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
