Текст книги "In the Veins of the Drowning"

Автор книги: Kalie Cassidy

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

I jumped to the deck. Pain shot up my shins when I landed. My attention narrowed on the poor knots the sailors had tied around Nemea. The ropes were slung loose across his barrel chest. It would take little effort for him to remove them. Yet he didn’t struggle. He sat at ease, gaze on me.

His stillness—his peace—sent a spear of anxiety shooting through me.

His sword lay on the deck a few paces away, gleaming gold in the early evening light. It gave a metallic scrape as I retrieved it. Cannon fire still quaked through the warm air, but the volley from the ship I’d been on had ceased. They were sailing away, up the line to support the others, leaving me and Nemea on his flagship—alone.

With a forceful current and a steady wind, I guided the ship away from the tight cluster of firing vessels. I let us drift out farther from Varya’s shore, yawing and pitching with the chaos of the sea. The sun limned Nemea’s silvering hair and shadowed his narrow face. I stared, forcing my adrenaline-sodden body to still, and looked for something of myself in him.

I’d inherited so much from my mother. Her features, the shape of her body too, were nearly identical to mine. But I feared I’d inherited my father’s heart.

All the deaths I’d caused did not pierce me like they should. I still stood on my own feet, I still pulled breaths into my lungs without collapsing under the weight of self-detestation. I wished to feel the sting of these terrible, punishing things, to feel absolution, as Theodore had said, but I was numb.

I must have gotten that from Nemea.

The sails flapped overhead, unmanned and now loose in the breeze. I’d never looked at Nemea with such clear eyes before. I could picture what he would have looked like with the years peeled away, back when the empress had known him. The dark hair and light olive skin, the narrow slant of his gray eyes. How they pierced like pointed steel. I walked nearer to him, toward where his crown lay on the deck. My heart knocked into my ribs as he watched me. I bent to pick it up, weighing the heavy, sun-warmed gold in my palm.

“Hello, Imogen,” he finally said, over the snapping sails. “Have I surprised you?”

That voice. Low, nasal. It sent a host of rotting emotions spreading through me. “You have.”

“You left,” he said simply, head leaning back against the mast. “I had no choice but to retrieve you.” His gaze slid to my wings. “I’ll admit, you’ve surprised me too.”

My fist tightened around his crown, its edges denting my palm. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know what I was,” I spat. “And I am not yours to retrieve.”

He gave a chuckle. It was unamused, rough, empty. “But you are. In so many ways, you are.”

“What is your strongest claim to me, Nemea?” I asked, adjusting my fist around the sword’s hilt. “That you are my king? My warden? That you fed my blood to a monster since I was a baby?”

Slowly, I rested his crown upon my own head.

He scowled. Then the expression on his face slackened as he realized I knew precisely what his strongest claim to me was.

“Take that off.” The words were clipped, frigid.

“It’s where it soon belongs, isn’t it?” I hated the feel of it, the way it pressed down and cut in. “Am I not your heir?” The vitriolic look on his face moved through me like a slow poison. “I disgust you, don’t I?”

“Disgust.” Nemea was so still. “The Sirens disgust me, yes.” He shook his head. “But you never have. She never did either.”

She. My mother.

He must have seen the questions springing through my mind, the longing that shadowed my face, because he said, “Would you like me to tell you of her?”

Nerves tingled beneath my skin. He pulled fear from me as easily as he had blood from my palm. He adjusted himself against the mast like his body ached, and the shoddily tied rope across his middle slipped lower. I saw the glint of something silver at his hip. A dagger. I set my teeth and moved my other hand to the sword’s grip. But Nemea only sat there, uneasily still, waiting for my answer.

As much as I was tempted, the story of Nemea and my mother was not one I needed. I needed to know of Eusia. Of the empress, and the princess, and the tangled web that I was stuck in the middle of. But I drew in a shaky breath and nodded.

He made a thoughtful sound and focused on something in the middle distance, seemingly slipping into the past. “You remember the stories of the years that I was missing at sea?” His voice was strange. It went soft and lank, rolling between us like an eerie morning haze. “I was with Ligea for most of them. The stories boast that I set out to conquer, but I was never fool enough to think that I, the lone mortal king of Leucosia, would ever amount to much in a realm where Gods exist. If I wanted power, I had to make it.” His haunted gaze locked quickly with mine. “Isn’t that right, Imogen? Isn’t that what I always told you?”

I didn’t answer him.

