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Writhing possessives overtook me. There was no need for it, but our blood bond lit in a painful, sparking protest. Agatha came to my side and tugged me back. I’d stepped closer to the sea without even realizing it, as if beckoned.
“Deep breath,” she said, so only I could hear her. “If we’ve learned one thing, it’s that your control is poorest when your emotions are high.”
I sucked in the salt air, but it did little good.
Princess Halla turned in Theodore’s hold and gave us gathered on the beach a beatific smile. Her voice rose above the roiling waves. “I know you do not pray to my saint, as I do not worship your Gods, but I ask that you all kneel during the ceremony out of respect.”
We lowered ourselves to the sand. I spun through my memories of Agatha’s lessons from when I had been a girl, searching for what I’d learned of the Obelian saints. All I could recall was that each family chose their own. The two other robed women walked into the water. They faced the princess and lowered themselves to their knees. The red sashes down their centers floated over the white foam, a thick stream of deep red.
Halla’s voice wound through the damp air like a song, reaching high, then dropping low into her chest. It was filled with heart and adoration. “I come with gratitude, with praise, with unending reverence. I come to keep our counterpoise. To take and to give in equal measure.”
One of the ladies in the waves raised the crystalline stake and Halla cradled it in both of her hands. “I ask for a happy marriage. I ask for a union that begets many children.”
My stomach felt slimy, flipping with sick. I dropped my gaze to my lap, where my interlaced hands had gone white.
Halla’s voice softened. “I ask that you strengthen the waters with your power. I ask that you aid King Theodore’s fleet. Twist the currents in his favor, fill them with your minions, so that the enemy may be lowered to your devouring dark.”
My gaze shot to Halla like a loosed arrow. Cold crackled through me as she twisted the stake and gripped it in one hand. Halla held her other hand out, palm up. “I give you my blood as payment for your blessings.” Halla’s eyes closed, and she whispered, so quietly I could hardly hear the words over the breeze, “I remember your body sliced open, and your blood spilled.” She set the sinister tip of the stake to her index finger and sliced the end of it clean open. Red dripped into the waves. “I give to the sand. I give to the water. Hear me, heed me. Cleanse the sea.”
Panic slammed me in the chest. “No.” I was on my feet to a chorus of gasps. I strode into the waves, water flying through the air in a wide spray.
Lachlan’s sword rang in my ears as he pulled it from his sheath and raced after me. “What the fuck—”
“Stand down, Lachlan,” Theodore shouted.
“Theo, you’ve lost your—”
“Stand down.”
I stood before Halla and ripped the stake from her fist. Our gazes stuck. The whites of her eyes were suddenly red, shot through with bright, snaking veins. Somehow, she looked even more like death now with white lips and sunken, gray cheeks. Her knees gave and Theodore braced to hold her up. “Who is your saint?” I demanded, holding the stake between us. “Tell me her name.”
“You gave your word—you would not interfere.” Her sweet, melodic tones were gone. Now she spoke with the crackling voice of a crone.
Theodore’s eyes widened at the sound.
“Answer me.” My hand fisted into the front of her robe, jerking her. She could not move at all now. The entirety of her body’s weight slumped in Theodore’s strong arms.
Halla let out a screeching yowl of frustration, of pain. “Do something, Your Majesty.”
“Imogen.” Theodore’s voice was alarmingly even. I met his gaze over Halla’s shoulder and there was something in it that stilled me. Disorientation. The steady, noble man did not know what to do. “Let her go, Im.”
I couldn’t bring myself to obey. My voice turned heavy and begging. “She worships Eusia.”
“Eusia.” Halla’s red eyes rounded at the name, and her jaw went slack. “You know Eusia?”
“I know her well.” My chest heaved with quick breaths. “Why do you worship her? What magic did she perform for you?”
Halla gaped, affronted. “She performed a miracle. For our family.”
“She performed a spell,” I said through my teeth. “What was the payment required for it?”
Some realization crashed over her at my question. Her face went blank. Her mouth closed into a thin, refusing line. My talons slipped from the tips of my fingers and sliced through the front of her robe.
“Imogen,” Theodore yelled, “let her go.”
I shook my head, and with a jerk, I forced her easily from his hold. He wasn’t expecting my force. Her body crumpled into the water, but I held her above the surface as I strode in deeper. It was cold and cutting when it reached my thighs. “What did your family pay for the spell?”
The water obeyed when I told it to envelop her like a coiling serpent, and she sucked in a rattling, terrified gasp. “Get me out of the water,” she cried in terror. “Please.”
“You should fear the water, Halla.” I pulled her nearer, locked my eyes with hers. “It belongs to me.”
I sent another current to wrap and writhe around her body. Her trembling cry cut through the morning mist.
“A body,” she finally said. “The price for her miracle was a body.”
