I add my other hand to the top of hers until we’re holding each other like fish skewered through the belly on a pike. Her hand is warm and reminds me a little of home.
“I will change you, but listen closely.” The girl’s eyes widen with relief. “Here is what you must do. As I told you before, dying Øldenburg blood must fall on your sister’s feet, shed by this knife. If that happens by the last moment of the fourth day—at sunrise, because that is when she ascended—she shall live. Though she can never become a mermaid again.”
She swallows. “Never? Not even with this knife?”
“Not the terms of her deal. The magic is serious about exchange—the sea cannot take her back.” I wrap a tentacle around the girl’s waist. “Now, your deal is different.”
I watch her eyes as I let that sink in. Her lip begins to tremble, and I don’t blame her—she feels as if she’s failed already because her sister can never again be a mermaid—but the girl’s eyes remain fierce and steady.
“Your deal, Runa, is one of very specific action. You are there to help your sister, but still, Alia must kill the boy with this knife. I can’t change that either. Her life was her bargain, not yours.” This truth seems to puncture Runa’s resiliency even more. “But having you there by her side, like you’ve always been, is the greatest power you have to give. Do you want me to go on?”
Runa swallows a sob and nods.
“After Alia allows the blood to fall on her feet for her survival, these are the things you must do to return to the sea: You must gather the boy’s red stone ring and retrieve the knife. Then you must sprinkle the boy’s blood on your own toes. Fail to do any of that by the close of the fourth full day after your arrival, including sending me the ring and the knife, and you will remain human forever.”
She swallows. “I … I won’t become foam in the tide? I’ll become human if I fail?”
“Don’t assume you will fail—you didn’t come here to fail.” She squeezes her eyes closed for a second and then she’s right back with me. Good.
My tentacle slinks off her waist and my hands drop hers as she runs it over in her mind. It’s a lot, true. And I gather that unlike Alia, the very last thing Runa ever wanted to be was human. But that was before she knew her sister might die. “Now, do you agree?”
She’s nodding before the words are out. “Yes, I agree.”
I watch her, making sure she means it. But she’s unwavering under my hard stare. “Give me the knife.”
Without a word, she extends the weapon. There’s a little hesitation as I transfer the hilt to my hand and draw it close, inspecting the serrated edge, the coral so finely cut, it’s almost translucent in its sharpness.
“Give me your hand.”
The mermaid extends her left hand over my cauldron, clever girl. She’d been holding the knife in her right, dominant, hand. She may trust me to change her, but she isn’t so sure I won’t send her topside missing an important appendage.
As a measure of good faith, I put a tentacle around her wrist instead, silky smooth and delicate. The cauldron is as deep and dark as the night, yet there’s a heat rising from it—part of my particular magic. I place my own arm over the cauldron, so that our arms are side by side. Then, without warning or hesitation, I drag the knife over the skin of my palm. Blood, onyx dark, oozes into the flat gray of the water, molasses slow and sparking with the magic I hold within.
The girl’s eyes stay on the knife as she waits, knowing that it will be her turn next. My blood drips onto her flat white palm in the moment before the knife breaks her skin. She doesn’t move, recoil, or even wince, though blood as red as the flowers her sister gave me swirls into the gray. I smother her hand in mine and squeeze, our blood dripping into the pot’s belly below as one.
With each drop, the cauldron softens with an inner light. It has the same silvery glow of a full moon on shallow waters, flashing mesmerizing rays into the starbursts of the girl’s amber eyes. I take a deep breath, and then I let my voice echo off the polypi, deep and commanding, with all the power her flowers have afforded me.
“Líf. Saudi. Minn líf. Minn bjod. Sei∂r. Sei∂r. Sei∂r.”
As I say the final word of the spell, the cauldron trembles with light—blinding and brilliant and enough to turn this whole pewter-rendered world stark, shocking white.
When the spell is complete, the light recedes in an instant. From the depths of the cauldron, a silvery liquid swirls, as if the best pearls in the ocean had been melted down.
I bring a tentacle up before the two of us, a small bottle grasped there. It’s much like the one I gave Alia. This one is light green in color, bringing all the power of the new spring sun. I dip the bottle into the potion, fill it to the top, and then stop it with a bit of cork.
“Take this draught in the shallows, so you shall not drown,” I say, and then I give her one final reminder. “You have four days for yourself. Two for your sister. Ring, knife, blood.”
With careful fingers, the girl seizes the bottle and the knife, pressing both to her heart, and repeats back what she must do. “Ring, knife, blood.”
As she turns to go, I swear I hear her voice again, whispering a single refrain.
“I’m coming, Alia. I’m coming.”
TOPSIDE, THE FIRST FINGERS OF DAYLIGHT SWIPE ACROSS the horizon, a bright white light across the Øresund Strait, the promise of the sun coming fast. The morning glow touches the beaches of Havnestad, the mountains behind the town lit only at the very tops, the rest in the steely tones of the sea witch’s lair.
The play of dawn would be beautiful if it didn’t signal another day gone for Alia.
I’m coming, Alia. I’m coming.
I cling to the shadows falling from the rocks that hug the sea witch’s black cove, the draught just as heavy in one hand as the knife is in my other. I need a place to change. I believe the sea witch that it would be best to take the draught in the shallows. It’s easy to picture Alia two dawns previous, changing on the main beach, timing it just so to coincide with the morning walks in which the king likes to indulge. She’d skipped breakfast for weeks on end just to watch him wander around, tossing sticks with his dogs, surveying his kingdom.
But from where I am, my view of Havnestad’s main beach is already filled with townspeople. The docks beside the beach are alive with the sounds of men, cargo rolling along on horse-drawn carts tinkling with lantern light that won’t be needed in a few minutes’ time. Many of them carve a path straight up a skinny brick road that lines the ocean and leads up to Øldenburg Castle, carrying preparations for the wedding, I’m sure.
The rest of the beach is an ode to that occasion as well. Tiny paper lanterns are strung from poles in a regal square closer to the castle, the skeleton of a bonfire pit to one side, an altar to another. I’d once been told the Øldenburgs loved to be married at sea, on the decks of their great ships, but I suppose it would be rather disastrous if the wedding party struck a mine planted in the waters its groom believed he owned.
I don’t see the boy on his morning walk, not yet, though he will likely be there soon. And maybe with Alia, if I’m lucky. I tuck the knife and bottle safely within my bodice, tight against the beating of my heart and the ríkifjor seeds I placed there before