The Dark Tide

by Alicia Jasinska

  But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She reached out with a shaking hand and rapped her knuckles against the broom boat’s side.

  29

  Lina

  There were too many stairs in the Water Palace. Too many stairs and too many doors and too many endless flooded corridors for someone still recovering from a broken ankle. Someone who’d just rolled that ankle for the hundredth time as she rushed indoors. Someone with a broken nose. Someone whose whole body was aching.

  Lina cursed as they climbed a spiral staircase, cursed as they crossed an empty landing beneath a ceiling set with milky stars, cursed as they flitted past framed portraits of frowning witches only to find another flight of stairs twisting skyward, another useless empty room, another spiteful, glyph-engraved door.

  She cursed the world and whatever stupid person had built this palace, cursed the witches for dredging it up from the depths of the sea, for feeding the doors so much magic that they’d acquired minds of their own. She cursed herself and her body and her utter uselessness right now. Cursed Yara for speeding away as soon as they’d raced indoors without telling them which way to go.

  “You’re not even the one doing the damned work!” Finley huffed out, panting, sweat pouring from his temples, down the back of his neck, his handsome face flushed an angry red from piggybacking her through what felt like half the goddamn palace.

  Lina adjusted her monkey grip on his shoulders. “Could you go any slower?”

  “Could you lose any weight?” he shot back, sounding exactly like one of their aunties.

  Lina resisted the extremely tempting urge to lock her arms around his throat and strangle him.

  But then who would carry her?

  “Please.” She shut her eyes, bit her lip. She had not fought this long and this hard for nothing. Thomas. Eva. Marcin.

  What was he doing while wearing her face? Would he hurt Eva the way he’d hurt her? Would Eva stop him from hurting Thomas? Was Thomas…

  Don’t think.

  The roar and rush of water, voices high and low, angry and frightened, filtered through the walls. The drub of running steps. The unmistakable sounds of panicked arguing. All conjured up images, each one darker and more horrific than the last.

  Lina tried not to think, and then tried to think of nice things to block the bad thoughts out: being named Best Dancer two years running; winning a solo in the autumn performance; the fact that Finley was here, that he’d come to rescue her; working magic with Eva; slurping steaming cups of Caldellan stew with Ma on the wharf; Thomas’s promise-filled smile.

  But her mind had never been cooperative or skilled at holding on to the good things. The memories morphed into nightmares; her shining awards turned into bloodstained weapons. Thomas’s smile became a scream.

  The stairs curved up and up and up.

  “I know you hate him. I know you might hate Eva, too, but she only made me the sacrifice because I—”

  “Lina,” Finley gritted out. “I’m going as fast as I can, all right?”

  Lina jolted up and down as her brother took the steps two at a time. Her rain-soaked clothes stuck to her skin. Every breath felt like she was inhaling needles.

  “And I, about Thomas—” Anguish deepened her brother’s voice. “I still don’t like him. And he’s still too old for you. He deserved that black eye. Oy, don’t slap!” Finley’s grip tightened on her knees, hitching her higher on his back. “But he came looking to rescue you. He should have come a damn sight sooner. But he admitted that, too. And I know how it feels to want desperately to make up for something you’ve done that’s unforgivable.”

  Lina leaned her forehead into the back of his head.

  “I would’ve taken the devil’s help if it meant saving you,” Finley said.

  The door at the top of the stairs had no brass knob to turn, no gold handle to jiggle. It was sealed by no visible lock or bolt. Lina clung on as Finley slammed a shoulder into the shimmering dark wood.

  The door scraped, gave a little, stuck fast.

  Lina let out a snarl of pure animal frustration. Guttural. Raw. The echo dwindled into the sound of Finley’s ragged breathing.

  He threw his whole weight against the door. Lina beat on it with her fists above his head, pleading, flattering. It didn’t budge.

  Finley cursed, pressing his forehead to the wood, chest heaving. Lina sucked in a deep breath.

  And remembered.

