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I blame the shock of all that bare skin for how long it takes me to get to my feet. For why, when I finally convince my legs to move, I forget to ring the warning bell and I skid down the cliff and into the sea with my clothes and shoes still on. For why—for a moment—I forget how to swim and sink beneath the waves.
The beauty of her was enough to shock the sense right out of a man, let alone a boy like me.
With just a glimpse, I know this girl is the loveliest thing on God’s green earth. Even if I make it off this island, out into the world where there are thousands of girls—millions of ‘em—even if I live to be a hundred and search every corner of the earth looking for someone to match her, I’ll never see her like again.
I can’t let her die.
I can’t let the world lose something as perfect as that girl.
I kick off my shoes in the water, shrug off my only coat, and let the ocean claim them because I refuse to let it claim the girl.
I push to the surface, gasp in a raw, salty breath, and swim hard toward the faint blue glow lingering above the water, the hope of rescue burning in my chest.
Chapter Three
Foxglove
My insides peal like every church bell in the world is clanging beneath my skin.
I’m lost and bewildered, an empty cup rapidly filling with cold, wet, and wrong.
Beneath the waves, I thrash and roll, my arms and legs churning through the icy water, but I can’t reach the surface. I can’t find my magic, can’t grow fins or flippers or go up in a puff of smoke.
For the first time since I left the garden, I’m trapped in my girl form, in this shell too fragile to survive the ocean’s dark embrace.
In the skin of a girl who never learned to swim.
Why learn to swim when you can become a dolphin? When you can grow crab claws and scuttle along the sand beneath the waves until you find shore?
My thoughts are reasonable thoughts, but the rest of me isn’t being sensible at all. My eyes sting like open wounds, my lungs scream for air, and my heart slams franticly against my ribs. My fingers claw at the water, trying to tear a hole in the sea, just a small one, big enough for a girl to fit through.
If I can put distance between myself and the island, surely my magic will return. I’ll be able to turn into a seal and cut through the waves like a spoon through custard. I’ll swim hard and fast, find the driftwood where Wig and Poke await my return from my scouting mission, and tell them we must leave at once.
The magic of this island is real and far too strong for an Earworm or Skritch to breech. It was nearly too much for me.
I made it through the wards, but at what price?
Perhaps the ultimate price…
I have never imagined dying—plantings are vigorous creatures and a witch’s daughter practically immortal as long as she avoids capture by those with the skill to kill supernatural things. But I imagine it now.
I imagine…
As my chilled limbs go limp and my hair drifts like seaweed around my face, soft and seductively sleepy-looking, I think about what it would be like to live no more. I look back at my early life and dozen or so years on earth, and I wish for…something.
Something more than memories of being a part of my sisters. More than survival or brief moments of comfort. More than a mission imposed upon me by another.
Something that was mine.
Something I made…something I felt…
Something…
I don’t know the name of the thing, only that it’s missing, and that I will never find it at the bottom of the sea.
Down, down I go, until the water is impenetrably dark, until the ocean’s arms wrap around me and squeeze, until my lips part and—
Suddenly the ocean’s embrace is broken by new hands. Hot, urgent hands that tangle in my hair, ripping strands out by the root as they fumble and clutch. Something strikes my cheek, and I flinch, then flinch again as fingers graze my shoulder, my hip. And then an arm wraps around my waist and I’m being dragged in the opposite direction—up toward the surface, pressed to a sinewy body, delivered into the air in the arms of a gasping human child.
I cough and spit up water, gagging as ocean and air fight for space in my lungs.
“Are you all right?” the boy pants, his breath coming fast, too. “Can you breathe?”
His dark brows—so brown they’re nearly black—draw together over ash gray eyes with flecks of slate near the center. Water drips from the end of his sharp, elegant nose to fall onto his chin and tremble there amidst a hint of black whiskers.
