64. Zendaya

Chapter 64

Zendaya

S eventy-one corpses. That is how many dead bodies lay aboard the warship flying a Lucin flag. Though I do not retch, my stomach spasms with horror and my fingers ball with anger as I tread across the tacky deck.

Fallon, who was luckily already on her way over to Shabbe when she heard about the boat, closes her fingers around my fist. "I know Meriam, and this isn't something she'd do."

"Um, yeah it is," Kanti says from where she sits high above us on the Amkhuti's embankment, legs swinging, palms flat on the grass as though sunning herself instead of observing a horror show. "Plus, how would the ship penetrate our fortifications and sail down our rivers were it not powered by Shabbin magic?"

When news of the boat spread, Kanti was one of the first Shabbins to traipse out of her abode to take in the spectacle.

"There are other sorceresses who could've floated that boat in," Agrippina counters, while my daughter steadfastly insists, "Meriam wouldn't murder a bunch of innocents, Kanti."

Yet some of the corpses from Behati's vision are there.

Right .

There .

The newborn babe nestled in a scarf knotted around its mother's back. The pubescent boy with a star-shaped birthmark on his jaw. The woman with a tattoo over her heart representing an anchor wrapped in a rope that spells a name— Raphaelle.

They might be dead but they've still got blood in their bodies, Day, Enzo says. It could work.

Seventy-one.

Seventy-one.

Seventy-one…

The number clangs between my temples like a death knoll, springing chills down my spine.

"Lazarus, maybe you could try to heal them with crystals?" Fallon suggests.

"I'm afraid crystals only work when the subject has a pulse, Your Majesty." The giant's sapphire robes flap in a gentle breeze. The lax wind feels discordant with the brutal scene. There should be a tempest, or at the very least, harsh gusts. "But I can try."

He rubs one of the beads hooped through his ear and leans over the babe. We all watch the infant's diaphanous lids, willing them to flutter, willing the child's rosebud mouth to part around a wail.

Nothing.

The healer unfurls his broad body, lips twisted in sorrow. "Perhaps if we sunk the ship and reversed the trajectory of the waterrises, your namesake beasts could be herded into the Amkhuti to try and heal them." The healer squints at the algae-lit Sahklare. "Where are the serpents, anyway? They usually swarm when they scent blood."

"That is odd." Fallon peers over the boat's railing. "Aoife, can you fly and see if you spot any?"

My heart pinches that my daughter cannot just spring off the deck of this ship and take to the sky at will.

"I don't like this." Cathal's apprehensive timbre carries my stare back to the massacre.

"None of us like this, Dádhi." Fallon must've learned that word before the Mahananda removed her Crow magic for she's never once called him anything but that.

"I mean, I've a bad feeling about this." He claps. "I want everyone off the ship."

"Serpents aren't lying in wait beneath the boat to ambush Mádhi and the others," Fallon says.

His dark gaze cuts to hers.

"Wait…you think that's what's happening?" The vein in Fallon's neck swells and strikes harder.

"I don't know what's happening, ínon. I just want everyone back on land." When no one moves, Cathal growls, "Now."

I get to my feet and am about to step away when Reid gasps. He's bent over a wooden barrel, fishing something out of it.

"What is it?" Agrippina traipses over. "Another corpse?"

Her mate straightens, hauling out a broad body clad in black. I suddenly worry it must be a Crow before remembering that Crows can no longer be harmed.

Fallon palms her mouth. It's only once a name tumbles from her lips in a muted whimper that I understand why this cadaver shocks her more than any other.