THE MOUNTAIN TIP IS hidden by its namesake clouds, and a never-ending snowstorm obscures most of its magnitude. Even so, I marvel. I know that long past the sky that hides half of the rock face is an endless peak. A gateway to the stars. The Cloud Mountain of Págos is the highest point in the world, farthest from the sea and so farthest from my mother’s hold. From mine. If the Second Eye of Keto really is on this mountain, then it would have been the perfect hiding spot. Far from where I could follow. Until now.
My face is covered by layers of thick fabric that obscure everything but my eyes. I itch to pull the cloth and furs from my face, but the cold is more than I can bear. And I dare not let go of the snow poles clenched tightly in my grasp. I’m not even sure I could if I wanted to. My hands feel like they’ve been frozen into solid fists.
We follow the trail up the great mountain for days that turn to weeks, with more silence than I’ve ever failed to hear from the crew of the Saad. Even Kye, who walks so perfectly in step with Elian, glancing back to Madrid every now and again – to make sure, perhaps, that she hasn’t turned into some kind of frozen sculpture or been blown from the cliff by the brutal winds – remains quiet. Elian is no different.
I’m strangely comforted by the fact that it’s not just me he doesn’t seem to be speaking to. He remains perfectly stoic, following the princess’s lead ardently. For some reason, that part is less comforting.
I know that marriage is a side effect of royalty. So many things are. Obstacles to content, so cleverly masked as duties. Trials made out to be solutions and burdens tailored for only the least willing to bear them. All of them, nothing more than a series of consequences that stem from being heir to a kingdom. Yukiko is Elian’s side effect, as the Flesh-Eater was mine. He traded the map for himself in a noble attempt to salvage his mission by sacrificing his pride. Things like this are expected. Predictable. But they’re also vexing.
I don’t know what I expected to achieve when I confronted Elian in the palace, but it wasn’t weeks of terse silence. I’m not sure why I even asked about Yukiko; it wasn’t why I waited for him while he dealt with the Págese royals. But I couldn’t help myself. Lately it has seemed impossible to try. Maybe that turned out in my favor, because my original reason to talk with him – to ask, maybe, if he’d ever considered an alliance – wasn’t much better. It was stupid to think I could just walk right up to him and ask if he was willing to forge a peace between our kind. I won’t kill you if you don’t kill me. It’s ridiculous. It’s simple for me to consider making a deal with someone who’s shown me nothing but loyalty and a way to walk a path I hadn’t thought possible before. Free from the shadows of my mother’s reign, a new era not determined by death. A delicate peace, even. But how can I expect Elian to do the same when he doesn’t even know who I am? When I murdered his friend and countless other princes? When I plotted to murder him?
I climb with Elian’s back to me, but his face is clear in my mind. As the sky fades to darkness and then the sun climbs higher again, we carry on that way. The farther we get up the mountain, the more I begin to drive myself crazy with thinking. Replaying conversations and actions and opportunities. Wondering when I began to feel so utterly human.
The sky turns to so many shades of blue that I lose count. It’s a quilt of color, blending perfectly through the clouds. Painting itself like a backdrop for the white glow of the moon and its guiding starlight.
“We have to move faster!” Yukiko yells. I can barely hear her voice above the ice winds. “Our next camp is two hours ahead, and we need to make it before sundown.”
Elian pauses and holds out the map, and the storm batters it in his grasp. The edges are crisp with winter, and when his fingers clasp the parchment tighter, trying to keep hold as the wind gathers strength, it splinters.
“Sundown is in an hour!” Elian yells back.
Yukiko’s breath clouds between them. “Hence, we need to move faster.”
The wind muffles their voices, but even I can hear the sound of Elian’s sigh. His shoulders slump a little and he casts a quick glance to check that we’re all still behind him.
“It’s doable,” he calls over to us, though I’m not sure if he’s telling us or trying to convince himself.
“I’m not sure I can walk without my toes,” Kye says.
“Madrid will carry you.”
“I don’t have toes either. Or fingers, actually.” Madrid holds up her gloved hands and whimpers. “I think I lost a few yesterday.”
“At least they’ll be well preserved then.” Kye presses his boot into the snow for emphasis. “If we pick them up on the way down, a healer should be able to stitch them right back on.”
Though I can only make out Madrid’s eyes, I’m sure she grimaces.
“We don’t have time for this,” Yukiko says. “Stop wasting your energy and move.”
Madrid sticks a snow pole into the ground and pulls her fur mask down. Frost gathers on her lips. “Is that a royal command?” she asks.
Yukiko throws back her headdress and it’s like the weather parts for her. She commands the cold like I once did. “You are in my kingdom.”
“But not in your court,” Madrid says. She wipes her tattooed cheek, where the wind has begun to blister it, and nods to Elian. “Our king is right there.”
“You’re forgetting something, aren’t you? He’s not a king yet.”
If the air hadn’t already been frozen, I’m sure that last comment would have done it. Kye stiffens and I see his hand twitch by his side. Quickly, Elian shoots him a sharp glance, and reluctantly, Kye lets his posture relax. Still, his hands keep twitching.
