Oh Gods.Foreboding choked me. My hands cramped around the sword’s grip. “The empress?”
He nodded. “She still feeds her.” His teeth gritted, he tried to move, but I held the sword above him steady.
My voice shook. “The empress still feeds her bodies?”
“She feeds herSirens.”
Dread hollowed me out as pieces of the past day fell into place. The empress was not simply a devotee of Eusia, she was all but a priestess, working vigilantly to keep her alive. She knew who I was—she never would have told me the story of the Nels otherwise. She’d come to my room in the healer’s quarters that night, distraught by the state I was in, as the healer had said. She’d meant to take me, but I’d been too ill to leave. Lachlan hadn’t been able to find Agatha.
Agatha.
She’d gone missing the night before the empress had left.
Agatha.
“No,” I breathed. She had taken Agatha. She had taken her—but she’d wanted me. “No, no, no.”
The wind and rain slashed at me, roaring as loud as the blood in my ears. I could just hear Nemea’s strained chuckle rise up from his sprawled, soaked body.
“You’ve lost, haven’t you?” he asked in a shaking voice. “Did you just realize?”
I pushed the sword tip down and held it firm against his neck. The next pitch of the ship, the next crashing wave, would send it straight through him. He sobered. Raised his hands in surrender.
But I didn’t wait for the next roll of the ship. The raging storm and lurching vessel would not be the executor of his fate.
I would.
I shoved the sword down. I felt it crunch through the tough pieces in his neck. I felt when it hit the bones of his spine, when it hit the wood beneath him.
I was grateful for the shroud of night.
I released the sword. Stumbled backward. Fell to my knees and vomited.
The seabirds roused me.
Aching, I rolled my head to the side, then rushed to cradle it in my hands. I cracked open my eyes. Dim light… morning. Above me, the dregs of last night’s storm clouds hung low, gray-hued and wrung out.
My eyes began to focus, and I traced the lines of the drooping sails, the ropes swaying in the humid breeze. Panic tightened around me as my mind cleared fully of sleep.
Agatha.I needed to get to Agatha.
I’d huddled beneath the risers that led to the quarterdeck in the night, and I gripped them now as I pushed myself up to sit. My panic only grew as I took stock of myself. The air was warm, but I shivered. My skin looked gray, covered in gooseflesh and cold sweat. The thumping pain in my stomach was consuming, profound. I blew out three slow breaths in a weak attempt to ease my racing heart, then peeled back my wet tunic.
“Shit.” The hole in my stomach oozed a steady, thin trickle of blood. The skin around it had grown tender and red, and I let out a wobbling cry when my cruel mind pushed forward a memory of Theodore. His bright, healing warmth, the press of his callousedfingers, the way his presence and power beat back the darkness that nipped perpetually at my heels.
“Nemea did it wrong.”
I gasped, head snapping toward the creaking voice that had come from across the deck. My body pricked with awareness when I realized the voice had come from within my own head too.
Eusia.
One of her nekgya sat on the deck, right where Nemea’s body had been. Her dark, silken hair stuck to her shoulders. She was wan and smattered in black, ragged wounds. Decay crept over her mouth and fingers, over her chest and arms. The sea held her together with bits of kelp and a patchwork of delicate, pale barnacles.
She cradled Nemea’s crown in her crooked fingers. His sword lay on the deck before her. Beside it sat a mound of wet sand and a slimy ribbon of kelp.
“Where is he?” I croaked.
Her eyes were rimmed in deep purple skin, her irises the color of the water off Varya’s shore. “Do you truly care?” Eusia’s voice asked through the nekgya’s rot-smattered mouth.
