She’s now in my face, the set of her jaw is angry, her nose at a subtle flare. “Mermaids don’t have souls, Evie, not like you humans. I couldn’t be created from someone who did. Your friend Anna is in a better place, not in this body that will become nothing but sea foam.”
Her crushing words hit me one by one, diminishing nearly all my hope. Then one of Tante Hansa’s sayings floats across my mind: The only thing magic cannot do is know its bounds. Anything is possible. I open my mouth to say more, to argue this one more point, but Annemette puts up her hand.
“Stop, Evie. Just stop. You’re only hurting yourself.”
I look at her closely. Is she really Anna? And then I hear her words echo from a moment before: Your dream isn’t possible for almost the very reason why I’m here. My blood begins to rise.
“Why are you here?” I ask, my eyes squinting at her every inch.
“What do you mean? I love Nik,” she says.
“No,” I shake my head. “You’re here for a soul. Aren’t you? Any soul will do. So is this your plan, you get Nik to love you, kiss you, and then you steal his soul? Is this all some kind of dark, sick game?” My heart is beating so loudly I can barely hear myself speak.
Her eyes go soft. “No, Evie. You’ve got it all wrong. I love Nik. And yes, if he loves me and kisses me, I get a part of his soul. I get to live on as human, and then when I die, more. But Nik’s generosity is no different from you giving a piece of yourself to him and to all the people you meet and treat with kindness, making them better. I don’t have that to give, but I don’t think wanting it is a crime, either.”
My heart rate slows, but I’m breathing like I’ve completed the rock carry. How could I have said what I just said? It was horrible. Annemette grabs my hands and pulls me into an embrace, the smell of the sea on her hair, calming me down. I look up when I hear boots clicking on the cobblestones. Iker and Nik are walking down the path. I pull away from Annemette, and I’m sure my face looks like hers, cheeks flushed and eyes red.
“Smile,” I say, wiping my eyes. “Our princes await.”
Annemette clasps my shoulder, a smile already blooming on her lips. “Thank you, Evie.”
With that she turns and runs past me and into Nik’s arms, squeezing him close and taking a pink tulip from his hand when it’s presented. He’s changed too, his mud-splattered boots and sweat-worn clothes switched out for a nearly identical, crisp, clean edition.
“When you weren’t where we’d left you, we’d thought you’d run off with some other sailors.”
Iker winks. “Well, he thought that. I knew you’d find none better.”
He hands me a red tulip, and I immediately sink into him. Impossibly, this new shirt smells of salt and limes and the sea despite being freshly clean and scratchy with starch.
Nik glances up the path to the court homes, Anna’s house prominently standing at the end. His eyes settle on the sharp red brick, and then move to me.
“That was our friend’s house, once,” Nik says, his chin nodding in its direction. “Has Evie told you about Anna?”
Annemette nods. “We met her lovely grandmother just now. Poor thing thought I was her.”
His thumb grazes her cheek in a delicate arc. “I must admit that you do resemble our old friend, but considering Fru Liesel has accused everyone—including me—of being Anna in the years since, I’d tell you not to worry about what she thinks.”
Nik and I allow ourselves a small laugh with the others despite how hard it is still to speak of Anna. And while my body is drained from arguing with Annemette, I can’t let go of the hope that somewhere inside of her is that old friend. I can feel it in my bones. In my heart. I’m right about this.
I’m right about her.
Tomorrow cannot be her last day, and if Nik can’t or won’t help me achieve what she needs, I will find a way do it myself.
FOUR YEARS BEFORE
The hero was too big for the room. That had been happening often of late, his new height making trouble with any doorframe or ceiling outside of the castle. Belowdecks on his father’s ships was definitely the worst, ironic considering the Viking blood thick in his veins.
It had been a week, and he had to see her again. She’d missed the entire Lithasblot festival that year, swallowed in blankets and despair. He’d visited her every night before his duties, entering a room cluttered with bottles and incense, Tante Hansa’s famous healing skills at work. He’d never been to this room before—she’d always come to him. Her house felt like another world—and it was.
