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?
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
