The Dark Tide

by Alicia Jasinska

  Lina hadn’t even had her very first kiss—that time with Josef when she was eight didn’t count, and neither did practicing with the girls at the Conservatoire, because that was just practice.

  A pang cut through her. What had she shared with Thomas save those few shy smiles? A handful of words. A stolen dance whilst searching for her brother. A piggyback ride when she turned her ankle on a slippery rock. Interactions so innocent, so childish. She suddenly felt very small, and somehow lesser. In that heartbeat, she would’ve traded all those moments for something darker, more grown up.

  “Natalia was kind.” The freckled witchling gave Lina another gap-toothed grin and wound a curl around her finger to chew on the end. “And very sad.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” said Miniature Eva.

  “Yes, she was! Not all the time, but sometimes. You’d be, too, if you had to keep feeding the boys you loved to the tide.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. It’s romantic, falling in love with a boy who’s doomed to die.”

  Lina opened her mouth to say something and stopped.

  “The magic doesn’t work if the queen doesn’t love the sacrifice,” the freckled witchling explained. “It’s not a proper sacrifice if it doesn’t hurt her.”

  “The tide aches to taste her sorrow,” said Miniature Eva with ghoulish enthusiasm. “It hungers for her tears.”

  “It’s a stupid magic.” The freckled witchling made fists in Lina’s blanket. “Even Thomas said it wasn’t fair to us. That’s why Eva said she liked him.”

  “Eva liked him?” Lina sat on the edge of the daybed. “When?”

  “Before. Last time. He made Natalia laugh.”

  “We liked him, too, a little,” Miniature Eva admitted grudgingly. She picked up one of the silver dancing shoes.

  Lina was too distracted to protest. “If she liked him—”

  “He used to play his music for us,” said the freckled witchling. “And sing. While Yara played piano. None of the other boys did that. They were always too afraid. They spent all day on the balcony staring at the city and all night watching the moon.”

  Lina didn’t think that was in any way surprising.

  “She tried to save him.”

  Lina’s jaw nearly hit the floor. “Eva?”

  “She wanted Natalia to be happy. Because she really, really, loved Thomas. Eva said a queen shouldn’t have to answer to the sea. She tried to find another way to calm the dark tide. Thomas helped. And Yara. They looked up all this old magic, dug out the first queen’s old grimoires, wrote to foreign witches and traded our bottled spells for their spells.”

  Lina didn’t understand. “Then why does she hate him now?”

  “Because Thomas is a liar,” said Miniature Eva.

  “Because he was only pretending to care,” said the freckled witchling.

  A shiver of foreboding snaked through Lina, and for all her earlier curiosity, she suddenly didn’t want to hear the end of this story. Didn’t want to hear how Thomas and Eva had once been friends, allies, of a kind. Didn’t want to know what they had attempted together and how they had fallen apart, when Natalia died.

  The freckled witchling pinched the bracelet of strung shells around her bony wrist. Lina had had a bracelet just like it when she was younger, as had Finley. It was a common charm to keep children safe from harm. A talisman against ill luck and misfortune.

  “They tried it all,” the little girl said. “All the spells they found, but nothing worked. The tide kept rising. Natalia was scared about what would happen to the island, and it was almost the full moon. They were running out of time. So Eva tried one last spell. A blood spell. She works with hair and knots usually, but she thought if she let the tide drink her blood…”

  “She gave too much of herself to it. She lost consciousness, started to bleed out. Not just blood—that wouldn’t have mattered so much, it’s awfully hard to kill a witch. But Eva was bleeding her magic into the sea. She might’ve faded away like the old witches do, like a dream does, but Natalia found her. She put Eva in a healing trance, and then she snuck Thomas down to the lower levels of the palace and let him escape in a broom boat. And then she sacrificed herself so no one could protest about it. All while Eva was unconscious. Natalia had the others chain her to the pillar. She said there was a passage in one of the grimoires Thomas had read that said her sacrifice might calm the tide for good, an act of true love to break the curse. Only later, no one could find where it said that. Thomas didn’t try to stop her. He let her do it. Eva might have forgiven him if he’d taken Natalia with him and fled, no matter what it meant for the island and everyone else. But he didn’t fight for her at all.”

