The Dark Tide

by Alicia Jasinska

  “The island is lost, Eva. You heard the reports. The East Tower’s completely flooded. The tide’s stealing back the levels below us. We can’t stay here. We need to sail before the storm breaks.” Marcin smoothed the map. “We need to get our family to safety.”

  “And the islanders?”

  Marcin shrugged. “They can come with us if they wish, if they’ll work for us. We’ll rebuild, take over Seldoma first.”

  “You want to start a war with the mainlanders.”

  “I want to lead us home. We were born on the mainland. I want to take us away from this cursed place. The mainlanders may even offer to help us.”

  “And if they don’t? If they still hurt people like us? If they don’t want us there?”

  Marcin had this frustratingly mercurial attitude toward the mainland, one day hating it and everyone who lived there, the next longing insatiably for home. Other witches who had fled from there refused to talk about it at all.

  Eva placed the moon shell she still held on the table atop the map, grimacing at the sight of the three nails she’d bitten bloody. Natalia would have known how best to respond. Marcin would never have pushed her like this. A wave of longing filled the hollow inside Eva’s chest. The confession slipped out before she could seal her lips.

  “I miss her.”

  She wanted to snatch the words back. But it was, in fact, the cleverest move she could have made. The soft words went in like a blade through butter. The fire banked in Marcin’s eyes, leaving only shadows swirling through his hazel irises.

  Strange how even weakness could sometimes be wielded as a weapon.

  Marcin massaged the scar tissue on his left hand. He looked suddenly older. Creases pinched the corners of his eyes, fading into blue veins peeking through the soft skin at his temples. He was a creature made from porcelain, riddled with cracks.

  “Why?” said Eva. “Why did you throw fire? I had the situation under control. Did you want the sea serpent to attack Lina? Attack me? Never has a queen looked such a fool.”

  “Well, that’s not true. What about that year the sacrifice jumped from the ship at the regatta and tried to escape by swimming to shore? I can still see Natalia’s face.”

  Eva cut him off. “Yara was almost hurt! I was hurt!”

  The air in the audience chamber thickened. They held each other’s gazes. Marcin was the first to break.

  “I thought I was helping. It certainly didn’t look like you had it under control. Why did you have to let it out in the first place? You wanted to scare Lina? To show off for her? You seem”—he paused, glancing down, smoothing a crease in the map—“interested in her, in a way you weren’t with the last boy.”

  Interested?

  Eva stiffened. Heat rose in her cheeks.

  “Even now you’re still slinking off to play with her, showering her with gifts and magic.”

  Of course she was. She was doing what was expected of her, to please the rest of their family, and to make sure Lina’s final days were filled with as much magic as possible, as the queens had always done. It wasn’t because she was interested. She wasn’t Natalia, falling in love with the boys she took. The very thought was absurd.

  But maybe not as absurd as it should have been.

  Eva tried to ignore the tiny part of herself that was even now recalling the ache of watching Lina dance for the sea serpent.

  She’d known in that moment exactly what Thomas Lin saw in her, had known the reason he’d dared to love again after Natalia. She had always understood Thomas. Deep down, they were alike, both cold and selfish creatures. Both people who would do anything: lie, pretend, sacrifice anyone to ensure their own survival. It was why she hated him with such a passion, because she knew she would have done exactly as he had, had their roles been reversed.

  But Lina was different. Fearless. Selfless. Foolish and completely infuriating. Eva now understood Thomas’s urge to warm his hands on that courage, that flame, to try and steal a little of it for himself.

  He did not deserve her. And she could just imagine the look on his face if he found out that she and Lina were…

  She kind of liked the thought of taking Lina away from him in that way, stealing someone he cared about from him like that. She liked it a lot.

  “I couldn’t bear the thought of you starting to care for her too much. I worried you would end up making the same mistake Natalia did. You even let Thomas Lin go free. After he spat in all our faces dancing into the revel with her. After all Natalia did for him.” Marcin’s expression was darkening.

