Chapter 1 – The Sea Voyage and the Leviathan
So that, more or less, is how we came to be entered in the magic academies’ world tournament.
The tournament is held somewhere different every year by long-standing rule, and this year it falls on an island out on the frontier. The reason is that the whole thing is the entertainment laid on for the Magic Society’s general assembly, which means the Society’s senior figures, scattered across every country there is, have to be gathered into one venue once a year. The assembly itself is mostly given over to awarding decorations for papers and achievements, and to debating the Society’s more consequential policies. With people coming in regularly from all over the world, moving the venue each year is simply the most convenient arrangement. This is the Magic Society, after all: a collection of eccentrics and oddities, homebodies very much included. Hold it in the same place two years running and some of them will kick up an almighty fuss about it.
For a student, placing well at the tournament proper carries its own advantages. Win the thing outright and you get words of praise and encouragement from the President of the Society himself, which is the sort of distinction that sets up the rest of your life. So: a healthy stimulus for talented students with futures ahead of them. That’s the stated reason the world tournament is run as the assembly’s entertainment, and the tradition goes back to my own day. There’s also a rumor that the Society finds it convenient for its various internal factions to stake early claims on young talent, but never mind that.
Four hundred years ago I was a late bloomer with a great many other things on my plate, so I never did get to compete as a student. Never mind that either.
“A sea voyage… Of all the luck.”
I was up on the deck of one of the luxury liners laid on for people connected to the Magic Society assembly, slumped in a chair and staring at three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon while the world swayed.
“I never would have guessed you were weak to boats, Master…”
Anastasia had been watching me with obvious concern. She handed me water, and I managed a small nod. “Thanks.”
“Honestly, Ephthal. Master and disciple both laid out by a boat… you have to admit that’s a little funny.”
Maria wasn’t wrong. Merlin was down in her cabin at that moment, groggy and flat on her back, while I sat up here putting a great deal of effort into not being sick. A fine showing from the pair of us.
“…The two strongest people alive, undone by seasickness. This is a rare sight.”
Sheryl nodded to herself, chuckling, as though the moment deserved to be savored. The same sleepy eyes as ever; and though she was laughing, her face barely moved. You still can’t tell the first thing about what this girl is thinking from looking at her.
“You’ve always been so…” Sasha said, thoroughly fed up. “Whether your inner ear is weak or merely oversensitive, I couldn’t say.”
I’ve been bad at this since I was a child. There’s nothing to be done about it.
“This one thing I can’t… urgh.”
I fought down whatever had come up from my stomach, and once it had passed I poured the water into me.
“So, obviously Ephthal’s competing in the world tournament too, right?”
“I’m here as a representative of the academy, so yes.”
“About that… This time I want the three of us to be the ones carrying it.”
“Go on.”
“You throwing your weight around at student level feels like cheating, honestly. And besides—”
“Besides?”
Maria, Anastasia and Sheryl glanced at one another and gave a small collective nod.
“We don’t want to be carried by you forever, is what it comes to. We’d like to start by doing the things we can actually do ourselves.”
“…And what’s behind that?”
“We want real combat experience without a guardian standing over us. We’re… mages too. We’ve got the same ambition, to climb to the summit of the art. Or—no. What I mean is we want to be like you.”
Something moved through my chest at the strength in Maria’s eyes.
Calling it my disciples growing up might be laying it on a bit thick. Still, hearing “the ambition to climb to the summit” out of her mouth surprised me and, more than that, made me glad. It’s the emotion that shook Sasha and me once… and shakes us both still, and it’s the wellspring of every kind of strength there is. Once upon a time I longed for Sasha’s power and went chasing after him, and he was never once within reach; the gap between us was hopeless. What the three of them are feeling now must be the same thing I felt then. Only they aren’t treating out-of-reach as a reason to give up. They are stretching their hands out and running after it anyway, and to raise themselves higher they mean to clear the world tournament under their own power, using me as little as they can manage.
That they had arrived at that frame of mind made me happy. Maria especially. If all she cared about was her goal of making the elven village eat their words… then having me win it for her would obviously be the easiest road there is.
“Well. As you three are now… at student level, you might genuinely be the strongest in the world. Only—”
It’s simply true that they can deploy up to about Level 5 under combat conditions. The training they did in that time-warped place before the showdown with the Fire God Emperor counts for a great deal, and beyond all that… I know what they put in day after day.
“Only… what? If you think we can hold our own at the tournament, then that’s all the more reason I don’t want your help this time.”