“Whose?” My voice was strange to my own ears. I sounded as vast and powerful as the crashing sea. I blurred into it, losing myself.
Halla jerked in my grip like a fish snagged at the end of a line. Tears poured from her reddened eyes. “My father’s. Eusia ensured that my mother would finally have a child. She became pregnant with me. And as payment, she gave her my father.”
My face bent with disgust. I looked up to Theodore, who stood frozen behind her, and our gazes stuck for a long, awful moment. “Eusia is a monster,” I said to Halla, “and you worship her all the same?”
Even at the stomach-knotting thought of what the empress had done, my mind still slunk back to Nemea. How the empress had said he’d been attentive while she’d mourned her husband. I thought of that disemboweled family, of my ring, plucked from one of their limp fingers. I thought of the red sash that ran down the front of Halla’s robe. Of the story of Eusia’s execution, her body sliced open and flung into the sea. I thought of the prayer Halla had spoken over the water and how Nemea had taught me the very same one when I was a little girl, bouncing blithely on his knee.
Below the plucking in my chest, below the oily darkness of my bond with Eusia, and the shining warmth of the one I shared with Theodore, was a knowing. A sudden, terrible clarity.
“Imogen.” Theodore’s voice was an anchor. It brought me back to my flesh and bone. I could feel the distinction between the water and my skin once more. My gaze fell upon him, standing before me like a signal fire, and my eyes burned at his radiance. “Bring her back to the sand, Immy.”
I couldn’t make myself move. For one step would beget the next, and now I knew where the heartbreaking path forward led.
Theodore walked farther into the waves, and I watched him with studying eyes. The slant of his nose, the hard cut of his jaw, the dark hair that edged his furrowed brow. I thought of his breaths in my ear and his lips on my skin and the shape of my name on his tongue when he’d whispered it in the darkest hour of the night.
“Now, Imogen. I am your king.” He said it firmly, as if the statement were a solid grip on a trusty hilt. A weapon that had never failed him.
I towed Halla a step closer to the shore. “And what am I?” The question was strung through with more emotion than I cared to reveal. His brow smoothed at the question. “Your subject? Your mistress? Your queen? The heir of Seraf and queen of Sirens? I am none of those things and all of them at once. I belong nowhere and everywhere.”
Hurt passed over his face like a storm cloud. “You know where you belong.”
“I don’t.” My throat narrowed. “The only piece of me that has found a true home is my heart.” A breath trembled through my lips. “But I am more than that, aren’t I? You want this to be tidy and painless. You want things to stay as they are, but I fear everything must be undone before either of us can hope to have what we want.”
There was a war within him; I could see it in his eyes. Halla shook in my grip, and I hauled her up, so her face was mere inches from mine. “I will see an end to your saint.” Unceremoniously, I released her. She fell with a shriek below the surface, and I sent a wave to carry her back to the sand.
Theodore helped collect her from the tangle of sodden silk that she lay in. The effects of the spell she’d performed had slowly worn off. Her color had returned. The red had left her eyes. Her legs shook, and she let herself lean into Theodore’s chest. “She said she was your queen,” she whimpered, looking up at him, distressed and needy.
Theodore looked to me, then back to Halla. I’d been foolish to speak so plainly, to reveal that I was a threat to her claim on him and her title, but I could only hope that Theodore would neutralize it. He took a full breath. “She is.”
I stared at him, dumbstruck.
There was a note of promise in his voice, as if telling Halla the entirety of what sat between us might let him keep me. “Imogen is the Siren heiress. We share a blood bond, and as a result, she can use my power. Our bond will keep her safe as she travels to find… to find Eusia.”
Halla stood leaning against him for a long moment, stu
Theodore’s face went stony.
“You gave your word, did you not? That I would be your queen.” Her thumb traced the line of his cheekbone. “And isn’t the word of a king as binding as a scratch of ink from his pen?” Her words turned cutting, menacing. “See your bond broken, Your Majesty. Our wedding is in one week.”
Her threat stung me, sent my need to protect him surging. I clamped my jaw against the impulse and reached into my pocket for the severing draught. I stopped when I felt something through the water. The plucking in my chest sped faster. Cold fingers brushed my ankle. Broken talons scratched up my calf.
“Not fucking now.” I sent a command shooting through the waves. The nekgyas rose up at my behest, breaking the surface with empty eyes. Halla screamed and scurried out of the water completely. Lachlan, Eftan, and Agatha all reared back too. Three Siren corpses stood before me. Their blue-gray flesh was knit through with seaweed and rot.
They spoke in unison through their black mouths, as Eusia’s voice echoed through my skull. “Home. Home. Home.”
Eusia had sent them to mock me. To tell me once more what she’d been trying to tell me from the start. To tell me what I’d tried so hard to ignore.