Page 92 of A Dark and Drowning Tide

This place unsettled Lorelei. It brimmed with magic like a glass overfilled. Aether shivered through the fog and puddled in the water. It unfurled through the veins of every leaf. It sparkled in the air and set the world aglow with its strange, wondrous light. The entire island seemedaware, watchful and waiting for their next move.

After what felt like hours, Sylvia stopped dead. “Wait. Look there.”

Lorelei strained to see through the dark. No more than a few meters away, those vague, tantalizing shapes Lorelei had seen beneath the Little Sea were rising from the river. Nixies dragged themselves onto rocks to bathe in the light of the stars. One inspected the shine of its lethally pointed nails, while another draped its tail across a sleek river stone, enticing as a woman lying over a chaise lounge. They regarded the group with those horrible reptilian eyes.

Instinctual terror seized hold of Lorelei. “This is far too dangerous. Find another way.”

“Thereisno other way,” Sylvia replied. “Do you want my help, or don’t you?”

“Lorelei has a point,” Heike said airily. “Why should we trust you not to drown us?”

“Please,” Sylvia muttered, somewhere between exhausted and exasperated. “I don’t have a death wish. Even if I made it out of these bonds and incapacitated you, your crew would detain me the moment I stepped foot on thePrinzessin.”

Heike hardly seemed appeased.

“Itisdangerous to follow the river,” Sylvia conceded. “However, those nixies don’t strike me as aggressive, by their body language. They’re curious about us.” She took a considering pause. “However, that can change quickly if they perceive us as a threat.”

Johann did not take his eyes off the nixies. “Who has silver they can part with?”

Adelheid looked expectantly at Heike, who was wearing a capelet fringed with delicate silver scales.

“Seriously?” Heike groaned. “This is brand-new.”

Adelheid’s non-expression deepened. With a long-suffering sigh, Heike yanked a few pieces of silver off the hem and placed them in Johann’s waiting palm. Her capelet chimed and shimmered with her every movement.

“What do you intend to do with those?” Lorelei asked warily.

He closed his fist around his new cache of silver. “We can purify the water and corral them.”

“Don’t!” Sylvia’s eyes went round. “It’s monstrous to treat them that way.”

“I, for one, would prefer not to be eaten,” Heike countered. She did not look up, too consumed with prodding at the loose thread on her capelet. “Do you have a better plan?”

“It’s certainly possible to earn their trust over the course of several days, maybe weeks . . .”

“Do it,” Adelheid said impatiently.

Without hesitation, Johann hurled a scale into the water. It tumbled through the air, flashing white and silver, then cut through the surface of the river like a knife. It took only a moment before the nixies recoiled. Their gills flared. They rent at their hair. And then, they shrieked.

The sound scraped against the very marrow of Lorelei’s bones. In a frenzy, the nixies dove into the river and swam upstream. As the last one disappeared into the current, it struck Lorelei that they had done something they couldn’t take back. She imagined the metal leaching into the water like poison.

Johann watched the scene unfold with a self-satisfied smile and turned away only when Adelheid took him by the shoulder. He was no better than a child burning ants beneath a magnifying glass.

Sylvia’s eyes glimmered withanger—andsomething like sadness, too. When she caught Lorelei looking, her expression shuttered. It stung more than she expected.

“I suppose we are proceeding like brutes, then,” Lorelei said. “Shall we?”

Adelheid, Johann, and Heike pulled ahead while Sylvia dragged her feet. Her fraying lead line trailed limply behind her like a sorry wedding train. Lorelei had half a mind to pick it up, if only so she wouldn’t trip over it or go on looking like a soldier on a death march. After a moment, she thought better of it. Sylvia would resent it, and Lorelei had no desire to incur any more of her rage. Once, a part of her might have relished how spectacularly low she hadfallen—mighteven have mocked her for it. Now, it felt like watching a hawk with its wings clipped.

They walked side by side in silence. At first, Lorelei thought Sylvia would have enoughself-restraint—orspite,perhaps—toremain silent. But in the end, she spoke.

“Why?”

“You’ll have to be more specific than that.”

“You know very well what I mean. After everything, after . . .”

She trailed off, and what Sylvia left unspoken gutted Lorelei. It hurt to breathe. Too many memories crowded too close to the surface. Snowflakes caught in Sylvia’s moonlit hair. Her eyes as molten as quicksilver. The pale blue of her lips when Lorelei pulled her from freezing waters. The exultant delight of her laughter on the back of the mara. Sylvia, for one, glorious moment, entirely hers.