The Dark Tide

by Alicia Jasinska

  The first successful sacrifice in two long years.

  And the last, if the rumors were true. Caldella’s Witch Queen had sent word: She would bow to the tide no longer. She would feed it no more lives. They would find another way to break this yearly curse that plagued their island.

  No more boys given to the sea. No more glorifying death and striking bloody bargains with the tide. No more trading innocent lives for safety.

  Lina drew in a breath. “And what, you think I’m going with him? Like this? With just the clothes on my back? Like Mama stowing away on Ma’s ship?”

  “You’ve always liked a good story.” Finley set her down by the red-and-white-striped post where his broom boat was moored.

  Lina hesitated, but when her brother did nothing, she started to unmoor it, rope landing in the bottom of the boat with a thud before she paused a second time, tugging at a strand of freshly dyed hair. She was still unsure about its new bright, silver color. Maybe she should go natural, or grow it, or chop it all off. She could never decide. For a second, she faced the gray spires of the Witch Queen’s palace, which you could see no matter where you stood on the island. Then her eyes flicked back to her brother.

  Finley had crouched down to cup a handful of water, letting it trickle through his fingers as if he still half expected the darkness to start creeping back. As if he expected the water around the broom boat to all of a sudden bruise black, tendrils of shadow snaking across the surface, spreading like an oil spill.

  “You’re not going to stop me? What if I said I was going with him?”

  Finley looked up as Lina clambered into the boat. There was something solemn in the set of his shoulders, an out-of-character sternness in his storm-gray eyes. And then he grinned, a flash of perfect teeth, reaching out to put a hand on her head and muss her hair, eliciting an outraged squeak. He kicked the broom boat away from the quay. Tam barked.

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Lina’s reaction was immediate. “You don’t know that!”

  “’Course I do. I’m your brother.” Finley cracked his neck. “An hour, and then I’m whistling for the boat to come back. You know Uncle’s going to skin you alive.”

  Lina shrugged as the broom boat swung out into the current. “I’ve faced worse things.”

  “For now,” Finley called after her. “Ma and Mama dock at dawn. You’re going to have to face them.”

  At dawn. A thrill of longing, relief, and nerves shot through Lina. Her mothers home tomorrow, home and safe. She made a face at Finley and rapped the side of the boat with her knuckles, sending it surging through the water. There were so many things she had to tell them, so many things she was never ever going to tell them unless she wanted to be grounded for a million more years.

  She could imagine what the rest of the family would tell them. One day, Lina vowed, she would stop being the cousin everyone gossiped about, the cautionary tale the aunties whispered about to their own children.

  There were things she needed to ask Ma and Mama, too, but she didn’t know if she could. Lina admired her parents plenty, and she wouldn’t mind being like them, but at the same time, she didn’t want to be them. She wanted to be herself. She wanted her own story. She wanted to be different.

  And a part of her was pretty sure she was, different from them, because she’d liked Thomas, too. She didn’t think she was going to stop liking boys even if she wanted to kiss girls now as well. And she wasn’t sure if that made her, well, enough to fit into her mothers’ world.

  Lina shook her head quickly. She didn’t want to think about it. Liking boys or kissing girls. Kissing witches. Kissing Eva. She didn’t want to think about Eva at all.

  Because it wasn’t as if Eva was thinking of her.

  The Witch Queen hadn’t looked at Lina once while she performed the sacrifice. Not when she’d chained Marcin to the pillar. Not when she’d stood stiff and silent as she fed him to the sea.

  Lina had been busy herself, dragging a half-conscious Thomas into the shelter of St. Casimir’s column-lined arcades as the black waves came crashing down.

  But even afterward, when she had left him, splashing through the water toward that bowed figure with its streaming hair and crown of scorched steel and spikes, Eva hadn’t turned. And by the time Lina managed to reach the place where she’d stood, there’d been nothing but curls of vanishing smoke.