  She dug a frantic hand down the front of her dress, into her brassiere, digging out the mother-of-pearl comb wound with Eva’s red string bracelets and ink-black hair. That curious sensation, that hum that seemed to sing through the strands like a plucked string, prickled her fingers and chased up her arm. “Put me down! Put me down!”

  “What?”

  “Now!”

  Finley knelt, and Lina half fell, half scrambled off his back. Her fingers were busy teasing a loop of string free, trying not to think of the last time she had worked magic with Eva’s hair out on the balcony in the storm.

  “Where did you get that?” breathed Finley.

  “You’re not the only one who gets gifted magic.” Lina stretched the red string taut and racked her brain. A knot would be quicker than making shapes, like those Eva had tied in her witch’s ladder during the storm. But what knot did you tie to force open a door? What knot did you tie to will it to take you where you wanted? A reef knot? A bowknot? A tiller’s hitch?

  She could tie any of those with her eyes closed. She had an elephant’s memory, the Conservatoire’s instructors liked to say. She never had to be shown a set of steps twice. But she didn’t know what each knot meant. She didn’t know how to speak to magic. It was like knowing the words of a foreign language but not what order to put them in.

  “Let me.”

  Lina twisted away from her brother, pinched the strings between her fingers, shut her eyes, and recalled the sensation of doing magic with Eva. That intoxicating, terrifying thrill. That tantalizing feeling of absolute power.

  Please.

  She threaded a loop. Please. Please open, please take me to where I need to go.

  She imagined the soft scrape the door would make as it swung open. Willed the charm to work with everything she had.

  The door stayed closed.

  Finley glanced back and forth between her and the door as he pushed. The patterns decorating the darkly polished wood shimmered and shifted restlessly. Mockingly.

  Rage and despair choked Lina, and she swallowed them both down. She slammed a palm against the wood, throat tight, eyes burning. She tied a blood knot and held her breath as string and hair started to glow a fiery orange.

  It started at the tips of her fingers: a faint prickling like pins and needles, blossoming into searing heat. Full-blown fire. Lina let out a cry as it engulfed her. There was a flash of blinding white, the heat at the very center of a star.

  Please, she whispered to the magic.

  And this time, it listened.

  Lina leaned her weight into the door and fell through it as effortlessly as sunlight falling through glass—catching her balance at the top of another grand staircase. There was a pained “Hell!” as Finley followed her and stumbled. The door had vanished completely, leaving only an empty arch. The blinding light of the magic was fading, revealing details: a glowing amber chandelier, pale stairs running down into a ballroom flooded with black water. The swell slapped against the stairs, rising halfway to the top, to where they stood.

  There was something swimming in it. Something scaled and dark and sinuous, something keening horribly as it tried to nudge something smaller and equally dark onto the steps. A body face-down in the dark water, head crowned with scorched steel and spikes.

  No.

  Lina flew down the staircase while Finley grabbed for her, trying to stop and steady her.

  “Don’t you da
re. Don’t you dare!” She fell to her knees, dragging Eva onto the stairs, her upper body out of the water. The sea serpent’s breath was hot on the back of her neck, stinking and rotten. Its endless keening made her shudder. “Finley!”

  Eva’s head lolled. Water ran down her cheeks and lips. Bloodless lips. Ashen skin. Closed eyes. Lashes two charcoal crescents.

  Lina ran her hand over Eva’s mouth, over her nose, feeling below her chin. No heartbeat. No breath.

  “I’ll get help. I’ll go get…” Finley was already racing back up the stairs, through the arch where the door had been, his calls for Yara echoing.

  “It’s awfully hard to kill a witch”—wasn’t that what the witchlings had said? Hadn’t Eva bled herself into the sea and survived? Hadn’t she faced down this very sea serpent and survived?

  But hadn’t Natalia drowned? Hadn’t Lina watched her?

  That was different, she told herself—that was magic spent, magic sacrificed. Magic didn’t die, it was just used up. Eva was still here. She hadn’t faded away. Didn’t witches fade away like dreams at sunrise when they died?

