I smirk a little. “He doesn’t like their new look?”
“You’re pushing him, old squid, and I’m worried,” she says. “Even trimming their hair... that loss is painful too. It’ll take forever for their hair to grow back.”
Yes, I know. They can’t magic it back. The hair is magic itself—and it is immune to whatever they’ll try.
Oma Ragn pulls in a long, steadying breath. When she speaks again, the weight of her two hundred years colors her voice. “The humans are weak from the great war above—war always does that, you know. War airs the worst in all of us and lets it fester in the light.” The old woman draws a sad smile. “And while their ugliness rots in the open, their human magic is nearly nonexistent to stop it. What better time than now to attack and shift the balance of magic permanently?”
The sea king will attack humans. I never thought this would happen. For millennia, the merpeople have survived as legend. Attacking humans means decimating the legend and the safety that comes with it. The ríkifjor has made him drunk with ambition.
I blink and I see that boy king dying on the bed. Perhaps if there was magic on land, he might not have needed to commission U-boats or lay those mines, all things thathave surely set the sea king on edge. Yet, still, striking first and destroying our shroud of mystery will bring nothing but more death to us below.
“But who will fight alongside him?” I ask. “He’s spent the last fifty years ensuring the common merpeople are terrified of the surface.”
Her answer is immediate and firm. “He’s planted fear within them. He knows how to sow it and grow it into what he needs it to be.”
My mind drifts back to the Sankt Hans Aftens of my childhood—a bonfire on a beach meant to renew fear and hatred of my kind, to prove we’re devils, that we don’t belong, that burning, drowning, or banishment was the only fair way to go. Things are different now in the years since I saved Nik, but the seeds of that fear were sown deep enough that it took a very public, traumatic act of love to change any sort of perception.
As that truth settles over me, Ragn speaks again, this time as quiet and uncertain as she was commanding and sure just a moment ago. “What should we do, Evie?”
“He sent you here to weaken me again. Threaten me again. Make me think he’s winning so my powers will be his to use as he sees fit.” I pause because I hate what I must suggest. “We need to make him believe he’s succeeded.”
Ragn nods. “He’s a hard man to convince. I half believe he sent me here as a test—he knows we’ve had contact without direction.”
Of course he does.
“You can’t keep coming back here.” I hold up a tentacle. “I have an idea.”
Yes, this might work.
I grab a fresh swordfish spear and sterilize it over the magical fire I keep hot under my cauldron. Then, before I can think about the pain, I slice off a rabbit’s-foot-sized piece from the tip of a tentacle. Blood black as night streams out, and I cauterize the wound with the hot swordfish spear before turning to hold the tentacle tip out to Ragn—my one true friend in all these years.
“Bring this to him as a gift. A trophy stolen by his mother’s abilities.” She takes it, but before she can slip it onto one of the many golden chains around her neck, I stop her. “Hold it out and still, please.”
She does just that, my blood trickling onto her hands. I dip a finger in it and run it along an upturned sucker. Then, I swirl the same finger in the contents of my cauldron, whispering nearly the same spell that brought me my view of the fight in King Niklas’s bedroom just minutes earlier. Though the sea king has blinded me from viewing the sea floor, he has no control over what I see on the land.
“Líta. Heyra.”
The sucker sparkles with the golden light for a quick moment before fading into the same onyx monotone of the rest of the tentacle tip.
Ragn’s feisty smile is back. “Clever witch.”
“See to it that he wears your trophy proudly and often.”
“I’ll thread it from his belt myself.”
Ragn places the tentacle safely around her neck, and I know she must get back. The last thing we need is the sea king following up and surprising us.
I pull her into a long hug. “Take care, you old fish.”
“You do the same, my friend.”
When we part, I dissolve the vines, leaving us in the open. The old mermaid leaves without a word.
When she’s gone, Anna can’t help herself. “Evie, you’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing,” I say, and turn my back to her. I nearly spell her silent again as I hear her draw in a breath, but she stops when she realizes what I’m doing.
I lean over the cauldron, swirling the contents as fast as I can with a clean swordfish spear. Then, when the storm within spins on its own, I spell the king’s bedroom back into my sight.