He pursed his lips at my silence before he continued. “I took a small fleet to seek out the Mage Seers. They had succeeded in making their own power, after all, so why couldn’t I? I’d thought magic could give me what I lacked. I was foolish in my youth, though. I had no knowledge of its cost. When I saw the Mage Seers, what the magic did to them…” He shook his head, lip curling. “That was not a price I was willing to pay.

“I remember the Mage who told me to go north. She could hardly speak. She lay in a ball on the floor of her tower like a dried-up insect. She was the one who told me there was a way to gain power without paying for it. She told me how I could serve Eusia.”

Fury ignited in me. The sword’s grip ached against the knot of scars on my palm. Proof of the cost. I lifted the blade and strode forward so the tip hovered before him. “I paid, Nemea.”

Whatever hold he’d had on himself snapped. His cheeks burned red. His gray eyes stretched with rage. “Let me speak.” The words hissed through his clamped teeth. “I paid. I paid, dearly. The fucking Mage lied.”

The tip of the sword fell to the deck with a dull clunk. I staggered a few steps back, startled by the depth of his emotion. He looked anguished. Tormented.

He spoke then like he was giving a confession. Quickly, eager to be rid of the words he’d held in for too long. “Eusia was one of Obelia’s saints. Centuries before, she’d washed up onto one of their beaches. She was old—old as the Gods. She’d been gutted, her insides missing when they found her. But she wasn’t dead. She could speak and move, and they worshipped her for it. For an offering, Eusia would grant her faithful a miracle. So I went. The empress, Nivala, was… she was a force. She was as hungry for power as I was. She welcomed me, a young Leucosian king, with open arms, eager to learn what sort of power I possessed. I never told her I was mortal. She lavished me with food and wine, took me to her bed, and I stayed in Obelia for months, preparing for my first sacrifice and blessing from Eusia.

“I remember the day that she finally got it out of me—that I was powerless, just like her—she laughed in my face. But she took me to their temple anyway and I made my offering to the little sunken pool inside it. I poured my blood into its water and said the prayer. I asked Eusia… I asked her to end the Sirens that had decimated my fleet. They’d cost me men, and money. My pride. They brought nothing but ruin, and I was determined to see them pay for it.”

A chill took me. The far-off cannon fire, the ship’s creaks, faded under the grip that Nemea’s story held me in.

“When Eusia’s head broke the surface of that pool, I screamed. She was so small. The size of a child. No hair. Flesh had grown over her eyes and down her cheeks, but she could see me—I knew she could see me. Her voice sounded strangled, but she had been eager to speak of her sister with me. Of Ligea. She spoke of how Ligea had been given everything and remained golden and hale and unmatched after so many centuries. And she had become a monster trying to best her. Our wants aligned. So I told her I’d help her.”

“Eusia is in Obelia?” I asked quickly.

Nemea shook his head. “She asked me to take her home. So she could perform the spell needed to end Ligea.”

“What did you say?” My entire body had filled with a terrible, crackling cold. A dread so deep that it ached. “She asked you to take her home?”

His eyes lit like I’d revealed a weakness. “You’re looking for her.”

“I am blood-bound to her,” I yelled. “Of course I’m Godsdamned looking for her.”

His thin lips tipped. “You’re very like her. Like Ligea,” he mused, through his annoyance. “It was absurd of me to think Captain Ianto would have been enough to keep you holed up in my fort indefinitely.” He shook his head. “You and her both—so damned stubborn, so arrogant, that you’ll see yourselves killed rather than fall in line.”

That struck me. Theodore had said something nearly identical. That Nemea might truly know me, my flaws and my strengths, turned my stomach. “Finish your story,” I said, voice thick.

He glared, made me wait. “I moved Eusia from Obelia. It was an undertaking. Making sure she had all that she needed for the journey. Before she left, the empress requested a final miracle. A large one. She made a final sacrifice—”

“Her husband,” I said, breathless. The realization cleaved me in two. “And the Nels. You didn’t kill them just for jewels. You killed them to feed Eusia while she was journeying on your ship, didn’t you?”

Nemea jerked. His eyes flared with confusion. “How do you know that?”

“I’ve been busy.” I lifted the sword once more.

Nemea cracked his jaw, a dangerous energy building through him. “Eusia wanted me to have a child with Ligea.” He said it so simply, as if he were remarking on the mundane. “There was a reason your mother never had children. She feared her sister, feared what she might do to them. Eusia wanted generations to feed on. Bodies kept her alive, but mortals did not give her Gods’ power. If she could capture her sister, and her sister’s children, she would be able to swallow their power and use her own magic. She would be endless.”