  There’d been nothing the day after, either. No sign of any of the witches. None of the usual festive celebrations that followed a successful sacrifice.

  Lina had been left with a strange, hollow kind of emptiness, and she’d wondered whether she would catch a glimpse of Eva if she joined the revel a year from then. A glimpse of the wicked Witch Queen as she danced in and out of the revelers in disguise, appearing one second as the person you loved, transforming the next into the person the boy beside you loved, tricking you into taking her hand, tricking you into kissing her.

  Lina bit her lips and tasted salt.

  She wondered now if it was really true that there would be no more sacrifices. If there really would be no more revels and bonfires and dances on St. Walpurga’s Eve. She wondered if she would ever see Eva again.

  She shouldn’t want to, but she did. Her heart beat faster when she imagined it, and her mind kept drifting, conjuring up images of a girl with a smile so sharp it left teeth marks in her daydreams. She didn’t know what this thing was between them. She didn’t know if there was anything between them, what Eva really felt for her.

  But she wanted to find out. And she had a feeling that whatever did happen, no matter if it was the most complete and spectacular disaster, it would be a story worth telling afterward.

  A cloud passed over the moon as Lina drew nearer her destination, Caldella’s longest pier. Icy spray caressed her cheeks, set crystals in her lashes.

  The broom boat bobbed alongside the wooden planks, slowing as it drew even with a figure walking along the pier’s edge. A boy with sun-kissed hair and sea-tanned skin. A boy with a guitar case slung across his back.

  Thomas Lin’s steps slowed, too. “Did you do something with your hair?”

  Lina’s hand went automatically to her head. “Sort of. I’m still not sure about it.”

  “It looks good.”

  “Thank you.”

  The pier creaked. The breeze whispered, rustling Lina’s dress. A quiet stole over them. Thomas took smaller and smaller steps. You couldn’t freeze a moment or stop the world from turning, but you could hold on for as long as possible, absorbing every last breath before things changed.

  A lump formed in Lina’s throat, and she was filled with the same overflowing sadness she felt when she reached the end of a story, when she realized something was ending.

  “I hear it’s cold in Skani,” she tried.

  Obviously. It’s the land of frost and ice. Stop talking. Just stop talking.

  “I meant it,” said Thomas, “when I asked if you would come with me.”

  “I know, but I—I know, but I can’t.” Lina couldn’t bring herself to say aloud that she didn’t want to, that she wasn’t willing to give up her family, her friends, that she wouldn’t leave the island she loved for him, the island where she’d learned to dance. Her sinking city with its ravenous sea, its witches and enchantments.

  And she didn’t think she could tell him that she wasn’t sure she still wanted him. And that maybe she wanted to figure out more about who she did want and who she was first, before she made that kind of decision.

  Thomas stopped and sat suddenly on the edge of the pier, guitar case scraping the wood, long legs dangling out over the water. Lina wobbled to her feet in the boat.

  The tide was high, and their heads were almost level. Thomas leaned forward, reaching out. For a wild second, Lina thought he was going to kiss her. And for a second, it seemed he thought so, too.

>   Her heart skipped a beat. But Thomas hesitated, and the moment broke.

  He held out his hand instead.

  Lina took it, his fingers twining together with hers. Palm rough, warm, and a little clammy.

  “I asked too late, didn’t I? If I’d said something about how I felt before all of this…” He looked up at the sky, at the full moon, letting a breath out, letting go. “I can never repay you.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be a trade.”

  “Still.” Thomas squeezed her hand. “I won’t forget it. Any of it. I won’t forget how we danced at the revel. I won’t forget how you came after me. I won’t forget you, Lina Kirk. Never. For as long as I live.”

  Lina swallowed.

  Thomas untangled his hand from hers. Hitched the strap of his guitar case higher on his shoulder and, turning on unsteady feet, walked fast this time, without looking back.