I notice that mine do too.
Torik grunts. He doesn’t seem to be able to translate Elian’s expressions as well as Kye can, and no sooner does Elian slump in hesitant submission does his first mate lurch violently forward. As Torik approaches Yukiko, I see the threat of his large frame for the first time. No longer is he the gentle giant who watches over the Saad. He advances toward the princess, kicking the snow with each heavy footstep.
“You little—”
“Enough.”
Elian’s voice cuts into Torik’s path. He holds out an arm and Torik stops short.
“Captain,” he says.
“I said that’s enough,” Elian repeats. As usual, his voice betrays nothing but what he wants it to. Perfect calm and indifference. But even from here, I can see his eyes blinking against the storm, like fierce gateways into his heart.
“Are we finished now?” Yukiko asks.
With every second her blue lips inch higher, mine turn to a snarl beneath my mask. I step forward and pull the cloth from my face. The air bites.
“Not yet,” I say.
Yukiko turns her steel gaze to mine. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Elian go suddenly rigid. When Yukiko takes a step toward me, his hand moves slowly to his side. To the knife I know is hidden there.
“Is there something else?” Yukiko asks.
Many things, I think.
The way she looks at Elian being the worst, like she’s better than him. Manipulating a prince to get her hands on his kingdom, just as my mother manipulated me to steal mine and extend her reign. Just like I fell into the Sea Queen’s trap, Elian is going to fall into Yukiko’s. Maybe it was different once, but now I know there’s no way I can steal the eye and let my kingdom rise while Elian’s crumbles beneath his debt to her. There has to be a way for us both to win this battle.
We are not naïve little heirs to be molded as they wish. We are warriors. We are rulers.
“Elian may not be a king,” I tell her,“but you’re not a queen, either. Not unless you kill your brothers.”
“Who has time for murder these days?” Yukiko says. “Better to just take another kingdom than wait around for this one.”
The insinuation is not lost. She thinks she can goad me with the deal she and Elian made. And I suppose she can. Because I can’t help but hate seeing him stand submissively by her, not giving him a choice in his own future. Using him for her devious plans, just like I intended to. It’s too much of a reminder of my life before the Saad. Before Elian made me realize what it was like to be free. The very person who gave me a glimpse of hope is now so willing to sacrifice his own.
“You should be careful,” I tell Yukiko. “The thing about taking something that’s not yours is that there will always be someone out there ready to take it back.”
“I suppose I’ll have to watch my back, then.”
“No need,” I tell her. “I can see it perfectly.”
Yukiko bites down on the corner of her lip, half-amused, half-curious. When she turns from me, I dare a glance at Elian. There is a dangerous corner to his smile, and I count the seconds while he looks at me. Green piercing through the new white of the world. Until, finally, Kye clasps Elian’s shoulder and pushes him onward.
When night falls, we set up camp on the flattest part of the mountain. Tents stapled into the ground circle a quickfire station. We crowd around it and cook what sparse remnants of food we have left. The cold seems worse when we sit still, so we hover our hands over the fire so closely that we risk getting burnt.
The wind wails harder, and the crew warms their throats with the rum Madrid brought in place of more food. When night deepens and the crew’s laughter fades to heavy breathing, I listen to the sound of the wind, knowing I won’t be able to sleep. Not with the Second Eye of Keto so close. My mission to overthrow my mother and Elian’s fate threaten to intertwine, and I can’t close my eyes without thinking about how this war will end.
After a while, the snow begins to fall more softly against the tent, and in the dying wind I make out a pair of soft footsteps approaching. I hear them before I see the shadow, drawn on the shelter by the fading glow of my lantern.
When the door unzips, I’m not at all surprised to see Elian crouching beside it.
“Come with me,” he says, and so I do.
I’VE NEVER SEEN THE stars. Not the way Elian has. There are so many things I haven’t done. Experiences Elian seems to have that nobody else, especially me, could dream of. The stars are one of them. They’re Elian’s in a way that they’re no one else’s.
Elian doesn’t just look at the stars, but he imagines them too. He draws pictures of them in his mind, creating stories about gods and wars and the souls of explorers. He thinks about where his soul will go when he dies and if he will become part of the night.
All of this he tells me at the height of the Cloud Mountain, with the moon and the wind and the empty space of the world before us. The crew is sleeping, along with the Págese princess. It feels like the entire world is asleep. And us – just us – we are finally awake.
“I’ve never shown this to anybody,” Elian says.
He doesn’t mean the stars, but the way he sees them. They are his secret just like the ocean is mine, and when he speaks of them, his smile is as bright as they are. I wonder if I’ve ever had that look. If it glittered in my eyes when I thought of home, washing over me like a wave and transforming me as I was so easily transformed before.
“I think there are a lot of things you haven’t shown anybody.”
We don’t talk about Yukiko, or the marriage that seems as impending as our war. We don’t do anything but pretend there’s something other than darkness and choices woven from the nightmare ahead of us both.