“And so you did.” I didn’t hide how despicable I thought it was. “How? Why would Ligea ever let you—”

“She bound herself to me.” He’d never spoken with such softness. Not even in my memories of him from when I was a girl, when he would greet me with a fleeting smile and a sweet in his palm, did I remember his voice sounding quite like that. “She was no fool, your mother, but binding herself to me was the most misguided thing she’d ever done—the beginning of her end.”

I took a step back. I needed space between us, I needed to remember his callousness and cruelty, for the look that swam in his eyes now set me too off-kilter. He was heartsick.

A gust cut across the deck and my balance swayed as the ship pitched over a set of high waves. The temperature was dropping as the sun fell behind a wall of dark, bulbous clouds. In the distance, a deep boom rolled over the water.

I searched the sea. The boom had been thunder—the cannon fire had ceased. The two Serafi ships that remained had retreated. Half of the Varian fleet had returned to port, and we had drifted far away.

“Looks like you lost,” I said.

“I had no intention of winning this battle, Imogen.” His eyes were depthless. Glittering with a terrifying sort of hunger. “Like I said, I came for you.” He slipped a hand through the ropes around him and tugged. They fell as readily as dead leaves. My arms shook with the weight of the sword, but I held it firmly between us and stepped backward across the deck. Nemea hardly noticed. He rose, unfurling his long limbs slowly, and then he adjusted his ill-fitting armor, the gesture easy and unafraid. He looked out toward the storm clouds at the horizon and asked, “What will you do?” He mocked me with the question. “I think only Ligea could have manned a crewless ship through a night storm. And you are so like her, yes… but you are also so much less.”

The air knocked from my chest. I watched him, quietly, waiting for him to take the dagger from his hip. He never did. He lowered himself onto a nearby crate instead.

“Did you love her?” The question slipped from me before I could stop it.

He huffed, rolling his shoulders before he answered. “I liked possessing her. That damn bond we shared was tricky, though. I wanted to hate her. I reminded myself that she was the root of my suffering, of my kingdom’s struggles, but the thoughts wouldn’t stick. That bond convinced me I loved her.”

I winced like his words had hit a bruise. “That’s not what the bond does.”

He froze. He’d been at ease, but now his body began to lock up with awareness. With a tilt of his head, he said, “You speak as if you know.”

“The bond compels you to protect.”

Disbelief, and the barest thread of amusement, curled his lips. “Dear Gods. That’s how you got that boy-king to help you, isn’t it? You stole him.” He scoffed. “Just like your mother.”

“I didn’t steal him. He agreed.”

“Oh, what benevolence! What sacrifice! And has he proclaimed his love? Has he sworn himself to you always?” He hit his knee with a fist. “He’ll be even more insufferable now, Panos’s grandson bound to Ligea’s daughter. As if the bastard wasn’t powerful enough already, he went and gathered up some more.”

The insinuation rocked something in me that had once felt unshakable. Theodore had first bound himself to me because of my power, because of who he’d thought I was. I suddenly couldn’t bat the thought away: Had Gods’ blood not flowed through my veins, would Theodore have left me in Nemea’s fort to wither and die?

Nemea stood quickly, his body coursing with familiar anger, and plucked the dagger from his belt. He rolled it in his fist and paced. “That bond…” He looked haunted and then locked our gazes. “Your mother learned of what I’d done. Of how I’d helped move Eusia. I was sailing back to Seraf through a narrow sea stack and there sat Ligea.” He pointed with his dagger, like he could see her before him. “Ligea, winged and speckled in salt water upon the rocks, looking like a glorious, brutal bird of prey. She dropped onto my deck and froze the entire crew without making a sound. I’d never seen anything like it. Power seeped from her, but she stared at me like I was a threat. She’d come to me like I was the one who possessed a vicious lure. She said, ‘I know you wish to harm me and my people. I shall see to it that you can’t.’ She sliced me open and bound us.”

My arms had begun to shake. The wind cut, covering my eyes in mist and stray hairs. I could sense our time running down and I still didn’t know where Eusia was. “How did you kill Ligea?

“I didn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me. Her wing hangs in your throne room, Nemea. How did the blood bond permit you to cut it from her?”