  Eva wondered if this was the true reason he’d lashed out, like a child throwing a tantrum because he had lost his favorite toy. Marcin was going to lose his precious chance to watch Thomas Lin drown.

  Eva sliced a dismissive hand through the air. “I let him go because I wanted him to know what it felt like to have someone he truly loved stolen from him. But if you hate him so much, I’ll let you feed him to my serpent when this done. Does that make you happy?”

  A flash of uncertainty crossed Marcin’s face. It was so very rare that she surprised him.

  “I promised I wouldn’t use him as this year’s sacrifice, I promised nothing else.” And really, Lina was a fool for not having considered that, for not even asking. But foolishly good people so often made a habit of thinking everyone was as honest and foolishly good as they were.

  Marcin was staring at her hard. Eva kept her emotions in check, not a flicker of feeling on her face. Was he seeing her or merely searching for Natalia in the set of her features?

  I am not my sister. I will not make the same mistakes.

  The silent vow passed through Eva’s mind as quick as light, but at the same time a bubble of doubt dredged up from the depths of her being. Because she was and always would be a creature of all or nothing. She didn’t care at all, or she cared with everything she was.

  Caring like that got you killed.

  “And here I’d almost forgotten,” said Marcin slowly, “that you’d thrown away your heart.”

  Eva adjusted her collar. She wished Yara were here to back her up. But she’d gone to speak with Lina’s brother, to convince him and the rest of Lina’s family to stop sailing pointlessly round and round the Water Palace.

  Yara’s presence would likely have set Marcin even more on edge, anyway. Natalia had spelled him to sleep the night she’d sacrificed herself so he couldn’t stop her. Eva, too. And Yara had tried to talk Natalia out of it but failed.

  A deeply buried part of Eva couldn’t forgive Yara for that, just as she couldn’t forgive her own failures, and she knew Marcin never would either.

  “I know what I’m doing.” She would care enough, but not too much.

  “You wouldn’t have to do any of this if we left.”

  Eva’s temper frayed. She peeled the map off the table, scrunched it slowly into a ball. Natalia had made her queen, not him. She had to believe her sister had done so for a reason. “We are not evacuating. We are not going anywhere.” She set the ruined map on the table. “The sacrifice will work this year. Have Jun weave more witch’s ladders so we can send away the storm. Tell the others to strengthen the spells on the lower floors against further flooding. Seal the doors. We will not abandon our sister’s city.”

  21

  Lina

  Scores of candles had strange shadows dancing across the walls of the book-lined study. Together with the flickering flames, they kept Lina company. She tapped a finger on the spine of each book as she tried to decide which might help, which of the countless grimoires might hold an answer. The only sounds in the room were that and her breathing, a distant but steady plink-plink-plink of water dripping, and a sudden muffled shuffling that might have been someone’s shoes marching across the carpet.

  Did your mother never teach you not to wear shoes indoors?

  “What do you think
you’re doing?” Eva gritted out. “What have you done to the study?”

  Lina smiled without turning. “It’s getting late. I just lit a few candles. It was so gloomy and dark in here.”

  “I like the dark.”

  Lina hauled a heavy tome off the shelf and sank cross-legged onto the carpet, back against the edge of a low lounge, flicking carefully through the pages. More books made untidy towers on either side of her, dusty hundred-year-old diaries, leather-bound grimoires, and tide charts, their pages folded or bookmarked. “I’m researching.”

  “In my private study.”

  Now Lina did turn, looking up, gray eyes wide and innocent.

  Eva wore a real crown, a narrow thing of scorched steel and spikes, and her hair was loose. Long, long, dark fairy-tale hair rippling down her back in impossible waves. Lina had a sudden terrible urge to tangle her hands in it.

  She cast a glance around the study instead, soaking in everything: The faint lingering scent of bittersweet smoke, the record player in the corner, turntable still spinning. A brass telescope for stargazing. A discarded coat and a stray slipper, a message sealed inside a cloudy bottle.

