He was frantic. The stormy twilight lit his horrified face. “Thespell.” He set his hand on the hilt of the dagger in my middle like he meant to remove it.
I whimpered and spoke through gritted teeth. “Do not touch me.”
“The spell will keep you alive.”
“So I can keep feeding Eusia for you?”
He shook his head, face crumpling as the pelting rain beaded down it. “Ligea. She was gone. I swear, I thought—as long as she lives, I swore I’d keep you safe.”
It was incomprehensible, how the blood bond he shared with my mother had formed this twisted moral compass of his. He was despicable, deceitful, but I’d never seen him like this. Heartsore and broken. Willing to offer me life when I’d spent so long certain that he wanted me dead—after he himself had struck the killing blow.
Regardless of how I could not understand him, I was clear in one thing: I wanted to live.
Lightning ripped through the sky, illuminating Nemea’s intent. He didn’t wait for my consent. His shaking hand gripped the dagger, and he ripped it straight out of my gut.
A cry gouged my throat.
Lowered on one knee, Nemea kept himself steady as the ship rocked. As water washed back and forth across the deck. He dragged the dagger over his fingertip, then scooped up some seawater as it rushed by. He let the bloody mixture trickle over the gash in my stomach. The salt burned my open flesh. “Will I be sick?” I asked, through a cracking voice.
“I don’t know.” He’d gone pale, tense.
My gushing blood looked black in the quickly fading light. I was growing cold. My body began to shake.
“Keep still.” He pressed his hand against the weeping gash. I squirmed from the feel of his fingers on my skin, all cold and gentleand wet. He closed his eyes and an unnatural calm came over him. He was a foil to the chaos of the rocking ship, the slashing rain, the gusting wind.
He spoke with reverence, with purpose. “In the wake of the ruined, when the spirit rends, mend and loop and seal. In the veins of the drowning, when blood fills the throat, clear and wash and heal.”
I felt nothing. Warmth still gushed from beneath his fingers. Then, at the very moment that Nemea sucked in a scraping breath and pulled his hand from me, my body arched with an awful, stabbing pain. It was like the dagger had been driven in once more. I looked down. The flow of blood slowed to a dribble, but it did not stop. The skin did not close. The wound was the width of my palm, a red-stained maw.
Nemea fell to the deck, wailing, as the spell sought recompense. His fingers flew to his eyes like they seared. Water crashed over him, sending his large body sliding until it hit the base of the mast. Water gurgled in his throat, and I couldn’t tell if it was the seawater or the spell that choked him.
I didn’t move from where I sat. Instead, I watched him flail and slide as the wind and water saw fit. With another sway of the ship, he managed to wrap his arms around the mast and curl himself around it. I waited for his watery breaths to even the way Halla’s had after she’d performed her spell. I waited for him to stop scratching at his eyes, but he writhed instead, fighting to stay put as the storm tried to dislodge him.
My gaze slipped back down to the dribbling wound in my stomach, and a flood of sickness filled me. I had been so close to suffering a death like Eusia’s. And then something struck me—Theodore’s account of her execution.
She was gutted and thrown off the coast of Anthemoessa.
The Sirens’ island. The seat of Ligea’s queendom. Where she and her sister had been created.
Home.
“It’s Anthemoessa, isn’t it?” Nemea’s breaths were coming easier now. “Answer me,” I yelled. “How did you get there? The waters are supposed to be impassable.”
It had been blighted by a spell and abandoned. A spell I could only assume Eusia herself had cast. Its land had grown black and toxic, as did the waters around it. There was no passing its outer reef, no touching foot on its inner shores without the blight seeping through the soles of your boots. As a result, Ligea had lost her seat. She’d been a queen only in title after that. The Sirens had spread out through the rest of Leucosia’s islands, welcomed by all—at first.
I crawled toward him and yanked at his shoulder, forcing him to look at me. His eyes bled, shredded and nightmarish. “How did you get on Anthemoessa?”
He shook his head like he wouldn’t answer me. It was growing nearly too dark to see, but as the ship rocked, I could hear the slide of metal on the deck behind me. The sword. I followed the sound, scraping my body toward it. My pain was deep and beating but I managed to take the wet leather hilt in my hand.
The storm cracked the sky. I rose, dragging the sword tip over the wet planks as I stumbled back to him. Nemea didn’t move. Only the faintest of groans filled his chest. I stood above him and positioned the blade so it hovered over the soft hollow of his throat. “How did you get on Anthemoessa, Nemea?”
He stared up at me, unmoving, and had the gall to laugh. Like I was no threat to him at all. Like he believed he’d done such a thorough job of defanging me that the worst I could do now was gum him.
I jabbed him quickly with the sword, enough to just break the skin. He snarled like a feral animal. “Eusia allowed it.”
“You and your whole crew? She let your whole ship past the outer reef?”
He shook his head. I couldn’t tell how well he could see me through the blood in his eyes and the impending night. “She let my ship pass the outer reef. She only let me and Nivala on the main island.”
