Читать книгу Sea Witch Rising - Sarah Henning - Страница 14

OUR CONVERSATION IS OVER, AND THE MERMAIDS swim away, their new chin-length hair streaming lightly behind as they navigate my polypi forest. But our visit is not over. I can feel it from the tip of my tentacles to the very ends of my curls.

“Why do you need their hair?” Anna asks.

“You’ll see,” I say, hoping that will stop the questions. The Anna I knew wasn’t full of questions, but that seems to be who she’s become since I gave her a voice. I suppose if I’d been left as a silent polypus, I’d have many too.

“You’re not … you wouldn’t … you can’t. If you leave us, we’ll be turned to rubble. Father—the sea king—he’ll decimate your lair.”

“I can’t leave unless he frees me, Anna,” I say, fishing the hair out of the cauldron before tying it all together with twine. Once wrapped, I tuck it into the remaining ríkifjor blooms, ensuring that it’s snug and hidden. “No spell of mine will change that.”

“That doesn’t mean you aren’t preparing to leave. Why else would you need that hair? I know you’re not going to use it to bring me back.”

“Létta.”

I silence her not a moment too soon. Runa has returned. I can only hope she believes she’s imagined her twin’s voice.

Runa has my knife clutched carefully, tightly between both palms before her chest, like she’s praying. The confidence has faded from her features, but here she is again. Unsatisfied with the bargain. She looks to me, eyes shining, and I know before she speaks that her voice will be the weakest I’ve heard it.

“She won’t,” Runa says, bottom lip rosy and trembling, her voice barely loud enough to be heard over the near-stagnant tide of my home. “She’s loved him since the moment she first saw him last year. She’s the only reason he didn’t die in that storm this summer. She wouldn’t let him die then, and she won’t kill him now … even if means her death.”

My breath catches. “This summer?”

The girl nods. I knew Alia had lied about the boy already loving her; she all but admitted it, but I at least thought the details of her story were true. I cock a single brow and ask a question that’s already been answered in the pit of my stomach. “And I don’t suppose she’s had a statue of him in her garden since she was ten?”

Runa glances down at the knife in her hands and then back to me. “Alia does have a statue, but only for the past few months. She pulled it from the wreckage and dragged it over to her garden like some sort of altar.”

I inhale deeply, closing my eyes. Beneath me, my body becomes perfectly still, tentacles like cut stone. Even my uncut curls feel weighed down by whatever is moving through my belly. Anger and revulsion—both directed at myself, not the little mermaid. I should’ve known the girl was trying to manipulate me. I’ve had sixty-six years on this earth to know better.

Finally, after a long moment, I open my eyes. “Alia told me she saved him a year ago, on the first night she saw him. She told me she’d had a statue of his likeness in her garden since age ten. And she told me that when she left him on the beach, he was found by a girl—one he believes rescued him, and therefore loves. She said she’d watched that love for a year.”

Runa’s lips drop open, color coming again to her cheeks, the fierceness in her eyes returning.

“That story isn’t correct—he’s marrying a girl from somewhere else. But”—her voice is trembling along with everything else—“if you knew all that and what she had to do in four days—why on earth did you say yes? Why on earth did you send her up there knowing she’d fail? That she’d die?”

Because I believed her love was worth it.

Because I saw myself in her. And his grandfather in him.

Because I still believe in happy endings, even when I’m a nightmare.

Runa is staring at me, and I wonder if she can see it in my face—the girl behind the years. The one who gave herself for Nik more than once and who would do it again.

“I thought her heart had had enough,” I say, and now my words are weak and threaded with all the exhaustion I don’t have the strength to hide. “I thought that she deserved a chance at love.”

“A chance?” Runa advances on me, what’s left of her curls swirling around her like a lion’s mane. “You heard all that, with all your fabled wisdom and reputation, and you knew she didn’t have a chance.”

