There would be no battle. The people in the villages had passed down the old stories and they knew this, but the Important Men wouldn’t listen. They claimed that they needed more food, more animals, more fish for the cause. They needed more wood, more glass, more metal, more cloth, more leather.

More men.

“Do not forget,” fathers whispered to sons. “You will come home to us if you do not forget.”

Day after day, the people tended their flocks and their fields. They baked bread and wove cloth. And they traveled the paths to the special places, bringing not only gifts but also precious photographs of their sons.

“He is a good boy. Let him come home.”

There was no answer. But as the villagers returned to homes all along the border of Cel-Romano, the land was filled with a terrible silence.

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 24

Fingerbone Islands

Rising out of the surf that caressed the Fingerbone Islands, she waited a moment, allowing most of the crabs and small fish to spill out of her gown before she made her way to the treasure rooms. There were chests filled with gold coins and tables heaped with necklaces so encrusted with gems she thought of them as rocks covered with colored barnacles.

Coins and necklaces had no particular interest for her, but maps were her delight. To see what she knew in a different way, to see where her kin lived. When she rose to walk on land, maps of any kind provided knowledge and entertainment.

But today she wandered from room to room, looking at what had been salvaged over centuries, and felt no curiosity, no pleasure. The creatures who made these things had been an enemy in the past and were an enemy again. They had killed her Sharkgard. They had killed fish of all kinds with their poison. And for what? To fill their little ships with gold or some other kind of treasure and scurry from one shore to another?

Let them fight among themselves. That was no more significant to her than male crabs maintaining a territory in order to entice a mate. But they had touched her domain, had spilled poison into her waters.

Because the Sanguinati were land predators the Sharkgard respected, she had sent her warning to give them time to withdraw inland. Soon she would strike. But not quite yet. Air said strange noisy things had been flying lately. Ancient Tethys was stirring, roused out of her benign watchfulness of the Mediterran Sea. Even Indeus slapped at the shores that bordered his domain, disturbed by a change of temper in Earth and Air.

Two shores—Thaisia and Cel-Romano. Where was she needed?

Leaving her treasure rooms, she returned to the water and flowed toward the west. The poison had come from Thaisia. She would deal with the enemy there first.

As she followed currents, she listened to the news the Sharkgard and Orcasgard passed along to her. And she waited for the right moment.