“I didn’t work for free,” said Serena, challenging her mother with her eyes, hoping to draw Moira’s poisonous gaze away from Hazel. “It’s called overtime. And yes, I do like scrubbing floors, at least more than I like being in this horrible place where merpeople slink in and out in secret. This place wreaks of greed and vanity and merpeople’s deepest darkest fears, and I don’t think I can stand it much longer.”
“So you’re going to live off a maid’s salary?” said Hazel with another shrill, derisive laugh. Her eyes darted to Moira in excited anticipation of the explosion—directed at Serena—that was sure to come soon. But Moira’s face was neutral and unreadable. Hazel pushed on. “Honestly, Serena, you’re twenty years old and you’re still a maid.”
“You have a gift, given to you from birth,” said Moira. Her voice was level and seemingly calm, but Serena detected the cold edge underneath that boded ill for both sisters, despite what Hazel thought. “A gift of power, a gift that offers you a lucrative career, and you turn your back on it and on your own family for what? A job fit for filthy bottom feeders!” A violet flame was dancing in Moira’s irises, a sign that her anger was making her magic build up inside her. “I will not have a daughter of mine scrubbing the dishes and licking the fins of those moronic, pompous, spineless shrimps who call themselves royalty! You have potential, Serena! You are strong-willed and intelligent, unlike your sniveling sister. You showed great power as a child. I know you’ll make a talented witch, also unlike your worthless sister, who can’t even skin an eel or mix together a simple sleeping potion. I’ve had enough of this maid nonsense! You’re going to…”
Hazel had fled the room, her chest heaving with sobs, her tears invisible as they mixed with the salt water around her. Serena clenched her hands into fists, staring at the corridor after Hazel.
“You’ve had enough?” Serena said, her own anger matching that of her mother. She clenched her fists harder, feeling the power inside her threatening to burst free and refusing to let it. “No, Mother, I’ve had enough! I’ve had enough of you ripping Hazel to pieces. Maybe if you would actually teach her instead of yelling at her all the time, she’d get better at controlling her magic. Just because you can’t bully me into doing what you want, doesn’t mean you can just take it all out on her. She worships you! Don’t you see that?” Serena rolled her eyes and scoffed. “Of course you do. You love it. You love to watch her grovel at your fins begging to be loved. Well I’ve had enough of it, and I won’t allow it anymore.”
“Allow it?” said Moira, her voice like a violently crashing wave. Her hair stood on end around her head in writhing snake-like tendrils. The tattoos covering her body started vibrating, making Serena avert her eyes. “You won’t allow it? Ha! You think you can command me?”
Moira floated off her seat. Her eyes had dancing flames where the irises once were. She lashed a hand out at Serena in a diagonal motion, her index finger pointed out, her long nail like a little dagger. Moira’s hand did not make contact, but Serena gasped in pain as a small gash appeared across her cheekbone. Her blood leaked out into the water and floated in front of her eyes.
“You know what I can do, girl!” said Moira. “You do not command me. I am power itself. As long as you refuse to use your own power, you will kneel at my tail like the helpless little maid you are. Get out of my face. I don’t want to see you again until you decide to take up your birthright and be the sea witch I know you truly are.”
Powerless against her mother’s magical fury, realizing she was beaten, Serena retreated, but she kept her head high and her features hard. She swam down the corridor after Hazel, pumping her tail hard in her anger, hoping her furiously flicking fins would translate her feelings to her mother better than words.
The hallway glowed with strange green light from the little orbs floating on the cave ceiling. Hazel preferred the green lights over the other colors and thus lined the corridor to her bedchamber with them as a way of staking her claim. Her bedchamber glowed green as well, the light dancing off her tail, the color of seaweed, making her iridescent scales even more dazzling. In this light, here in her safe haven, she was beautiful.
She was sprawled out on her bed that was shaped like a giant jellyfish and woven out of hundreds of jellyfish whose stingers Moira had removed for potion ingredients. Even though jellyfish were brainless, and thus unable to communicate with mermaids, Serena still felt uneasy every time she sat on the bed. In bobbed underneath her weight and felt much too alive. Hazel had her back to Serena, her head buried in her arms as she sobbed.
