THE KETO PALACE LIES within the center of the Diávolos Sea and has always been home to royalty. Though humans have kings and queens in every crevice of the earth, the ocean has only one ruler. One queen. This is my mother, and one day it will be me.
One day being soon. It’s not that my mother is too old to rule. Though sirens live for a hundred years, we never age past a few decades, and soon daughters look like mothers and mothers look like sisters, and it becomes hard to tell how old anybody truly is. It’s another reason why we have the tradition of hearts: so a siren’s age is never determined by her face, but always by how many lives she has stolen.
This is the first time I’ve broken that tradition, and my mother is furious. Looking down at me, the Sea Queen is every bit the tyrannical sovereign. To an outsider, she may even seem infinite, as though her reign could never end. It doesn’t look like she’ll lose her throne in just a few years.
As is customary, the Sea Queen retires her crown once she has sixty hearts. I know the exact number my mother has hidden in the safe beneath the palace gardens. Once, she had announced them each year, proud of her growing collection. But she stopped making such proclamations when she reached fifty. She stopped counting, or at least, stopped telling people that she did. But I never stopped. Each year I counted my mother’s hearts just as rigorously as I counted my own. So I know that she has three years before the crown is mine.
“How many is that now, Lira?” asks the Sea Queen, looming down at me.
Reluctantly, I bow my head. Kahlia lingers behind me, and though I can’t see her, I know she’s shadowing the gesture.
“Eighteen,” I reply.
“Eighteen,” the Sea Queen muses. “How funny you should have eighteen hearts, when your birthday is not for two weeks.”
“I know, but—”
“Let me tell you what I know.” The queen settles on her carcass throne. “I know that you were supposed to take your cousin to get her fifteenth, and somehow that proved too difficult.”
“Not especially,” I say. “I did take her.”
“And you took a little something for yourself, too.”
Her tentacles stretch around my waist and pull me forward. In an instant, I feel the crack of my ribs beneath her grip.
Every queen begins as a siren, and when the crown passes to her, its magic steals her fins and leaves in their place mighty tentacles that hold the strength of armies. She becomes more squid than fish, and with that transformation comes the magic, unyielding and grand. Enough to shape the seas to her whim. Sea Queen and Sea Witch both.
I’ve never known my mother as a siren, but I can’t imagine her ever looking so mundane. She has ancient symbols and runes tattooed over her stomach in red, stretching even to her gloriously carved cheekbones. Her tentacles are black and scarlet, fading into one another like blood spilled into ink, and her eyes have long since turned to rubies. Even her crown is a magnificent headdress that peaks in horns atop her head and flows out like limbs down her back.
“I won’t hunt on my birthday as recompense,” I concede breathlessly.
“Oh, but you will.” The queen strokes her black trident. A single ruby, like her eyes, shines on the middle spear. “Because today never happened. Because you would never disobey me or undermine me in any way. Would you, Lira?”
She squeezes my ribs tighter.
“Of course not, Mother.”
“And you?” The queen turns her fixation to Kahlia, and I try to hide any signs of unease. If my mother were to see concern in my eyes, it would only be another weakness for her to exploit.
Kahlia swims forward. Her hair is pulled back from her face by a tie of seaweed, and her fingernails are still crusted with pieces of the Adékarosin queen. She bows her head in what some might interpret as a show of respect. But I know better. Kahlia can never look the Sea Queen in the eye, because if she did, then my mother might know exactly what my cousin thinks of her.
“I only thought she would kill him,” says Kahlia. “I didn’t know she’d take his heart, too.”
It’s a lie and I’m glad of it.
“Well, how perfectly stupid you are not to know your own cousin.” My mother eyes her greedily. “I’m not sure I can think of a punishment unpleasant enough for complete idiocy.”
I clench a hand against the tentacle that grips my waist. “Whatever the punishment is,” I say, “I’ll take it.”
My mother’s smile twitches, and I know that she’s thinking of all the ways this makes me unworthy to be her daughter. Still, I can’t help it. In an ocean of sirens who watch out only for themselves, protecting Kahlia has become somewhat of a reflex. Ever since that day when we were both forced to watch her mother die. And throughout the years, as the Sea Queen tried to mold both Kahlia and I into the perfect descendants of Keto. Carving our edges into the right shape for her to admire. It’s a mirror to a childhood I’d sooner forget.
Kahlia is like me. Too much like me, perhaps. And though it’s what makes the Sea Queen hate her, it’s also the reason I choose to care. I’ve stuck by her side, shielding her from the parts of my mother that are the most brutal. Now protecting my cousin isn’t a decision I make. It’s instinct.
“How caring of you,” the Sea Queen says with a scornful smile. “Is it all those hearts you’ve stolen? Did you take some of their humanity, too?”
“Mother—”
“Such fealty to a creature other than your queen.” She sighs. “I wonder if this is the way you behave with the humans, too. Tell me, Lira, do you cry for their broken hearts?”
