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to be you. The children of the poor, of the workers, well, I really had no use for them. After all, it was not the poor who

had encroached upon the water and dried up all of its riches, was it? No, it sent a message to the burghers, the men who sat

safely in rooms of marble and gold, playing at God. But you,” she continued, “you were slippery, my little fish. Your brother

came easily enough, but either through luck or some other force at work, you were much harder to net.”

A fever. Helma had told her that her brother had died of a fever in infancy. She felt the rock beneath her cant, the whole

world shift. The word brother shaped itself on her lips.

The queen’s expression was slightly peeved, as if she could not believe she was being forced to recount such obvious details.

“Your parents offered me one of their children, but they forgot to specify which one. They thought taking one might placate

me, might make me forget the terms of the deal. So when they told me they had a daughter that had been unwanted, I took the

son instead. Let them understand that the terms of the deal were mine to forge and enforce. And I told myself that there would

be time, that I would return for you later. Well, now we see how that came to pass.”

Clara staggered up from her seat, the ground swaying beneath her. With a hand to the wall, she began lurching toward the narrow

spiral path.

The queen tracked her movements with detached interest. “Well? Did you get what you wanted?” she asked.

None of this was what Clara had wanted. She longed to be back home at Wierenslot, walking through the same old gardens while Helma shouted her same old warnings after her.

If she could, Clara would go back even further than that, to the days when she and Fenna had run free, careless of the world and its evils.

How good life had been, and what a fool she was to not have seen it.

But such is the nature of childhood, a curse and a gift all at once, something so sweet that the rest of life tastes bitter in comparison.

“You were a beautiful child,” came the queen’s voice behind her. A melancholy thread wound through the soft words. “And you

could have stayed beautiful, here under the water with me, far from the corruption of man and his ambitions.”

Despite every instinct telling her to flee, Clara turned around. The queen’s attention seemed to have strayed entirely as

she gazed up into the softly winking lights that clustered about the ceiling. “A child should be a child forever.”

It was good that Clara did not have her voice, because despite the queen’s soothing assurances, she was sorely tempted to

argue that what a child needed beyond anything else was the privilege to grow up.

The queen was toying with a glittering bangle about her wrist. “Do you disagree? What has adulthood brought you other than

a keen awareness of the injustices of the world? What has it done other than shaped you into a prize for a man to pluck?”

A life of injustice still seemed preferable to no life at all. The queen had drowned Fenna, and the fact that she thought

it a mercy, instead of the murder that it was, made Clara all the angrier.

“You are not a mother,” Queen Maren continued, unaware or unmoved by the anger that radiated from Clara.

“And so you can never truly understand. When you are a mother, every child becomes your own, regardless of their race, and you would do anything to safeguard their innocence. I lost a child,” the queen said softly.

“A daughter. She should have sat on the throne, been a great queen like myself. But I lost her to a whaler’s harpoon when she was not yet even seventeen. ”

Maurits had never mentioned a sister. But then, he had never mentioned a brother either. She thought back on their conversations,

their few happy encounters and tried to shake them out like a rug, seeing if anything loosened and flew off. But of all the

facades he had worn, he had never painted himself as a grieving brother. Her heart gave a tender tug.

“Do you truly think that humans deserve their young?” the queen asked, lengthening her spine as the hardness crept back into

her voice. “You have seen how quickly they were to bargain away their futures, how thoughtless they are with their inheritance.”

All Clara could think of was Fenna, sweet, innocent Fenna, running toward a beautiful woman who promised her the world. Tears

stung Clara’s eyes, and she was surprised that even here she could taste the salt as they slid down her cold cheeks.

The queen was saying something else, but Clara could not stand to be in her presence a moment longer.

“Wait.” Queen Maren reached a slender arm out toward Clara, compelling her to stay. The quiet word was not so much of a command

as a plea. But Clara had had enough of the riddles and tangled logic, the conceited lessons on morality that the queen meted

out.

Whatever answers she had been seeking from the queen, she was to leave empty-handed. As she was about to squeeze back through

the narrow tunnel that led out, something compelled Clara to turn around one last time. And for just a moment, Clara saw Queen

Maren as what she truly was: a mother, mourning the loss of her child.