  Tiny forbidden glimpses into Eva’s life.

  There was so much Lina still didn’t know about her. But it satisfied her in some small way to know Caldella’s infamous Witch Queen was as messy as she was. The fact brought her down to Lina’s level.

  “The doors brought me here. I didn’t know it was private.” Although she had realized, with no small amount of glee, that she’d finally managed to find her way into the Queen’s Tower. After that glimpse of the coming storm in the sea cave, Eva had vanished as abruptly as she always did, before Lina had had a chance to ask any of her questions.

  “Is that from Jada’s shop at the floating markets?” She pointed at the bottle with the message sealed inside. It was not the kind of bottle you’d expect to find in a witch’s house. Not a round-bottomed spell bottle filled with baby teeth and wishes.

  The bottle in question was old. Ancient. Cloudy green and crusted over, stoppered with wax and cork. The type of bottle that might have been brought up from a shipwreck like sunken treasure or discovered buried in the sand along Caldella’s rocky shore. A bottle filled with crumbling love letters or murderous confessions rolled and tied with twine. Never meant to be read, cast into the unforgiving depths of the sea. Decades, even centuries old.

  “I love going there,” said Lina. Each of Jada’s bottles had its own secret story sealed inside.

  Eva looked startled, then uncomfortable. “Me, too.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ve always thought there was something…”

  “Romantic,” prompted Lina.

  “Tragic,” said Eva, lip twitching. “Macabre. About sealing something inside a bottle and casting it into the sea. Or maybe I just worry my own bottle will wash up there one day.”

  “Your bottle?” Lina couldn’t picture Eva writing anyone a love letter. A murderous confession, on the other hand…

  The thought crossed her mind in jest, but it spoiled as it lingered, bringing her back to herself, to the reason she was here.

  It had been so easy for a moment, in this shadow-filled, candlelit room, with a dusty grimoire on her lap, to pretend that they were just two witches discussing spells.

  So easy to pretend she wasn’t a prisoner here—a prisoner of her own making—and that the moon wasn’t growing fatter and fuller, and that every breath wasn’t another grain of sand trickling to the bottom of an hourglass. Her life, running out.

  A fresh wave of panic made Lina’s skin flash hot and then cold again.

  She stabbed the pages of the grimoire in her lap with her finger. “I’m finding another way to calm the dark tide. One that doesn’t require someone dying.”

  Eva glided away from the low lounge and Lina. “There is no other way.” The words had the ring of an adage oft repeated, a finality, a tired note of resignation.

  “Maybe there is.” Lina caught the singlet strap slipping off her shoulder as Eva stopped before one of the book-lined walls and very deliberately started snuffing out the candles resting on the shelves, pinching the flames between her thumb and forefinger. A moody silhouette in a long, cascading black lace dress. It was quickly becoming apparent that she was allergic to color.

  Lina had taken several books down from that shelf; they were on the floor to her left, on top of an illuminated text from the mainland, a tome so large Lina could have curled up inside its gilded covers and drawn the pages over herself like a blanket.

  She had grabbed anything and everything she could find that had to do with human sacrifice. And animal sacrifice. Bloodless sacrifice. Offerings made to stave off drought, wildfire, storms. Libations to placate earthquakes and volcanoes. Sacrifices made for good fortune, for good harvests. To please malevolent gods and vengeful spirits.

  “Here.” Lina held up a different grimoire, flipping to a page she’d marked. “A different kind of sacrifice. ‘The witches of Skani sheared the fair locks from their skulls and with them wove a net of hair to cast upon the waves, calming the vengeful sea,’” she read out.

  “You want us to shave off all our hair,” said Eva flatly.

  “There’s also teeth!” Lina grabbed a gold-edged grimoire. “Witches on the desert continent used to brew a potion, there’s a list of ingredients here. They’d add a few teeth and pour the mixture at the foot of Mount Coroban every solstice to stop the volcano from erupting.”

