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Bane was right. The curse had won. How could I fight that? The evidence was right there, before my eyes. He was stone. He didn’t love me. He couldn’t.

I’m sorry, I thought, my hand slipping from his shoulder.

‘He loves her.’

Mors stepped forward, facing Nerida with the defiance of a king. His lined face was warm in the melting dusk, his gold eyes fiercer than the sinking sun.

‘He chose to let her go when he knew it would end like this,’ my uncle said. ‘He chose her, over his people – the one thing he has always put above all else. If that isn’t love, then I’ve never loved a thing in my life.’

‘Aye, it’s true.’ Una cut in. ‘And when ye tried to take her from us, he stood between yer creatures and her. He would’a burned to save her.’

Una met my eyes, her reassuring smile so full of terror and conviction at once that my doubt slipped away. It seemed so obvious, all of a sudden. The way he’d held me while he healed me. The way he’d looked at me the night I left. The way he’d let me go, rather than make me watch him destroy himself.

This, I realised, looking around me. This is what he was trying to save me from.

I’d let him convince me that it was impossible, but I’d felt it in my bones when he kissed me. I knew it like the tides knew the shore.

A thread of steel twined through me as I turned back to the sea. I was fighting the will of a god, but I wasn’t doing it alone.

‘They’re right,’ I said. ‘You’d need a human heart to see it, but he loves me.’

The air turned icy. ‘He never said the words.’

‘That was never the bargain,’ I asserted, as if I had any idea. My mind scrambled for a way to make sense of this, to save him. ‘He never said it aloud because he didn’t believe himself capable. How can you expect a man to know he’s in love if he can’t feel it?’

Nerida looked triumphant. ‘Precisely, human. He could not feel it.’

I gritted my teeth, imagining I had his strength, his unquestionable power.

‘Yet he loves me,’ I said. ‘You know it as well as I do. You felt it. Why else would you send those creatures? You thought I’d escape, given the chance, but I stayed. And when that didn’t work, you tried to have me killed. Why seek to stop something you believed to be impossible?’

A ghost of amusement passed over Nerida’s lips, but in its wake, her eyes burned with an unfathomable fury, glinting red as the sun’s last drops of life bled out into the water.

‘It’s no wonder you are a princess,’ she hissed. ‘You act as though you have earned the world.’

She circled me, feet soundless against the planks. The waves whispered around us.

‘My tides pity you,’ she said at last, coming to stop in front of me. ‘They say you deserve a chance at happiness. A chance at a love as pure as the one you have always shown me.’

Hope, like sunlight, began to rise in my chest, telling me I was close, so close. That perhaps I hadn’t lost everything just yet.

‘Is that what you desire, human?’ the goddess asked. ‘You wish to see his kingdom? To free his people?’

‘It’s all I want.’

My lungs tightened as the goddess curled her fingers into a fist once more.

A whorl of water burst from her hand, erupting over us.

A gasp fell from my lips as Aron and Golde thudded to their hands and knees, spluttering, drenched – alive.

Una was on them before I could blink, tugging them both close, ignoring Golde’s protests, a mess of tears and salt water and cries of relief.

Then it was just Aron, Aron and her, arms caught around one another, sopping wet and so entwined I didn’t think either of them would ever let go. I blinked back my own tears. At last.

‘It is done,’ said the sea.

When I turned, I saw him – Sebastien. Water dripped to the planks as he lifted his head, eyes immediately on mine. I collapsed into him, letting his arms cage me in against his chest.