“No, it’s that there’s a reason I have to win it this time.”
“Um… that’s the… magic aptitude stamina thing?”
“Tracing Bridget’s trail means the Unexplored Territories and the ruins of the ancient civilization, and there’s no way around either.”
“…”
“And there’s another possibility… Maybe the reason the Fire God Emperor never got hold of a way to save Bridget was purely that his power couldn’t physically reach it.”
“…”
“Above all that, though… I’m just an idiot who wants to get stronger. If there’s a way to do it sitting right there, I have to reach for it.”
“…The last part’s fine. But is Bridget-san really that important to you, Ephthal?”
“Sorry?”
I looked over. Maria had tears standing in her eyes, and she looked thoroughly put out about it. Anastasia was exactly the same. Sheryl’s face hadn’t moved at all, but her cheeks were puffed out.
“Er…”
The atmosphere around the three of them was souring by the second. If you drew it in a manga you’d put black auras behind all three, and something in the region of rage was climbing steadily higher… so I changed the subject at speed.
“Besides that—the Sword God Emperor is supposed to be at the tournament’s awards ceremony.”
“The Sword God Emperor?”
“Which is where I intend to beg him to teach me something.”
“Beg him… for what?”
“Swordwork… No—physical enhancement, strictly speaking. The inner mystery of close combat.”
“Physical enhancement?”
“In that field the swordsmen have a head start on us magic people. They’re the close-range specialists, after all.”
“You’re getting him to teach you physical enhancement, not swordsmanship?”
“I’d learn swordsmanship if it were on offer, and I don’t intend to be shy about asking for that either—but,” I said, and shrugged, “footwork, body handling, the sword arts themselves: none of that gets into you overnight. Right?”
“No, that’s fair.”
“Physical enhancement is different, though… That’s magic-power handling.”
Maria clapped her hands.
“True. Swordsmen do have their own particular kind of physical enhancement, and it’s called the foundation of everything and never taught outside the school.”
“Exactly. And when it comes to magic handling I like to think I’m an expert… so once I have the theory I should be able to fold it into how I fight almost immediately.”
“‘Like to think’…? There isn’t a person anywhere in the world above you at it.”
Maria laughed at me, exasperated, but I shook my head firmly.
“You can’t say that for certain. The Fire God Emperor exists, and so does my master.”
That was when a woman’s voice came from behind us.
“The little birds are chirping away, aren’t they.”
I turned. Five people stood there, dressed in what looked like noble clothing under white robes.
“And you are?”
One woman in her early thirties; the other four our own age, mid-teens. A closer look put the four teenagers in the uniform of some magic academy or other.
“I am the headmaster of the Ryushira Magic Academy, an institution of tradition and standing. And you appear to be students of Merlin-san’s Altena Magic Academy.”
Ryushira is a distinguished school. It was old long before my own era four hundred years ago, and you’d hardly need to be me to know the name.
“We are… Which means you’re here for the tournament as well?”
“Just so. And where is Merlin-san?”
“Shut up in her cabin at the moment. Seasick.”
At that, the woman in her thirties, the Ryushira headmaster, went briefly blank. Then her mouth twisted and she doubled over.
“Ha, hahah! Ahahaha! Merlin-san… the demon of the battlefield, Merlin of the Flashing Chains, is seasick?”
I couldn’t see what was funny. The headmaster, however, laughed and went on laughing, clutching her stomach, until there were tears in her eyes. She looked about ready to roll around the deck with it, and all of us just stared.
“Fufu. Well… still, you have my sympathy.”
“Sympathy?”
“An academy led by a battle maniac like Merlin-san… There is a limit to what such a place can amount to.”
She threw her ample chest out and turned a sneer on us.
“I realize this sounds like slander against your headmaster. Do take no offense… it is simply true.”
“Hmm. And what exactly do you mean by that?”
“A combat-obsessed fool who cares for nothing but her own training and cannot be troubled to show her face at the Society, put her in a headmaster’s chair as a sideline and there is no possibility of proper education taking place… That is what I mean.”
Come to think of it, Merlin has never been happy about the post. An honorary position somebody pushed onto her, she calls it… good for nothing but generating pointless errands; she grumbles about it constantly.
“What the Society was thinking, I cannot imagine. An excellent combat mage, certainly. I said until I was blue in the face that this did not make her fit to guide the next generation, that it did not make her an educator.”
