I RUN FASTER THAN I thought I could. Through the maze of the ice palace and the tunnels where Elian’s crew still sleeps. I run until it doesn’t even feel like running, but as though I’m floating. Flying. Swimming through the labyrinth as I did the ocean. I run until I smell water and see light peek out from the end of the path.
Elian let me live, but it was a small act of mercy that will be undone in the coming battle. Did he do it because he knew it wouldn’t matter? Because he wanted me to see my mother die first? I don’t want to cling to the idea of it being anything more, but I can’t help myself. I toy with the possibility that the betrayal of my identity didn’t undo whatever bridge had built itself between us.
When he dropped his sword, there was something so utterly depleted about it that I can’t find the words to describe it in any language. The idea that he doesn’t want me dead is impossible, but I hold on to it more desperately than I have ever clung to anything in my vicious life. He kissed me, after all. Brushed my cheek so delicately and pressed his lips to mine in a way that shot fire through me, melting away any pieces of the mountain that had slicked itself to my skin.
Things like that can’t be forgotten any more than they can be undone.
I break free from the ice palace and grab the oars to one of the small rowboats. I reach the other side of the great moat breathless and clutching the seashell necklace in my hand. The thick grooves of it press against my palm as I debate the choice ahead of me. Elian will think he can use the eye to kill my mother and every single siren in the ocean. He’ll risk his life, believing he has a weapon, when in fact that weapon is useless in his hands.
With my blood coating it, it can have no other master.
There were a lot of things the Sea Queen told me about Keto’s eye, but the one I remember most clearly is this: Whoever frees the eye will become its master. I hadn’t lied to Elian when I said blood was needed; it just didn’t have to be siren blood. If Elian had sliced his own hand across the waters, the Second Eye of Keto would have been his to use. It would have given him the same powers my mother’s trident gifted her. That was how the original families planned for the humans to take down the Sea Queen: an even battle of magic.
I thrust the seashell necklace into the moat as I did in Eidýllio, only this time I focus on my mother’s image. I call to her inside my mind, loud enough to have it puncture through an entire mountain and spread across the seas. At first, I’m not sure if it will work, but then the water begins to boil and around me the ice that scatters over the moat melts.
It singes like an invisible fire and a gust of water spouts up. Black flows like shadows spilling into light. I hear a familiar humming and then, unmistakable, the sound of laughter.
From the abyss, my mother appears.
She is still beautiful, as all siren queens are, and horrifying in a way that only she has ever managed to be. Her eyes burnish mine and her long fingers stroke her trident like a pet. All the power in the world at her fingertips, ready to bend the seas and its monsters to her whim.
For some reason, she looks so strange to me now.
The Sea Queen smiles with fresh blood on her teeth. “Are you going to speak?” she asks.
I glance back to the palace, expecting Elian to come hurtling out at any moment, but the entrance stays clear and the water is steady by its feet and the Sea Queen simply waits.
“Do you know where we are?”
She casts an unconcerned look at her surroundings, resting her long, webbed fingers on the trident. There is barely a flicker in her chiseled eyes when she says, “The Cloud Mountain.”
“This lake” – my breath rattles between us – “is where the Second Eye of Keto was hidden. I followed the prince whose heart you wanted me to take and he led me here. To the very thing you’ve been searching for. I found this place when you failed to. Couldn’t you sense it with all of that power in your damn trident?”
It is not until she blinks that I realize I’m screaming.
Suddenly every deception and excuse I was so sure I could weave doesn’t seem important. My mind is blank, save for one thought: how unreasonably righteous I feel. When the water parted, I thought there was something odd about her. A small change in my absence that I couldn’t quite place my finger on. Now I realize it isn’t that she looks strange, but that she looks like a stranger.
The Sea Queen laughs and the ground cracks by my feet. She reclines and the water bubbles up to meet her like a throne.
“You’re still the stupid child,” she chides. “Can I sense every cup of water a human presses to its lips? You think this is part of our world just because it flows the same way?”
The Sea Queen scrapes a fang across her lip. “All of it is a disguise,” she says. “This mountain – this moat – is not ours. It’s theirs. The original sires of this infestation of human kingdoms. Man-made; magic-made. There is nothing of our goddess in these waters. I wouldn’t have been able to surface here if you hadn’t used the seashell to call me. I wouldn’t have known such a place could be reached.”
“And now you do.”
“And when you give me the eye, I can bring it all crashing down to the depths of Diávolos.”
I smile faintly. “That sounds like quite the plan. If only it was what I had in mind.”
The Sea Queen holds out her palm, fingers sharpened to the bone. A hand of knives. “Daughter,” she commands, “give me the Second Eye of Keto while I’m still being pleasant.”
“That’s a little impossible, since I don’t have it at the moment.”
The Sea Queen’s sculptured face cracks. A small twitch in her grooved brows and the tight pull of her lips too sudden to be a smile. She angles her head, studying my rigid stance. Assessing this sudden change in me. Still the insolent child, but with something far more duplicitous to my gaze.
