Eric looked at her blackly.
And that was when the chef chose to come back in.
“How waz everything?” he asked, clasping his hands together.
Vanessa hurried to pick up her fox and wrap it around her neck. “Quite good,” she whispered.
“Oh! Zat is wonderful. I will attend to ze palate cleanser now…”
The idea of spending another half hour, another ten minutes, another course with Vanessa, made Eric sick.
As soon as the chef was gone Vanessa gave him a nastily patronizing smile. “Don’t fret, darling. I really do have Tirulia’s best interests at heart.”
“I highly doubt that you have Tirulia’s best interests anywhere near what passes for a heart on you.”
“Well, I suppose hearts are a mostly human condition, aren’t they? Especially yours. You’re so full of love and feeling for everyone around you. Your country, your little mermaid, your dumb dog, your butler…Say, speaking of hearts, his is rather old, isn’t it?”
Her words chilled Eric to his bones.
“Hate for anything to happen to it. A man at his age probably wouldn’t recover from an attack,” she said thoughtfully.
“I…I’m not sure how you could arrange that,” the prince stuttered. “Since we just established you don’t perform your witchery anymore.”
“Oh, there are other magics, my dear,” she said coyly. “And things besides magic when one must make do.”
Eric fumed, unable to think of a snappy retort. The dead Ibrian lay like an unspoken nightmare in the middle of their table.
“So while you’re keeping everyone’s best interests at heart,” she continued through clenched teeth, “perhaps it’s best if you stay out of my way. If I so much as suspect you’re helping the little redhead, Grimsby will be dead before the day is out. And if anything should suddenly happen to me, he is also dead. Along with a few others I have my eye on. Am I clear?”
“As seawater,” Eric said, through equally clenched teeth.
And that was how the chef found them, glaring silently at each other, when he came back in with the sorbet. He shifted from foot to foot for a full minute before fleeing back into the kitchens.
Of course her spells didn’t work on land.
Idiot.
She was a sea witch.
The cantrip she had cast over the prince remained because she had begun it in the sea, just like the one for her new body. So too the mass hypnosis she had blown across the sleeping citizens of the land like an ill fog—it had been created while she was in the ocean. Flotsam and Jetsam were transformed while they were still in the shallows. Ursula had also disguised her favorite polyps on her last trip down to the bottom of the ocean when she realized her future lay on land. She had waved a cheery goodbye to the prisoners who remained in her “garden,” selected a few to keep Triton company, cast a quick perceptual slanter on the rest, and never looked back.
Mostly she viewed her current situation as a minor inconvenience that could be handled, like all things and people. It didn’t bother her. Systems where there were prices and balances and choices were the world where she lived, and lived very nicely. It was never a question of what was fair; it was a question of how far you could push the rules.
Of course, then she had found that black-bound book from Carcosa, the one with the complicated circuex that would give her powers she could use on land. While this was still an option, it was a difficult and dangerous undertaking. Only the greatest magics could break the rules of the Dry World and the World Under the Sea.
Only the sacrifice of many, many people would be enough to propitiate the Elder Gods.
And only one very, very rare ingredient could complete the spell: blood that contained within it the might and heritage of an Old God.
Like the body she currently wore, she had kept Triton around for just such an unexpected emergency.
She played with the heavy golden chain she wore under her dress, thinking. Things were in fact getting a tiny bit out of hand in Tirulia. Although the stubborn Iase had been taken care of, his otherwise agreeable replacement wasn’t taken seriously by the king of Ibria. She was still three warships short of the fleet she had promised potential allies. The number of soldier recruits were down this week—the townspeople were growing uneasy about her military maneuvers. There was a mermaid amok in Tirulia, and Ursula’s power over Eric was effectively gone. All she had left were threats and promises.
Every piece of this mess could easily be cleared up with a bit of magic.