My heart stutters as Iker immediately does as I say—family over everything. “Let the old woman go!” he commands.
The guards comply. But I can’t watch her act. My heart can’t take it if she fails. She’s known as the Healer of Kings, but tonight she’ll have to save my prince.
As Hansa works, Anna’s magic tugs at the edges of my strength. Overhead, storm clouds gather. Pinned beneath my body, Anna’s suddenly laughing again. I want to slap her, but I don’t want to lose my grip. “Shut up!” I scream. “How could you? He loved you! I loved you!”
She spits in my face. This person I no longer know. This person I don’t recognize. This person who tried to take Nik. This person who took my father.
The wind picks up, and lightning sizzles in my peripheral vision. Thunder crashes. Her magic rolls over us, and I do everything I can do to keep her down, my magic sparking in spurts as I bleed.
Now she’s laughing so hard that she’s crying. Actual tears.
They flee down her blood-splattered cheeks, wet and real. Terror claws at my heart as it struggles to work under the weight of the blood streaming out of my shoulder and chest.
No, she can’t be human. This person doesn’t deserve a soul. She can’t have won. Nik isn’t dead.
He can’t be.
Yet her tears are there. And with them, her eyes roll dramatically up to where I have her hands pinned to the sand. Where the knife is pinned—no.
No.
Screams sound from the sea lane. A mass of bodies rushes forth. The guards, too. All to a single body, prone on the beach. Knife sticking out from a strike dead center to the throat—the last of Annemette’s mermaid magic used to hit its target.
Not Nik.
His father. The king, dead on the sand.
It must only be royal blood that matters to the magic—Øldenburg blood, passed down from the witch-hunter king—because before him is Iker, pulling himself up from a crouch. He’d been just low enough that Anna’s blade missed. It was meant for him—the final player on the day Anna drowned, but the king would do.
The queen’s voice, shrill and high, echoes above the chaos as she sinks to the sand. “Kill them!”
The guards spring forth. Anna continues to laugh, her human legs kicking at mine. My blood has stained her dress, her skin, her hair. It only makes her laugh harder. So hard she doesn’t even try to escape—she’s reveling in it too much.
Over the noise—the laughing, the lockstep of the guards, the screaming townspeople, I hear it. The voice I’ve always known as well as my own.
“Evie.”
Nik.
He’s crawling toward me with Hansa’s aid. The look in her eyes tells me her healing cannot help—he’ll soon be dead, like his father. Nik knows it too, his voice shaking. “Evie, I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t say it until today. I’m sorry . . .”
“Tante, hold Anna still. Please. Don’t let her up.” Hansa’s magic is strong and she uses a binding spell like Anna used on me. One I never learned.
Still, only when I know Hansa has Anna pinned do I let go. Anna is screaming at me, struggling against Hansa’s magic, but I drown her out. My hands find Nik, and I bring his bleeding body to my chest. “I love you, too. And I won’t let this be the end.”
Confusion crosses his face. The skin there has lost its color. His breath comes in pants, his lungs struggling against my bodice. The blood from our wounds runs together, like finding like.
I shut my eyes, my mother’s words coming to me. I don’t need octopus ink. I don’t need gems or potions or charms. I just need the words and the will.
I am a witch. I am and I always will be. The magic is in me and it is enough—I suppose Annemette taught me that.
“I love you, Nik,” I repeat, and then I start my mother’s spell. The words coming like I’ve known them my whole life, and maybe I have.
“Líf. Dau∂i. Minn líf. Sei∂r. Minn bjo∂. Sei∂r. Sei∂r.”
My skin begins to burn, white hot, heat radiating from my bones outward, steam in the air. Tears come to my eyes, and I know they’re black—Mother’s eyes didn’t do that, but I’m my own kind of magic. They drip onto Nik’s skin as I begin to shake. My eyes roll back for a moment, and the last thing I see is color returning to his skin, his cheeks pinking like we’ve been together all day at sea.
I force my vision to clear. I need to see him. I need to.