He took a menacing step toward me. “I never hurt her. I never wanted to. I lived with regret over my service to Eusia for years because of my feelings for Ligea and did all I could to keep her safe. I kept her from the sea so Eusia couldn’t sense her. When she… when we… Ligea was determined to give birth to you in the sea. Despite how I begged her, how I demanded she stay on land.” The color drained from his face. “She slipped out in the night. We were on Seraf, at the old keep on the western shore. The mountain fort wasn’t finished yet. I realized too late she was missing from our bed. I should have tied her to the post like I’d threatened to, but I couldn’t bring myself to scratch her wrists with the Godsdamned ropes.” He scrubbed violently at his eyes. “When I got to the beach, the sun was just rising. The spume was still colored with her blood. You were screaming, lying up on the dry sand—like she’d tossed you to safety. And her wing floated on the breaking waves. Bits of her flesh still hung from its root. Eusia took her, but she didn’t kill her.”

“How do you know that?” I whispered.

“Our bond didn’t break when she left me. I still felt it. For years and years.” He looked up at me and I could just make out the sneer and dark amusement on his face in the fading light. His laugh came angry and low. “This might be the first time you’ve ever looked at me like I have a heart.” He shook his head. “Don’t be fooled.”

“Why didn’t you gut me and throw me into the sea?” I fought for balance against the rolling ship. “Why didn’t you make Eusia all-powerful? Get rid of us Sirens once and for all.”

“Eusia doesn’t want you dead,” he said in a snarl. “She kept Ligea alive as long as she could. And she’d do the same to you. She’d use you up slowly.”

I stared at him in slack-jawed disbelief. “Are you telling me that you kept me as a mercy? That you made me give my blood in that ritual so that I wouldn’t suffer like my mother did?”

Alarming anger filled him, bringing color back to his cheeks. “I did it for Ligea. Not you. I’ve kept my word to Eusia. I’ve fed her. But I swore that while our bond still lingered, I wouldn’t let Ligea’s daughter suffer her same fate.”

“Your bond,” I said. “Is it gone?”

He paused and seemed stunned by the question. As if he’d never before considered it. Eyes darting, he searched himself inwardly. Set a hand to his stomach. His voice went low and, unbelievably, a lovelorn look filled his eyes. “I can’t feel it.”

The change in him was instant. Intent built through his body, bringing him nearer to me.

“Where is Eusia?” I demanded, firming my stance.

“With all that you’ve learned while you’ve been away, you still can’t figure it out?” His shoulders rose. His weaponless hand curled into a tight fist. “I kept you up in that fort, away from the sea, as a mercy because you have always been so weak. You were so small when you were born, so sick. The sea would have swallowed you whole had I ever let you near it. Eusia would have plucked you from the sand with no effort at all. Even now, you stand there with a sword, letting me speak and asking me questions you should know the answer to.” He gave me a disgraced shake of his head. “Harden up. Fight.”

“If I am fearful and weak, it’s because of you,” I yelled. “You have made me this way.”

“And what will you do about it?” He held his dagger up between us. “Will you come back home with me where you’re safe, and we can pay Eusia for her blessings where she cannot reach you, or will you make me gut you now, and let her monsters carry you to her? I know the spell that will keep you alive until you reach her. The very one she used to save herself from death.”

The water had grown choppier, the troughs of the waves deeper, and it made the ship sway steeply. I met his gaze through the gloaming. My voice filled with steel. “Neither.”

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The sword’s weight combined with the rocking of the ship had me fighting to stay upright.

With all my strength, I hefted it and set the blade slicing down toward Nemea in a wide arc. He dodged. His hand flashed in my periphery, and then a bright striking pain lit my cheekbone. My head snapped to the side and the crown I wore went flying to the deck, where it landed with a wobbling roll. Sparks flew across my vision. I waited for the next strike, for the dagger to my gut, but it never came.

My face smarted, my eyes watered, but I found my footing. On the far side of the deck, Nemea paced. His shoulders were hunched, and he kept swiping his hand through his mussed hair, as if distraught.

“Is that your measly conscience, Nemea?” I yelled over the howl of the wind. “Did it hurt you to strike me?”

He shot me a glare. “No.”

I moved toward the rigging and grabbed hold. The storm threw the ship over the surface of the water like a loose flower petal. “I look like her. How can you not picture her face when you strike mine?”

The rain started. It fell sideways, plastering his hair to his brow. “Use your power and let this be done,” he said, over the crash of the waves.

