Page 56

T he sword’s weight combined with the rocking of the ship had me fighting to stay upright.

With all my strength, I hefted it and set the blade slicing down toward Nemea in a wide arc.

He dodged. His hand flashed in my periphery, and then a bright striking pain lit my cheekbone.

My head snapped to the side and the crown I wore went flying to the deck, where it landed with a wobbling roll.

Sparks flew across my vision. I waited for the next strike, for the dagger to my gut, but it never came.

My face smarted, my eyes watered, but I found my footing. On the far side of the deck, Nemea paced. His shoulders were hunched, and he kept swiping his hand through his mussed hair, as if distraught.

“Is that your measly conscience, Nemea?” I yelled over the howl of the wind. “Did it hurt you to strike me?”

He shot me a glare. “No.”

I moved toward the rigging and grabbed hold. The storm threw the ship over the surface of the water like a loose flower petal. “I look like her. How can you not picture her face when you strike mine?”

The rain started. It fell sideways, plastering his hair to his brow. “Use your power and let this be done,” he said, over the crash of the waves.

“You want me to kill you?”

“You cannot understand my misery.” His voice cracked. “I lived all those years with an intact blood bond, never being free of the worry or the compulsion to keep her safe, and there was nothing I could do.”

“Nothing you could do?” Something inside me cracked.

I hauled the sword up and started toward him.

“How dare you try to justify your cruelty.” I charged, bringing the sword down just above his shoulder.

He dodged again, swiping at me with his dagger.

“All the ways you’ve terrorized me. You made me into what you wanted me to be—into what served you.

You made me small and timid. You made me everything my mother was not so that you could use me. ”

His eyes flashed. The dark was pressing in, making it harder to see the details of his movements.

Nemea lunged. I made to move out of his reach, but the ship pitched and sent me stumbling directly toward him.

He was more prepared than I was. He grabbed my hair in his fist and yanked me sideways. A scream tore up my throat at the pain.

Nemea seethed, his breaths coming hard through his teeth. “All I have done is keep you safe and require your obedience in return. Is that not how a God treats his worshippers? Is that not the agreement a king has with his subjects? How a father treats his child?”

He released my hair with a shove. I fell flat to the deck and the air rushed from my chest. Teeth bared, he took the dagger from his hip once more and fought the ship’s swaying to trudge toward me.

My power was swirling, an eddy in midnight water, eager to break free of its confines, but I couldn’t pull in a full breath, couldn’t focus on sending out a lure through my pain.

Slowly, I rose to my knees and set all my intention on Nemea’s withered heart.

He was right before me, dagger gripped in his fist, when I let my lure fly.

Silver light glinted off the blade in his hand as he reared back. I waited for him to freeze under my control, waited for the dagger to clatter to the deck… but my lure never sank in.

He lunged, eyes locked with mine. I sucked in a ripping breath as the dagger tip cut into me. Fire blistered through my middle, through muscles and organs. Right through the spot where my bond with Eusia sat.

A cry bubbled up in my throat.

Nemea froze. His eyes blew wide. The rain rolled down his stunned face like tears. “No,” he whispered, releasing the hilt of the blade like it scorched him. He shook his head, mouth gaping. “You tried… didn’t you? You tried your lure?”

I gave a weak nod. My hands went to my stomach, to either side of the half-pressed-in dagger. “It didn’t take.”

He nearly lost his balance as a wave crashed over the deck.

It washed me off my feet. Threw me on my side.

My gut exploded in agony as the dagger shifted and drove deeper into me.

No scream came forth, no rush of pained breath.

My body locked up instead, stiff from the consuming press of metal into my soft flesh.

Nemea’s fingers dug into my arm. He hauled me up with such force that my shoulder popped loudly from its socket. I screamed then. I flailed, dragged my talons over his cheek and summoned forth dark blood.

He hissed, but his fingers dug deeper into my arm.

“ Stop. ” He hauled me to the stairs that led to the quarterdeck and forced me down.

My spine struck the risers. I only saw his shaded outline, a flash of teeth as he yelled, “She’s still alive.

If your lure didn’t work, that means Ligea’s still alive. Our bond remains.”

He was frantic. The stormy twilight lit his horrified face. “The spell.” He set his hand on the hilt of the dagger in my middle like he meant to remove it.

I whimpered and spoke through gritted teeth. “Do not touch me.”

“The spell will keep you alive.”

“So I can keep feeding Eusia for you?”

He shook his head, face crumpling as the pelting rain beaded down it. “Ligea. She was gone. I swear, I thought—as long as she lives, I swore I’d keep you safe.”

It was incomprehensible, how the blood bond he shared with my mother had formed this twisted moral compass of his.

He was despicable, deceitful, but I’d never seen him like this.

Heartsore and broken. Willing to offer me life when I’d spent so long certain that he wanted me dead—after he himself had struck the killing blow.

Regardless of how I could not understand him, I was clear in one thing: I wanted to live.

Lightning ripped through the sky, illuminating Nemea’s intent. He didn’t wait for my consent. His shaking hand gripped the dagger, and he ripped it straight out of my gut.

A cry gouged my throat.

Lowered on one knee, Nemea kept himself steady as the ship rocked.

As water washed back and forth across the deck.

He dragged the dagger over his fingertip, then scooped up some seawater as it rushed by.

He let the bloody mixture trickle over the gash in my stomach.

The salt burned my open flesh. “Will I be sick?” I asked, through a cracking voice.