  Lina waited until he reached the shadow of the fishing trawler, then rapped the broom boat with her knuckles and sailed away.

  35

  Eva

  It was the witching hour. The murk and midnight hour. An hour when dark things came out to play, and Caldella’s Witch Queen liked to think she was the darkest of them all.

  Eva’s steps echoed as she followed the narrow, sloping passage down to the lowermost levels of the Water Palace until the musty air mixed with the scent of salt and sea. Wind teased wispy black strands free from her crown of braids, and she paused when the passage ended abruptly, the tide nibbling gently at crumbling stone.

  She stepped out onto the surface of the emerald water, out into the full moon’s light. Charmed shoes left a chain of silver-edged ripples behind her as she crossed the night-dark waves and walked on, into, and over the sunken ruins of the old city.

  The living city loomed ahead, rising shadows and warm golden light winking in hundreds of windows like handfuls of scattered stars dropped by a careless god. Life and laughter drifted through those windows, too, from rooftop gardens and open doors, palpable relief catching on the breeze.

  Eva listened carefully as she walked to those carried sounds, to the islanders’ hopes and fears, to their dreams and secret desires. Voices tangled in her head, and she separated them out, following each thread to the end, spending a little magic to search for one voice in particular.

  It wasn’t currently speaking, but singing, a tune that grated on Eva’s ears.

  The Witch Queen comes on wings of night,

  The Witch Queen has your heart’s delight.

  Hold her, hold her, hold on—

  Heat flooded her cheeks. Yara had fallen into peals of helpless laughter when she’d heard the newest rendition of the famous song, the witchlings into fits of near-hysterical giggles. The first bright sounds in the palace since…

  Eva’s steps faltered and then kept going. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to forbid the islanders from singing the song, use magic to steal all their voices, wipe the words from their memories, or just turn them all into seagulls.

  “But if you do that,” Yara had pointed out, “who will you have left to rule?”

  And what was a queen without her subjects? A fallen queen. A queen of nothing and no one.

  Still, she didn’t have to like it, and she didn’t have to agree with what the song was implying. Eva preferred to see her leaping into the fire after Lina Kirk as a moment of fleeting insanity, a delayed side effect of Marcin’s sleeping draught, an unfortunate by-product of nearly drowning in the flooded ballroom. As for sparing Lina and sacrificing Marcin…

  Well, Lina wasn’t the one who had tried to kill her.

  “They fear you now, you know,” Cyla had whispered, referring to all the other witches. “They worry what you’ll do if they step out of line.”

  Good.

  The knowledge did not trouble Eva as much as it maybe should have, as much as it might once have done. If she was to rule through fear instead of love, then so be it.

  Let them fear her. She was never going to be her sister.

  She followed the singing, which eventually melted into humming as she approached the old bell tower. She ran a fingertip along the crumbling bricks. The tower’s spire cast a shadow over the broom boat bobbing below its rusted cupola, over a girl in a silver dress and fluttering feather boa, her storm-gray eyes fixed on the full moon. A girl with hair the pale diamond sheen of starlight on the sea.

  Lina jumped, almost spilling off the broom boat’s bench seat when Eva stole up silently beside the boat and lit a cigarette, orange light flaring suddenly.

  “God damn it! You—Couldn’t you say something first?” Lina leaned out of the boat and splashed a great wave of water at Eva.

  Eva stepped nimbly out of the way, then stepped into the boat as if she owned it. “I could have you executed for that.”

  “Seems a waste after everything you went through to save me.”

  “Maybe I regret saving you.” She regretted the words the second they left her mouth.

  Lina seemed to shrink. She tossed the end of her feather boa over one shoulder in a carefree fashion, but her spine was stiff.

  Eva flicked ash off the end of the cigarette. If she’d still had a heart, it might have beaten a tiny bit faster. But she didn’t. So it didn’t. She sank down onto the bench seat beside Lina. “I don’t regret saving you. I would do it again. Every time.”