“None of us knows anything for sure, Little Runa. But your sister was resolute. She sought me out, willing to fight for something she believed in. Whether she wins that fight or not, it wasn’t my place to tell her she shouldn’t try.” I clench my teeth, my fists, my tentacles. “Love is worth suffering and sacrifice if it’s true.”

“Love is worth nothing to a life if you aren’t around to live it!” Her face is screaming at me: Why can’t you see this? Haven’t you lived long enough, suffered long enough, to see that death is permanent? Haven’t you lived long enough, suffered enough, to see that death is death? “Alia should’ve been here for three hundred more years. How many times could she have loved in all those decades and not paid so dearly?”

Runa is heaving now, the knife deadly in her grip. I’m not afraid of her, but suddenly I am afraid for her.

“You don’t believe in love, do you?” I ask.

Her fingers clench white-tight around the knife. “I love my sister.”

“Runa,” I say, wanting very much to lay a calm hand on her heaving shoulders, though it won’t help dull the abandonment she feels. “If you truly love her, the best you can do is give her that knife and accept her choice.”

“No. I won’t accept that. I gave you my father’s flowers, endangering him and me in the process. We gave you our hair—and you didn’t even use it for anything.” Runa raises the blade. “And now I have a knife but a sister who would die before wielding it on the only damn Øldenburg available.”

The mermaid isn’t done. She’s pausing to make sure it sinks in for me. Everything she’s lost, laid out plain.

“I only have one more thing to give you, and if you don’t take it right now, you’ll find out how talented I really am.” Her nostrils flare, and she advances on me, knife out. “Change me. Change me and I’ll do it. I’ll kill the boy if it means she’ll be saved.”

The girl’s amber eyes bore into my face, her shoulders and chest heaving.

I truly believe she will kill the boy for her sister to live.

I am both impressed and completely heartbroken over this. No matter what she may think of me, my motives were pure in sending her sister above. I firmly believe my heart was in the right place when I gave Alia legs. Though now I realize I shouldn’t have worried as much about her lying on land as lying to me, though either way her manipulation may be Nik’s grandson’s undoing. Somehow, I wish Niklas were anyone else. Maybe he is—maybe the little mermaid told me one more lie to get her way, knowing my history with his family and how I loved Nik.

“You’ve seen this boy above, and yet you will do it?”

Runa nods, fury hot in the set of her shoulders. “Oh, I saw him. He acts like she’s a prize pet. Something shiny he found on the beach. A nice complement to his stupid sapphire crown or dumb red ring.”

My breath catches. “Red ring?”

“Yes, it’s not rubies or garnets but something else. He rubs it like a two-bit moon play villain.”

I work to keep my face plain, though at my back I can feel Anna yearning to scream. When Nik was alive, he would visit often. He’d dip the toes of his oxblood boots in the water, rear end in the dry gray sand, and tell me about his life. Within a year of my absence, he told me how a maid had found a red crystal rock in the old dresses I’d left at the castle the night that my time above ended. It was the stone the sea had given me when I practiced my first exchange spell—Annemette’s life for what the sea had already claimed. He remembered me wearing that dress when he’d spotted me while readying Iker’s boat for the Celebration of the Sea.

My heart lurches for all the things I would’ve done differently that morning on the dock. I should’ve kissed Nik when he brushed a curl from my cheeks, his fingers lingering long enough that we both turned nearly as red as the stone in my pocket. The stone that Nik fashioned into a ring, that now sits atop his grandson’s finger.

“What else do you know about him?” I ask the girl.

I’m worried I’ve gone too far and that her frustration won’t stand it, but Runa bites her lip, her interaction above running through her mind. Though she’s thinking hard, I find it difficult to believe she’s forming a lie. She badly wants to save her sister, and it’s enough to keep her honest. It wouldn’t do to exaggerate.

“These other boys, they were talking about something called a U-boat.”

My heart stops. U-boat? It had been invented when I was a girl—it wasn’t common, but Father had done his research on them for King Asger, believing he might be able to better spot whales while working in tandem with them.

They weren’t widespread then, but now, with time and improvements in technology? They might be. That possibility looks much different to me from my vantage point under the sea. The danger they might pose to the merpeople is great.