It was weeks later now, August bearing down. And still she kept to her house, heartache confining her to her room.
That afternoon she’d improved a bit, sitting up with her back to the wall, reading some dirty old book in the low light. She glanced up as he ducked under the threshold, sitting at the end of her bed—his proper mother and her opinions about boys and girls far from here.
“How’s the world outside?”
“Still moving?”
She flinched. He didn’t blame her, he’d nearly flinched too.
Whenever anyone called him a hero for saving the life in front of him, his stomach curdled with the knowledge that he wasn’t quite heroic enough. Everyone had seen Iker pull him from the water. He’d been stopped, but everyone assumed he’d failed. Everyone, including Evie. He saw it in her eyes, wells underneath them as dark as this room.
Guilt was there too. It filled the space where Anna had been, just as large and unwieldy as an eleven-year-old girl. His guilt lay in his failure to save her, her guilt in the fact that she’d put Anna in danger in the first place. In some other part of Havnestad’s world, there was disappointment there too—that he’d saved the fisherman’s spawn instead of a friherrinde. He was a hero, but in dark rooms and hushed conversation, he was a traitor to his class as well.
“As are you, Evie. You’re here. There is so much outside these walls.”
To put a point on it, he took a tentative step forward into the tiny room. She watched him as if he might bust through the roof. But he made it carefully to the window, pulling back the curtain she had draped there, letting a sliver of sunlight stream in, blinding and white. The girl blinked so hard, her eyes stayed shut. He waited to speak again until she had the will to open them.
“The world is out there. It misses you.”
“That’s a lie.” And it might have been. But he didn’t care about the world. He missed her.
It took four more days of those visits, but he drew her out.
They avoided the beach and the cove, sticking to the market streets—at first. Even though he was there to shield her as much as he could, buying honey buns and the sweet man’s fresh saltlakrids with all the joy of a summer day. It didn’t stop the stares. Judgment radiated out of every street corner and doorway.
“Acts as if she were the one who drowned.”
“The sea takes as much as it gives; it’s just the way of things, young lady.”
“Saved by a prince and still can’t put a smile on that lucky face.”
Evie’s eyes kept to the cobblestones. There was no way she could enjoy the sun with those stares—even with him by her side.
So he took her away.
He tugged her wrist toward the mountains. Up and up they hiked, the trail twisting toward Lille Bjerg Pass.
There, in a clearing, a mile from the cobblestones, he’d found a sturdy log. One with a particular view of the farmlands sprawling out in the valley below, the sea and its troubles at their backs. They’d never truly been alone like this. Not since they were children, and even then Anna had been there nearly every moment.
Paper bag rustling, he offered her saltlakrids and a smile.
“Salty licorice for your thoughts?”
She didn’t touch the bag.
“I knew that was how they’d react.” She gestured aimlessly behind her, the entire town in a sweep of her palm.
There was no use in denying it—he’d seen and heard it
too. He nodded. She went on.
“They were the same after Mother died and Father would take me to the market, unaware of how to buy for a household with Tante Hansa still away.”
She was six at the time, the hero knew. Old enough for memories to truly settle. She looked away from him then, out to the summer-burned pastures below.
“I just want to steal a ship and leave it all. I just want to be me—” She almost said more, but then he snatched her hand in his and gathered the treats in the other.
“Come, then, to the docks. Let’s go.”
She skipped along beside him, her joyful urgency closer to matching his with each step.
“Where shall we go? Copenhagen? Stockholm? Oslo? Amsterdam? Brighton? Name the place you want to be!”
“Anywhere but here.”
“Then anywhere it is.”
The hero and the girl made it across the strait and to Rigeby Bay that day. The hero’s aunt, uncle, and cousin greeted them first with surprise—both at their arrival and that they’d come alone—and then with dinner.
