then, let us take your hair.”
One by one, the witch seats us on a sandstone block next to her cauldron and, using a plain knife fashioned of razor-thin coral, slices our hair up to our chins. Eydis sits first, and, without planning it, we go in birth order. Ola next. Then Signy. Then me. Every lock is tossed without a second glance into the cauldron.
When she’s finished, I straighten, nose to nose with the sea witch, awaiting our antidote. The murky water feels cool against my neck, and I tell myself it’s simply a new sensation and not my nerves settling in. We’ve done our part; now she will do hers and then we’ll save Alia from her quest.
“Very good then, my girls. You’ll have what you need, along with instructions as to what must be done.”
I expect the sea witch to return to her cave, rifle around, and come back to us with another little glass bottle filled with a shimmering liquid.
Instead, the witch hands me the knife she used to cut our hair. I stare at it, the words dying in my mouth. The witch brings a silky tentacle to my chin and tips my head up so that I can do nothing but stare into her dark blue eyes.
“Find your sister at the waterside and give her this knife. If she does not gain the boy’s love in return by the end of her fourth full day on land, she must plunge this knife into his heart, letting the blood drip upon her feet. When his life-force is gone and his blood has anointed her new body, she will be human for the remainder of her days.”
“She can’t come back to us?” Eydis asks. “She can no longer be a mermaid?”
The witch’s voice is level and clear. It’s a dagger to each of our hearts. “Oh no. Never. That isn’t how the magic works.”
No. That’s not right. The words tumble out as I try to grab a breath.
“But Queen Mette—”
“Queen Mette’s magic was something else altogether—the joining of this world’s magic with the magic above.”
She says it like it’s a fact. That Father’s first queen was able to achieve something we can’t. My guts sour and pucker. I glare at the knife in my palm, wondering whether, if I murder this witch right now, my sister will automatically sprout fins and be called home. The weapon is sharp enough to slice a finger straight through with barely any pressure. There’s definitely magic in it, but it isn’t what we asked for.
What’s more—it won’t work.
Alia’s face on the balcony when I suggested this as an option flashes through my mind. I know my sister, stubborn and romantic to the core. She won’t murder Niklas under any circumstance, even if it means she’ll rot from the inside out.
This was supposed to be an antidote—an alternative to get her home.
“But that describes your magic too,” I say, lobbing the sea witch’s logic back to her. Reminding her of who she was. I move from my seat to my full height, daring to bear down on this witch, reclined on her stupid tentacles. “Which means you have the antidote. You have what Mette had. We kept our end of the deal. This isn’t an antidote; it’s a murder weapon. We agreed on the antidote.”
The witch straightens herself to her full length, giving me a taste of my own medicine, staring down her nose at me. Her presence is more than her frame—the entire cove seems to join her in staring me down, the weight of it all pressing into me. On all sides, her strange trees seem to curve inward, their skeletal limbs reaching out for me, my sisters, our anger.
“You know nothing of my power. And it was you who said the word antidote, Runa. I did not,” the sea witch says. “I told you I’d give you what you need. And what you need is this knife.”
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
