The Dark Tide

by Alicia Jasinska

  She shook the thought free, gnawing the inside of her cheek. If she didn’t find a way, if she didn’t survive this…was there a part of her Thomas would take with him? A part the next girl he kissed wouldn’t know belonged to Lina Kirk? Her habit of chewing her cheek? The way she hummed when she was nervous?

  What part of me are you going to share with someone else once I’m gone?

  Her eyes followed Eva’s hand as it dropped and the other girl bent down, picking an open book off the carpet, fingers standing out against the yellowed pages.

  What parts of you have I known through him?

  “I will find another way,” said Lina.

  Eva shut the book with a clap and drew a circle on its dust-clouded cover, fingertip coming away with a silver film as if she’d pinched a moth. “Do you think you’re the first to try? Do you think it a coincidence that there happen to be so many books and letters here on the topic? Accounts and grimoires from all over the world, all here in my study.” Her voice was soft, even, deadly. “Do you think so little of us, that we haven’t tried it all before?”

  “I know you tried.” Lina’s voice was just as even. “The witchlings told me what you did, what you tried. But you gave up. You failed, and then you stopped fighting.”

  Eva’s eyes flashed with such fury that Lina shrank a little inside her skin. Eva’s anger could put even Finley’s to shame; it seethed like the tide in a tempest. “I do not need to be told that by someone who never fought at all before this. There are islanders who have protested the sacrifice, islanders who petitioned Natalia, yet I never saw you or your name listed among them. You were happy enough to let lives be taken until it was the life of someone you cared about. Until it was you. And now you dare lecture me? You, who’ve never fought and lost anyone? You, who never tried to change anything?”

  Lina’s heart pounded. Her mouth opened and snapped shut. A pang of shame twisted her stomach.

  Because it was true, and she really wished it hadn’t taken Thomas being chosen and being trapped here herself to realize that maybe they should try to find another way. Instead of merely accepting the yearly sacrifice as something that was necessary. Never questioning it, because this was the way things had always been done.

  “You know nothing,” said Eva. “You heard one story, and you understand nothing.”

  “Fine.” Lina threw her hands up, slumping back down to the floor, tucking one leg beneath her. “Fine, I don’t. But I will. I’m going to keep searching for a way. I know I should’ve before. I know it’s probably too late now. But I’m not giving up.”

  “And you think I’ll just let you stay here all night, picking through all my private belongings?”

  “If you want me to leave, you’ll have to carry me out,” said Lina, tensing a heartbeat later when she started to wonder if Eva really would try and drag her out of the study.

  But a second heartbeat passed, and then another. From over by the bookshelves came a long and exasperated exhale. Lina relaxed a measure, yanking a stack of folded letters into her lap, ruffling through their crackly pages.

  She discarded them when she realized they were written in another language, one she didn’t recognize. She reached for another diary instead.

  Anger was still singing through her, and the words were almost a blur. Though to be fair, words often looked that way to Lina: fat paragraphs of black letters squiggling eel-like, attempting to swim off the page. She loved stories but preferred hearing them or watching them danced out onstage. She was not a big reader.

  She chewed her cheek, trying to concentrate. But buried below that song of anger was a sharp, stabbing disappointment. Why had she thought Eva anything more than a heartless nightmare? Why had she gotten her hopes up? Why had she wanted so badly for her to be something more?

  She couldn’t stop herself from chancing a last glance across the room.

  Eva had slouched ungracefully into a high-backed armchair and was gnawing on a thumbnail, staring studiously at the ceiling and ignoring Lina.

  Lina looked at the ceiling, too.

  And then back.

  And then away again quickly as she caught Eva doing the same, stealing a glance at her.

  Their eyes caught for the briefest awkward beat.

  Lina’s cheeks heated, and she really focused on the text this time, searching for clues, for magical solutions hidden in delicate lines of curving script as the candles slowly melted down to stubs. Rubbing her stinging eyes and humming to keep herself awake.

  The Witch Queen comes on wings of night.

  The Witch Queen has your heart’s delight.

  She did fall asleep at some point, jerking awake minutes or hours later, drool making ink weep through a page. Eva was very likely to drown her just for that.

  But the armchair was empty, and when Lina sat up, a blanket smelling faintly of smoke slipped off her shoulders.

  Twists of dark smoke were dissolving in exactly the space where someone might have stood if they’d tiptoed close to tuck it gently around her.

