“We dock at Eidyllio in three days’ time.” Elian pushes himself from the glass. “I’ll make my decision when we get there.”
“And until then?”
A slow smile spreads across his face. He steps aside to reveal the full glory of the cage. “Until then.”
In the wake of the unspoken order, Madrid grabs my elbow. To my other side, Kye’s hands tighten around my arm. I struggle against them, but their hold is unbreakable. In moments I’m hoisted from the floor and dragged toward the cage. My writhing does nothing to steer them from their path.
“Let me go!” I demand.
I try to kick out with clumsy motions, but my body is squashed between them, leaving little room to breathe or move. I throw my head back wildly and thrash, furious at the lack of control. How frail and weak my body is now. In my siren form, I could tear them in half with a single movement. I bare my teeth and snap through the air, missing Kye’s ear by half an inch. He doesn’t even blink. I’m as powerless as I feel.
We reach the cage and they throw me in like I weigh nothing. I bounce off the floor, and when I rush back to the entrance, my palms meet a wall. My fingers spread over the surface, and I realize that it’s not glass after all, but solid crystal. I pound relentlessly against it. On the other side, Elian crosses his arms over his chest. My human heart thumps angrily against my chest, stronger than my fists on the prison wall.
I point an accusing finger at him. “You want me to stay in here until Eidyllio?”
“I want you overboard,” Elian says. “But it’s not like I can make you walk the plank.”
“Your chivalry won’t allow it?”
Elian walks to a nearby wall and pulls back one of the drapes to reveal a circular switch. “We lost the plank years ago,” he says. Then, in a voice much lower: “And I lost my chivalry around the same time.”
He twists the switch and the shadows take over.
THERE’S ONLY NIGHT INSIDE the crystal cage. The room is coated in damp darkness, and though the prison seems impenetrable, I can smell the musk of soggy air from the world outside. Every so often, someone comes with food and I’m allowed a rare few minutes of lantern light. It’s almost blinding, and by the time I’m done squinting, the lights are off and a tray of fish assaults my senses. It doesn’t quite have the taste of salties and white pointers, but I devour it in moments.
I don’t know how long I’ve been in the crystal cage, but the promise of Eidyllio weighs on me. When we arrive, the prince will try to throw me onto land with humans who know nothing of the ocean. At least in this place, I can smell the salt of home.
When I sleep, I dream of coral and bleeding hearts. When I wake, there’s nothing but dark and the slow wash of waves against the body of the ship. The first time I killed a human, it was so bright, I couldn’t go above water without squinting. The surface barely rippled, and in moments the sun melted any shards of my kingdom’s ice that still lingered on my skin.
The boy was a prince of Kalokaíri and I was twelve.
Kalokaíri is not much more than a beautiful desert in the middle of a desolate sea. It’s the land of endless summer, with wind that carries the smell of sand. In those days, my legend hadn’t been born, and so royalty sailed with no more trepidation than any human.
The prince was cloaked in white, with purple cloth wrapped tightly around his head. He was gentle and unafraid, and he smiled at me long before I sang. When I sprang from the ocean, he had called me ahnan anatias, which was Kalokaírin for “little death.”
The boy wasn’t frightened, even when I bared my teeth and hissed in the same way I heard my mother do. Taking his heart had not been such a nasty business then. He almost came willingly. Before I began my song, he reached his hand out to touch me, and after the first few clumsy lines, he climbed slowly from the docked sailing boat and walked until he was deep enough to meet me.
I let him drown first. While his breathing slowed, I held his hand, and only when I was sure he was dead did I think of his heart. I was careful when it happened. I didn’t want there to be too much blood when his family found him. For them to think he suffered, when he had died so peacefully.
As I took his heart, I wondered if they were looking for him. Had they realized he was missing from the boat? Above the water’s edge, were they screaming for him? Would my mother scream like that if I never came back? I knew the answer. The queen wouldn’t care if I was gone forever. Heirs were easy things to make, and my mother was the Sea Queen first and nothing second. I knew she would only care that I hadn’t taken the boy’s heart while he was still alive. That she would punish me for not being enough of a monster. And I was right.
When I arrived home, my mother was waiting for me. Surrounding her were the other members of our royal bloodline, arced in a perfect semicircle as they awaited my entrance. The Sea Queen’s sister was at the forefront, ready to greet me, each of her six daughters looped behind her. Kahlia was last, directly beside my mother.
As soon as the Sea Queen saw me, she knew what I had done. I could see it in her smile, and I was sure she could smell it on me: the stench of my regret for killing the Kalokaírin prince. And no matter how much I tried to avoid looking at her, the queen could tell I had been crying. The tears were long washed away, but my eyes remained bloodshot and I had done too good of a job trying to scrub the blood off my hands.
“Lira,” she said. “My sweet.”
I placed a trembling hand onto her outstretched tentacle and let her pull me slowly into her hold. Kahlia bit her lip as my mother regarded my clean hands.
“Have you come bearing gifts for mummy dearest?” the Sea Queen asked.
I nodded and reached into the netting tied around my waist. “I did what you asked.” I cradled the young prince’s heart, lifting it above my head to present it to her like the trophy she wanted. “My twelfth.”
The Sea Queen stroked my hair, her smooth tentacle slinking from my scalp and along my spine. I tried not to blink.
“Indeed,” the Sea Queen said. Her voice was soft and slow, like the sound of the dawn breeze. “But it seems you didn’t quite listen.”
“He’s dead,” I told her, thinking that was surely the most important thing. “I killed him and I took his heart.” I held it a little higher, pushing it toward her chest so she could feel the stillness of the prince’s heart against the coldness of her own.
“Oh, Lira.” She cupped my chin in her hand, sliding the talon of her thumb over my cheek. “But I didn’t tell you to cry.”
I wasn’t sure if she meant when I killed the prince, or not to do it now, in her grasp, with our royal bloodline watching. But my lips shook with the same fear my hands had, and when the first drop fell from my red eye, my mother breathed a heavy lament. She let the tear run onto her thumb and then shook it from her skin like it was acid.