Fine. Let it bleed.
I bare my teeth. “That money would only line his pocket, kill his people, and make our kind vulnerable to discovery, capture, imprisonment, and murder.”
She shakes her head, emphatic.
You’ve listened too much to Father!
Humans are not the root of all evil.
How do we know that they’d destroy us if they discovered us?
I stomp away from her, tossing my words over my shoulder, higher pitched than they should be. “They’d treat us exactly like anything exotic they’ve come across. Our kind would be locked behind bars at the zoo, forced to perform in circuses. Some might even take our fins for prizes to display—mermaid-skin pillows to rest atop pelts like those in your own lover’s bed.”
Alia stops dead behind me. I turn around to pull her forward. We have to get going—our lead will evaporate before we know it. With each step toward the countryside, we’re losing our tree cover. In mere feet we’ll be naked targets under the clouded stars, just as we were on the open lawn. But now the guards are ready with their pistols and likely orders to cut us down.
They won’t need to question us—Sofie witnessed the whole thing. They just need us to pay.
Alia’s standing there, shoulders shaking, head lollingback. She doesn’t make a sound, but I feel the sob radiating out of her, the sound of it seeping into my bones.
Oh, Urda.
I take her hand now, softer than before. I don’t snatch it or grab it, but handle it as I would the most delicate little fish.
“Come on... let’s keep going. Wherever we’re going...”
She sniffs. Another sign.
Witch.
My head pounds with her making that sign in the courtyard. I’d thought she wanted to talk about the sea witch and our failed deal, but here, where we can’t even see the water, it strikes me another way.
“Wait. A human witch?”
She nods. And then grabs my hand, spelling out letters on my palm. She has to do it twice for me to form the word on my lips in the weak light.
K-A-T-R-I-N-E.
“Katrine? A witch named Katrine?”
She nods again. And points down to the valley as it must angle back toward the coastline. Then, she makes another singular sign.
Help.
I hesitate. “Do I have to remind you the last time a witch helped a mermaid? No, this Katrine will not help us.”
I can’t believe you. You think I’m foolish, but you regurgitateFather’s words like you don’t have a brain in your own head!
She thunks me hard upside the head to prove her point, but then almost seems to regret it, forgetting my injury as I sink to my knees, off-balance. She helps me up but doesn’t apologize as I squeeze my eyes shut and wait for the ringing to clear. It doesn’t, and it seems like it might never, so I turn and try to get past her to go back toward the mountain pass—if we skirt down the edge away from Katrine’s, we could lose them in the lands north of the kingdom’s seat.
But Alia plants herself in front of me.
Your flowers—he used you to suck up every ounce of power in the sea and strip the land of everything the humans and their fear of witches didn’t. It’s corrupted him. And you know it.
I swallow hard and stop attempting to pass her. I do know it.
There’s no more balance.
She needles in on that word again: balance.
