The door guards outside of Ellian’s quarters were among the ones recruited to Pastian’s search. To Ezra, their absence only meant that there would be no guards to overhear this particular conversation.

Ezra had no need, and no desire for stealth. He didn’t worry about the locks, instead ripping off the doorknob with a loud grinding snap!

He poured himself into the prince’s room, ready for fear and confusion, only to be met with the prince’s sloppy snores.

It seemed the young imbecile hadn’t seen fit to share the luxury quarters with his escorts, leaving him entirely unprotected. Ellian was arranged in an anatomically impossible position on the sponge bed. He made odd whimpering grunts in his sleep at the noise, but did not wake, even when Ezra lighted above his postered bed. Waiting like a spider ready to pounce, he watched a stream of drool waft from the prince’s mouth over a peaked night cap that lolled halfway off his head.

Ezra curled a lip. What are you, still a hatchling?

A guttural hiss sound from somewhere in Ellian’s pillows.

“Not so unprotected after all,” Ezra muttered, as a lemon-colored moray raised its head from its place snuggled on Ellian’s pillow. “But still, just a pet.”

Ezra strangled the creature’s hiss with one of his tentacles before it could take another breath. Then he descended on the prince before the eel could so much as bare its teeth.

Ellian woke with a gasp when Ezra’s tentacles seized his tail, and his hands wrapped around his throat.

“What have you done?” Ezra enunciated every syllable by knocking the prince’s head against the headboard—hard.

“Gah—guards!” Ellian choked out when his eyes managed to focus on what was in front of him.

Ezra blew a stream of hot bubbles into the prince’s face through his sneer.

“What guards, boy? You’ve given them away to the service of Titus’ barracks like a trusting hatchling fool!”

Ellian’s eyes darted to the empty doorway, where one of the doors hung loosely on one of its remaining hinges. He swallowed against Ezra’s loose grip.

“Release me, King Ezra,” Ellian said with all of the imperial force of a backwater clam. “King Titus’s guards will hear you, and then where will you be?”

“Right here to snap your neck,” Ezra growled. “Titus’s guards are off searching every corner of the ocean for Ayalina. You’ve managed to lose the princess I practically served you in wedding tresses—and you’ve done it in less than one night.”

It took several long, dull moments for Ellian to understand what Ezra was saying. Then, it took another few pregnant pauses, and a whole weighted minute for the fear to register as he realized how completely alone he was with an angry cecaelian king.

“Princess…Princess Aya? Gone? But you said before—you told me she would—Where is she?” he spluttered.

“That’s what you’re going to tell ME, you irritating little slug!” Ezra let go of Ellian’s chin, and threw him back down onto his sheets, where he would have landed on his pet if it hadn’t scuttled away under the pillow.

The pet is smarter than his master, Ezra fumed, seizing the prince again.

“I won’t ask again! What. Did. You. Do?” This time, he let his lower limbs do the work, folding his arms coldly above the rattled prince as he knocked him against the wall.

Ellian’s mouth gaped like a fish out of water, but came out of his rattled state quicker than Ezra expected.

“I proposed to the princess. She promised to marry me.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean, what else? I did what was requested of me! No more! So you can take this—this whatever it is, and go and find my princess! Are you absolutely sure she’s gone? Mermaids flit about for all sorts of reasons. Bragging to their friends. Daydreaming. Shopping—”

Ezra growled, showing a mouthful of pointed teeth to their fullest.

Ellian swallowed.

“Chief Pastian was under the impression,” Ezra snarled, “that you’d had a run in with a cecaelian intruder just before the engagement was announced. This just after you bragged to the whole ballroom about murdering one of mine in cold blood. Now, your lovely fiancée—a highly valuable magical seer—is missing! Somehow, I fail to see the room for coincidence.”

“The intruder was carted away to the palace cells!” Ellian protested, wriggling for room under Ezra’s grip.

“You believed that one merman could lock away a cecaelian?” Ezra spat. “The intruder never made it past the door guard to the holding box! The guard in question has disappeared.”

At last, Ellian seemed to grasp the full scale of the danger he was in.

“It was the cecaelian apprentice!” he gasped. “The sea witch had him brew the potion that you told her to make, and he came to stop me from using it. Nothing but seller’s remorse—”

Ezra’s eyes widened in horror at his blatant stupidity.

“Do you mean to tell me that the cecaelian boy, the one that I told you specifically not to antagonize, was here in the palace?”

Ellian shrugged, trying to seat himself in a more dignified position on the bed, and only managed to make himself look trapped. He nodded, glaring.