Slowly, the Sea Queen arches forward. Her eyes gleam against the light. “Where is it?”
I summon the parts of myself best learned from Elian. The well-practiced bravado that comes from a knack for survival and the notion that luck may never end. Just this once I want to see something true from her. A reaction she hasn’t measured or calculated.
“It’s with the prince who came looking for it,” I say. “I let him have it in exchange for my life.”
I feel the impact of the ground before I register the blood. When I open my mouth to breathe, it pools from my nose and onto my tongue.
“Insolent trash!” the Sea Queen screeches.
Her tentacles thrash wildly, pounding through the air between us. I feel her boiling against my skin as she locks a tentacle around my neck and squeezes.
“Do you think your life is worth more than that eye?”
My mother lunges forward and her fingernails slice across my wrists like razor blades. I try to snatch myself free, but her grip is unbreakable. The more I struggle, the harder she presses, until I feel that with one more movement my bones will snap.
She drags me across the way, closer and closer to the ice palace. My joints crack with each violent jerk, feet dragging along the water. My throat burns in her grip, but I don’t let my smile falter. I don’t do anything except wait until she comes to a halt and tosses me back to the ground.
I don’t even think of telling her that it was me who freed the eye and that when I’m reunited with it, its power will belong to me. Admitting that would put Elian’s life at risk. Right now my mother sees him as the threat and that’s exactly what I need.
Misdirection, Elian said. He’ll be proud to see how well I’ve learned.
The Sea Queen regards me like a disease. “Do you think your life is worth anything?”
“Maybe not to you,” I say. I angle my head to the side and spit. “But to him it might be.”
“I knew you were weak,” she says. “But I never realized the extent of it. The heir to the sea kingdom of Keto, who I had to beat into brutality. Who would sooner see a young prince drown than rip out his heart while it still beat. Who cried while she murdered my sister.”
At the mention of Crestell, my chest heaves. The Sea Queen looks at me like I am a pitiful thing, no more her daughter than any other creature in her dominion. The complete opposite to the way Crestell had looked at Kahlia when she saved her life.
“I thought I clawed it out of you,” the Sea Queen says. “Yet look how much survived. Like a plague, this humanity infected you long before I stole your fins.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I say. “You wanted me to learn a lesson through this punishment and I have. I know that the prince isn’t my enemy. In fact, he’s just a more honorable version of me.” I stare into her stone-glazed eyes. “And in another life, if I ever had a choice about who to be, maybe I would have been like him.”
“Enough!” she demands. “You will give me what’s mine before I kill you.”
“No,” I say. “I think first I’ll take what’s mine.”
A derisive sound punctures from her lips. “You want my crown?”
“It’s my crown, actually.”
The points of her fangs glisten in the daylight. “You think you can kill me, Lira?” she asks. “The very one who brought you into this world?”
No fear, just curiosity. Layered in as much amusement as disbelief.
“If we were in the ocean, you would have an army,” I say. “But this is the Cloud Mountain, and we’re the farthest we can possibly be from home. In this place, with Elian and his crew, you’re practically carrion.”
“Elian?” She says his name with bile in her mouth. “You and your filthy human prince think I need the ocean for my army? Wherever I go, my power follows and so do they. If you truly want to end this war, then I’ll oblige. As a mother, I must grant my daughter her wish.”
She lowers her trident deep into the water, watching my face tick. Black weeps from the trident’s spine like tears. It blots across the moat and then floats a few inches from the water, forming large, dark circles across the way. Portals to Diávolos.
A hand punctures through the first one, closest to my feet. Then another. An army’s worth follow, and the water groans with this dark magic, shaking as one by one sirens rip their way into the mountain. Claws and teeth and fins and cold, cold eyes.
And then, not too far from me, a sight far worse.
I feel the power of the eye before I see Elian step out from the palace with his crew like an army lining up behind him. He surveys the rising army with a look equal parts awe and horror. I let out a breath, and even from here I can smell his angler scent on the breeze. It chips away part of me that is already raw.
As though he can sense this, Elian’s eyes find mine. He looks tired but ready for war. Always prepared for what’s to come, even if that thing may be death. As he watches me, something strange crosses his thunderous eyes. Uncertainty. Relief. A thing so utterly conflicted that I can only frown in response. Whatever it is, it’s gone far too quickly for me to decipher.
I open my mouth to call out to him – warn him to run, or hide, though I know he’ll do neither – but then he blinks and his expression sharpens. I can tell by just that one look that the Sea Queen has clawed her way into his line of vision. The moment they set their sights on each other, my heart jerks against my ribs.
The sirens grow, preparing for attack, and I know that not one of them will use their song to let Elian and his crew die peacefully. This isn’t a hunt; this is war. And they will want a fair kill. A victory brutal enough to make their queen proud.
The Sea Queen curves downward, her tentacles brushing my hand, lips like broken glass on my ear. “Stupid girl,” she whispers, and then – as though it’s the worst thing she could utter – “stupid human girl.”