“They’re ships that can stay underwater for weeks at a time,” I say, my memory shooting back to drawings Father got from a sailor near the mouth of the Rhine in the North Sea. Runa startles. “Yes, what you’re thinking is correct—they’d be extremely dangerous to your people in the water.” A shock of realization goes through me. “And the kingdom is building U-boats for the war effort?”

Havnestad always put its people to work on boats in times of famine. Times of war may be no different.

The girl nods. “All of Denmark, including Havnestad, is officially neutral, though boys in the southern regions are close enough to Germany that they’re being conscripted. So, Havnestad—all of Denmark, really—is in the war, whether it wants to be or not.”

Boys, stolen for war. They’re just bodies. Bodies upon bodies. I don’t think it would be much of a stretch to believe Niklas or any other ruler losing civilians to a foreign power would want to make sure that power succeeds.

“Niklas is king of Havnestad now, not simply a prince.” More news to me—news that would explain his impending marriage. “So, he would have to approve these U-boats—I don’t know how it works above, exactly, but here Father would have a say on anything that could be a potential pain—or profit.”

Profit. In war? I can’t reconcile this thought with my Nik. Though his grandson is not the boy I loved. “And you believe he could be making a profit?”

“Why else would he help without declaring war himself?” she says, anger flaring, though it’s not for me. “He’s probably even making a profit on the mines he’s set in the waters.”

I know all about the mines. They go off daily outside my lair, a sign of what rages above.

Runa shakes her head. “They’re meant for enemy ships, but they’re dangerous to all of us down here. There’s something unsettling to me about a man who would place live bombs in the sea without a care for who or what might detonate them.”

“And your people have died from this practice.”

“Not yet, but there have been injuries. Whales, sharks, and fish from the smallest to the greatest have been killed. If a ship explodes, the projectiles can wipe out anyone or anything in their wake.” She takes a shaky breath. “It’s bad enough already, and who’s to say how long the war will last?”

The meaning of all of it piles between us, shadows dancing in the almost-dawn. In some ways I’m protected here in my prison, protected from the outside by buoys Nik erected long ago, my cove off limits to anyone who would want to wade out into the black tide. They do toss Sankt Hans Aften dolls into my waters each year though. Not everyone, of course. Only those who believe the tale of the witch, the prince, and the spell that plucked him from the brink of death.

The mermaid stares at me. “Let me do it. Help me save her. Change me.” She dares to grab my hand in the one that doesn’t hold the knife. “Please, please. Please let me make this right. I can’t lose Alia.”

Something Tante Hansa once told me breaks loose from the memories of old, falling into the forefront of my mind.

Loneliness is the weakest excuse for magic there is, and it mixes horribly with pride and ignorance.

She’d meant it as a rebuke of me while I tried to help Annemette, yet I know this is different. This girl is lonely because this is her sister. Her twin. Her other half.

She’s not prideful. She’s not ignorant—she knows much more about the situation than I did about the girl I once knew. That much is for sure.

And she’s given me every indication she will go through with murdering the king to save both her sister and the merpeople endangered by the U-boats and the mines.

My mind churns with all the possibilities. Who might live, who might die, what might become of the magical imbalance with another mermaid on land. With another exchange. It’s a long shot, but we all might get what we want.

I add my other hand to the top of hers until we’re holding each other like fish skewered through the belly on a pike. Her hand is warm and reminds me a little of home.

“I will change you, but listen closely.” The girl’s eyes widen with relief. “Here is what you must do. As I told you before, dying Øldenburg blood must fall on your sister’s feet, shed by this knife. If that happens by the last moment of the fourth day—at sunrise, because that is when she ascended—she shall live. Though she can never become a mermaid again.”

She swallows. “Never? Not even with this knife?”

“Not the terms of her deal. The magic is serious about exchange—the sea cannot take her back.” I wrap a tentacle around the girl’s waist. “Now, your deal is different.”