“And that he is somehow, completely unconnected to the boy you bragged to the whole ballroom about killing?” Ezra clarified.

Ellian blew hot bubbles at that.

“Of course not! There was a cecaelian on the reefs who heard me asking directions to the Leviathan’s Grotto. I killed him so that no one could track what I was doing—on your orders, by the way! There’s no way to trace it back to me. I left a squid hook in his side and made it look like a service hunt! One of my masterpieces. You might be comfortable leaving loose ends, but I am not,” the prince huffed.

Ezra shook his head. “Titus says that Ayalina rejected your proposal. Why was the betrothal announced at all?”

“Like I said, I used the potion the sea witch made.”

“Clearly there was something wrong with it if the maker tried to stop you from using it. Had you considered that?” Ezra snapped. Cirrina was a professional. She would not have interfered in her own product usage for the sake of reputation, alone.

Ellian crossed his arms over his chest, and might have been trying to look stern, or royally overbearing, but only managed to make himself look like a petulant guppy in his floppy sleeping cap.

“The potion worked fine.”

The king glared. “Clearly.”

The eel prince struggled briefly against the hold of Ezra’s tentacles.

“I’ve told you all I know!” he protested. “There was an eavesdropper. I dealt with him. I bought a potion to make the princess love me. I used it. There was an intruder. I had him arrested. That’s all.”

“What kind of potion?” Ezra tightened his grip to push Ellian’s limbs farther down into the mattress. He stropped struggling. “My advice to you was to buy some relaxer tonic to make the princess receptive to your nonexistent charm while you made your suit. Don’t lie to me! Potions don’t make you fall in love. What did Cirrina really give you?”

The eel prince shrunk into himself. “The witch gave me something to make her think she loved me. It accomplishes the same purpose as any tonic. I don’t see how that’s much different.”

His jaw fell open. “You purchased a mind-meddle? What in the trenches did that cost—no, don’t tell me, I should have wondered where that hideous royal birthmark had gone. And now Cirrina can plaster a mark on the face of whatever merman comes her way as the true birth heir of your position. Did you think of that? No?”

Ellian only shrugged and yawned, and Ezra had to fight the very real temptation to knock him into a wall.

“She won’t have the time. Once I’m married, the love potion will be permanent and so will my hold be in both kingdoms.”

Ezra raged. All this spoiled brat thought about was himself, and not even in the right way!

“Losing your position is the least of your worries, boy! In the same week, you’ve lost your royal marker and managed to muddle the mind of the most intelligent tool who ever could have served your kingdom—permanently.” Something deep in Ezra felt the loss of Princess Ayalina as keenly as he would any family member—and he had so few of those left. Adriatta would be devastated and confused, if he could ever summon the gills to tell her why her sister was so different. The princess herself would have lost all autonomy. Forever.

The future queen had let herself become a pawn against his own warnings, and it was partially Ezra’s fault.

“I can run my own kingdom,” the prince huffed obstinately, pulling Ezra’s attention foolishly back on himself. “The princess would have served her purpose and larked about with the rest of the palace women—and she still will.”

Ezra had suggested Prince Ellian as a suitor primarily to get Ayalina out of the kingdom, but at the same time the bright-eyed little princess would have handled Ellian just fine. Without question, she was his intellectual superior. It would have only been a matter of time before she ruled more than Ellian did. Then, she could have won over her prince as well as she did anyone else. She might have been happy. She might have been many things. Ezra was angry at the imbecile’s blatant misuse of his princess. He was angry that he felt the pain of her loss. He lost what was left of his control.

He snatched Ellian up with one tentacle, and clotheslined him around one of the bedposts as easily as throwing a dishrag. The prince flopped to the floor with a pained grunt.

Ezra loomed over him, pinning him to the sharp mosaic tiles he seized the prince’s tail again, twisting him so that the tiles chafed his scales just-so. Ellian screamed like a newborn hatchling, and started to call for his pet eel before Ezra clamped a tentacle down over his mouth.

Ellian’s eel maintained its frightened position under the pillows, hissing uselessly.

“Your pet is smart enough not to save you,” Ezra hissed, seething. Ellian’s eyes bulged under the pressure. “Why did the princess run away then, if she was under the influence? Pray. Tell?”

The prince looked as though he was trying to say something, and Ezra lifted his tentacle from his mouth just long enough for him to spit it out.

“I don’t know why,” Ellian half-gasped, half-snarled. “She was in love with me all evening. Believe me, I know the signs.” With that, Ellian gave an almost compulsory flip of his perfect golden hair, managing to knock his night cap off in the process.