There may be something in that… I have to admit. Merlin is hot-blooded and short-tempered, and a natural who does everything on instinct, which makes her hopelessly unsuited to teaching anyone anything. Not that the woman herself has ever spent a moment worrying about whether she’s suited to it.
“And when the very school of her own master, one of the original Four Emperors, has died out, the pedigree tells you everything about her capacity to educate broadly.”
Then, with a “Which means—”, she delivered her verdict.
“—Merlin-san was never suited to it in the first place.”
That part… I can own, honestly enough. Even in my day my school was a strange, narrow thing built around rapid-fire performance, and in the present age simply using the high-level range is difficult; the trick of firing off Levels 6 through 9 in sequence has become impossible. My style of fighting never assumed anything as pedestrian as rapid-firing the low-level range, either. Given the state of magic now… it dying out is no surprise at all.
“So… Before you reach us at the world tournament, do try not to make the same disgraceful spectacle of yourselves you did last time. My own students, in person, will be the ones to finish Merlin-san the educator.”
In short… she had come over here purely to pick a fight, and the wiser course wasn’t to give her one.
Only—what did she mean, the same as last time? Ah. Come to think of it… last time we went out somewhere around the quarterfinals.
I was thinking about that when a scream went up from the bow.
“Kyaaaaaa!”
We ran forward along with the Ryushira party to see what had happened, and there, sure enough—
“Fishmen! A whole pack of them!”
I couldn’t tell whose voice it was. But there were unmistakably several fishmen up on the deck, hauled up out of the sea. About the size of a human being, and looking exactly as the name suggests: slick, glistening hides and bulging eyes that turned the stomach on sight. Out in the water there were dozens more, climbing steadily up the hull as we watched. It wouldn’t take long for them to have the deck.
“Wh-what is this, Master?! What is that?! What are they?!”
“Demi-humans… Or near enough monsters, maybe. Fishmen are called the gangs of the sea: they raid ships for gold and silver and treasure.”
“I understand that we’re being raided! What do we do?!”
Good question. The ship did appear to have some provision for repelling attackers, but the equipment amounted to a launcher-type harpoon of the sort used for whaling, which would be meant for the large sea-beasts. Come to that, I couldn’t see any anti-pirate guards about… or their gear either.
Just then two people came running along the deck toward us, a man and a woman.
“What’s happened, Anastasia?”
“Merlin-sama! Er… who’s the man?”
“The captain of this ship. We fell in together on my way out of the cabin… Now, what’s going on?”
“We’re being attacked by fishmen!”
“I see… Then, captain, how does this ship intend to repel them?”
The captain smiled pleasantly at the question.
“This voyage’s passengers are a gathering of mages, are they not? Students aside, I’m told the chaperones are all first-rate.”
“Meaning?”
“There have been Kraken sightings lately, so we do carry armament for the large sea-beasts. But against pirates or fishmen, the tournament committee’s instruction was that you handle it yourselves. I confess I never expected it to actually happen.”
Merlin nodded, satisfied.
“Meaning I may do as I please?”
“Just as you say.”
“Anastasia! Maria! Sheryl! These are exactly the sparring partners you need. We will not lift a finger. Begin the intercept!”
Maria made a complicated face at the order.
“Weren’t you flat on your back with seasickness a minute ago, Merlin-sama?”
“Where there’s a battlefield, poor condition isn’t an excuse available to me. At any hour, in any place… if it’s a battlefield, I’m in the best condition of my life.”
“And how’s Ephthal’s condition?”
“Where there’s a battlefield, that excuse isn’t available to me either. My seasickness is long gone, obviously.”
Maria shrugged at me, thoroughly unimpressed.
“…Honestly… You two are alike right down to this, aren’t you.”
And so, with a wry smile from me, the fishman sweep began.
⁂
“Level 4: Fire Bomb!”
“Level 4: Ice Edge!”
The Ryushira students had moved first, and their magic swept the fishmen off the deck in swathes. No casualties on our side so far, and the headmaster over there wore an expression of complete ease. She evidently had no more intention of intervening than we did.
“Oh, they’re decent enough.”
“Indeed, Ephthal-sama. This is the world tournament, after all. Prodigies and geniuses gather here from every quarter, as one would expect.”
So far it had looked like easy going, except that the enemy kept swarming up over the rail, and it didn’t take long before the Ryushira students could no longer handle all of them. To be fair, part of that was being unable to use area-effect magic without damaging the ship.
