, throwing a wink at Robbie, a wink he sadly couldn’t see.

  ‘Watch it,’ he responded, with a smile and a shake of his head. The medicine must have kicked in, because he didn’t wince.

  ‘Thanks, Rob,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Take some out to the guards, along with the bread. I’ve got some salted meat stored away.’ Robbie started to get up, but Lily made a tsk-ing sound.

  ‘I’m taking you to bed,’ she said, and at this his smile widened further, into something goofy, like a little boy who’d just been offered a ride on a steam train.

  ‘Hmmm, getting my ear hacked up has its plus side…’ his voice trailed off into a deep giggle.

  ‘What did you give him, Miranda?’ Lily groaned before throwing Robbie’s arm over her shoulder and leading him down the hallway.

  After helping Jonathan feed the guards, I decided to check on Marko.

  In the very last room at the back of the cottage, I found him lying on his back in bed, staring up at the ceiling with his hands crossed behind his head. When he saw me he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  Easing myself onto the bed, I lay beside him in silence—not wanting to disturb him, but just wanting to be near him. In a few minutes, his breathing became deeper and he fell asleep. Turned out I was tired, too, because I woke up some time later, alone in bed, to the sounds o
f lowered voices in the kitchen.

  Walking sleepily down the hall, I paused. The voices were Robbie’s and Marko’s.

  ‘What is the point? Sylvia and Damir together are unbeatable. And if they have all the guards on their side—’

  ‘Not all the guards…’ Robbie interjected, sounding much more alert and serious than before. ‘I still consider myself your guard; a poor one at that, but look how many showed up here tonight. Jonathan said eight; but now there’s about twenty sleeping in the sheds, which means we gained twelve through the night. Who’s to say we won’t have a hundred by tomorrow? Word will get out about Anne. Her parents are good, well-respected people. Nobody will like what they hear.’

  ‘Twenty is not enough. And wishing for one hundred is not the same as having.’

  ‘Listen to yourself. I can’t believe you’re just going to roll over and give up. That’s not the Marko I know.’

  Marko snorted. ‘I am not rolling over. All I want is for the people of Marin to be safe. If I fight, there’ll be bloodshed.’

  Trying not to disturb the conversation, I slipped into the room and sat down as quiet as a breeze. Both men straightened their backs and softened their faces at my arrival. I cleared my throat.

  ‘There’ll be more bloodshed if you let Damir be king. He planned to cut Anne up; sent her to his hideout in the Underworld, to do his mermaid experiment on her. He already did it to Svetla.’ I turned to Marko. ‘She was a maid of yours.’

  He nodded, eyes downcast, his hands curling into fists against the table. ‘She told me she was leaving service to get married. I gave her money for her wedding.’

  ‘Blake, who’s hiding Anne, found Svetla’s mutilated body beside a rubbish bin in the Underworld.’

  Marko furrowed his brows. ‘And who is this Blake?’

  ‘He lives in that mansion across the road from Damir’s old hideout. He’s the one who returned the sun ring last year.’

  ‘I vaguely remember him,’ Marko said, his brain ticking behind his focused eyes. ‘I’ll have to remember to reward him if—no, when, all of this is over.’