Elian takes in a breath. His hand lingers beside mine. “I had this idea that when I found the crystal, I would feel something,” he says.
“Victorious?”
“Peaceful. But we’re so close, and I feel the complete opposite. It’s like I’m dreading the moment we open that dome.”
Something shifts in my chest. Hope, maybe.
“Why?”
Elian doesn’t reply, and that’s enough of an answer. Despite everything, he doesn’t want to be responsible for destroying an entire race, no matter how evil he thinks we are. I want to tell him that I feel it too: the sense of dread mingling with the pull of duty. I want to tell him that we weren’t all born monsters.
The Second Eye of Keto could destroy either one of us, and neither of us seems to want to be the one to wield it. I toy with the idea of revealing the truth to him, like maybe it will sway him over to my side as he has seemed to sway me over to his. But it seems like more of a fairy tale than the eye ever has been, because if I tell Elian who I am, he’ll never accept it. I could promise I’ve changed. Or not changed, but changed back. To who I was and could have been if not for my mother. This humanity has transformed me in a way that is so much deeper than fins for legs and scales for skin. I’m as different on the inside now as I am on the outside. I feel the horror of what I’ve done and the overwhelming desire to begin again. To become the kind of queen I think Crestell always wanted me to be.
I turn to Elian, letting the snow wet my cheek.
“You once asked me to tell you something about the sirens you didn’t know,” I say. “There’s a legend among them that warns of what can happen if a human were to take a siren’s heart.”
“I’ve never heard it.”
“That’s because you’re not a siren.”
“Neither are you,” Elian says, matching my wry tone.
I give him a hollow smirk and continue on. “They say that if any human were to get ahold of a siren’s heart, then they would be forever immune to the effects of the song.”
Elian arches a cynical eyebrow. “Immunity from a dead siren’s song?”
“From any siren’s song.”
I don’t know why I’m telling him, save for the hope that if this war can’t end, then the least he can do is survive it. Or stand some kind of a chance.
“According to the stories,” I say, “the reason sirens dissolve so quickly into foam when they die is to prevent such a thing from happening.”
Elian considers this. “And you think that’s possible?” he asks. “If I somehow manage to cut out a siren’s heart before she melts away, then I’ll suddenly be able to face any siren without needing to worry about falling under their enchantments?”
“I suppose it won’t matter,” I tell him, “if you plan to kill them all anyway.”
Elian’s eyes lose a little light. “I think I understand why the original families didn’t use the crystal back when it was first crafted,” he says. “Genocide doesn’t seem quite right, does it? Maybe once we kill the Sea Queen, it will be enough. They might all stop. Maybe even the Princes’ Bane will stop.”
I turn back to the sky, and quietly, I ask, “Do you really believe killers can stop being killers?”
“I want to.”
His voice sounds so far from the confident prince I met all that time ago. He’s not the man who commands a ship or the boy born to command an empire. He is both and neither. He is something that exists in the in-between, where only I can see. A slip in the world where he is trapped.
The thought lights something inside of me. I steal my gaze from the stars and turn to him, my cheek damp on the snow-soaked blanket. Elian is so much like the waters he plunders. Still and peaceful on the surface, but beneath there is madness.
“What if I were to tell you a secret?” I ask.
Elian turns to me, and suddenly just looking at him hurts. A dangerous longing wells, and I dare myself to tell him over and over in my mind. Reveal the truth and see if humans are as capable of forgiveness as they are of vengeance.
“What if you were?”
“It would change how you saw me.”
Elian shrugs. “Then don’t tell me.”
I roll my eyes. “What if you need to know?”
“People don’t tell secrets because someone needs to know them. They do it because they need someone to tell.”
I swallow. My heart feels loud enough to hear. “I’ll ask you something instead, then.”
“To keep a secret?”
“To keep a favor.”
Elian nods, and I forget that we’re murderers and enemies and when my identity is revealed, he might very well try to kill me. I don’t think of Yukiko claiming him like a prize she doesn’t know the value of. And I don’t think of the Sea Queen or the notion of betrayal. I think of my human heart, suddenly beating so fast – too fast – and the crease between Elian’s eyebrows as he waits for my answer.
“Are you ever going to kiss me?”
Slowly, Elian says, “That’s not a favor.”
His hand moves from beside mine, and I feel a sudden absence. And then it’s on my cheek, cupping my face, thumb stroking my lip. It feels like the worst thing I’ve ever done and the best thing I could ever do and how strange that the two are suddenly the same.
How strange that instead of taking his heart, I’m hoping he takes mine.
“Do you remember when we first met?” he asks.
“You said I was more charming when I was unconscious.”
Elian laughs, and he’s so close that I feel his body shake against mine. I can see every scar and freckle of his skin. Every streak of color in his eyes. I lick my lips. I can almost taste him.
“Ask me again,” he says.
His forehead presses against mine, breath ragged on my lips. I close my eyes and breathe him in. Licorice and ocean salt and if I move, if I breathe, then whatever fragile thing it is between us will disappear with the wind.
“Just do it already,” I say.
And he does.