  “Not to stop it from erupting, to honor it. The volcano is their goddess. They don’t see destruction in the eruption, only beauty. Strength.”

  “Well, there are more things, too,” said Lina, determined. This bored detachment was not the reaction she’d hoped for. A tiny part of her had even wanted Eva to be impressed she’d thought of this, to leap at the opening she was giving her. “There are plenty of other examples: witches giving up their voices, their beauty, trading away their memories, sacrificing their—”

  “And why is it,” said Eva, eyes narrowing dangerously, “that in all your grand schemes, it’s we who have to give something up? Our hair. Our teeth. Our voices.”

  Lina pressed both palms to her bare knees. “And how many of our lives have we given up? Every year. Every May. For hundreds of years. It’s only we islanders who—”

  “Only you? Are you forgetting my sister? The girl you so admire and aspire to be like? I’ve been meaning to ask, is your life truly so boring that you’re determined to live hers for her? Even going so far as to pine pathetically over the boy she loved?”

  Heat scalded Lina’s cheeks even as the words set her mind racing. Natalia had sacrificed herself, and that had settled the tide for a time. Would the sacrifice work again with another witch?

  Why didn’t the witches ever pay the price with one of their own?

  “Every year, our queen surrenders pieces of herself,” said Eva, as if she could read Lina’s mind. “Only the destruction of the city or her suffering can quench the tide’s hunger. Her tears. Our magic. We spend ourselves, trading pieces until there’s nothing left. Until we have no magic left and fade away. We already give enough. We have saved this island.”

  “And in doing so, you made the sea a monster!” Lina flipped open yet another book, rising to standing. “I’ve been reading these old diaries.” She probably should have paid more attention before now instead of just rolling her eyes in class and when Finley gibbered on about his theories as to why the island was sinking. She should have listened to her aunties, who talked about the tide like it was some kind creature cultivating its power. “The island was already flooding two hundred years ago, yes, and it was almost lost. But the tide wasn’t like this before the first queen cast her spell. You witches gave it life. You gave it power. And now you keep feeding it.”

  With more lives, with sorrow, nourishing it with
tears.

  “In the past, there didn’t even have to be a sacrifice every year. An islander was given to the tide once every decade or so.” Lina slammed the diary closed.

  Eva had gone still as stone. It was possible that Lina was about to be cursed, or worse. Eva might summon the wind or sand to scour the flesh from her bones, scrub them smooth as sea glass.

  Lina dropped her gaze. “Sorry. I just… I have to find another way.”

  I really, really don’t want to die.

  “I offered to let you go,” said Eva tightly, running her finger up and down the edge of the shelf, her back half turned. “You asked for this. You wanted to take Thomas’s place. I told you to put yourself first.”

  She had, and the same frustration painting Eva’s tone was tying knots in Lina.

  “I don’t regret it.” She’d made her peace with it. Even after hearing the witchlings’ story about how Eva had nearly died trying to find another way to calm the tide for the sake of her sister, for whom she’d even fought to save Thomas. The same way Lina had fought for Thomas and for Finley.

  The way Thomas hadn’t fought for Natalia or, it seemed, for her.

  Thomas, who maybe wasn’t who she’d thought he was.

  But what he’d done and was doing now had no bearing on her choice. Maybe he wouldn’t risk his life for her, as she had done for him. Wouldn’t trade his life for hers, as Natalia had done for him. But that was him and what he could live with.

  “I’m not going to be made to feel bad for saving someone’s life. No matter how afraid I am now, I would still make the same choice. I’d rather die knowing I saved the person I loved than live knowing I abandoned them to save myself. But that doesn’t mean that I want to die.” Lina twisted her necklace into a stranglehold. “I want there to be another way. I need there to be.”

  Eva pressed a thumb to her bottom lip in thought, in frustration, in an eerily familiar gesture.

  Familiar because it was a gesture Thomas always made. A gesture, Lina realized with a jolt, that Eva must have picked up from him. Or was it something Thomas had picked up from Eva when he’d been here last?