A flicker of disgust moves across the sea witch’s face. “Definitely not pearls.”
My confidence begins to slip. Inside the safety of myrib cage, my heart stutters and teeters. “I returned with the ríkifjor. We refuse to make the same deal our sister did—you shall not make our entire generation voiceless. We’ve brought you items of great value that could buy you freedoms you haven’t seen in decades,” I say, frustration and exhaustion making my voice thick, yet higher than I’d like. I can’t sob in front of this woman. In front of my sisters. I look her dead in the eye. “What will be enough for you?”
The sea witch’s answer is immediate. And I wonder if she always knew I would return with my sisters, just like she knew I would come in the first place.
“It’s not much that I require, and it means more to me than it does to you.” She could say the same thing about our voices, so I do not find comfort in this statement, clamping my lips shut, waiting impatiently for her to go on. “All I want is the same thing from each of you: your hair.”
At this, Eydis’s breath catches. “Our hair? But why our hair—it’s not precious; it’ll grow back.Youcould magic it back.”
The sea witch’s face remains placid—no reaction. Simply a tilt of her head. She’s nearly the definition of bored, settling on a throne of writhing black.
“That’s exactly right; it is of no consequence to you. Hair grows. But that is what I request for what you want me to do.”
This can’t be right. It can’t be. From all of us? Something that isn’t precious, endangered, or rare?
This has to be a trap. A trick. Wrong.
The sea witch just watches us, no concern crossing her face or posture, as she waits to be paid.
Unease growing in my belly and in my teetering heart, I nod, telling myself it’s not what she wants; it’s what she needs for the antidote. Maybe she needs a piece of us to return our missing piece.
The witch seems to sense the tide turning her way. She extends a hand to me. “Come then, let us take your hair.”
One by one, the witch seats us on a sandstone block next to her cauldron and, using a plain knife fashioned of razor-thin coral, slices our hair up to our chins. Eydis sits first, and, without planning it, we go in birth order. Ola next. Then Signy. Then me. Every lock is tossed without a second glance into the cauldron.
When she’s finished, I straighten, nose to nose with the sea witch, awaiting our antidote. The murky water feels cool against my neck, and I tell myself it’s simply a new sensation and not my nerves settling in. We’ve done our part; now she will do hers and then we’ll save Alia from her quest.
“Very good then, my girls. You’ll have what you need, along with instructions as to what must be done.”
I expect the sea witch to return to her cave, rifle around,and come back to us with another little glass bottle filled with a shimmering liquid.
Instead, the witch hands me the knife she used to cut our hair. I stare at it, the words dying in my mouth. The witch brings a silky tentacle to my chin and tips my head up so that I can do nothing but stare into her dark blue eyes.
“Find your sister at the waterside and give her this knife. If she does not gain the boy’s love in return by the end of her fourth full day on land, she must plunge this knife into his heart, letting the blood drip upon her feet. When his life-force is gone and his blood has anointed her new body, she will be human for the remainder of her days.”
“She can’t come back to us?” Eydis asks. “She can no longer be a mermaid?”
The witch’s voice is level and clear. It’s a dagger to each of our hearts. “Oh no. Never. That isn’t how the magic works.”
No. That’s not right. The words tumble out as I try to grab a breath.
“But Queen Mette—”
“Queen Mette’s magic was something else altogether—the joining of this world’s magic with the magic above.”
She says it like it’s a fact. That Father’s first queen was able to achieve something we can’t. My guts sour and pucker. I glare at the knife in my palm, wondering whether, if I murder this witch right now, my sister willautomatically sprout fins and be called home. The weapon is sharp enough to slice a finger straight through with barely any pressure. There’s definitely magic in it, but it isn’t what we asked for.
What’s more—it won’t work.
Alia’s face on the balcony when I suggested this as an option flashes through my mind. I know my sister, stubborn and romantic to the core. She won’t murder Niklas under any circumstance, even if it means she’ll rot from the inside out.
This was supposed to be an antidote—an alternative to get her home.
“But that describes your magic too,” I say, lobbing the sea witch’s logic back to her. Reminding her of who she was. I move from my seat to my full height, daring to bear down on this witch, reclined on her stupid tentacles. “Which means you have the antidote. You have what Mette had. We kept our end of the deal. This isn’t an antidote; it’s a murder weapon. We agreed on the antidote.”
The witch straightens herself to her full length, giving me a taste of my own medicine, staring down her nose at me. Her presence is more than her frame—the entire cove seems to join her in staring me down, the weight of it all pressing into me. On all sides, her strange trees seem to curve inward, their skeletal limbs reaching out for me, my sisters, our anger.
“You know nothing of my power. And it wasyouwho said the wordantidote, Runa. I did not,” the sea witch says. “I told you I’d give you what you need. And what you need is this knife.”