His mother was the angriest when he arrived back at the castle two days later, wearing his cousin’s clothes—loose at the shoulders, short in the arms.
Still, his mind wandered to the time they’d had—Evie, Iker, and himself, across the strait—even as his parents dressed him down in the royal apartments, far from where any servant could hear.
Beach walks with hvidtøl (his first taste), his cousin’s seafaring stories, and Evie’s hair blowing over her shoulders in the bay’s famous wind. It was the first time they’d all been together since the day Anna died. His cousin drank enough hvidtøl to become wobbly on his feet; the hero stopped short of a full glass.
“You are twelve and an heir, what were you thinking?”
The three of them collecting sap for syrup in the deep forests, the shadows thicker than clouds under a knot of pine.
“You have duties in Havnestad to your people and your father. You are too old to be running off. Too smart, too important for such whims.”
Her grin, crumbs on her lips, at the queen’s insistence on butter cookies at every meal to fatten her up.
“Evelyn is a sweet girl, but you care far too much. Believe me when I say you will only get hurt.”
His cousin escorting the two of them home, ordering his minder down below as the three of them ran the sails, capable hands all.
“Nik, listen to me. I was young once. I know what it’s like to love someone you cannot have.”
The hero blinked then, eyes focusing on the queen. “She’s my friend, Mother,” though he knew the words sounded flat, not at all how he felt.
“I don’t think you should see her anymore. It’s for the best. It’s the only wa—”
“No!” the hero shouted.
“Let him be,” said his father, moving out from a shadow in the room. “She is a good girl, Evelyn. Neither I nor Nik nor you, my dear wife, would be here were it not for Hansa. They can be friends. Just friends. Isn’t that right, Son?”
The hero nodded. “Yes, Father.”
21
THE SUN HAS NEARLY SET, TENDRILS OF GOLDEN LIGHT spraying the beach, when it is time for the close of today’s games. The crowd is thrumming with hvidtøl and excitement for the finale—the rock carry championship. The brine of sweaty bodies mixes with the musk of the king’s summer wine and the fatty scent of fresh-fried torsk.
Annemette and I pick at the remains of a fruit-and-cheese plate—grapes, a few slivers of rye left alongside crumbles of samsø and Havarti that somehow escaped our lips. We share a cup of honeyed sun tea as well—something I badly need to help calm my nerves.
Iker and Nik are warming up in the inner circle, jogging paces down the course, a hundred yards long. With them are six winners of earlier heats, ready to run one more time today after winning two earlier eliminations to get to this point. The princes, of course, get to run just in the final round. Nik hates the special treatment, but it makes the people happy to see him run, so he complies.
The rocks that they must carry are all beached at the end closest to where we’re sitting. They are heavy, each roughly five stone in weight, though they vary in shape.
Little Johan Olsen is getting ready to compete again too. Nik was right: he is a sight. He’s so large, he rivals Nik in height and Iker in strength. The oldest of the finalists is Malvina’s father, Greve Leopold Christensen. His daughters sit across the arena from our side, Malvina ignoring us, her attention either on her father or the hand pie in her fingers. The other four competitors are fishermen I see on the docks in the morning—in their twenties and thirties, the lot of them.
“What happens if they drop the rock on their foot or some such thing?” Annemette asks, watching Nik practice his start by repeatedly hauling the rock to his right shoulder from a dead lift. She’s been nearly silent since the boys left us.
“They pick it up.”
“And then what? Drag themselves home on a broken foot?”
“Most likely.” I laugh, though it’s cruel. “Don’t worry, Mette. Nik has done this before. He won last year, in fact. He’ll surely have two good feet to dance with you tomorrow night.”
He’ll also, unfortunately, have two good feet to dance with the suitors who arrived an hour ago on a steamer so large it could rival the king’s. The docks were full of girls, their chaperones, and some parents. Every mark of Øresund nobility was accounted for from equal kingdoms to landholders of each shape—hertug, markis, greve, friherre, and the like.
