Highness, you should know better than anyone that even you can’t control a strong-headed woman,” I say, and I know he’s thinking of his first queen, Mette, the human he saved but then couldn’t keep, her heart cracking as she longed both for him and for the life she was meant to lead. “Alia must be free to make her own choices and live her own life—experience love and freedom. But instead, you trap her, and all your people, under your thumb with false promises of protection from humans. Not since Annemette—”
“Never speak that name to me again,” he growls, his fury sputtering between us. She’s the one who left him, betraying him, his family, and the secrets of the mermaids. I hope Anna is really listening to him now.
As his nostrils flare, I look him dead in the eyes. “Like Annemette, Alia has four days to make the boy love her and live, or fail and die. Either way, you’ll never see her again.”
“I can destroy you!”
I bare my teeth. “Ah, but you haven’t. Even with all the power you steal, you still need me.” My voice gains strength with each word. He’s desperate. He can’t retrieve Alia on his own. There is an element of my magic he will never master. “I can bring Alia back, but I will need something from you in return. I have my price.”
The sea king’s lips drop open. I have him backed into a corner, and he knows it. My ask is simple, and only he can do it. He can’t give me my life back, my lost time, or Nik—may he rest in the tide—but he can unchain me from my lair. The words are on my tongue, ready, when something nasty ticks across his handsome features.
“You have your price, Witch, but you forget your place.”
His teeth click together, and the blue of his eyes goes cold. It’s then that the wet, hard certainty of my mistake reveals itself to me. This man won’t kill me, but for the abundance of magic that he is, heavy and unwieldy, he can hurt me so badly, I will wish I were dead.
The power within him—amplified, multiplied, looted from land and sea—expands, bursts outward, like a living bomb. A sea mine of magic, aimed straight at me.
“Morna, herfiligr kvennali∂!”
Waste away, wretched woman!
The words hit my ears with a force of magic I’ve never felt, slamming into me with the power of the sun falling out of the sky and barreling toward the earth, bringing enough light to dissolve all of us the instant before impact.
And then my world, already so dark, fades to complete, flat black.
I SHOULD’VE KNOWN I WOULD LOSE HER THIS WAY.
To him.
The boy. That stupid boy. With his stupid dark hair and sparkling eyes and regal blood.
The one she saved in the height of summer, during a ferocious storm when she’d been stalking him yet again. Living in the wake of his ship, hoping for a glimpse of him with his brothers, with their cheekbones and songs and dogs. As if they’d been created from her heart’s desires and plunked onto the earth, just close enough for her to want, just far enough—different enough—to escape her.
Always fascinated with humans, Alia.
Always fascinated with what she shouldn’t have. Riding the edge of what was acceptable down below—testing our father’s kingly patience and personal leniency. Rescuing that boy and then all but bragging about it by lugging into her garden that stupid statue that went down with him.
I was there when she first saw him above. Her eyes shone with immediate curiosity. We’d turned fifteen at the same time—twins so alike and yet more like two sides of the same coin. We had gone to the surface together, but the fascination with the world above was hers alone.
Once she learned his name, it wouldn’t leave her lips.
Niklas.
Now she’s gone to him, I’m sure of it.
It’s been a day since I’ve seen her, the longest we’ve ever been apart. I have no choice but to believe I’ve lost her to him, because the alternative—that she’s dead or dying somewhere and my heart has yet to realize it—is too painful.
Not that it feels fantastic knowing that my twin left me, our family, our world for a boy.
A stupid human prince of a boy who doesn’t even know her name.
“Oh, Alia. How could you do this to yourself?” I mumble into the morning tide, mermaid tail swishing hard, fists balled tightly at my sides, nails digging crescents into my palms. “How could you do it to us?”
The magic to become human has been banned forever by our father’s own hand. He invented it himself, after he brought home his first queen, but the last time it was done, it nearly brought our people to ruin. Four days, one knife, and the truth about life beneath the sea spilling from the lips of one of our own, nearly exposing and endangering us, if Annemette had lived.
So, here I am, closer to land now than I’ve ever been, swimming in the shadows of a new morning, staring at the place I know in my gut Alia will be.
Øldenburg Castle.
Home of stupid Niklas and his stupid laughing smile and stupid dimples.
The castle is just as Alia said it would be. High on the hill and old enough to have Viking bones in its crypt. It’s the biggest thing in sight, dwarfing the mountains at its back simply by a purposeful trick of perspective. The town below it is a warren of stone houses, shops, and the like. Bricks line the streets, slick under the weak light of a rising morning sun as the people of Havnestad run out for their errands.
I sink back below the surface. The waters will be safer near the castle—buoys keep ships from docking too close, so none will mar my path, even with the bustle of the morning. Plus, there are mines out here, bombs meant for ships in the humans’ great war. I doubt they know or care how these hurt us below.
I set a course straight for the castle, my path clear though I’ve never swum it before, but still I know it. Late at night, Alia would whisper tales into my ear while our sisters slept. Tales of watching the grand summer parties from beneath a marble balcony, something new added onto the old castle in recent years.
Morning isn’t the time for parties, but this balcony may be the only way I can see into the castle from the water. Beyond the buoys, I swim into a narrow channel, sheer rock faces on each side, protecting the Øldenburgs from visitors they’d rather avoid. And there, right as I enter the opening of a cove, the balcony’s footings appear like skeleton bones, jutting up from the sea floor. They sweep out over the water and back down below the surface with the fluid motion of a dolphin’s jump.
Above the balcony that sits atop those arches, the castle teeters from a cliff face. It juts out like the haughty chin of its founding king, eyes down on all that it owns, including the waters at its shores.
“The