His eyes flash open. He knows what’s happening. He knows it like I did the day my mother died.
I will see to it that he is safe.
That he lives a long life.
That he can rule his people without fear.
I will see to it.
With the last of my strength, I leave Nik and push my failing body onto Anna’s, tight as a corset. Tighter than the magic Hansa used to paralyze her. My tante steps back, tears in her eyes, and helps Nik to his feet. He’s almost completely healed. He will be fine.
Anna is the only threat left, but I have plans for her.
With my last breath, I take ahold of her—this girl I loved, this girl who came back to me. Used me. Ruined me. Ruined every person who ever loved her so that she could be human again. Ruined for revenge.
I get to my feet and heave her toward the water. My hands burn fingerprints into her skin as she tries to pull away.
“What are you doing?” she shrieks. I can feel her heart beating wildly against her bodice. Against my heart—still in my chest.
The clouds are clearing overhead. The wind has died down. The lightning vanished. Her magic is leaving this world, and soon she will too.
Her blue eyes grow wide. She’s realized that she’d gotten what she wanted. She’s just a girl, like she was before—and it’s made her vulnerable to people like me.
I smile at her, and there’s no pity in it. No joy. Nothing but rage.
“This life is not yours to live.”
With that, I do the only thing I can to reverse Anna’s final magical act. To keep my loved ones safe. To stop her threat cold.
I return Anna to the sea.
BELOW THE SURFACE
The tide claimed the two girls, one with curls of raven black, the other with waves of butter-blond. Its water was crisp, despite the summer night. All veins of magic swirled under the surface, mixing with the blood and death that bound the girls together.
The raven-curled girl’s heart was failing. Her time was up, spent on the boy above. The one she’d always loved. Always protected—even from herself.
But she would win—the blonde’s lungs were seizing. The raven-curled girl could feel them sputtering and shuttering as she held tight to the girl’s chest, driving them both down, down, down. As deep as the cove would allow. To the bottom, home to that bewitched octopus, her father’s corpse, and the fresh bodies of the guards the blonde had killed with a sweep of her fingers.
So many dead, but the prince was alive. Her boy. Her own borrowed breath in his chest. She‘d sacrificed herself for him again.
As the cool remnants of magic swirled around them, the girls plunged to the sandy bottom. The blonde’s back lodged in the cove floor, the raven-haired girl’s body flushing streams of blood into the water, more of her life fleeing through bullet holes.
Light was failing as fast as their bodies, the strong moon barely reaching these depths. Still, the raven-curled girl wouldn’t give in to the darkness. Her heart was barely beating, but her eyes were open, watching the blonde struggle and fail to break free.
She wouldn’t die first. She couldn’t.
She had to know her boy would be safe—her family, her home—from the monster beneath her fingertips.
Just before the raven-curled girl’s heart finally stopped, the blonde went still. Her blue eyes stuck wide, blank. Her rosebud lips forever parted, water seeping in.
The girl had really drowned this time. There’d be no coming back.
The raven-curled girl opened her mouth and accepted the ocean. Let it sweep in and claim her along w
ith the magic still singing in her veins. Still skimming over her skin—it would live longer than she.
Then, a darkness fell across the pewter light of her vision. The end, pulling the curtains shut.
No.
The octopus. The giant one. The one that haunted the cove. Her beast—a product of her spell of abundance. A mistake. An aberration.
The animal was swift. Vengeful. Spiteful.
“Líf . . . líf,” the girl started, the words dying in her mouth, drowned in salt water. She wasn’t sure what to say other than to tell the octopus to go. Live. Live away from this battlefield. Let her rest with her father in peace.
But the octopus smelled the ink in her veins and the magic it held, and it began to feed. The beast’s tentacles trembled with power as they slithered across her wounds, mingling with the water, with her blood, with her spell that controlled its life for the past few months. The girl’s eyes rolled back into her head as fresh magic entered her veins.
“Líf. Líf.”