“You want me to kill you?”

“You cannot understand my misery.” His voice cracked. “I lived all those years with an intact blood bond, never being free of the worry or the compulsion to keep her safe, and there was nothing I could do.”

“Nothing you could do?” Something inside me cracked. I hauled the sword up and started toward him. “How dare you try to justify your cruelty.” I charged, bringing the sword down just above his shoulder. He dodged again, swiping at me with his dagger. “All the ways you’ve terrorized me. You made me into what you wanted me to be—into what served you. You made me small and timid. You made me everything my mother was not so that you could use me.”

His eyes flashed. The dark was pressing in, making it harder to see the details of his movements. Nemea lunged. I made to move out of his reach, but the ship pitched and sent me stumbling directly toward him. He was more prepared than I was. He grabbed my hair in his fist and yanked me sideways. A scream tore up my throat at the pain.

Nemea seethed, his breaths coming hard through his teeth. “All I have done is keep you safe and require your obedience in return. Is that not how a God treats his worshippers? Is that not the agreement a king has with his subjects? How a father treats his child?”

He released my hair with a shove. I fell flat to the deck and the air rushed from my chest. Teeth bared, he took the dagger from his hip once more and fought the ship’s swaying to trudge toward me.

My power was swirling, an eddy in midnight water, eager to break free of its confines, but I couldn’t pull in a full breath, couldn’t focus on sending out a lure through my pain. Slowly, I rose to my knees and set all my intention on Nemea’s withered heart. He was right before me, dagger gripped in his fist, when I let my lure fly.

Silver light glinted off the blade in his hand as he reared back. I waited for him to freeze under my control, waited for the dagger to clatter to the deck… but my lure never sank in.

He lunged, eyes locked with mine. I sucked in a ripping breath as the dagger tip cut into me. Fire blistered through my middle, through muscles and organs. Right through the spot where my bond with Eusia sat.

A cry bubbled up in my throat.

Nemea froze. His eyes blew wide. The rain rolled down his stunned face like tears. “No,” he whispered, releasing the hilt of the blade like it scorched him. He shook his head, mouth gaping. “You tried… didn’t you? You tried your lure?”

I gave a weak nod. My hands went to my stomach, to either side of the half-pressed-in dagger. “It didn’t take.”

He nearly lost his balance as a wave crashed over the deck. It washed me off my feet. Threw me on my side. My gut exploded in agony as the dagger shifted and drove deeper into me. No scream came forth, no rush of pained breath. My body locked up instead, stiff from the consuming press of metal into my soft flesh.

Nemea’s fingers dug into my arm. He hauled me up with such force that my shoulder popped loudly from its socket. I screamed then. I flailed, dragged my talons over his cheek and summoned forth dark blood.

He hissed, but his fingers dug deeper into my arm. “Stop.” He hauled me to the stairs that led to the quarterdeck and forced me down. My spine struck the risers. I only saw his shaded outline, a flash of teeth as he yelled, “She’s still alive. If your lure didn’t work, that means Ligea’s still alive. Our bond remains.”

He was frantic. The stormy twilight lit his horrified face. “The spell.” 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 gentle and 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.”

Oh Gods. Foreboding choked me. My hands cramped around the sword’s grip. “The empress?”

He nodded. “She still feeds her.” His teeth gritted, he tried to move, but I held the sword above him steady.

My voice shook. “The empress still feeds her bodies?”

“She feeds her Sirens.”

Dread hollowed me out as pieces of the past day fell into place. The empress was not simply a devotee of Eusia, she was all but a priestess, working vigilantly to keep her alive. She knew who I was—she never would have told me the story of the Nels otherwise. She’d come to my room in the healer’s quarters that night, distraught by the state I was in, as the healer had said. She’d meant to take me, but I’d been too ill to leave. Lachlan hadn’t been able to find Agatha.

Agatha.

She’d gone missing the night before the empress had left.

Agatha.

“No,” I breathed. She had taken Agatha. She had taken her—but she’d wanted me. “No, no, no.”

The wind and rain slashed at me, roaring as loud as the blood in my ears. I could just hear Nemea’s strained chuckle rise up from his sprawled, soaked body.

“You’ve lost, haven’t you?” he asked in a shaking voice. “Did you just realize?”

I pushed the sword tip down and held it firm against his neck. The next pitch of the ship, the next crashing wave, would send it straight through him. He sobered. Raised his hands in surrender.