As they rushed to comply with my orders, I leaned over Maren, searching her eyes.
“It’ll be alright, darling. Just try to hold still for a few moments. Can you do that for me?” I cooed in the sweetest voice I could muster, but I couldn’t entirely hide the rough notes of anguish from it.
Her eyes were wide open. Veins bulged out on her forehead. Her mouth was open, too, but only a hoarse croak came out in response.
Fuck.
I closed my eyes for a moment, afraid to delay yet terrified to rush it.
“We’re ready, Your Majesty,” Sagara’s shaky voice reached me.
My fingers trembled as I extended a hand toward the pearls on Maren’s body. As necessary as removing the strands around her neck was, I decided to start with those on her chest first. The outer layer of the row just above her breasts seemed a little more accessible, easier for me to reach with less danger of accidentally touching her skin.
The black pearls weren’t like beads on a string. Black, sticky slime connected them. As I slid my finger over the row, the entire loop turned to glass.
“Break them away from her,” I ordered one of the crew.
Carefully, avoiding my hands, the man hurriedly scraped at the glass. The glass beads fell off, bouncing off the deck, then rolling off into the ocean.
It worked.
Except that this was just one row. The rest of the cursed black beads, thousands of them, were still clinging to my butterfly’s body. Disrupting one strand didn’t loosen the grip of the others.
An old woman rushed to us from one of the lower decks. I didn’t spare her a glance, simply catching her moving in my peripheral vision.
“I’m Daria, the ship hag you sent for, Your Majesty.” She stopped at a distance, probably utterly confused by what was going on.
“Great,” I rasped, my throat dry as sand. “Don’t just stand there. Help her.”
The hag slipped behind the mast, keeping as far away from me as possible. Reaching from around the mast, she touched Maren’s cheek.
“She isn’t breathing, Your Majesty...” the hag whimpered.
“Then make her breathe!” I roared the order.
Terror gripped my insides. My hands shook, and I clenched them into fists, drawing a long breath. For once in my life, I couldn’t just let the rage out. I couldn’t break things, murder people, and roar until my throat felt sore and my voice was gone.
Every moment I wasted could be Maren’s last. She needed me to stay calm. And for her, I tried. I tried to organize my thoughts. I tried to stop my hands from trembling. I had to be careful and patient, when I had never been known for either of those qualities before.
“Take off her choker,” I said to Sagara, who seemed to be the least terrified among them all.
The white pearls that allowed Maren to breathe underwater clearly didn’t come from the god. They didn’t constrict her throat, but they were in the way.
“Now, bend her head forward and hold it very still,” I instructed.
The black pearls sank into Maren’s delicate throat like a garrote. I couldn’t dig them out of her skin without killing her with my touch in the process. The only accessible pearls were at the back of her neck, against her spine, where the bone prevented them from sinking into her flesh.
I reached for one there.
One wrong move, one slip of my finger, one jerk of her head, and Maren would be gone, lost to me forever.
Terror chilled my inside. I couldn’t allow myself to think about that.
The moment my finger connected with the smooth, glossy surface of one pearl, all in that one row turned to glass, snapped apart under the pressure of Maren’s body, and rained toward the deck. I touched the second strand right away, and it followed the first one.
Thank all the fucking gods in the ocean, Maren’s neck was now free.
The hag’s hands fluttered over the gory red marks left on Maren’s delicate skin. But I had no time to linger. Hundreds of pearls constricted her chest, threatening to break her ribs and crush her organs. Her arms and legs were trapped in them too, the god’s vile magic constricting the blood flow to her limbs.