She drops her grip on me, disgusted. I hate what I become in her presence: trite and undeserving of the crown I’m to inherit. Through her eyes, I see my failure. It doesn’t matter how many princes I hunt, because I’ll never be the kind of killer that she is.
I’m still not quite cold enough for the ocean that birthed me.
“Give it to me so we can get on with it,” the Sea Queen says impatiently.
I frown. “Give it to you,” I repeat.
The queen holds out her hand. “I don’t have all day.”
It takes me a moment to realize that she means the heart of the prince I killed.
“But . . .” I shake my head. “But it’s mine.”
What an incredible child I’ve become.
The Sea Queen’s lips curl. “You will give it to me,” she says. “Right now.”
Seeing the look on her face, I turn and swim for my bedroom without another word. There the prince’s heart lies buried alongside seventeen others. Carefully, I dig through the freshly placed shingle and pull the heart out of the floor. It’s crusted in sand and blood and still feels warm in my hands. I don’t stop to think about the pain the loss will bring before I swim back to my mother and present it to her.
The Sea Queen strikes out a tentacle and snatches the heart from my open palm. For a while she stares into my eyes, gauging my every reaction. Savoring the moment. And then she squeezes.
The heart explodes into a gruesome mass of blood and flesh. Tiny particles float like ocean lint. Some dissolve. Others fall like feathers to the ocean bed. Shots plunge through my chest, slamming into me like whirlpools as the heart’s magic is taken from me. The jolts are so strong that my fins catch on a nearby seashell and rip. My blood gushes alongside the prince’s.
Siren blood is nothing like human blood. Firstly, because it is cold. Secondly, because it burns. Human blood flows and drips and pools, but siren blood blisters and bubbles and melts through skin.
I fall to the floor and claw the sand so deeply that my finger stabs a rock and it cleaves my nail clean off. I am breathless, heaving in great gasps of water and then choking it back up moments later. I think I might be drowning, and I almost laugh at the thought.
Once a siren steals a human heart, we become bonded to it. It’s an ancient kind of magic that cannot be easily broken. By taking the heart, we absorb its power, stealing whatever youth and life the human had left and binding it to us. The Adékarosin prince’s heart is being ripped from me, and any power it held leaks into the ocean before my eyes. Into nothingness.
Shaking, I rise. My limbs feel as heavy as iron and my fins throb. The glorious red seaweed that covers my breasts is still coiled around me, but the strands have loosened and hang limply over my stomach. Kahlia turns away, to keep my mother from seeing the anguish on her face.
“Wonderful,” says the queen. “Time for the punishment.”
Now I do laugh. My throat feels scratchy, and even that action, the sound of my voice so wrought with magic, takes energy from me. I feel weaker than I ever have.
“That wasn’t punishment?” I spit. “Ripping the power from me like that?”
“It was the perfect punishment,” says the Sea Queen. “I don’t think I could have thought of a better lesson to teach you.”
“Then what else is there?”
She smiles with ivory fangs. “Kahlia’s punishment,” she says. “Per your request.”
I feel the heaviness in my chest again. I recognize the dreadful gleam in my mother’s eyes, as it’s a look I’ve inherited. One I hate seeing on anyone else, because I know exactly what it means.
“I’m sure I can think of something fitting.” The queen runs a tongue across her fangs. “Something to teach you a valuable lesson about the power of patience.”
I fight the urge to sneer, knowing no good will come of it. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
The Sea Queen leers down at me. “You always did enjoy pain,” she says.
This is as much of a compliment as I’m going to get, so I smile in a way that is sickeningly pleasant and say,“Pain doesn’t always hurt.”
The Sea Queen shoots me a contemptuous look. “Is that so?” Her eyebrows twitch upward and my arrogance falters somewhat. “If that’s how you feel, then I have no choice but to decree that for your birthday, you will have the chance to inflict all of the pain you like when you steal your next heart.”
I eye her warily. “I don’t understand.”
“Only,” the queen continues, “instead of the princes you are so adept at trapping, you will add a new kind of trophy to your collection.” Her voice is as wicked as mine has ever been. “Your eighteenth heart will belong to a sailor. And at the ceremony of your birth, with our entire kingdom present, you will present this to them, as you have done with all of your trophies.”
I stare at my mother, biting my tongue so hard that my teeth almost meet.
She doesn’t want to punish me. She wants to humiliate me. Show a kingdom whose fear and loyalty I’ve earned that I’m no different from them. That I don’t stand out. That I’m not worthy to take her crown.
I’ve spent my life trying to be just what my mother wanted – the worst of us all – in an effort to show that I’m worthy of the trident. I became the Princes’ Bane, a title that defines me throughout the world. For the kingdom – for my mother – I am ruthless. And that ruthlessness makes each and every sea creature certain I can reign. Now my mother wants to take that from me. Not just my name, but the faith of the ocean. If I’m not the Princes’ Bane, then I’m nothing. Just a princess inheriting a crown instead of earning it.