  “Because it’s what he wanted all along,” cut in Miniature Eva, voice like venom. “He only pretended to love Natalia and made her love him too much. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”

  “You can’t know that.” Lina’s tongue flicked out to wet her lips. Her heart hammered against her ribs, beating as if she’d run a race. “You can’t know he was just pretending, that he didn’t care.”

  But wasn’t that what everyone on the island had long suspected? Wasn’t that why so many admired him? He was the boy who had seduced a queen. The boy who had tricked a witch and won his freedom. The only boy the Witch Queen had ever let go. Wasn’t this why she had gone to him for help, asked him how to make a witch fall in love? Because she’d wanted her brother to do the same if he was taken?

  Why, then, did it feel like someone was clawing out her heart?

  Why was it so different hearing it now?

  The breeze carried in the crash of the tide from the balcony, a dull and rhythmic roar.

  Lina tried to remind herself just who it was that she was feeling sorry for: Caldella’s wicked Witch Queens. The queens who stole faces and chained boys to pillars to drown on full-moon nights. She shouldn’t feel bad, shouldn’t care that one of them had traded everything to save a boy who might not have loved her back. Even if she’d admired Natalia—

  Eva and Natalia were still witches. Living nightmares.

  And she hated them suddenly, hated everything about this. Their story had taken something from her, something she didn’t know if she could get back.

  Was it even true? Had Eva sent the witchlings here to tell her this?

  Was this another gift?

  “And now he’s doing the same thing to you,” said Miniature Eva, the reef snake slithering sinuously across her lap. “Using you. Doesn’t that make you hate him? Doesn’t that make you angry?”

  Anger was flooding through Lina, hot as coals. “Did Eva send you here to tell me this? Did she?” It was easier somehow to be angry with Eva, easier to cling to that familiar fury.

  The witchlings must have sensed the change in her mood, heard the lethal edge in her voice, because both slipped away suddenly, bodies and black dresses dissolving into sea mist.

  They left the daybed all in a rumple. The dresses wrinkled.

  Lina didn’t care. She didn’t want any of these twisted, macabre gifts. The enchanted violin. The little reef snake. The perfect silver dancing shoes.

  She snatched the shoes up, carried them out onto the balcony. And, chest heaving, breath so choked it felt like someone had wrapped a hand around her throat, she hurled them high into the air, into the sea.

  But she could not make herself look away, could not stop watching as they fell, sparkling with white fire, sinking to their watery grave.

  19

  Lina

  There were no new gifts after that. No trays of treats or magical trinkets. No sinister, black-clad visitors tiptoeing closer to the daybed when Lina’s back was turned.

  Or at least she didn’t wait for any to appear. As soon as another day broke, she left the room.

  Whatever Eva had hoped to achieve by having the witchlings tell their story—to make Lina
regret her choice, to make her hate Thomas—Lina was pretty sure it had backfired. Because after a night of turning the tale over and over in her mind, only one part of it occupied her thoughts now, and that was this: Eva had tried to find another way to calm the dark tide, one that didn’t require the sacrifice of an islander’s life.

  And if she’d tried once, if she’d believed there was a chance once, then why not try again now?

  You didn’t give up simply because you failed at first. You tried again. And again. And again. You kept at it, through the setbacks and the bad days, never giving up, because defeat was unacceptable.

  Which was why Lina wasn’t giving up now. Gnawing her cheek in frustration, she jiggled a brass door handle. The Water Palace doors were still playing games with her, leading her in circles, rearranging the rooms to their own inexplicable whims. She could wander this labyrinth forever. Lost. Alone.

  But, Lina had to grudgingly admit, never bored.

