Page 57

T he seabirds roused me.

Aching, I rolled my head to the side, then rushed to cradle it in my hands. I cracked open my eyes. Dim light… morning. Above me, the dregs of last night’s storm clouds hung low, gray-hued and wrung out.

My eyes began to focus, and I traced the lines of the drooping sails, the ropes swaying in the humid breeze. Panic tightened around me as my mind cleared fully of sleep.

Agatha. I needed to get to Agatha.

I’d huddled beneath the risers that led to the quarterdeck in the night, and I gripped them now as I pushed myself up to sit.

My panic only grew as I took stock of myself.

The air was warm, but I shivered. My skin looked gray, covered in gooseflesh and cold sweat.

The thumping pain in my stomach was consuming, profound.

I blew out three slow breaths in a weak attempt to ease my racing heart, then peeled back my wet tunic.

“Shit.” The hole in my stomach oozed a steady, thin trickle of blood.

The skin around it had grown tender and red, and I let out a wobbling cry when my cruel mind pushed forward a memory of Theodore.

His bright, healing warmth, the press of his calloused fingers, the way his presence and power beat back the darkness that nipped perpetually at my heels.

“Nemea did it wrong.”

I gasped, head snapping toward the creaking voice that had come from across the deck. My body pricked with awareness when I realized the voice had come from within my own head too.

Eusia.

One of her nekgya sat on the deck, right where Nemea’s body had been.

Her dark, silken hair stuck to her shoulders.

She was wan and smattered in black, ragged wounds.

Decay crept over her mouth and fingers, over her chest and arms. The sea held her together with bits of kelp and a patchwork of delicate, pale barnacles.

She cradled Nemea’s crown in her crooked fingers. His sword lay on the deck before her. Beside it sat a mound of wet sand and a slimy ribbon of kelp.

“Where is he?” I croaked.

Her eyes were rimmed in deep purple skin, her irises the color of the water off Varya’s shore. “Do you truly care?” Eusia’s voice asked through the nekgya’s rot-smattered mouth.

I hated the man. I was relieved he was gone. And yet his death snapped a tether that had tied me to this world. Bits of my life—memories of me, of my mother—that only he held had died with him. That realization filled me with lonely grief.

“Tell me where he is.”

“The sea, of course.” She set the crown on the deck with uncanny, jerking movements. “Come. We must close that wound. You’re running out of time.”

“Why?” I said, in a groan. “Why help me?”

“If you die, in a short time, so shall my power.”

The impulse overtook me—to let myself fade, right there on the deck of Nemea’s bobbing ship.

To let my death be the severance that finally brought an end to Eusia.

But my selfishness was a stubborn, inextinguishable fire.

My desire to live burned bright. I thought of Agatha and the danger she was in.

Of Theodore, days away from marrying an enemy bride.

I rose to my knees, shaking from the pain, and crawled across the deck toward her.

The ocean was calm, rolling the ship gently.

I knelt across from her, with the sword and sand and kelp between us, and looked into her dead eyes.

My voice trembled. “I’m inclined to die if it means your end.

” She remained silent, unblinking. “Tell me how to get to you and I will agree to your spell.”

There was only quiet. Only her hollow stare, until finally she said, “It is not perfect.”

I shook my head. “What’s not?”

“Our bond,” she said, simply. “How I have used up Ligea is preferable. If I had you beside me, like I do Ligea, I’d be stronger.

This bond we share—I can access your power, you sustain me.

But despite how I’d like to, I cannot harm you.

” The nekgya’s dead eyes met mine and ice shards sliced through me.

“Do you feel that too?” Her voice was a scratching whisper.

“The desire to end me? To win. But if I let you come to me, if you stood above what is left of my body, ready to sever our bond, you could not do it.”

“Is that why the empress tried to take me?” I asked. “To bring me to you. She is your aide. She can harm me. She can help you perform the spell to break our bond and help you make a new one that is just like the one you share with my mother.”

The nekgya’s pallid head tilted unsettlingly to the side, the movement almost human. “Yes. Her veneration and fear have served me well.”

Warm blood dribbled down my lower stomach. My head seemed to float and the tremors that had begun to rack my body were too strong to stanch. As hopelessness settled over me, I thought to curl up on my side beneath it. We had reached an impasse. There was no way for me to succeed.

“You’re dwindling,” Eusia said, her voice empty as ever, but I could practically feel her panic. A thrum, a worried sort of whirr that stirred my blood.

I clamped my chattering jaw. Pulled in a painful breath. And a spark lit my mind.

I was fearsome too. I was worthy of veneration, and if none would devote themselves to me as the empress had done Eusia—then I would make them.

And I knew precisely who I would take as my aide. Who I would make assist me in breaking my bond to Eusia and ending her.

“Permit me onto Anthemoessa and I will perform this spell. I will keep you alive,” I said in a rush, my heart thumping quickly. She didn’t answer me. “Quickly, Eusia.” My voice scraped. “I have a bride to steal.”

The nekgya stared at me for a long moment and I knew Eusia was considering my terms. I would come to her on Anthemoessa and one of us would win.

Her nod was sharp and quick. She blinked, then moved like a spider, inching toward me on all fours, and Theodore’s warnings against spell work pealed through me.

He’d outright refused to let me even consider performing more than one spell—the one to end Eusia. But there was no hope without it.

