Chapter 2: Chapter 2
"Bring him to the Pearl Chamber," Reginella said, turning to her court. "Alone."
A ripple went through the assembled ducks. The scarred guard shifted his weight, but the queen's gaze did not waver. One by one, they bowed and withdrew through an archway of branching coral, their footsteps whispering on the black stone. The last one, an old duck with spectacles of polished clamshell, lingered a moment too long before the queen tilted her head, and he too was gone.
Then it was quiet. The atrium hummed with the sound of the sea pressing against the invisible wall, a low, patient breathing. Reginella gestured toward a doorway hung with curtains of woven silver kelp.
"Come, Donald Duck. You are half-drowned and shivering, and I dislike conducting hospitality on a throne room floor."
She led him through corridors that glowed softly from within, the mother-of-pearl inlays catching their light and throwing it back in slow, rolling waves. His feet squelched on the immaculate floors. Every few steps he left a small, dark puddle, and a silent servant duck appeared behind them with a towel of soft sponge-moss, mopping his trail with grave dignity.
The Pearl Chamber was small and round, lit by a single orb of bioluminescent algae that hung from the ceiling like a captive moon. Two chairs of bent driftwood faced each other across a low table. On the table sat a pot of something steaming. She poured it into a shell cup and handed it to him.
"Kelp tea. It tastes like forgiveness feels. Drink."
He drank. It was warm and briny and strange, and it settled somewhere behind his ribs and spread outward. The shaking in his hands slowed.
"Your Majesty," he said, when he trusted his voice. "I don't... I mean, how did you even know? I was in the middle of the ocean. Nobody knew where I was. Nobody cared."
Reginella settled into her chair, folding her hands in her lap. The starflowers in her gown dimmed slightly, as if sensing the shift in her mood.
"We knew," she said. "We have watched your world for a long time, Donald. We have our ways. Small windows. My people call them the Glass Minnows. Devices we seed along the shipping lanes, in the buoys, on the pier pilings. They show us the surface. The boats, the storms, the harbors full of bright, careless life."
"Cameras?" Donald blinked. "You've got cameras down here?"
"If that is the surface word for them, then yes. Cameras." A small smile touched her bill, then faded. "I confess something to you, Donald Duck. Most of my court finds the surface dreary. Loud. They watch the shipping lanes out of duty. But I have always watched one particular channel."
"A channel?"
"A buoy," she said, and her ocean-dark eyes held his. "Off the eastern pier of your city. It has a Glass Minnow inside it, cracked and half-blind, older than I am. It looks down at a small dock. At a ramshackle blue boat tied there with too many knots and too much paint. It looks at a duck in a sailor suit who comes out most mornings to patch that boat, and argues with it, and loses."
Donald's cup stopped halfway to his beak.
"I have watched you for over a year," Reginella said quietly. "I watched you repaint that boat the wrong color and then repaint it back. I watched you fall in the water twice trying to fix an anchor. I watched you feed the gulls that steal your bait, even while shaking your fist at them. And I thought, there. There is a heart that keeps giving even when the world keeps taking. I thought it the way one thinks about a star. Far away. Beautiful. Not real."
She rose and walked to the chamber's single window, a round porthole of thick crystal looking out into the blue. Schools of silver fish drifted past like slow confetti.
"Then tonight the Minnows on the outer watch flared red. A vessel sinking, and one soul in the water. I sent my guard before the court could finish debating. I do not send my guard for strangers, Donald. The Advisor himself will tell you I never do. But I knew your silhouette before I knew your name."
Donald set the cup down. His hands weren't shaking anymore, but something inside him was, a low hum under the breastbone.
"You knew me," he said slowly. "From a buoy. Before tonight, you knew me."
"I did."
"That's..." He laughed, a short, disbelieving honk. "You know what's funny? I used to talk to that dock. Out loud. When nobody was around. About Daisy, about my uncle, about all of it. I'd say things to the water I couldn't say to anybody with a face."
"I heard every word," Reginella said.
The hum under his ribs went hot and he felt his face burn beneath the feathers. "Oh no. The thing I said about the... in March, when I was mad about the..."
"The tax notice," she said. "You called it a word I had to ask the Advisor to explain. He refused. I looked it up myself." The corner of her bill twitched. "It took me an hour of dictionary work and it was worth every minute."
Donald laughed. It came out ragged and surprised, the first real laugh since the candle went out. She laughed too, a soft, bubbling sound, and the starflowers on her bodice brightened and dimmed with it, like breathing.
Then it was quiet again, but a different quiet. She had not gone back to her chair. She was standing close, by the porthole, the algae-light catching the copper dust on her feathers. He could smell the tea and the sea and something sweeter under it, like flowers growing in a tide pool.
"I should tell you," he said, "that I got thrown out of my house tonight. My girl left with another guy. Took my savings and my car. I got punched in the face and dumped in the ocean and I don't own anything except what I'm standing in." He looked down at his soaked sailor suit. "So if you're expecting somebody impressive, I should probably mention that part now."
"I don't want somebody impressive," Reginella said. "I have impressive. I have a palace full of impressive. I watched a hundred impressive dukes and captains and princes parade through that throne room, and not one of them ever fed a gull that stole from him." She stepped closer. "I want the duck from the buoy. The one who argues with his boat and loses."
"I usually win," Donald said. "About once a year."
"Then you're overdue."
They were very close now. Close enough that he could see the fine grain of her feathers, the deep water of her eyes with light moving in it. His heart was doing something complicated and loud, and the hollow place in his chest, the one Daisy had carved out with her heels and her strongbox, was filling up with something warm before he could stop it.
"I know how this sounds," Reginella whispered. "We met an hour ago. It's absurd. I am a queen, and I am telling you that I have been waiting a year for a drowning sailor."
"It sounds crazy," Donald agreed. His voice came out low and rough. "But I felt it the second I saw you on that shell thing. Like I'd been swimming toward this my whole life and just didn't know the address."
"Made for each other," she said. "That is the surface expression, isn't it? I read it in one of the books the currents bring us."
"That's the one."
She tilted her head, and he leaned in, and the kiss was soft and salt-sweet, her bill warm against his, the algae-orb light pulsing gently overhead like a slow heartbeat. She reached up and rested a webbed hand against his cheek, careful of his bruised jaw, and he wrapped his arms around her and forgot, entirely, about the cold and the current and the lavender dress.
When they parted, her eyes were shining, and outside the porthole a school of luminous fish had gathered, ringed around the window, flickering like a crowd of tiny applause.
"The Glass Minnows," Donald said breathlessly. "You're not... there isn't one watching in here, is there?"
Reginella's smile went sly and slow. "There is exactly one. It is very old and very loyal, and I will deal with it personally." She took his hand. "But first, you will tell me everything about the surface, and I will tell you everything about the deep, and we have until the second bell. Which, fortunately for us both, is a very long way off."
The door chimed softly. A muffled, elderly voice came through it, sharp with suspicion.
"Your Majesty. The Advisor requests, most insistently, to know why the court has been dismissed and the stranger has not been questioned."
Reginella looked at Donald. Donald looked at Reginella.
"Tell him," she called out, "that the questioning has begun. And that it may take all night."