  Flowers blossomed as she pushed into a sunroom that doubled as a secret garden, fresh greenery sprouting wherever she stepped. Each hesitant footfall conjured ghost flowers and violet hollyhocks, blushing anemone and sunset-orange marigolds. As if she were the May Queen, the spirit of Spring itself. Dancing in to wake the winter world, come to rouse the barren earth.

  Sweet-smelling gardenias trailed her like footprints in damp sand. Roses bloomed where the tips of her fingers tapped a cold stone wall three times for luck. Peach azalea and butter-yellow trillium sprouted in rings around her heels as she twirled, her new sugar-pink dress fanning out, chin tilting to the ceiling, giddy with guilty wonder. The air was lush with the scent of rain-wet leaves, heady with the sharp tang of a wild vine crushed under boot. She trod softly, fearing her slippered feet might scorch the floor.

  She crossed a covered walkway next, strung through the air like a necklace linking two of the Water Palace’s towers, a crisp breeze gusting through the bridge’s spindly columns. The stone swaying like it was made of rope.

  And then she was passing the wall mosaics in the corridor she’d found Finley in: images of dead queens and dancers taming sea serpents fashioned from glimmering chips of shell and mother-of-pearl. Scenes from Caldella’s colorful history.

  Smiling at the serpents now, Lina hummed as her eyes focused on a new mosaic. One depicted the story of the girl who had refused to hand her lover over to the Witch Queen. The girl who’d held on when the queen used magic to try and steal him away, never letting go, even when the boy was transformed into a sea serpent, a monstrous bear, a raging wall of fire.

  Hide him, hide him, out of sight. Hold him, hold him, hold on tight.

  She’d danced the part of that girl once at a summer performance—she could still remember the steps even now. It was a role she’d fought tooth and nail to win, because it was exactly the kind of story she liked to imagine herself in when she was daydreaming through a boring class or worrying if Mama and Ma would ever sail home.

  Sometimes she wondered if she constantly escaped into stories, dramatized situations, merely to keep her mind busy. Her imagination was such a vast and anxious thing that if she didn’t keep it active at all times, the ugliness of the real world threatened to creep in. Disappearing into stories was a way to keep all the frantic thoughts and fears at bay.

  Lina reached to open another door.

  Her hand froze an inch from the handle. A will that wasn’t her own pulled on her fingers. They splayed wide, wider, then gave a little wriggle as she gasped, as if she were playing piano on the air. Her fingers bent themselves so far backward that she cried out, a flare of agony shooting up her forearm.

  Whatever will or magic held her let go.

  Lina cradled her hand to her chest, eyes stinging with tears.

  “Oh, it’s you. Our little dancer.” Slippers scuffed behind Lina. Marcin peered down at her, licks of red hair falling across his pale brow, large blue shells stretching chasms in his earlobes. He was handsome in that effortless way her brother and Thomas were, but there was something about him that set the fine hairs at the back of Lina’s neck prickling. She got the distinct impression that he didn’t like her, which made her anxious, because she couldn’t help always wanting everyone to like her.

  “You don’t want to go through that one,” he said. “Where are you trying to get to?”

  “I wanted to find Eva.” Her voice came out shy, and she hated the sound of it. “I need to talk to her.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  Lina bristled.

  “I can open a different one for you. Send you straight to the Queen’s Tower.” Marcin tipped his head toward a shimmering door set between the mosaics farther down the corridor. It was next to the final image in the story Lina had been following: a girl and boy engulfed in flame.

  Burning alive. Burning until there was nothing left.

  Because the girl hadn’t loved the boy she was trying to save enough to keep him.

  Lina looked away. “Really?”

  “If you give me your blood-coral as payment. Your necklace.”

  The glossy red beads made a little shuffling snick as Lina clutched the strands. She’d been gifted so much magic of late that she’d forgotten there was usually a cost. Forgotten that magic was damn expensive. The necklace Finley had given her—she couldn’t part with it.

  Marcin smiled. “Or a kiss.”

  Lina tensed.

  “Or an eye. You have very lovely eyes, little dancer. Just like the storm clouds gathering outside.”

  Lina’s heart beat a cadence of panic.