“Don’t let the old hag get to you that way, Hazel,” said Serena.
Hazel inhaled in surprise, and her head shot up from the bed. She gulped down another sob and her face pulled down into an angry look of reproach.
“Go away,” she said. “I don’t want to…” Her eyes opened wide, and the angry set of her brow and jaw softened as her eyes rested on Serena’s cut cheek. “Did she do that to you?”
“Yeah, she gave me the ‘I am power itself’ speech and threw a tantrum,” said Serena, shrugging her shoulders and smiling easily at Hazel. “What’s that? The third time this week?”
Hazel laughed weakly and said, “At least.”
“You need to make her an ‘I am serenity itself’ potion. Maybe a little sea slug slime in her morning anti-aging potion; that’ll slow her down, don’t you think?”
Hazel’s mouth turned down, and she looked as though she might start crying again.
“You know I’m no good at potions. Don’t make fun of me.”
“Who says you’re no good? Mother? She just likes to beat you down so you don’t stand up to her— so you think you have to depend on her so she can keep you around to do her errands.”
“No, I’m really no good. Whenever I try to make a potion by myself it’s a disaster. She’s right; I can’t even make a sleeping potion, and it only has two ingredients. It’s just every time I try, the instructions get all jumbled up in my head and I forget things, or I don’t prepare the ingredients properly. When I try to say incantations I get all tongue tied.”
“Where’s Mother when you’re doing those things?”
“Watching me, so she can tell me what I did wrong afterwards so I can learn.”
“She doesn’t stick around to teach you, Hazel. She hangs around to intimidate you. You mess up your potions and your incantations because you’re so afraid of displeasing her that you lose your nerve. You have to learn to ignore her.”
“I try! I just…oh, what do you care anyways? You think magic is stupid and wrong,” said Hazel, hanging her hand and fidgeting with her nails.
“No I don’t. The king does good magic with the Trident. He helps people with his magic. I think the way Mother uses her magic is wrong. She only uses it for her own gain, and she loves to play games with people’s minds and trick them into terrible deals. What did she make that last man give her? I saw him leaving, and he looked terrified. What did she give him?”
“She helped him,” said Hazel, her voice defiant. “She gave him a potion to cure his dying brother.”
“And what did he have to give her?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes it does, Hazel. I want you to say it. What did her give her in return?”
“The…the heart of a pirate.” She averted her eyes from Serena’s and said in a high, desperate voice, “Sinner’s hearts are very special ingredients that can make lots of good potions to help people. Besides, pirates are thieves and murderers anyways.”
“Hazel, do you hear yourself? You know it’s wrong. You can’t keep letting her shove that nonsense down your throat. She’s influencing your mind without even needing to use her magic.”
“Let me fix your cut,” said Hazel, swimming over to the recessed holes that held her things on the far side of her room. “It looks like it hurts.�
��
Serena sighed. Hazel had shut down. She wouldn’t hear any ill words spoken against their mother. She so desperately wanted to control her magic like Moira, to be confident and powerful like her, and so desperately needed to be loved by her that she couldn’t see Moira’s considerable dark side.
Hazel pulled a small clam shell full of a clear balm from her wall and brought it to Serena. As she rubbed the balm into Serena’s cut, sending a warm, pleasant feeling radiating across her cheek, Hazel said, “Our magic is much better than the Trident’s magic, you know. It comes from within us, not from an object. If you think the Trident’s magic helps people, I don’t see why you won’t learn to control your own magic and use it how you think it should be used.” Pressing her finger onto Serena’s cut hard enough to make her wince, she added bitterly, “Mother seems to think you could be a whole lot better at it than me.”
Sea witches were born with the ability to work magic. Potions and incantations were useless to regular merpeople; they only worked for those who had magical power in their blood. From infancy, Serena had shown great magical ability. Before her fins developed enough to swim, things she wanted—toys, food, even her mother—would come zooming into her little hands as if she’d pulled them to her with an invisible rope. When she cried, the ground beneath her would shake or objects around her would explode. As she grew, she learned to keep her magic bottled inside herself, but she refused to learn how to properly use it. Children often tease and bully those they don’t understand, and being the daughter of a sea witch with a dark reputation was bad enough in school without adding her own magical ability to the mix. She didn’t want her mother’s reputation.
