“I am a prince,” I say, and move to pass her.
Lira walks in stride with me. “Not usually.”
“What would you know about being usual?”
Lira’s face remains blank, and once again I fail to have any sort of impact. Then she rolls her eyes, as if in compromise. Here, I’ll act irritated. Just to please you, Your Highness.
“You’re right,” Lira tells me.
She pulls on the fabric of her dress. It’s an old raggedy thing that Madrid found shoved into a trunk belowdecks. A stowaway from a ransack of a pirate ship. I’m almost sure it was pretty once, just as I’m almost sure we’ve been using it to clean Madrid’s speargun for the past year. It was the best that I could do on short notice, unless Lira wanted to be clothed like a pirate, which I doubted.
Still, looking at her now, the decent man in me feels a little ashamed.
Lira stops walking to clutch the ends of her dress in both hands and then lower to the ground in a sardonic curtsy. I, too, stop, shooting her a scathing look, and she scoffs, which is the closest thing to a laugh I’ve heard from her.
“Queen Galina isn’t big on pirates,” I tell her, as I turn away and begin walking again. Lira follows. “It’s not like I enjoy dressing this way.”
I tug at my collar, which suddenly feels tight around my neck. There’s silence and Lira promptly stops walking. I turn to face her, a question in my eyes, but she just stares.
“Here,” she says, and makes a grab for my knife.
I flinch back and grab her wrist before she has the chance. Lira shoots me a disparaging look, like I’m even more of an idiot than she thought. I can feel her pulse strumming under my thumb before she slowly pulls out of my grasp.
She reaches for my knife again, tentatively, and this time I let her. I can tell she’s enjoying the fact that I’m wary, as though it’s the greatest compliment I could give. When her hand touches the knife, there’s a spark in my chest, like a cog being pulled loose from a machine. I’ve always been connected to it in a way that I struggle to explain. When Lira touches it, I feel a sudden coldness passing from the blade through to my bones. I watch her with steady eyes, not risking a blink. She hesitates with the blade in her hands, as though considering all the possibilities it could bring. And then she takes a breath and swiftly cuts a line down my shirtsleeve.
The blade grazes my skin but, miraculously, doesn’t draw blood.
I snatch the knife back from her. “What do you think you’re doing?” I ask, surveying the tear below my shoulder.
“Now you look like a pirate,” she says, and continues walking.
Incredulous, I jog to catch up with her. I’m about to tell her that she’s going to have to pay for that, either with coin – which I doubt she has – or her life, but she turns to me and says, “I saw the Reoma Putoder.”
“Did you make a wish?”
“Maybe I stole one instead.”
She says this with a biting smile, but as the sentence fades, she reaches up to toy with the seashell I returned. It looks unnaturally bright against her neck. She touches it contemplatively, and I recognize the gesture. It’s something I’ve done a thousand times over with my family crest ring. Whenever I think of the people I’ve left behind, or the burdens of a kingdom I’ll never feel ready to rule. If Lira’s story is true, then the necklace probably belonged to the siren who killed her family. A talisman to remind her of the revenge she must carry out.
“I still want to come with you,” Lira says.
I fight to keep walking with long, even strides. The Serendipity appears ahead, another building in a row of chess-piece houses. It’s stacked three stories higher than the others, with orange brick and a sign that hangs from a silhouette of the Love God. Outside, a group of women smoke cigars on thick oak benches, large jugs of mulled wine by their feet.
We stop by the doorway and I raise an eyebrow. “To avenge your family?”
“To stop this war once and for all.”
“We’re at war?” I make a grab for the door. “How dramatic.”
Lira snatches my torn shirtsleeve. “This needs to end,” she says.
I flinch at the contact, resisting the urge to go for my knife. There’s never a time when I don’t have to be on guard.
I roll my shoulder out of Lira’s grip and keep my voice low. “Don’t keep making the mistake of thinking you can touch me,” I tell her. “I’m the crown prince of Midas and captain of the world’s most deadly ship. If you do that again, a few nights in a cage will seem like a godsend.”
“The Sea Queen took everything from me,” Lira spits, ignoring the threat. There’s a deep crease in the center of her brow, and when she shakes her head, it’s as though she is trying to shake the wrinkle out. “You can’t imagine the pain she’s caused. The Crystal of Keto is the only way to fix that.”
She hisses the last part. The raw and scratchy way her voice pounces on the Midasan, like the words aren’t enough to convey what she’s feeling, makes my head swim. So much inside of her that she can’t get out. Thoughts and feelings there are never enough ways to show.
I swallow and try to pull myself together. “You said you know things that nobody else does. Like what?”
“Like the ritual you must perform if you want to free the Crystal of Keto from where it’s hidden,” she says. “I’d bet my life you don’t have the first clue about that.”
I don’t let the surprise register on my face. Even Sakura didn’t know the first thing about the ritual we need to conduct, and it’s hidden in her kingdom. What are the chances a stowaway on my ship would be the one to have the last piece of my puzzle? There’s no way I’m that lucky.
“You have a habit of using your life as collateral,” I say.
“Does that mean you will take the deal?” Lira asks.
I’d be a fool to take it and trust a stranger who claims to know the one secret I don’t. I haven’t survived this long by putting my life in the hands of my ex-prisoners. But to not take it would make me even more of a fool. Lira can speak Psáriin. She has experience hunting sirens. What if I leave her behind and then can’t even free the crystal once I have it? If I make it all that way only to drown in the final wave. The ritual is the only part of my quest where I don’t have an idea past winging it, and now Lira is offering up a plan of her own on a gold platter.
If Kye were here, he’d tell me not to even think about considering it. Good riddance, he said when we left Lira to the streets of Eidyllio, sure neither of us would see her again. I’ve got enough to protect you from without adding deadly damsels to the list. And he wasn’t wrong. Kye had sworn to protect me – not just to my father, whose money he’d taken more for the heck of it than to seal any deal – but to me. To himself. And Kye has never taken that job lightly. But I have a job too, a mission, and without Lira’s help, I could leave the world open to the evils of the Sea Queen and her race forever.