Suddenly, a great spasm of white light shot up between them. Connected them. Magic as old as the sea itself threaded the octopus’s life and hers.
The light drew the great beast closer to the girl’s prone form, barely alive. Barely anything at all. The tentacles reveled in her blood. Tried to capture it. The magic between them was a magnet, pulling all of it to all of her.
“Líf . . . ,” she repeated again, no breath in it. Seawater washed the word down her windpipe, pushing the oxygen out of her heart, her blood. Until she was one with the sea. Her soul water itself.
The light flickered and grew, engulfing both the girl and the octopus in its warmth, shooting past the water’s surface, to the moon and the magic still hovering in the air above. With the light came an equal darkness, seeping across the cove in a sheet of black.
The people on the sand scattered then, knowing it wasn’t safe. All but the boy and his cousin, still watching the water as if the girls might resurface. So many questions on their lips as the black water feathered out toward the Øresund Strait.
And down under the surface, the water roiled and turned until great whirlpools twisted from cove bottom to top. Scalding gas from deep within the earth shot up through the deadened sand, violent geysers forming between the whirlpools. The cove’s sand began to rot, all the color washing away until nothing but gray remained. And when the light faded to nothing but the obsidian of the ocean, something peculiar happened.
The girl with raven curls was no longer a girl.
She still had her raven curls, her beauty, and the upper body of a woman, but where her long legs had once been were eight tentacles, onyx black and shiny as silk. They plunged from her waist, unlike anything the ocean had ever seen.
And, with magic swirling around her, through her, from her, the creature opened her eyes.
Epilogue—Fifty Years Later
THE SEA KING AND HIS PEOPLE CALL ME THE SEA witch—though I’m still surprised to be anything at all.
I was prepared to die that day in the water.
I’d given my life to Nik. I knew what that spell would do.
But something happened in the swirling magic—mine, Mother’s, Hansa’s, what was left of Annemette’s. The octopus haunting the cove had something to do with it too. All combining to leave me with the body I have now.
Not the body of a mermaid.
Not the body of anything else seen in these waters.
I am my own magic.
I spread out my tentacles beneath me: eight, shiny and black, and as voluminous as one of Queen Charlotte’s gowns, each plucking a shrimp from the seafloor. I am quite the sight, though very few have laid eyes on me. I am tied to the cove, something keeping me here. Magic or memories, or both.
My lair is a sunken cave, surrounded by bubbling mire—turfmoor—and violent whirlpools. The water here is a flat black—Havnestad Cove now a sunspot on the sea.
Around my cave, strange trees have grown from the bones of Anna and the guards, though my father’s bones never changed, buried gently as they are. These trees—polypi—are half-plant, half-animal, like serpents rooted to the pewter sand, a hundred heads where branches should be.
The Tørhed died in the magic that made me this way, the sea rid of both drought and abundance. And so, the whirlpools draw fish into the polypi’s clutches, keeping me well fed without ever having to hunt.
Feeding on my strange forest’s catch, I study magic. I’ve learned everything I can about the sorcery beneath the waves, though new mysteries present themselves to me daily. And so my power has grown, but so has my reputation.
The merpeople are frightened of me—time and tales building upon each other. They’ve been told to stay away from the witch powerful enough to ruin the sea as soon as save it. The sea king knows of the magic I’ve done—of the black death and then the famine—and he also knows of me and his Annemette, memories of her resurfacing when my name is spoken aloud. But that is rare. No one dares.
It, too, has been long enough that no one on land knows me as Evelyn. Evie. That girl.
They know the story of the mermaid and the witch and King Niklas. They know of—and dare to visit—the strange cove with ink for water and sand as gray as steel. Now they forgo the bonfire and toss their little wooden dolls into the cove every Sankt Hans Aften. Presents to the witch who saved their kingdom.
But they don’t know me.
My people are long gone, or so I’ve heard from pieces of conversation floating down from above over the years.