  “Wouldn’t want you to wander our palace forever; it’s not long now before the full moon, is it? You don’t have much time. If I were you, I’d be focusing on trying to get away from here.”

  “Away?”

  “Let me know if you change your mind.” Marcin started in the opposite direction, slippers slapping the floor, the sound growing smaller the farther away he moved.

  Lina bit the inside of her cheek, then turned and advanced on the door beside that flame-bright image, running a hand over the golden glyphs shimmering restlessly across the polished wood, pleading with it.

  Please.

  Pretty please, take me to where I want to go.

  She thought she’d failed again when she found herself in the dark, stepping down onto a slippery, moss-grown stepping stone, a gasp of cold air scraping the top layer of her skin, conjuring gooseflesh.

  But then her eyes adjusted to the sea cave’s murky emerald light, and her ears recognized the soft shusha-shusha of saltwater. Her nose wrinkled at the pungent stench of fish. A soft cooing echoed off the sea cave’s walls, then cut abruptly into silence.

  Eva looked like one of Lina’s small cousins when they’d been caught with their hands in Auntie Iris’s enchanted biscuit tin: flustered, embarrassed, their lips sticky with crumbs tasting of lost kisses and chocolate-coated laughter.

  She was poised atop a stone in the center of the ink-black water, in dark trousers and a waistcoat, leaning down with parted lips, clearly frozen in the act of baby-talking to her pet sea serpent.

  “Aww,” said Lina, drawing out the sound, layering it thick with sarcasm. “You’re so disgustingly adorable when you’re with it.”

  Eva straightened.

  Lina took a very careful step onto the next stone in the trail leading through the water. They were slippery, and she couldn’t risk another fall so soon after her last one on the deck of Eva’s ship. She’d had to strap her ankle. But she was having a good day today, savoring the absence of any kind of ache. “How is the monster? Eaten anyone today? All healed up?”

  “I don’t know,” said Eva, and she sounded so forlorn, so lost, that had it been anyone else, Lina would have done something utterly ridiculous, like try to wrap an arm around her. “It won’t come to me anymore.”

  “Oh
.” Oh, that wasn’t…that wasn’t what she wanted to hear at all. A strange feeling of loss and pity hollowed out Lina’s stomach. The sea serpent was terrifying, but it had liked her dancing. And there was the awful way it had keened, so bewildered, in so much pain as Eva had forced it below the waves. That terrible grief on Eva’s face.

  Reaching the stepping stone nearest Eva’s, the natural instinct to offer comfort still lingering in her skin, Lina couldn’t stop herself from reaching out.

  Eva tensed, staring at Lina’s hand like it was the serpent come to bite her. “What. Are you doing,” she snapped, voice too flat to make it a question.

  “I—” Lina flushed. I get this stupid, overwhelming impulse to make other people feel better when they look sad. She dropped her hand, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I was thinking I would push you in, and then you could swim down and make up with it. Or you know, get eaten. With any luck.”

  Eva stared at her, eyes as dark and unfathomable as the sea at midnight. And then the corners of her mouth lifted in the tiniest curl. “Maybe I should make you swim down to it. As I said before, it took a liking to you.”

  “That’s because I am irresistible,” said Lina.

  “Irritating is the word I would have chosen.”

  “How long has it been—a hundred years? More?—since a dancer last managed to tame one?” said Lina, smug and relieved to be back on familiar footing, trading barbs. She didn’t need to feel sorry for the other girl, couldn’t let her guard down. But her smugness faded abruptly, shriveling like a sea slug doused with salt as her gaze dipped from Eva’s face down her body to the sparkle of her shoes.

  A familiar pair of silver dancing shoes, glittering all over with diamonds.

  “You didn’t need to fling them off the balcony if you disliked them,” said Eva. “You’re so needlessly dramatic.”

  “Because you can talk?” Lina shot back. Vanishing in a whirl of dark smoke, slinking about in the shadows, the black clothes, the bloodred lipstick. “You fished them up from the bottom of the sea just to annoy me.”