“But there—they don’t have the volume of attacks for it.”
The moment I said it, several fishmen slipped through the net of magic and threw themselves at the students.
“Damn it! One after another!”
“That’s far enough, students. I’ll deal with the rest.”
The other headmaster stepped forward to relieve them and swept the fishmen away with magic of her own, and she kept sweeping until the deck was empty. Then—
“Did you get a proper look at my student’s magic just now, Merlin-san? Level 4 at that age.”
Merlin made a complicated face of her own. Then she called out to the Ryushira students.
“It seems that where you come from, they teach you how to do magic but not how to fight.”
“Excuse me, Merlin-san? Am I being ignored? Or have you forgotten me?”
“I remember the face. All theory and a swollen head, and never once been on a battlefield, if memory serves.”
“A swollen head?!”
“Also… my apologies. The name escapes me.”
“Forgetting my… what an insufferable woman! And what do you mean, how to fight?!”
“You lot! These fishmen are too poor to serve as practice! Disable them with close combat alone!”
Anastasia and the others gave a small nod at the order, and the three of them advanced on the second wave hauling itself over the rail. Anastasia, the magic swordswoman, with her sword; Maria the elf with the knife that sits so well in her hand; and Sheryl, a pure mage, in support, laying Material Guard over the two of them and herself. They went into the pack together and cut their way through it, one fishman after another, moving fast.
“How are they… that skilled…”
“This is what I mean. At my academy we teach, at minimum, what to do when it comes down to a melee.”
“But mages, in close quarters… to this degree—”
The other headmaster was gaping openly.
Well. Anastasia and Maria had the aptitude for it to begin with, so it’s not quite the whole story… though it’s perfectly true that I’m the one teaching them close-combat technique, so it isn’t a lie either. And our academy does put real effort into close-quarters work.
Then, visibly, the fishmen began to slow. Not because anyone had cut them with a sword or a knife, either. The reason being—
“I scattered paralytic on the wind!♪ They’re all slimy, so I thought they’d soak it up nice and fast!”
Anastasia’s smile couldn’t have been brighter, and around us the fishmen began to shriek.
“My trap’s live too. Elf-made rose-thorn leghold, you could call it.”
Exactly as Maria said, the fishmen were bound fast about the legs by her magical implement, Rose Bind. Between the pair of them and their underhanded little arts, every fishman on deck was out of action, and after that it was simply a matter of beating them senseless.
Watching the two of them, Merlin smiled wryly.
“Mind you, Altena does not teach fighting to quite this standard.”
“That… that’s cheating! There’s nothing honorable about this!”
“And what sort of fool makes a scene about being shot in the back on a battlefield?”
“That may be so… but this isn’t the honest way!”
“Unfortunately, I teach the children to survive by whatever means the battlefield requires, and I was taught the same. Which makes this… the honest way to fight.”
The other headmaster was stamping her foot, making a noise like a kettle coming to the boil. Then my breath caught.
Cold sweat down my back. Something felt badly wrong, and I started scanning our surroundings.
“What is it, Ephthal-sama?”
“You haven’t noticed, Merlin?”
“…Noticed what? I see nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. All right, let me ask it differently. You can’t hear this singing?”
“…Singing?”
It had started a little while ago… a song riding on an amount of magic power that had no business existing. That a mage of Merlin’s caliber could fail to notice it filled my head with question marks; I half expected her to tell me she was joking.
“Ah—there’s a siren flying nearby, certainly. Which would mean we’re close to the destination port, I imagine.”
No. That’s not a siren’s voice.
It’s not a voice within any sane range of that word at all. And there was something familiar in it…
Setting that aside… Merlin still showed no trace of wariness. So she genuinely couldn’t hear it. I glanced at Sasha and was, in a sense, relieved: he had gone to a combat footing, and he gave me a small nod.
Nobody else showed any sign of alarm at all. So the two of us were the only ones who could hear it.
That’s strange, though. Grant me that sensing the magic power is a separate matter; the volume of the song alone is considerable… and for nobody else to be hearing it is stranger still.
And then—
“Kraken! A Kraken’s surfaced!”
Fishmen and now a Kraken. What is happening out here?
I looked, and there in the water a few hundred meters off our bow was the shape of an enormous squid. Tens of meters, at a guess. A large specimen even for a Kraken, half the length of this ship, near enough, which meant that if it got hold of us, that was the end. It would take the whole ship down into the deep with it.
Merlin turned her head unhurriedly toward the bow.
