“You’re wrong, Kolfinn,” Astrid said defiantly, thinking of Becca and Sera. “My friends want me.”
“Friends?” Kolfinn echoed scornfully. “Rulers have no friends. Rulers have realms.” In a tone that brooked no further discussion, he added, “I’ll have my advisors bring the requisite documents to my bedside tomorrow at noon. Tauno will be here. Rylka, too. Make sure you are.”
Noon, Astrid thought. It was seven o’clock now. In seventeen hours she would be back here, signing her name to a marriage contract. With Tauno, a merman she despised. The thought filled her with revulsion.
“What we do, we do for Ondalina,” Kolfinn said, as if reading her mind.
Astrid nodded. She dutifully kissed her father’s withered cheek, slung her sword and her pack over her back, and left his room.
She swam out of the hospital, and then down the Hall of Elders, an arched passageway that led through the palace to her family’s private apartments. The hall was empty. On either side of it, life-size statues of Ondalina’s past admirals stood. Astrid’s head was high and her gaze cold as she glided by them, but inside her emotions burned like waterfire.
Part of her desperately wanted to swim away. Now, before it was too late. But another part refused to desert her family or her realm. She told herself that she would face tomorrow, and her Promising, the same way she’d faced every other hard thing in her life—by encasing her heart in ice. She had no choice. It was the only way. For her and for Ondalina. Kolfinn had said so.
Astrid stopped dead. Her anguished eyes swept over the statues, over their silent, stony faces. “But is it?” she asked them.
The statues didn’t answer. They just stared through unseeing eyes as Astrid struggled to make sense of her warring feelings.
Staying here and promising herself to that squid Tauno, watching as her realm capitulated to Miromara’s demands, and knowing that all the while Abbadon grew stronger…how would doing these things help Ondalina?
As she continued to gaze at the admirals—some who’d ruled hundreds of years ago, some thousands—Astrid realized that their ways, and her father’s, were the old ways. Their strength had come from hiding. From camouflaging. From keeping secrets in, and keeping others out.
That had been Merrow’s tactic, too. According to Vr?ja, Merrow had hidden many truths—the truth about Atlantis’s destruction, the truth about Abbadon—to protect the mer. Instead she’d put them in terrible danger.
“Kolfinn’s way, Merrow’s way…they aren’t my way,” Astrid whispered.
She had embarked on a different current the moment she’d set off for the Iele’s caves. Meeting Vr?ja, learning the truth of the mer’s origins, spending time with Sera and the others had all carried her farther down that new current. Was she going to turn back now?
“There has to be another way,” she said. She had less than a day to find it.
“MACAPá, AT LAST, BABY!” Ava said wearily but happily to her pet piranha. “Meu deus, I thought we’d never get home.”
Ava couldn’t see her home, but she could hear it, smell it, and feel it.
She heard the sounds of children playing. Someone singing a lullaby. Dishes clattering. Mothers yelling. The spicy smell of mud peppers wafted by, followed by the sour tang of marshfruit. She felt the warmth of Macapá’s waters, and its mer.
She’d lost her sight at the age of six—young, but old enough to allow her to remember how the village looked.
Its dwellings were made from the empty shells of giant river mussels, tethered to the riverbed by ropes made of tree roots. Round holes were cut into the shells’ walls for both doors and windows, and the windows were framed by brightly painted shutters, which were closed at night and opened in the morning. Glass was costly and Macapá was a poor village. Tiny snail shells, threaded on river vines, dangled in doorways to keep the pesky purple, blue, and orange discus fish out. Caimans floated on the river’s surface, their bellies like pale clouds drifting by. Anacondas slithered across the river’s muddy bed.
Ava couldn’t wait to be inside her house. She missed the sound of her mother singing, the taste of her father’s spicy salamander stew, and the comfort of her own bed. As she and Baby made their way down the narrow, crowded current that flowed through Macapá, Baby snapped constantly, annoying everyone around him.
“Stop it, louco, or I’ll put you back on your leash!” Ava scolded.