“Who cares what Mother says,” said Serena. “How can I possibly be better than you when I don’t even do magic? She just says things like that to hurt you and to try and convince me that I should get into the witch business.”
According to Moira, Hazel hadn’t shown as many signs of power as Serena. Objects she wanted would fall short of her crib. When she cried she just tipped things over. Serena wasn’t sure she believed it—perhaps it was just another of Moira’s manipulations to convince Hazel she was second rate—but Hazel took it to heart. Hazel just shook her head in rehearsed disbelief at Serena’s words of encouragement.
“And I would like to use my magic to help people,” said Serena, “but you know as well as I do that it will take a lot of training to learn how to properly use my power, and I refuse to be taught by Mother. I won’t do magic until I have a teacher I trust.”
Serena looked hard at Hazel, hinting with her eyes and a small smile. Hazel looked back with the same level of intensity, and for a fleeting moment, Serena thought Hazel would offer to be her teacher. Then Hazel’s eyes narrowed in a bitter look that Serena was familiar with and that always made her sad. She knew how needlessly jealous Hazel was of her—how it drove them apart when they should be banded together.
“I guess you’ll just have to go on being a maid then,” said Hazel, a snarl in her voice.
Serena sighed, and Hazel turned away from her. They sat that way, Serena studying Hazel’s dull hair under the green glow of the orbs while Hazel studied her bedroom wall, for a long time. Serena longed to reach out and touch her sister, comfort her, but knew instinctively that she needed to wait and let Hazel come back to her.
“You know she’s just in a bad mood because of Queen Amphitrite’s ridiculous declaration,” Hazel finally said. “She didn’t mean any of those things she said about me.” She turned back to Serena with a small smile, looked at the already fast healing cut on her cheek, pointed to it, and said, “She didn’t mean that either.”
Serena knew Moira had meant every word and had relished giving Serena the cut, but pressing the issue would only push Hazel away again. She said nothing.
Hazel was right about one thing, though. Moira was in a horrendous mood over the royal declaration given by Queen Amphitrite a fortnight before that said it was now illegal for merfolk to deal with sea witches, punishable by imprisonment. A lot of Moira’s regular clients were not returning for their weekly anti-aging, anti-stress, and talent-granting potions or healing balms (like the one on Serena’s face now). Some, those who were the most desperate for the perks Moira could give them, still showed. She would still make the same amount of dark, under the table deals, but losing a large chunk of her daily revenue made her absolutely furious.
What Serena, Moira, and Hazel knew, unlike the other merfolk, was that Queen Amphitrite had suspected King Poseidon of cheating. When she discovered him sneaking off one day a fortnight ago, she followed him to Moira’s cave and overheard him buying his usual anti-aging potion—yes, even the king used to come to Moira. At first she was relieved that he was not going to meet a lover, but then she deduced from Poseidon and Moira’s conversation that he came there weekly for the potion. She realized he had never once shared the anti-aging potion with her, and this made her wonder if he was trying to look younger for another woman, that perhaps he was planning on replacing her with someone who didn’t need to use an anti-aging potion. She even began to suspect that perhaps he made weekly visits because he had a thing for Moira herself, with her fierce beauty and mysterious lifestyle.
Amphitrite had caused quite a scene in the cave, slapping Poseidon with her hand and her tail and knocking over Moira’s ingredients containers. Moira had gotten the gist of the situation during Amphitrite’s tirade. Serena and Hazel had heard it all from their bedchambers. Moira had called the girls out after the king and queen had left, and they had watched the fight that had ensued at the palace as well, from the depths of Moira’s cauldron. Moira said an enchantment and the water inside the cauldron became like a one-way window into the palace. They had learned the rest of the story through watching that fight. Serena had felt terribly guilty about eavesdropping, especially alongside her mother, but her curiosity had gotten the best of her.