“That’s rather beyond the students.”
The Ryushira headmaster worked out what she meant to do and went white.
“Merlin-san, wait! A Kraken takes several companies of a magic corps… no, a whole battalion running ritual magic, to deal with!”
“What are you talking about, woman?”
“What am I…”
“Are you unaware of my record? I annihilated a nation’s magic corps single-handed.”
“What? That’s the sort of battlefield legend that grows in the telling—”
Merlin shrugged, wearily.
“It is fact. And you have been picking a fight with me because I displease you, have you not? Analyzing your opponent’s strength is the first principle of fighting.”
She left it there, as though the woman weren’t worth another word, and made to walk past her.
“Wait, we are not finished—”
“That attitude is precisely why I cannot be bothered to remember your name.”
Then Merlin leaned in and spoke by my ear, very quietly.
“A question, Ephthal-sama.”
“What is it, Merlin?”
“Would you mind if I handled it? Ephthal-sama no longer has any reason to avoid standing out… and if you wished to make a name for yourself, this is an ideal opportunity.”
Fair enough, as far as it goes…
I’ve kept my identity hidden all this time, and underneath it was wanting a quiet life at the academy: wanting, specifically, to do my research on magic aptitude in peace. That particular problem is admittedly cleared now.
“No, I’m fine. You go ahead and take care of it, Merlin. Standing out for no reason is still a bad idea. If I ever need the fame there are any number of ways to get it, and now isn’t the time.”
Frankly, rank and honors don’t interest me. Becoming a duke, becoming the Thunder God Emperor four hundred years ago. Those were byproducts of grinding away at magic. The honest version is that I rampaged around and found I’d become those things along the way. It’s also true that there’s no more need to hide, so if it becomes necessary I intend to go all out. Only… when the situation is one Merlin can handle, there’s nothing to be gained by me making it bigger and more complicated than it is.
“Then… without delay.”
And there she looked out across the water, and the words died in her throat.
“The situation has changed for the worse. What shall we do, Ephthal-sama?”
Out beyond the bow… throwing up a wall of spray, an enormous sea-beast had come up out of the deep and into the air.
Comfortably over a hundred meters. As it rose it swallowed the Kraken whole, then fell back into the sea in another burst of spray, and when it surfaced again it flew, by flight magic or something like it. I don’t follow the mechanism, but it came at us skimming the surface of the water.
The moment it started toward us, screaming broke out all over the deck, and the Ryushira headmaster went straight down on the boards, her legs gone from under her.
“After a Kraken… that can’t be… the legend… it’s over… it’s all over…”
No wonder Merlin was troubled. The Ryushira headmaster’s collapse was about the only sane reaction available. Hardly anyone on this ship was looking at that thing without the word despair in their head.
“Looks like I’ve got no choice but to step out.”
Over a hundred meters of body. A hide as black as a whale’s, with human arms and legs… Human in shape, in fact, in the plainest sense, except for a head so grotesquely oversized it could swallow a Kraken.
That monster’s name—
They call it the Genocider.
They call it the Sea’s Titan.
They call it a slaughter-weapon of the ancient magical civilization.
Its name is Leviathan, and it’s defined, factually, as the strongest living thing in the sea. Even four hundred years ago it was rated a calamity-class monster. In the present age… a single nation might just about manage it by throwing in everything it had.
I’ve never faced one myself. This wasn’t going to be easy.
So: to the giant skimming the waterline—
“Level 10: Thunder God Emperor Ephthal!”
No holding back. Straight out of the gate, my signature move, at full power.
“Good!”
Monsters are monsters in the end. At the root of it they’re not much different from animals. There was no sign of a defensive formula going up, and it was dead center in the path of a clean hit. Take a Level 10 of mine square on and even a calamity doesn’t walk away from it.
“Th-that… Merlin-san’s companion… what he just used… L-L-Le… Level 10? Don’t tell me your school teaches Level 10?!”
“That we do not teach. Rather… I could not teach it.”
The Ryushira headmaster was talking gibberish. She had gone past astonishment into open-mouthed panic.
Never mind her. The Leviathan.
Maybe this settles it here—
—Oh, you have got to be joking.
It dove. The bastard dove, half a breath before the lightning hit.
So the lightning came down on open ocean with a hell of a noise and, predictably enough, didn’t finish the Leviathan. Seawater is loaded with electrolytes… sodium in short, so it conducts. But there’s a great deal of seawater, and the wider the area, the higher the resistance climbs. The upshot is that the range over which the current stays strong enough to do real damage is limited, and as things stood almost nothing had reached the thing.