Suddenly, Ezra felt the tiniest bit of remorse for Ayalina’s experience the prior evening.

“She was in love with me, and then we announced the engagement. It doesn’t matter if she likes me or someone else—”

In the name of self-preservation, Ezra tuned out of Ellian’s ramblings. Something about what Ellian had told him pricked at his senses as the pieces of the eel’s disastrous actions fell into place.

“A moment,” Ezra held up a finger to silence the prince. “An apprentice of the witch came to stop you. The potion didn’t work as it should. This more than a day after you visited the cavern.…Did you say you left a squidhook in the boy you killed? As evidence? On purpose?”

Ellian gave a pained nod.

The king gave a pained breath.

“And what did this boy look like—not the apprentice who came to stop you, the eavesdropper.”

Ellian screwed up his face unattractively, evidently tyring to remember.

“He was a cecaelian.”

If murdering this prince wouldn’t immediately start a war with the Aegean, Ezra would have done it right then.

“Green tentacles. Then clear. Then red. Quite fast. Had gray hair…”

Ezra groaned. There weren’t many Cecaelia that young on the reefs, and only one whom he knew.

Ezra moved his face closer to the prince’s, sure to give him a view of each of his pointed teeth.

“What if I told you, young imbecile, that no one in this kingdom uses squid hooks, and that practice is solely the practice of your lovely Aegean?”

Ellian took a pained breath.

“And?”

“Meaning that you couldn’t have made it clearer who was responsible for the cecaelian boy you murdered—yes, murdered!—if you had danced naked at the scene, shouting ‘murderous-bastards-are-here-again!’ That boy was of no consequence as an eavesdropper because plenty of mer-folk have to ask directions to that blasted cavern. Now, however, he is of great consequence, because he was the ward of the sea witch you just signed a piece of yourself over to in a magically-binding deal. You’ve killed a boy she has raised as a son!”

“That doesn’t explain why her first apprentice was in the palace and not herself,” Ellian argued pointlessly.

“She didn’t have to!” Ezra bellowed into the prince’s face, spitting. “Thanks to the information he would have gotten for her, the sea witch you dealt with now knows not only your face, but your weaponry, your origin kingdom, and your purpose here in the palace, with enough blackmail to get you thrown into a box for the rest of your miserable existence. That cecaelian who came to collect the princess was hers, and that doesn’t tell you anything?”

He lifted his tentacle once more for the prince to speak.

“She wouldn’t attack me,” the prince scoffed when Ezra removed the tentacle. “The witch would only implicate herself!”

“Which is why she won’t, and didn’t,” Ezra felt as though he was having to explain bubbles to barnacles. “She doesn’t have to! Cirrina won’t go through Titus or his methods at all. Do you really think she’ll be content to see you humiliated by the High King?”

“She would never—”

“The things that woman can do to you, boy, would confound the chief ethicists for centuries to come, and since she already has a piece of you, you can only pray that she never finds you again.”

“You still need me,” said Ellian confidently, jutting his chin up at an uncomfortable angle. “Cirrina said that the potion would take full effect in three days. I still used it properly. Ayalina love me. She’ll still marry me. You need me to.”

“Then where is the princess, now?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can find anyone. The wedding will still happen, on my scales as a tracker!”

“It had better, little prince. Because if it does not, you lose my protection. And when Cirrina gets her tentacles on you, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

With a final cathartic slam of the prince into the floor, Ezra knocked the air from Ellian’s gills long enough for a parting instruction.

“Since you like to play with magic, take this.” Ezra forced the tracking sphere into Ellian’s hands.

“What—”

“This very valuable trinket will take you to your princess. Do not lose it. Pastian’s and Kael’s men leave for the official search at dawn, the sightless inbreds. You’ll be leading them, if you have a spine in your gut.”

Ezra flew from the room. Behind him, the sounds of Ellian collecting his weapons clattered after him.

Good.

Guards nearly all removed from the palace. Princesses all slotted to leave, or already gone… Ezra would have had to be blind to miss this opportunity.

Princess Ayalina was one pawn of many. Unfortunately, Ellian was the best he could offer her at the moment. For now, there were other, bigger pieces that needed to be moved before Titus’ greater forces returned to the palace.

As quickly as the opportunity presented itself in its fullness, a plan was forming in Ezra’s grasp. If he acted now, he still had a chance to get the bident of Atlantis away from its tyrant for good.

King Ezra had panic to stir in the ambassadors, a pair of princesses to evict, a king to kill, and some unlucky soul to implicate—all before the white eclipse in three days.