  So she mustn’t be dead. Couldn’t be.

  She didn’t have a heart—that’s what the islanders said. What Marcin had said. She’d sealed it inside a bottle and cast it out to sea. She was like the sea giant in that old, old story, the one who’d hidden his heart outside his body so he couldn’t be killed.

  Lina stared at the gray, almost-translucent sheen of Eva’s skin. “Don’t you dare go. Don’t you dare.” A ragged sob tore from her throat.

  She dug her nails into Eva’s shoulders. Into cold, clammy skin. She pressed her mouth against Eva’s unresponsive one, blowing in breath, pounding on Eva’s chest, trying to remember what Ma had taught her to do when a sailor went overboard.

  She looked up when footsteps sounded. “Finley?”

  But it was a slim, silver-haired figure in black standing at the top of the stairs. Jun. The witch whose humming and singing had taken away her pain in the ship’s cabin after the regatta. He stared at her and Eva in obvious horror, stared beyond them both to the sea serpent swimming through the flooded ballroom in fretful, anxious circles, churning up waves that broke with a splatter against Lina’s side.

  “Help!” Lina croaked. “Please help!” She was ripping strands of hair from Eva’s head now, knotting them desperately, wishing, pleading once more with magic. The strands started to glow.

  Jun’s shadow spilled over her.

  “Marcin, he wore my face and…” Lina swore she felt Eva shudder.

  Jun dropped to his knees. A wiry arm snaked around Lina’s waist from behind, pulling her back and flush against his firm chest, away from Eva.

  Lina squirmed as a hand clamped over her mouth, sweat-sticky skin smushed against her lips. “Shush. Shush, now. Oh hell, Marcin, really? It’s one thing to say we’re leaving Eva behind because she’s stubborn, quite another to…” Hot breath tickled Lina’s ear as Jun spoke his thoughts out loud. “I’m sorry, I really am, but I can’t have you telling anybody.”

  Lina writhed furiously, a muffled shriek making it through the sweaty hand covering her mouth.

  The arm around her tightened.

  The sea serpent lifted its head from the water and keened.

  The lights guttered.

  The ballroom went dark. Utterly dark. The darkness of a night with no moon, when storms and smoke blocked out the stars.

  The arm around Lina loosened. Let go. The palm covering her mouth peeled away.

  She gulped in a great shuddering breath. The air was so heavy and gritty with magic that she could taste it, ash on the back of her tongue. She couldn’t see an inch in front of her, couldn’t see her own hands.

  But she could feel it—something waking. For it was not an empty darkness.

  There were staggering steps behind Lina, then a scream, but it cut off. A horrible, wrenching tearing, like cloth ripped in half.

  But she did not think what was ripping was cloth. It was something thicker, juicier, meatier. Lina’s heart raced faster, faster. Something brushed her side. She flinched but didn’t dare move.

  Someone moaned.

  The light came back slowly, softly at first, as the haze cleared, as the black smoke coalesced into a queen and the world faded back into focus.

  Eva stood over Jun. Scorched steel crown clenched in one hand, lurid crimson dripping from its spikes onto the pale staircase.

  Lina didn’t want to think what she’d done with that crown, did not look closely at Jun’s crumpled, cowering form. She kept her gaze locked on Eva, whose eyes were open. Open and empty, like a hollow doll’s. Lina had seen Eva look smug, had seen her look shocked, furious, mischievous, cold, and uncaring.

  She had never seen her look lost, look naked, look haunted.

  Something in Lina told her to turn away, turn away quickly. They weren’t anything at all to each other, really. And yet it broke something inside of her to see Eva looking like that, and she was suddenly terribly frightened by the thought of never again seeing that familiar knife-sharp smile, that mischievous, smug version of the other girl. The thought was somehow unbearable.

  Lina stood, weight on her strong leg. The words were out before she could think better of them, an echo of Eva’s first words to her, back in the sea cave. “Did you enjoy drowning?”