“Hmm. Struggling, for once? Shall I lend a hand, Ephthal?”
“Sorry, master, this isn’t a situation that needs you sticking your neck out.”
“Then you’ll blow it away with your Level 11?”
“Sorry again. Magic aptitude wide open with a five-minute limit isn’t what this situation needs either. You keep a trump card back until there’s a place to spend it.”
“Then what will you do? There’s not much time. And I have no wish to get wet when the ship is broken…”
He had a point about the time. Distance between us, by eye: two hundred meters. A body that size hits us at speed and a ship like this one is finished.
“Captain! That harpoon… the whaling gun. Can you fire it?”
“Ah—yes! We can… but I can’t imagine it doing anything against that!”
“Just fire it! I’ve got a way to win!”
“A way to…”
“The aim can be garbage! Get it pointed roughly the right way and I’ll steer it in with wind magic and it’ll hit!”
The captain thought about it for a fraction of a second, said “A Level 10 caster…” to nobody in particular, and ran for the whaling gun.
“I’m certain it won’t work, but I’ll fire on faith!”
He worked the mechanism and the gun went off, and the harpoon, trailing its steel wire, buried itself in the Leviathan. It showed no sign of having been hurt. It came on at us without so much as noticing.
—A hundred meters left.
“Right. Now you can’t run and you can’t hide.”
I thrust my right palm out toward it and put up a second Level 10.
“Level 10: Thunder God Emperor Ephthal!”
The Leviathan sank below the surface again to dodge the strike. Which was useless, because I hadn’t aimed at the Leviathan. I had aimed at the harpoon buried in it, or to be exact… at the steel wire running from that harpoon back to the ship.
The lightning came down with the same shattering noise, tore along the wire and into the Leviathan, and the feedback through it was solid. And then—
“…Huh?”
What floated up to the surface wasn’t the Leviathan’s corpse. It was the Kraken’s.
The impact had been real. And a lightning strike delivered from a harpoon inside its own body… Anything that lived through that would be well past being called a monster. On top of which… that Kraken carcass had to be the one the Leviathan swallowed a minute ago.
“What in the hell, master?”
“Don’t ask me. I’ve no idea.”
Sasha and I looked at each other.
And in my head, the singing I’d been hearing went on and on.
⁂
“Bringing down a Kraken alone… It seems the legends about you were true after all, Merlin-san.”
Things had gone slightly strange, and the main reason was that the Leviathan’s corpse was nowhere to be found.
The conclusion everyone landed on was that a siren had been flying nearby and its song had put us all into a hallucination, meaning we’d collectively panicked over nothing. That became the mood of the place, somehow. Except that nobody had actually heard a siren singing, which makes that conclusion a considerable stretch. Then again, a Leviathan appearing when there hasn’t been a confirmed sighting in a century, to say nothing of a Level 10 being cast, is a far bigger stretch… So that’s where it landed.
For my part I’ve no intention of hiding what I can do any more, and equally no intention of standing out for nothing. So if that was where everyone was… I went along with the version they were all reciting, the one where Merlin killed the Kraken.
“Also, Merlin-san.”
“What?”
“In close combat… the children at your academy really are the better of the two, it seems. I’ll grant you that.”
“Hmm…?”
“Mind you, with a Kraken I might have managed something by concentrating fire with my students. Not as neatly as you did, though.”
“…What is it you want to say?”
The Ryushira headmaster put out her right hand toward Merlin.
“Rivals of a high standard are no bad thing for the children either. I don’t intend to give ground at the tournament, but I see no need for us to be at each other’s throats. I acknowledge you.”
I still felt the whole thing had been one-sided from the start… and there were still barbs in the corners of what she said. But Merlin, wry smile and all, met the offered handshake with a handshake, so I decided to keep out of it.
“You… Your name?”
“Rieju. Rieju Macamin. Don’t forget it again.”
“I shall make an effort.”
And there, out past the horizon, land came into view. That felt like the end of the affair, more or less…
Except that when I glanced at Sasha, he had evidently been thinking the same thing I was, and gave a small shake of his head.
That singing.
I really do feel like I’ve heard it somewhere.
And that ruinous song, the one that called the Leviathan up out of the sea—
—it would be a little while yet before it overlaid itself, out of the far distance of memory, on the sound of Bridget singing.