“She’s…dead?” stammered the girl. Lux almost missed the question as a wave crashed.
“For now. Maybe forever,” Lux replied. Her dread intensified. “Are you all right? I’m sorry I cut your hair.”
Clumps of red strands blew about the grass. The girl glanced at them and away again. “I can’t go back there. They told me I would be better, that the drink would help the salt-sick, but I can’t wait. There’s so muchwanthere, and it’s making me sicker. You’ll help me, won’t you? You don’t feel like them. Thatwoman… She felt like nothing at all and that scared me the most.”
Lux could hardly follow the girl’s running thoughts. Her own were in too much turmoil. “I don’t feel like them?”
“No. You feel lonely. And scared. And…very angry.”
The girl’s eyes had grown wide at her final assessment, and Lux had to indeed push down her anger. She was furious with herself. She hadn’t thought through every consequence of cutting Hildred from the girl. She’d only been focused on the most obvious one. Giving the girl her freedom.
Because for Lux, freedom had always felt like the most important thing.
She surveyed the girl’s attire. Her nightgown was a replica of Lux’s own upstairs, gifted by Mothlock. “I can’t help you yet. Wait for me if you can, but I must look for the body in the cove first.”
“I’ll wait by the garden door.”
Lux nodded. That would do.
A few minutes later, she stood upon the first stone step and cursed her long skirt. This was why she’d always cut everything off at the knee. With so much fabric, she risked tumbling to her death the same as the body she sought. She adjusted her bodice and retied her knife, then she gathered her skirt in her fists.Saints above, let me live.
The first half of the path wasn’t so awful: she slipped only once. But by the second half, she cursed and abandoned her grip on one part of her skirt to extend her arm for balance. To compensate for the drag, her opposite hand clutched her dress higher. Though her bare knees protested the exposure, it was infinitely better than falling.
The waves grew to a bellowing roar as she descended, and Lux almost lost her balance entirely at their sheer size. She’d been sofocused on her feet, she’d not braved a glance. She paused now. A single step more and her boots would meet black sand.
She tried to remember what Corvin had said regarding this cove, what she should watch for.The waves. I shouldn’t swim in the sea. Of course, she’d not told him at the time that she would never attempt it because she’d never learned how. Lux stepped forward. Her boots sank. She tried to hurry, but it was difficult. It reminded her of walking beside Ghadra’s marshes—the strange feel of ground shifting beneath one’s feet.
Rocks of various sizes littered the cove, the larger ones offering themselves as homes to blue crabs. She picked her way around two boulders dripping with seaweed and sea-spray, and a large crab sought immediate shelter at her nearness.
It was then she met the sea.
It came upon her quick, a collision rather than a meeting. A wave crested, the force of it peppering her face with drops, and when it rolled in, the water splashed over her more than she intended. It soaked her boots and a good amount of her hem. Immediately, she noted the added weight.
But she didn’t care. It was breathtaking. Even in the moonlight.
So utterly, terrifyingly—
Lux’s thoughts snagged. Because farther out was something decidedly not froth-like, but white all the same. A body. In a white apron. A wave caught it up, and for a brief moment, she glimpsed more than that.
Long hair. Sallow skin. Seaweed clinging to the length of skirt tangled about the legs.
Hildred.
Lux gasped when frigid water met her thighs. Except when she cast a surprised glance to the rock beside her, the one dripping and dark, it hadn’t moved.
Which meant neither had she.
“It is the changing tides you must be wary of.”
Her mind gifted her the remainder of her and Corvin’s conversation, just as another wave crashed against her. Her dress hung heavy and limp from her hips.Turn back,demanded her head, but the woman had drifted closer. Enough that Lux could see the deep lacerations marring her legs. The body wasn’t within arm’s reach, not yet, but perhaps if she took one step closer.
Lux stepped—
And sank beneath the waves.
For several heartbeats of time the world was dark and serene. She was suspended in a place she’d never found herself before, and it might have been peaceful—if only she couldbreathe.
Lux found the barest foothold and pushed.
