The girl stirs, confusion puddling in the fine features on her face. “Wha...”
“The ring, I need it.” Still working at half speed, she lets me take her hand, and I wrench off the king’s ring, scraping her thumb knuckle as I go, the magic doing its job of keeping it snug.
“Wait. No, you gave that to me. It’s mine. I—”
She pushes herself up, but I’m already hopping over her and Agnata and running for the door.
“Runa—” Will says, trying to catch my arm.
“It’s important,” is all I say to the room before sprinting out the door and back into the night, the ring tight in my palm.
I’ve almost made it to the hill where I first saw them, lungs working hard against the resistance of the wind, when I hear it.
The unforgettable boom-and-spray of an explosion at sea.
“No, no, no...” I drop my chin and dig deeper, cresting the hill.
White foam shoots for the moon in a huge starburst, right where my sisters would’ve been waiting.
A mine. A floating mine where they were.
“No!” I scream, and thunder down the hill.
The water roils and rolls, whitecaps as tall as I am pulsing and shaking, dipping and cresting.
This time, I keep my distance, toes barely in the tide.
“Eydis! Ola! Signy!”
I scream their names, but there’s nothing. My sisters are gone.
Escaped, injured, or murdered. I know not which.
And then, far in the distance, under the fat moon, I see the outline of a tail fin.
At least one survivor. I’m relieved, though I know with the same certainty that I can sense a storm, that I will likely never see her, or any of them, again.
25
Evie
ASIWAIT FOR THE SISTERS TO RETURN WITH THE RING,a new crop of flowers appears in my lair. Right outside my cave, the red flowers Alia brought me from her garden take root.
Without a body, Alia’s polypus will be unusual. Though Anna expected her, I wasn’t sure the magic would agree. The polypi surrounding me were made from humans—not just Anna but the king’s guards who died during my last stand. Their bone-lined branches are the work of real bones, their structure created from what they were.
Alia wasn’t a real human, and she didn’t die here. But there she is—flowers like blood, taking root and growing fast. Their blooms are already misshapen, once-supple petals gone knobby, rigid, graying in this new existence beyond life.
“I told you she’d come,” Anna says, an edge of satisfaction in her voice.
I’m reminded again that I don’t know this Anna at all—the one who delights in being right even if it means a life is gone.
Bile churns within me at the finality of it all. Those little flowers represent a life I’d tried to improve, only to lead to its end.
My voice wavers when I speak again, and in her glee, I hope Anna won’t notice. “You did. You were right.”
“I always am.”
We sit in silence with that statement for a few moments more before the clearswish, swish, swishof tail fins announces the arrival of the princesses.