“I don’t know.” He’d gone pale, tense.

My gushing blood looked black in the quickly fading light. I was growing cold. My body began to shake.

“Keep still.” He pressed his hand against the weeping gash. I squirmed from the feel of his fingers on my skin, all cold and gentle and wet. He closed his eyes and an unnatural calm came over him. He was a foil to the chaos of the rocking ship, the slashing rain, the gusting wind.

He spoke with reverence, with purpose. “In the wake of the ruined, when the spirit rends, mend and loop and seal. In the veins of the drowning, when blood fills the throat, clear and wash and heal.”

I felt nothing. Warmth still gushed from beneath his fingers.

Then, at the very moment that Nemea sucked in a scraping breath and pulled his hand from me, my body arched with an awful, stabbing pain.

It was like the dagger had been driven in once more.

I looked down. The flow of blood slowed to a dribble, but it did not stop.

The skin did not close. The wound was the width of my palm, a red-stained maw.

Nemea fell to the deck, wailing, as the spell sought recompense.

His fingers flew to his eyes like they seared.

Water crashed over him, sending his large body sliding until it hit the base of the mast. Water gurgled in his throat, and I couldn’t tell if it was the seawater or the spell that choked him.

I didn’t move from where I sat. Instead, I watched him flail and slide as the wind and water saw fit.

With another sway of the ship, he managed to wrap his arms around the mast and curl himself around it.

I waited for his watery breaths to even the way Halla’s had after she’d performed her spell.

I waited for him to stop scratching at his eyes, but he writhed instead, fighting to stay put as the storm tried to dislodge him.

My gaze slipped back down to the dribbling wound in my stomach, and a flood of sickness filled me. I had been so close to suffering a death like Eusia’s. And then something struck me—Theodore’s account of her execution.

She was gutted and thrown off the coast of Anthemoessa.

The Sirens’ island. The seat of Ligea’s queendom. Where she and her sister had been created.

Home.

“It’s Anthemoessa, isn’t it?” Nemea’s breaths were coming easier now. “Answer me,” I yelled. “How did you get there? The waters are supposed to be impassable.”

It had been blighted by a spell and abandoned.

A spell I could only assume Eusia herself had cast. Its land had grown black and toxic, as did the waters around it.

There was no passing its outer reef, no touching foot on its inner shores without the blight seeping through the soles of your boots.

As a result, Ligea had lost her seat. She’d been a queen only in title after that.

The Sirens had spread out through the rest of Leucosia’s islands, welcomed by all—at first.

I crawled toward him and yanked at his shoulder, forcing him to look at me. His eyes bled, shredded and nightmarish. “How did you get on Anthemoessa?”

He shook his head like he wouldn’t answer me.

It was growing nearly too dark to see, but as the ship rocked, I could hear the slide of metal on the deck behind me.

The sword. I followed the sound, scraping my body toward it.

My pain was deep and beating but I managed to take the wet leather hilt in my hand.

The storm cracked the sky. I rose, dragging the sword tip over the wet planks as I stumbled back to him.

Nemea didn’t move. Only the faintest of groans filled his chest. I stood above him and positioned the blade so it hovered over the soft hollow of his throat.

“How did you get on Anthemoessa, Nemea?”

He stared up at me, unmoving, and had the gall to laugh. Like I was no threat to him at all. Like he believed he’d done such a thorough job of defanging me that the worst I could do now was gum him.

I jabbed him quickly with the sword, enough to just break the skin. He snarled like a feral animal. “Eusia allowed it.”

“You and your whole crew? She let your whole ship past the outer reef?”

He shook his head. I couldn’t tell how well he could see me through the blood in his eyes and the impending night. “She let my ship pass the outer reef. She only let me and Nivala on the main island.”

Oh Gods. Foreboding choked me. My hands cramped around the sword’s grip. “The empress?”

He nodded. “She still feeds her.” His teeth gritted, he tried to move, but I held the sword above him steady.

My voice shook. “The empress still feeds her bodies?”

“She feeds her Sirens. ”

Dread hollowed me out as pieces of the past day fell into place.

The empress was not simply a devotee of Eusia, she was all but a priestess, working vigilantly to keep her alive.

She knew who I was—she never would have told me the story of the Nels otherwise.

She’d come to my room in the healer’s quarters that night, distraught by the state I was in, as the healer had said.

She’d meant to take me, but I’d been too ill to leave.

Lachlan hadn’t been able to find Agatha.

Agatha.

She’d gone missing the night before the empress had left.

Agatha.

“ No, ” I breathed. She had taken Agatha. She had taken her—but she’d wanted me. “ No, no, no. ”

The wind and rain slashed at me, roaring as loud as the blood in my ears. I could just hear Nemea’s strained chuckle rise up from his sprawled, soaked body.

“You’ve lost, haven’t you?” he asked in a shaking voice. “Did you just realize?”

I pushed the sword tip down and held it firm against his neck. The next pitch of the ship, the next crashing wave, would send it straight through him. He sobered. Raised his hands in surrender.

But I didn’t wait for the next roll of the ship. The raging storm and lurching vessel would not be the executor of his fate.

I would.

I shoved the sword down. I felt it crunch through the tough pieces in his neck. I felt when it hit the bones of his spine, when it hit the wood beneath him.

I was grateful for the shroud of night.

I released the sword. Stumbled backward. Fell to my knees and vomited.