Free The Poisoned Crown by Amanda Hemingway

of the sky, clouds were piling up, great thunder-heads swelling visibly, rank on rank of them, like mountain ranges marching across the sea. The sun was swallowed up; a wind came scurrying before the storm, whipping the waves into restless peaks. But the whales did not vary their pace, heaving and sinking to the same steady beat. A dark rain came slanting down; thunder drums drowned out the whalesong. Purple lightning stabbed at the wave caps, foiled by the salt water. A stem of cloud came writhing downward, sucking the sea into its vortex, until sea and sky were joined by a whirling cord as thick as a giant’s arm. The water seemed to be flowing up it, feeding the storm-heart.
    Then Nathan saw the Goddess.
    He could not tell if she was solid or phantom, vapor or water, but it made no difference: she was terrible. Her upper body seemed to spout from the wavering column of the tornado, filling the sky, a pale cloudy shape with billowing hair that mingled with the thunderheads and lightning eyes. Her arms were stretched wide as if to draw the whole ocean into her embrace; the storm flowed from her fingertips. This was the Goddess who had eaten the islands, destroying all human life, who had made Widewater into a sea without a shore—the Queen of the Deep, ruler of maelstrom and tempest, an elemental with no soul andno heart, made of rage, and power, and greed. Even as he was, without form or substance, Nathan feared her.
    Not just because she was a goddess. Because he knew her …
    She bent down over the whale pod; he seemed to hear her voice like a giant whisper on the wind.
Lungbreathers!
The whales dived, eluding her cold grasp—all save one, the larger of the two calves, who hung back from curiosity, or because his reflexes were too slow. Her long fingers spanned his back, and the sea plucked him away from the others— away and away—sucking him into the storm, rolling him in the waves, spinning him into the tumult of the tornado. Nathan followed, drawn in her wake, closing his mind against the nightmare of engulfing water…
    Long after, or so it seemed, the sea was calm again. The morning sun shone down through the water onto a coral reef flickering with smallfish. The young whale was coasting along its border, now far from family and friends, seeking the currents that would lead him back to the north. Then Nathan saw the fin cutting the water, just one at first, then another, and another. Following him. Circling. Nathan didn’t want to watch anymore, but the dream would not let him go, not till the sea exploded into a froth of lashing bodies, and the red came, pluming up through the foam. Then at last it was all over, and the sea was quiet, and the finned shadows flicked and circled, flicked and circled, while the stain thinned like smoke on the surface of the water, vanishing into a vastness of blue.
    Nathan sank out of the dream, and once again he thought he was drowning, plunging into a darkness without air or breath. He struggled in a growing panic, fighting against the familiar asphyxiation—and then he was in bed, breathing normally, and there was a hand on his forehead. A hand that felt unnatural, cold and leather-smooth. A hand in a glove.
    The hand was withdrawn, and when it returned it felt like skin. Nathan’s eyes were shut, but a picture formed in his head: the Grandir in his protective clothing, with his white mask and black gauntlets. It was an oddly comforting image. He found himself thinking about skin, human skin, the softness of it, its coolness and its warmth, the intimacyof its touch. Only a flimsy layer between hand and brow, between sense and senses, between heart and heartbeat. Animals had hide and scales and fur, feathers and down, protection and insulation. But humans wrapped themselves in a tissue-thin covering so transparent the blood vessels showed through, so fragile it might puncture on a leaf edge or a blade of grass, so sensitive it could feel the lightest pressure, from the