It’s overwhelming, and now that they’ve filled the rooms of the castle with their trunks and demands, they’ve crowded around the king and queen on the royal platform. King Asger’s expression is unreadable, but Queen Charlotte is soaking up the attention, flitting among the ladies as if each is a tulip lovelier than the next. And Nik, as usual, is being a gentleman, repeating their names, kissing each hand, but still managing to steal some glances our way. Iker is being Iker—loud, grand, princely—but I can see in his eyes that his heart is not in it.
I turn away, finally, after this afternoon feeling confident in what Iker and I have. Annemette, though, continues to watch the chatter. Especially the queen’s.
“What do you think the queen makes of me?” Annemette’s eyes shift to mine. “She’s been friendly with me . . . but then she is just the same with all of these girls.” She lowers her voice to just above a whisper. “And she can’t be so high that gossip hasn’t reached her ears—Malvina’s surely not the only one to notice Nik’s time with me.”
At this I nearly smile from experience. Everyone’s noticed, trust me.
With the race almost ready to begin, Queen Charlotte has moved to look down upon the competitors, but I know she is only truly seeking Nik for one last wave of good luck.
“She has eyes only for her son. And she wants to see him properly matched.”
Annemette’s hand presses to my shoulder. I turn to her and find a flash of anger in the depths of her eyes.
“Properly matched? I know we fought earlier, but there is no need to be cruel, Evie. I have as much of a chance as those other girls.”
“I didn’t mean it to be cruel, Mette. Really. I meant it as a truth. In order to win him, which you know I hope you do, you must know what he is up against. She is quite an opponent.” I move into a whisper. “Your father is a king; would he be pleased if you came home with just any boy?”
The anger recedes. “Well, no—” Annemette’s face drains of color. “So, it doesn’t matter if I stay . . . she’d find out eventually that I can’t claim the title I’ve told her. . . .” She eyes the suitors, all in fine silks and hair ribbons. “Not like those other girls.”
“I didn’t say it was her choice.” I wait until her eyes meet mine and then hold them with a smile. “If Nik is in love, he will fight for you. But it wouldn’t hurt to impress her some more. You’ll need to show her and these girls at the ball what kind of friherrinde you are.”
Ann
emette laughs. “Oh, I can definitely do that.”
The stiff call of a conch cuts off any further conversation, and the race begins. Our heads whirl around to a rush of sand and bodies, lunging down the course. Iker is already in the lead, Nik and Johan right on his tail. Amazingly, Leopold Christensen is fourth, experience making up for his lack of youth.
My heart is pounding as they get farther away, striding one in line with another until they are so far and so in step that it’s impossible to discern from our angle who exactly is in the lead.
We leap to our feet along with everyone else, our hands twined in a clasp of nerves, our faces taut with yelling above the din and cheer.
“Go, Nik!”
“Come on, Iker!”
And from my right, “Johannnnnn!”
Across the way, Malvina and her sisters have their hands above their blond heads, chanting, “Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa!”
As they cross the line, first there is silence. Then a cheer goes up, and the king and queen are applauding. Nik’s arms are above his head. He hops atop his rock and claps and waves.
The victory is his.
The other competitors circle around him, slapping hands and patting him on the back with hearty-enough claps that he must check his balance. Iker is the last one to congratulate him, pulling him off the rock, pinning his arms in a bear hug, and running him back to the start line.
The girls on the platform shriek, and the crowd laughs. And the crush of people is so great that it takes several minutes for us to meet the cousins. Both are still breathing hard, sweat slicking their brows, hands on hips. Iker catches my eye and his breath quickly enough to set his future intentions. “Next year, I’ll take him. The scoundrel.”
Nik’s breath is still coming fast enough that he can only shake his head.
“It was close,” Annemette concedes, flush with excitement.
“I think your beauty must have made the difference, Annemette. Needed to impress you, the rat.”
I wince, though only a little. “I suppose that means we’ve come past the point where you work to impress me.”
Sea Witch Page 14