Talk of Amphitrite made Serena remember why she had been so happy on her way home.
“Oh, Hazel, you’ll never guess what happened today,” she said, ignoring Hazel’s comment that Moira hadn’t meant anything by her rage.
“What?”
“I spoke with Prince Triton; a face-to-face actual conversation…well sort of. He was mostly apologizing for bumping into me.”
“He bumped into you?” said Hazel, a smile brought on by Serena’s infectious excitement forming on her face, despite the familiar twisting feeling of jealousy rising in her gut.
“Well really, I bumped into him on purpose, but he doesn’t know that,” said Serena with a sly smile, wiggling her eyebrows playfully at her sister, who giggled. “Anyways, he was so kind and charming, and guess what, Hazel.”
“What?” said Hazel when Serena paused with her lips pursed in an attempt to hold back a giant smile. “You’re killing me here.”
“When he was apologizing, he asked me if he hurt me,” said Serena, speaking quickly and breathlessly now, “and I said no, and he said ‘I would never want such a pretty face to come to harm.’ And he smiled at me! Just like he smiles at all those wealthy, eligible girls. Can you believe it, Hazel? Prince Triton called me pretty and he smiled at me! And he asked me my name. He knows my name, Hazel!”
Hazel’s smile had grown with Serena’s, but when her sister finished her story, Hazel’s neck and cheeks felt hot despite the cool water all around them, and she had to bite her lip to keep from saying, “Great, now he can address you directly when he needs you to fetch him something.” The jealousy warred in her gut. Whenever Hazel looked at Serena, a battle between love and hatred clashed inside her. Between interactions with her mother and her sister, Hazel was always in the midst of inner turmoil. Jealousy usually won out, but Serena had been so kind to her, and she looked so very happy.
“That’s amazing, Serena,” said Hazel, forcing the smile back on her fa
ce. “I can’t believe it. It must have been like a dream.”
“Oh, it was,” said Serena, tilting her head back and lifting her eyes to the green orbs above them. “Just like a dream, Hazel. And maybe that’s the reason that I’m starting to believe it can actually happen.”
“What can happen? You and Prince Triton?” Hazel wasn’t able to hold in her derisive laugh. “Serena, you’re a maid. It’s never going to happen no matter how many pretty smiles he flashes you.”
Hazel’s words seemed to have no effect on Serena. She just looked over and gave Hazel a knowing smile that seemed to say, “Just you watch, Hazel. Just you wait and see,” and then she swam to the doorway with that same dreamy look on her face. She turned around with one hand resting on the stone archway.
“Think about what I said, Hazel, please,” she said. “Don’t let Mother make you feel bad about yourself. You’re better than her, Hazel—a better mermaid. Don’t let her tell you otherwise.”
As Serena swam into the hallway, Hazel thought, Being a better mermaid means nothing. I want to be the better witch.
Serena took the back corridors to her room, not wanting to cross the foyer and run into Moira again. Whereas Hazel had chosen green orbs to line her hallway and room, Serena had chosen blue to match her own tail. Serena’s bed was a stone frame she’d packed with blue and purple seaside flowers. An enchantment kept the flowers fresh even though they were plucked. Serena had asked Hazel to perform the enchantment, and she had done a perfect job. Serena often reminded her of this, but Hazel just said the spell was child’s play and that if she couldn’t do that then she shouldn’t even call herself a witch. Serena wasn’t sure Hazel was even aware of copying their mother’s words when she said it.
But now, as she lay back on her bed, her arms splayed behind her, her tail flipping slowly up and down, she wasn’t thinking of Hazel. Behind her closed eyelids, she saw herself at Triton’s side in the throne room, sitting in the queen’s throne, the one shaped like a dolphin holding itself up out of the water. She sat in the curve of the dolphin’s tail, her back resting against its belly. Triton sat beside her in the king’s throne, shaped like an octopus, with six legs attached to the ground serving as the chair and two held up as armrests. The Trident sat in the curl of the right side tentacle of the throne.
The Sea Witch (The Era of Villains Book 1) Page 2