Tante Hansa was taken by age, having lived out the remainder of her life in Havnestad despite her magic. Safe from banishment because of her role in saving Nik on that awful day. Hansa sent me gifts until the end—enchanting her own magical tomes to be waterproof before hurling them into the deep. All the secrets that she didn’t dare teach me when I was a girl, now at my fingertips. Almost as if she knew I were alive beneath the muck. And maybe she did—though I cannot surface.
Iker: lost in the North Sea. Victim to the king of the whales, who grew tired of being his prey.
Nik is gone too, but he lived out his days as he should have. How I had hoped he would. Marriage, children, a successful reign, and beloved by all.
I miss him. I miss everyone. I strangely miss her sometimes, too—Anna, Annemette, whoever she was.
Alone, there is a quiet under these waters that no one above will ever know. A quiet that makes me miss even the most painful of sounds.
But one day, I receive a visitor. Not from land, but by sea.
A little mermaid. Brave girl, with golden curls topped with a wreath of sea lilies and a complexion as clear as fresh milk with cheeks blushed at the apples. Her eyes are an earnest blue—as icy as the fjords up north.
As icy as Iker’s once were.
But rather than the confidence that flashed in his, her eyes hold a determination warring with fear. For such a fearsome creature I’ve become.
So immediately I know.
Yes, only one thing would cause a mermaid like her to brave my presence.
I stare down at her as she approaches, tentacles mounded beneath me—a throne if ever there was one—a web of ghost-gray curls swirling about my face. Her tail swishes under the weight of eight oysters, each showing her rank. For a moment, I think she will retreat, but instead she holds out her arms, which had been clutching a bouquet of bloodred roses.
“Please accept these flowers grown in my garden, a gift for the great sea witch—”
All it takes is a shake of my head, and her voice immediately cuts off. I glide toward her, and to her credit, she stays still.
“I know what you want,” I say, and the girl’s eyes blink with my words. Her arms flutter down, the roses sinking to the seafloor. “You want to chase the love of a human boy on legs of your own.”
Her answer is immediate. “He already loves me, this I know.”
Dubious. “And do you know this boy’s name?”
“Not his official name—it is
long and drawn out, five names in one—but the other sailors, they called him Niklas.”
Crown Prince Asger Niklas Bryniulf Øldenburg V.
Nik’s grandson.
I grit my teeth and set my jaw, glancing down my nose at the girl before me. A princess. One of the sweet singing girls who perform often at the palace. Shows to which I’m never invited. I can hear the music, though—the sea king’s castle isn’t far. If I squint past my strange forest, I can see the peculiar blue radiance surrounding the palace grounds. It looks almost as if a piece of clear sky fell from the heavens to the navy depths of the sea and mingled with the brine.
“Please,” the girl starts when I say nothing. Though she’s desperate, there’s a thoughtful quality to her face—both her head and heart are feeding her bravery. “You are the only one with the magic to change me—it’s been banned for so long. Please, even if it is just for a day, I must see him. My heart cannot bear to be away from my Niklas.”
Looking in her eyes, I am sixteen again, learning of Nik’s love for the very first time on that beach. Kissing him before our lives changed forever.
But now I am old enough to know better than to listen to my memories.
And I know she doesn’t know what she is asking. The price: the cost to her family, her loved ones, the magic. The pain: physical, mental, familial, magical. It is too much.
“The heart can bear many things, child, and love is one of them.”
The little mermaid reaches for my hand, but thinks better of it at the last moment. As if my touch will burn. Maybe it will. “Please—I will do anything.”
I again think of Nik. His laughter. His love. How long it had been there, waiting for me to see it. There in his dark eyes.
Before he passed, Nik would visit me sometimes, walking the cove’s edge, fancy boots marked by my black water. Then he’d tell me stories of the world above, trusting the tide to carry his tale. Maybe he knew I was alive too. A friend, a love, to the end.
I hold the girl’s stare. Her eyes are no longer fearful, determination and need filling them in a rush. It is impressive, I suppose—no one has ever braved my lair with such a request. She wants this, more than anything.
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