“You can. It’s just like the prayer you performed on that beach. Intention is what matters most.” I undid my shirt and removed my boots. “Youmustdo it now.”
She was speechless as Theodore grabbed a dagger and set it in her hand.
I stood in only my trousers and binding. “Cut your hand. Put your blood in the water. Swallow a piece of your flesh, then say the words.” I braced my hands on the launch’s edge, preparing to jump over. “You must set your mind on the monster and be determined to see it die.”
She gave me a jerking nod.
Theodore’s gaze was alight with terror. “Come back to me,” he ordered before he opened the book to find the spell.
“I will.”
Then I dove into the turbid water. It was the very temperature of my body, slimy and heavy. With my vision occluded, I focused on my connection to Eusia, and this time I didn’t try to keep a clamp on it. The scalding power in my middle burst forth and suddenly I could sense the whole of the lagoon. Siren bodies—unanimated nekgya—were strewn across the seabed, alongside the old bones of sailors and their ships. The monster’s every curl looped my own innards. I could feel Lachlan’s slowing heart.
With greater urgency, I dove straight down, following their vibrations through the midnight water. I pushed, and fought toward Lachlan, but as I did the edges of my body began to blur with the salt and muck. My power—in this place and unfettered—made me feel like I was dissolving. Like I was becoming everything, and nothing, and for a clouded moment, I wondered if this was what it was like to feel ancient. Like the spirit of the Great Gods had.
The new vastness was intoxicating.Thishad to have been the sensation Eusia had spoken to me of, the enthralling rapture ofpower.But as I transcended, as I went down and down, the hold I’d had on my goal began to slip. I began to slow, wanting to bask in the heady sensations, to revel in the omniscience.
The euphoria turned suddenly to terror when I realized the sluggishthump, thump, thumpI felt through the water was Lachlan’s heartbeat, growing weaker.
Frantic, I strained to focus once more on the monster. On the boundaries of my body. On Lachlan and Agatha and Theodore. I tried to fill the darkness with their visages, the silence with the sounds of their voices, and to give the formless immensity around me—inme—their shape.
Despite the way my power still roiled and filled the whole of me,clinging to them somehow helped to harness it, to construct it a limit and make it heed my will with a new ease. I could feel my skin again, could feel the slide of the warm water against it as I dived toward Lachlan. Somehow, through homing in onthem,I found myself again.
Then I was upon it. I sensed, rather than saw, the undulating outline of the monster. I reached out and felt its rubbery flesh. The bond I shared with Eusia would not let me rip my talons through it like I wished to, but I searched for my tie to it as I swam around its massive folds and coils, looking for where it held Lachlan. The tapping of his heart was coming slower and slower.
I commanded the thing to release him when I finally felt the hard edge of his armor. He was wrapped in one of the immense ropes of intestine, over which suction cups and scales had grown. I yanked on it, trying to loosen it from around Lachlan’s shoulders, waiting for Halla to complete the spell. Time was slipping. Lachlan’s head was pressed against the fleshy coil. I took it in my hands and blew a breath of air into his mouth.
It was slow to obey but finally the monster unspooled itself, letting Lachlan’s armor-heavy body sink lower. I strained through the water once more, reaching for him while forcing a current to raise him up, when I felt a stinging against my skin. A faint tightening through my muscles. For a moment, the strange sensation made my power falter.
The monster had sunk below us when I’d commanded it to release Lachlan, but I sensed it go suddenly still. That unfamiliar ache crescendoed, just as I felt those long tentacles fling wide and go stiff, as if with rigor. I gritted teeth as my power guided Lachlan toward the surface, but I could hardly feel his heart now.
My own had grown erratic.
Halla had completed the spell, I’d felt it, but the monster below me was not dead. It had merely slunk to the seabed as if chastised.
I broke the surface of the water beside the boat and swiped at the slimy wetness over my eyes and face. Theodore had already heaved Lachlan into the boat and quickly sprawled him across its small hull. He went to work straightaway. Removing Lachlan’s armor, rolling him, compressing his chest to rid it of water, but my gaze was set on Halla.
She was balled up at the bow, arms around her knees, paying for the spell she’d just performed. She pressed her forehead into the wood, her breaths coming heavy and loud. Tears poured from her red-rimmed eyes, and they were locked on me.
I lifted myself over the lip of the boat. “You lied.” I grabbed the dagger, then took her white hair in my fist. Mucky water dripped across her snowy gown as I pressed the blade to her throat. “You said you’d help. You said you wanted to ensure that no one else was harmed by Eusia and your mother.” I’d felt the potency of that spell through the water. Iknewit had been performed correctly—it was her intention that had faltered. “If your intention had been true, the spell would have worked.”
Halla swallowed against the blade’s edge. “I tried.” Her voice was still spell-roughened, harsh and crackling. “I meant what I said, but I… I cannot bring myself tokillher.” More tears poured from Halla’s bloodshot eyes. “I thought perhaps I could… but I find it is not in my heart. I’m sorry.”
Behind me, I heard Lachlan hack and pull in gasping breaths. I ripped the dagger I held away from Halla’s throat and let it clatter to the hull.
The launch was almost to the shore. Theodore had Lachlan breathing well but still held a reviving hand to the middle of his back.
We looked to one another. He seemed fractured and terrified, his mouth grimly set.
“Heartbreaking, isn’t it,” I said, sounding utterly hopeless. The launch scraped against the sand. “To have the spell, and no one to cast it.”
17
Imogen
Before us, up the pale purple-hued beach, sat Raidne Keep. My mother’s old home. The thick mist that hung over the water choked the land too, but the wind swirled it, letting me glimpse the gnarled shapes of bare trees, clusters of hollowed-out and fallen buildings, and empty rolling fields.
The blight had stolen even the memory of Anthemoessa’s beauty. There was no telling what it had once been.