“Will I be the same?” I leaned my body against the mast. “After the spell?”

“What magic takes, it never returns.”

My vision began to smudge the sails and rigging above me. My pain began to numb. “What do I need to do?” I sounded like a terrified child.

Her empty eyes did not meet mine as she knelt beside me. She cupped the sand in her decaying fingers. “The sand meets the blood. The fat fills the mouth. The kelp knits the flesh.”

I looked at her own rotting body, at the smattering of kelp and barnacles, at the patches of gelatinous skin. My stomach turned at the thought of making myself into her likeness, but I clamped my teeth and pulled my damp tunic over my head. “I put my blood in the sand?”

She nodded. I shook as I cut the familiar line over my palm with a talon.

I let my blood run into the sand she held, and she crawled closer to me, reaching for my wound.

I shuddered as she pressed the bloody sand into it, sucking in a harsh breath from the sting.

She shoved the kelp at me. I bit a piece of it off, set it over the spot, then looked at her for approval.

“Fat,” she said.

My stomach fell. “I… I don’t—”

“Magic cannot make something from nothing.”

The price was steep.

Once again, I twisted my talon into the soft skin below my navel. I took the smallest piece from myself and remembered Rohana. How she had tucked the piece of my flesh into the hollow of her cheek. Gagging, I set it on my tongue and fought to swallow.

“The words.” The nekgya waited like she expected me to repeat them from memory.

My senses swam. “I don’t remember…”

“Repeat. Hold them in your head.” I could only focus on the nekgya’s black lips as they moved with the words. “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 repeated after her, each word torture to speak, and waited. When nothing happened, I met her empty gaze.

“You will feel pain,” she said, voice even. “You will only find relief in your king.”

“In my king?” My face bent as I tried to parse her meaning. “A healer will do, won’t they?”

“There is no power like that of the Gods, dear girl. Only the king will do.”

I froze. Eusia’s meaning had morphed. I could nearly feel her yearning through my body, through our bond. A warning shot through me. “You want him. You want his blood like you want mine, don’t you? This… this spell was a trick. To get me to return to him.”

A slow pain started in the middle of me.

I winced, and the nekgya smiled. “No trick, Imogen. The spell will keep you alive. And you, all on your own, will find your way back to him.” The nekgya was so still, so horribly lifeless.

“And if you don’t… well, one way or another, I’ll have his blood too. ”

I opened my mouth to speak, to scream, when the spell consumed me.

My eyes seared like hot oil had been dripped into them.

My scalp, my skin, my lungs, all felt like they were being pierced by thousands of burning needles.

My mind left my body from the sensation.

It slipped into another plane where there was only insatiable hunger and endless want.

It took me to a place where I yearned for Gods’ blood like it was precious, flowing gold.

Yearned like it was the only thing that would sate me.

Beneath the spell’s influence, terror took me.

Magic was headier than I’d anticipated. It was like nectar—ambrosia.

And despite the horrific pain, I wanted more and more and more.

I wanted power in all its forms. Safety and control and influence.

I wanted revenge. I wanted Theodore and the potent, shimmering blood that ran through his veins.

I would do awful things to ensure that it was mine… to ensure that I was fed.

There was no grasping the passage of time, but when I returned to my body, it was with a shriek.

The nekgya was gone. I was alone. Only Nemea’s crown and sword remained at my side.

My body felt like it had absorbed the entirety of the sea.

I looked down quickly. The seaweed had stitched itself into my skin, sealing the wound and stopping the blood.

I pressed my hands to my burning eyes. I ran my fingers over my scalp and a clump of dark hair came away stuck to the tips.

My cries seemed to come from outside myself, mixing with the slap of the waves against the hull, with the hammer of my heart in my ears.

Using the mast behind me as support, I rose, and the effort nearly made my vision go black.

The bleeding had stopped, the spell had worked, and just as Eusia had said, I was filled with a crippling pain.

For a long moment, I simply stood there. I fought to remember what my own want had felt like before I’d been tainted with Eusia’s. Kill Eusia, find Agatha, keep Theo safe. I chanted it like a prayer. I grasped it like a lifeline.

The sun was warm over my chilled skin, and I let my aching eyes skip over the ship’s deck.

It was worse for wear. Large, jagged holes marred its sides.

Some of the sails had torn and come free from their lines.

Nemea’s eel-stitched sail hung empty above me.

Shame burned through me. Perhaps my mother could have guided a ship in this state alone, but I was not my mother.

I was something darker and plagued, something worse.

Bending was agony, but I scooped up my tunic, Nemea’s crown and sword, and hobbled toward the edge of the ship.

Kill Eusia. Find Agatha. Keep Theo safe.

Keep Theo safe.

I clothed myself. I stared down blankly at the frothing water.

Keep him safe. Safe from me . For I had become his greatest threat.

Sea mist settled over me, and I set my plan. I would find Halla and take her with me. I would let her meet her beloved saint before she helped me end her. I’d bring Agatha to safety. The command I sent to the sea was crystalline: Guide me to Varya one last time.

I stepped off the edge of the ship, and the water swallowed me whole. It hauled me up and held me, so I floated on its surface like an old corpse.

In the cool, in the salt, my dream flashed to my mind.

The faceless woman, floating over the waves. No eyes. No hair. Adrift. While a dark, lurking presence combed through the depths below.

Starved.

Searching.

It finally found me.