Rogue Wave (Waterfire Saga #2)
Jennifer Donnelly
For the awesome Steve Malk,
with gratitude
The sea is never still.
It pounds on the shore
Restless as a young heart,
Hunting.
The sea speaks
And only the stormy hearts
Know what it says….
—From “Young Sea,”
by Carl Sandburg
BEHIND THE SILVER GLASS, the man with no eyes smiled.
She was here. She had come. As he’d known she would. Her heart was strong and true, and it had led her home.
She had come hoping that there was someone left. Her mother, the regina. Her warrior brother or fierce uncle.
The man watched the mermaid as she swam through the ruined stateroom of her mother’s palace. He watched with eyes that were fathomless pits of darkness.
She looked different now. Her clothing was that of the currents, hard and edgy. She’d cut her long copper-brown hair short and dyed it black. Her green eyes were wary and guarded.
Yet, in some ways, she had not changed. Her movements were halting. There was uncertainty in her glance. The man saw that she still did not recognize the source of her power and so did not believe in it. That was good. By the time she did understand, it would be too late. For her. For the seas. For the world.
The mermaid looked at the gaping hole where the stateroom’s east wall had once stood. A current, mournful and low, swept through it. Anemones and seaweeds had begun to colonize its jagged edges. The mermaid swam to the broken throne, then bent down to touch the floor near it.
Head bowed, she stayed there for quite some time. Then she rose and backed away, moving closer to the north wall.
Closer to him.
He’d tried to kill her once, before the attack on her realm. He’d come through a mirror in her bedroom, but a servant had appeared, forcing him back into the silver.
Long, jagged cracks, running through the glass like a network of veins, held him back now. The spaces between the cracks were too small to fit his body through, but large enough for his hands.
Slowly, silently, they pushed through the mirror, hovering only inches from the mermaid. It would be so easy to wrap them around her slender neck and end what the Iele had started.
But no, the man thought, drawing back. That wouldn’t be wise. Her courage and strength were greater than he’d imagined. She might yet succeed where others had failed—she might find the talismans. And if she did, he would take them from her. A merman she’d once loved and trusted would help him.
The man with no eyes had waited so long. He knew he must not lose patience now. He retreated into the glass, blending back into its liquid silver. In the hollows where his eyes once were, darkness shone, bright and alive. It was a darkness that watched and waited. A darkness that crouched. A darkness as ancient as the gods.
In her last moments, she would see it. He would turn her face to his and make her look into those bottomless black depths. She would know that she had lost.
And that the darkness had won.
“HERE, FISH! HERE, SILVERFISH!”
Serafina, breathless and trembling, called out as loudly as she dared. Liquid silver rippled around her as she moved through the Hall of Sighs in Vadus, the mirror realm. Its walls were hung with thousands of looking glasses. Light from flickering chandeliers danced inside them. Except for a few vitrina, who were gazing vacantly at their reflections, the hall was empty.
Sera had hoped her friends would be nearby, but they weren’t. They must’ve come out in other parts of Vadus, she reasoned. At least no death riders had followed her. Baba Vr?ja had seen to that by smashing the mirror Sera had swum through, allowing her to escape the soldiers, and their captain, Markus Traho.
“Come, silverfish!” she called again, her voice barely a whisper.
She had to be quiet. To make as few ripples as possible. She didn’t want the mirror lord to know she was here. He was every bit as dangerous as Traho.
She remembered the beetles. Vr?ja had given her a handful of them to lure a silverfish. She pulled them out of her pocket and rattled them in her fist.
“Here, fish, fish, fish!” she called. The quicker she found one, the quicker she’d get home.
Home.
Serafina had fled Miromara two weeks ago, after Cerulea—its capital city—had been invaded. The attackers had tried to assassinate her mother. They’d murdered her father. They’d been sent by Admiral Kolfinn of Ondalina, an arctic mer realm, under the leadership of the brutal Captain Traho.