  An anxious beat passed in which she debated whether or not to leap back out of the boat or turn herself into smoke.

  She took a quick drag instead, held the cigarette out.

  “I prefer cigars,” said Lina softly, but she took the cigarette anyway, placing the lipstick-stained filter between her lips.

  Eva blew out a breath and watched it spiral up into the sky. A strange tingling feeling, like pins and needles but all over, was crawling under her skin, and she was alarmed to realize it was panic.

  She crossed her ankles, long trouser-clad legs in line with Lina’s bare ones, their thighs almost touching because the bench seat was too small.

  She should leave. She should turn back the way she’d come. Return to the Water Palace. This was a stupid, foolish idea. Yara should have stopped her. Cyla should have stopped her. What kind of family were they if they didn’t stop her from looking like a fool?

  Safer not to care.

  Safer never to care, because caring hurt, and caring got you killed.

  But Eva had always been a little reckless with magic and with her heart. She’d bled her veins into the sea for love of her sister, had cut out her own heart in grief, and even now, when she had no heart to speak of, she still couldn’t quite resist the risk.

  “Have they banned smoking inside the palace now?” said Lina, “and that’s why you have to lurk out here like some lowly criminal?”

  “Actually, we could hear your singing, and the sound was so terrible that everyone begged me to come out here and make it stop.”

  Lina scowled.

  A sharp smile tugged at Eva’s lips, then died. “I heard Thomas Lin was leaving the island, setting sail on the midnight tide.”

  And I thought you might be going with him.

  “Please tell me you didn’t come out here to sink his ship,” said Lina.

  “The idea hadn’t occurred to me. However, now that you mention it…”

  Lina cut Eva a look that was half exasperation, half…something else.

  “I thought you might be going with him.” She dropped her gaze as she said it, tried not to make it into too much of a desperate question.

  “No. I’m not.”

  A knot inside Eva’s chest unraveled and then retied itself a thousand times tighter.

  “No more sacrifices?” said Lina, breaking the silence. A tiny orange spark, the lit end of the cigarette passed between them.

  Eva nodded. No more sacrifices. “Yara
said—” She didn’t know why she was telling Lina. It wasn’t as if she would even understand. “She said perhaps that was why Natalia made me queen.” Not because she’d trusted Eva to do what she had for the island, but because… “Because I tried to find another way to calm the tide, and she thought I would continue to fight for that.” Natalia had not expected Eva to give up. “It still might not be possible,” she added. “There might be no other way.”

  “We’ll keep trying to find one,” said Lina. “Together. However long it takes.”

  “That wasn’t a request for your help.”

  “Too bad.” Lina shifted, body leaning into Eva’s side, letting her head fall to rest on Eva’s shoulder.

  Eva nearly swallowed the cigarette.

  “Come and watch me dance when I’m allowed to again, when my ankle’s stronger.”

  Eva took a long and shaky drag, tipped her head back, and took her time blowing out the smoke, enjoying the way Lina started to fidget with impatience. “Only if you come dance for the sea serpent.”

  Lina let go of her necklace. She might have been smiling—you could hear it in her voice. “Because it likes me?”

  “Because I like you,” said Eva, before adding quickly, “I can’t think why.”

  Lina was definitely smiling now, head still resting on Eva’s shoulder but face lifted to the night sky. She drummed her knuckles on the broom boat’s side, sending it bobbing forward, sailing them through shadowed and moonlit ruins. They shared the remaining smoke between them, with no other sound to disturb them but the soft shusha-shusha of the tide.

  Acknowledgments

  There honestly aren’t enough words to convey my gratitude to all the people who helped make The Dark Tide into a real book.

  First and foremost, a giant thank-you to Aully Qian, who read this story first and all its many, many iterations thereafter. I’m blessed to call you my friend. I would not have gotten here without you and I cannot wait to see your work published and out in the world one day!