Runa,she says, and I wince again at the sign—two. The two of us. I’m the second. She’s the first.I love you.
She signs it as that blue line between the sea and the sky flashes white. I read her eyes and I know she can feel it.
It had to be romantic love. Our love was strong enough, but it wasn’t what the magic needed for this exchange. I take her hands into mine and say exactly what I wished to tell her the moment I realized I’d lose her like this, to this boy, to this dream. “Alia, I love you.”
The light changes again, the first fingers of dawn slipping up from the horizon. They sweep across us, iridescent. Alia’s hands grow lighter in mine until they’re nearly nothing at all. Pressure builds in my chest until the whole of me trembles. Her hands don’t shake in mine. Nothingmoves her, serene as she is. Alia closes her eyes, and I know with complete certainty that I’ve seen the blue there for the last time.
I draw in a breath—a long pull of the brine air with lungs made for it—and watch as Alia becomes nothing but sea foam.
My sister, my twin, my other half, gone.
17
Evie
“SHE’S FAILED.SHE’S GONE—CAN’T YOU FEEL IT?” ANNAasks in her stolen voice.
Yes, yes, I can feel it.
Even though the dawn does little here, it’s definitely risen, the morning tide changed. The magic has shifted yet again. Alia didn’t make it.
Nothing went according to plan. Though she captured Niklas’s eye, his whole heart was not hers. She wasn’t the one to kill Niklas—Runa did that, and the blood didn’t even drip on her feet.
She’s gone, and the sea king knows it. He felt it just as surely as we did. And his rage will be worse when he realizes not only is his one daughter dead, but the other—and the power he gets from her special skills—is staying topside forever.
Yet Anna’s babbling on like we’re getting Christmas decorations rather than another body dead from magic. “She’ll be here soon—a baby tree! Won’t that be fun?”
I’m beginning to regret giving her a voice.
“You know what you must do now?” she asks with conspiratorial glee.
“Enough, Anna. A girl is dead.” I’m tempted to silence her not with just a quick spell, but for good.
Why did I bring her back?
Yes, I missed her. Though there’s no undoing what she’s become. What she did and what she tried to do. It’s only been four days now, but it’s clear that this Anna is not my Anna. She never will be again. Still, somehow this Anna, in all her earnestness to make up for lost time, by forcing her opinions on me, has torn a memory loose from the brambles of our history.
My Anna was always keen on advice too. Always suggesting another way. Something else to try. Most of the time it was because though I lived in the literal shadow of royalty, I would never think like them, and she knew it. Nik and Iker were different from most, the people’s princes, as it were, but my outlook on the world was still different.
That Anna was trying to help—I know it. Trying to nudge me in an acceptable direction. Fit me into a little box so I could last longer in our trio. She knew I didn’t belong, and she used what influence she had to keep mearound, safely protected from any calls for my removal from Nik’s orbit.
Her advice meant something then, and I always wanted to return the favor, but she never sought me out until that day when I dared her to go into the ocean.
“How... how do I get him to look at me... the way he looks at you?” Anna asked, shoulders slumped on the steps of her home, the day before her shared birthday with Nik.
I sat down next to her and pulled my knees tight to my chest, the other hand on hers. The three of us had just spent the day together, as always, before Nik had to leave for finance lessons with the royal treasurer.
Anna’s question was an awkward ask, but it was one that could be made from a position of power, if not age. A fisherman’s daughter must always answer a friherrinde. Yet I didn’t know what to do with her question any more than I knew what to do with how Nik looked at me.
I thought of all the things I’d done that Nik seemed to like best—working a ship like a boy instead of a girl, swimming into the depths without fear, and then there was the time we never spoke of, when I saved him. I’d thrown myself onto a rock to break his fall, leaving me with a collapsed lung, a dead mother, and yet a healthy, safe Nik.
Finally, I said, “He wants you to be brave.”
Anna’s lips pursed, tears sparkling in her eyes. “I’m justas brave as you. That’s not it.”
“You are just as brave as I am; we just have to prove it.” My mind wheeled for a chance to cure her desperation. There was a way to make Nik see. There had to be. “A race. Tomorrow, we can go to the beach and swim against each other. And make sure you win.”
Anna’s nose scrunched up. “That doesn’t sound very brave.”