I watch her eyes as I let that sink in. Her lip begins to tremble, and I don’t blame her—she feels as if she’s failed already because her sister can never again be a mermaid—but the girl’s eyes remain fierce and steady.

“Your deal, Runa, is one of very specific action. You are there to help your sister, but still, Alia must kill the boy with this knife. I can’t change that either. Her life was her bargain, not yours.” This truth seems to puncture Runa’s resiliency even more. “But having you there by her side, like you’ve always been, is the greatest power you have to give. Do you want me to go on?”

Runa swallows a sob and nods.

“After Alia allows the blood to fall on her feet for her survival, these are the things you must do to return to the sea: You must gather the boy’s red stone ring and retrieve the knife. Then you must sprinkle the boy’s blood on your own toes. Fail to do any of that by the close of the fourth full day after your arrival, including sending me the ring and the knife, and you will remain human forever.”

She swallows. “I … I won’t become foam in the tide? I’ll become human if I fail?”

“Don’t assume you will fail—you didn’t come here to fail.” She squeezes her eyes closed for a second and then she’s right back with me. Good.

My tentacle slinks off her waist and my hands drop hers as she runs it over in her mind. It’s a lot, true. And I gather that unlike Alia, the very last thing Runa ever wanted to be was human. But that was before she knew her sister might die. “Now, do you agree?”

She’s nodding before the words are out. “Yes, I agree.”

I watch her, making sure she means it. But she’s unwavering under my hard stare. “Give me the knife.”

Without a word, she extends the weapon. There’s a little hesitation as I transfer the hilt to my hand and draw it close, inspecting the serrated edge, the coral so finely cut, it’s almost translucent in its sharpness.

“Give me your hand.”

The mermaid extends her left hand over my cauldron, clever girl. She’d been holding the knife in her right, dominant, hand. She may trust me to change her, but she isn’t so sure I won’t send her topside missing an important appendage.

As a measure of good faith, I put a tentacle around her wrist instead, silky smooth and delicate. The cauldron is as deep and dark as the night, yet there’s a heat rising from it—part of my particular magic. I place my own arm over the cauldron, so that our arms are side by side. Then, without warning or hesitation, I drag the knife over the skin of my palm. Blood, onyx dark, oozes into the flat gray of the water, molasses slow and sparking with the magic I hold within.

The girl’s eyes stay on the knife as she waits, knowing that it will be her turn next. My blood drips onto her flat white palm in the moment before the knife breaks her skin. She doesn’t move, recoil, or even wince, though blood as red as the flowers her sister gave me swirls into the gray. I smother her hand in mine and squeeze, our blood dripping into the pot’s belly below as one.

With each drop, the cauldron softens with an inner light. It has the same silvery glow of a full moon on shallow waters, flashing mesmerizing rays into the starbursts of the girl’s amber eyes. I take a deep breath, and then I let my voice echo off the polypi, deep and commanding, with all the power her flowers have afforded me.

“Líf. Saudi. Minn líf. Minn bjod. Sei∂r. Sei∂r. Sei∂r.”

As I say the final word of the spell, the cauldron trembles with light—blinding and brilliant and enough to turn this whole pewter-rendered world stark, shocking white.

When the spell is complete, the light recedes in an instant. From the depths of the cauldron, a silvery liquid swirls, as if the best pearls in the ocean had been melted down.

I bring a tentacle up before the two of us, a small bottle grasped there. It’s much like the one I gave Alia. This one is light green in color, bringing all the power of the new spring sun. I dip the bottle into the potion, fill it to the top, and then stop it with a bit of cork.

“Take this draught in the shallows, so you shall not drown,” I say, and then I give her one final reminder. “You have four days for yourself. Two for your sister. Ring, knife, blood.”

With careful fingers, the girl seizes the bottle and the knife, pressing both to her heart, and repeats back what she must do. “Ring, knife, blood.”

As she turns to go, I swear I hear her voice again, whispering a single refrain.

“I’m coming, Alia. I’m coming.”