  Eva didn’t move, didn’t blink.

  But there was a flicker of something in the depths of those dark eyes. A spark. Like fire. Like the gleam of starlight on the sea at night. Lina watched the color seep back into Eva’s cheeks with a relief that made her weak, and something else that she wasn’t yet willing to put a name to that made her chest grow tight.

  Eva stalked closer, the drip-drip-drip of blood from the unforgiving spikes of her crown. Her free hand lashed out, wrapped around Lina’s throat before she had time to breathe, and squeezed. “Are you sorry that you didn’t stay to watch?”

  30

  Eva

  Feet pounded down the stairs. Rough hands tore Eva from Lina, jerking her around to face a second set of merciless, storm-gray eyes. “What in hell are you doing, you ghoul? She came to help you.”

  A voice hoarse and low and trembling with fury, yet liltingly familiar. As the rest of the boy’s features were painfully familiar. Those eyes, those cheekbones, those strangely square brows.

  Lina’s brother shook Eva so hard it felt like her teeth would rattle.

  “Finley! Wait, Finley!” Lina had fallen back, a hand to her throat, coughing. Her other hand stretched out in anxious appeal.

  Lina Kirk, always putting other people before herself.

  “Finley!” Another voice. Yara was flying down the stairs after him. “E, thank God, I thought—”

  “Finley.” Lina pleaded with her brother. Her brother, who had come for her, to save her, like Natalia had once saved Eva.

  The emptiness inside Eva’s chest expanded. Her left hand clenched around steel, around the sharp spikes of her bloodstained crown. When the water from the sea cave had flooded in and the magic had wound around her like chains, dragging her deep into the dark, she’d wondered: Would she see Natalia before the end? Would she dream of her sister?

  How badly she had wanted to. People said it happened, that they spoke to the dead as their own deaths drew near. That their loved ones came to offer them peace, forgiveness. That they urged them to live, to love, to follow their dreams.

  Funny how what the dead wished for was always what the living most desired.

  Natalia had not visited Eva, had not come for her as Lina’s brother had. There had been nothing but the icy bite of the water and darkness. And she’d decided then that if she came back, she would offer no one forgiveness. She would wish for no one to live or love. She would haunt them all. Every last one.

  Thomas Lin, whom she had trusted with her sister. L
ina Kirk, who had left her to drown.

  To be eaten by her own pet sea serpent. Only it hadn’t eaten her.

  Her loyal monster, the only creature she could trust.

  Eva’s gaze slid away from Finley, a tiny crease forming between her brows as she soaked in details her mind had not registered earlier. A tight, deathly stillness stole over her, constricting her chest and making her voice a hiss, a whisper.

  “Who did that to you?”

  This was not the Lina she remembered lowering her to the floor, welcoming in the tide. The deep bruises blooming below those eyes, across the bridge of her nose; the blood crusting above her lip, down her chin; the bedraggled, sodden sun-gold hair—Eva would murder whoever had done this.

  “Marcin,” Yara said quietly, tugging on Finley’s sleeve, trying to make him release his grip on Eva’s arms.

  “He wore my face.” Lina’s eyes were red-rimmed and glassy. “I—” Guilt pinched her features. She forced out the words. “Thomas came for me. Marcin stopped us from escaping. He forced me to jump from one of the balconies. He said you wouldn’t have to know I was gone. I don’t know what happened afterward. Finley brought me back so I could warn you. I don’t know what—I don’t know if Thomas—” Her voice cracked, gaze darting past Eva as if she thought she might find Thomas Lin lurking in the curves of the ballroom’s staircase. As if it might not be too late. “Were you going to give him to Marcin? Were you going to let Marcin feed him to your serpent as soon as I was gone? Even though I…I thought we…”

  Eva stared. A bolt of lightning-hot irritation shot through her, head to toe. Did that really matter right now? Was that really the question to ask right now?

  Marcin.