“Why not?”
The distance in Lira’s voice gives me pause. The answer should come quick and easy: because they’re monsters, because they’re killers, because of a thousand reasons. But I don’t say any of them. Truthfully, the idea of this not ending in death never crossed my mind. Of all the outcomes and possibilities I considered, peace wasn’t one. If I had the opportunity, would I take it?
Lira doesn’t look at me and I hate that I can’t figure out the expression on her face.
“Why are you questioning this?” I ask. “I thought the Sea Queen took everything from you and you wanted to use the Crystal of Keto to end the war. You want revenge for your family as much as I do for Cristian.”
“Cristian?” Lira looks at me now, and when she says his name, it freezes in the air between us.
“He was the prince of Adékaros.”
I run a hand through my hair, feeling suddenly angry and unfocused. For a man like Cristian to die while a man like Tallis Rycroft gets to live is more than unjust.
Lira swallows. “You were friends.”
Her voice sounds wretched and it distracts me. I can’t remember her voice ever sounding anything short of pissed off.
“What was he like?” she asks.
There are countless words I could use to describe Cristian, but a man’s character is better seen in his actions than the laments of his loved ones. Cristian was full of proverbs and sentiments I never understood and enjoyed mocking as much as I enjoyed hearing them. There wasn’t a situation we found ourselves in that Cristian didn’t think warranted an adage. Love and madness are two stars in the same sky. You cannot build a roof to keep out last year’s rain. He always had something ready to settle the rampant parts of me.
I think of what Cristian would say now if he knew what I was planning. Any other man would want revenge, but I know he wouldn’t see the crystal as a weapon. He wouldn’t even want me to find it.
If your only instrument is a sword, then you will always strike at your problems.
Instead of telling all of this to Lira, I clasp the Págese necklace and say, “Do you think she’ll feel it?”
“Who?”
“The Princes’ Bane,” I say. “Do you think she’ll feel it when the Sea Queen dies?”
Lira lets out a sigh that turns to smoke on her lips. The air is thin and perilous. Wind cuts between us like daggers while a storm rumbles closer. I can smell the rain before it’s here, and I know within moments the sky will come weeping down on us. Still, I don’t move. The night flashes and groans, thick clouds creeping toward one another and merging into an infinite shadow that blocks the stars. It grows darker with each moment.
“I wonder if she can feel anything at all,” Lira says. She shifts, and when she turns to me, her eyes are vacant. “I suppose we won’t need to wonder for long.”
32
Lira
THAT NIGHT I DREAM of death.
Seas run red with blood, and human bodies drift along the foam of my fallen kin. When the waves finally ladder high enough to stroke the night, they collapse and the bodies mangle against the seabed.
The sand bursts beneath them, scattering my kingdom in golden flakes. Amid it all, my mother’s trident liquefies. I call out to her, but I’m not part of this great ocean anymore, and so she doesn’t hear me. She doesn’t see me. She doesn’t know that I’m watching her downfall.
She lets the trident wither and melt.
Elian stands beside her, and the newly sunlit water parts for him. He has eyes like vast pools and a jaw made from shipwrecks and broken coral. Every movement he makes is as quick and fluid as a tidal wave. He belongs to the ocean. He is made from it, as much as I am.
Kindred.
Elian stares at the seabed. I want to ask him why he’s so fascinated by sand, when there is an entire world in this ocean that he can’t begin to imagine. Why isn’t he seeing it? Why doesn’t he care enough to look? I’ve seen the world through his eyes; can’t he see it through mine?
The urge to scream rips through me, but I can only remember the words in Psáriin and I don’t dare speak the language to him.
I watch him turn toward the sand, his face as plainly broken as my mother’s.
It’s only when I’m certain I might lose my mind from the anguish that I suddenly remember his language. I sift quickly through the Midasan and find the words to tell him. I want to explain how full of magic and possibility my world could be if not for my mother’s rule. I want to comfort him with the chance for peace, no matter how small. Tell him things could be different if I were queen. That I wasn’t born a murderer. But I find the words too late. By the time they become clear in my mind, I see the truth of what Elian sees.
He is not staring at the sand at all, but at the hearts that rupture from it.
Don’t look. Don’t look.
“Did you do it?” Elian’s eyes find mine. “Did you do it?” he asks again in Psáriin.
The razors of my language are enough to cut through his tongue, and I wince as blood slips from his mouth.
“I took many hearts,” I confess. “His was last.”
Elian shakes his head, and the laugh that escapes his lips is a perfect echo of my mother’s. “No,” he tells me. “It wasn’t.”
He stretches his hands out and I stumble backward in horror. I’m no longer in control when my legs buckle and throw me to the floor. I look at the heart in Elian’s hands, blood gathering between his fingertips. Not just any heart. His own.
“Is this what you were after?” he screams.
He takes a step forward and I shake my head, warning him not to come closer.
“Lira,” Elian whispers. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
I wake up gasping for air.
My hands clutch the thin white bedsheet, and my hair slavers over my bare shoulders. The ship rocks slowly to the side, but the motion that I used to find comforting makes me more nauseated by the second. My heart ticks madly against my chest, shaking more than beating.
When I unclench my fists from the bedsheet, there are scratch marks on my palm. Angry red streaks across the lines of my hand. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to catch my breath.
The image of Elian’s heart plays on an unsteady loop. The betrayal in his eyes. The punishing sound of my mother’s laughter.
I spent my life hiding from the possibility of being different than what my mother told me I must be. Swallowing the child with a desire to become something else. I was a siren and so I was a killer. It was never wrong or right; it just was. But now my memories are cruel dreams, twisting into merciless visions and accusing me of a past I can’t deny.
The truth of what I am has become a nightmare.
33
Elian