  Lina blinked, heart falling into a strange, unsteady rhythm. She clutched the blanket, not knowing if she wanted to tear it off or draw it snugly around herself. In the end, she did draw it snugly around herself, lit fresh candles, and continued to research.

  22

  Lina

  She didn’t find any answers in Eva’s study. No solutions or spells to try, because they had already been tried.

  So she begged the Water Palace’s doors to take her elsewhere, anywhere, to anyplace within its walls where she might uncover a new kind of magic to calm the dark tide. She used the black pearls that steeped her voice in syrupy sweetness, cajoling, complimenting each one on its pretty shining, shimmering glyphs and polished dark wood frame.

  Apparently the doors responded well to flattery, because with only a few mischievous detours, they led her to more bookshelves, let her into hidden workrooms, into bedrooms where grimoires were tucked secretly beneath feathery pillows.

  She ventured into dripping vaults and dusty archives, was chased out of both by angry witches wielding brooms. But she didn’t let it stop her.

  After all, whenever a particularly irate witch threatened her—like Marcin, whose precious handwritten journals she might have borrowed without asking and then spilled tea all over—Eva appeared to rescue her.

  Lina was this year’s sacrifice; it wouldn’t do to let anyone else put an end to her.

  Ducking inside a smoke-hazy salon as footsteps drummed an ominous approach, Lina clutched two books to her chest and smiled. The first was a tattered diary containing a scrawled spell of transformation she thought might work, and the second…well, she hadn’t picked that book herself.

  Over the past few days—days she could ill afford—odd books and stray unopened letters had found their way into her hands, tumbling innocently off the shelves she was searching, adding themselves to the bottom of the stacks she was carrying, slithering beneath scrolls she’d just set down.

  Lina hated letting herself hope, but she was almost sure she knew who was behind it.

  It was as if, deep down, Eva really wanted to help, wanted to continue the search she’d started two years ago, but she was too afraid to let herself. Lina couldn’t decide if this made her even more frustrated, or amused, or angry, and even the slightest bit sad.

  She could feel herself walking in Eva’s footsteps. Half the time she’d discover Eva’s notes already scribbled in the margins of the grimoires she took down. She’d get distracted then, tracing that perfect handwriting with her fingers, each carefully penciled line so faint it was as if the words were the other girl’s whispers breathed onto the page.

  A hesitant knock sounded on the salon door. Lina slipped hastily past armchairs and a low lounge, halting when an arm suddenly snaked out of nowhere and dragged her into a shadowy alcove.

  “D
o I even want to ask who’s chasing you this time? You know Marcin spat in the face of the last person who angered him and turned them into a bird.”

  “Oh, how sweet. It’s almost like you actually care what happens to me.” Lina’s back was pressed against the wall. She was pinned between it and Eva, a blush creeping into her cheeks, suddenly painfully aware of her own heartbeat.

  She blamed it all on the books she’d been reading.

  While searching desperately for solutions, she’d also looked for that passage the witchlings had spoken of, the one they’d said Thomas had read to Natalia about how if she sacrificed herself instead of him, it might calm the tide once and for all. Forever. The passage no one could find afterward.

  Lina hadn’t found it, either.

  But she’d read repeatedly that the queen had to love the sacrifice in order for the magic to work. She had to care enough for that person that she wept genuine tears over them.

  So why, back in the ship’s cabin, had Eva said the sacrifice had to be Lina? That it couldn’t be anyone but her?

  “Maybe,” said Eva. “I just don’t want to go down in history as the queen who had to sacrifice a seagull. But on the other hand, it would mean I’d get to keep you in a cage until the full moon, so perhaps I should let whoever it is catch you.”

  Lina adjusted her grip on the books she was holding, expression turning mischievous. “Ah, but are they trying to catch me?”

  For the first time, Eva looked vaguely disconcerted.

  Lina pushed off the wall, moving forward into Eva’s space. “I’m not running from anyone. I was looking for you. And a little witchling tells me a certain queen likes to hide in here and smoke when she’s supposed to be—”

  Eva pressed a cold fingertip to Lina’s lips as another loud knock sounded on the salon door.

  Lina’s heart skipped a beat. “I found a spell that could work,” she whispered. “I want to try it.”

  “What part of ‘be quiet’ do you not understand?”

  “It’s a spell of transformation.” Lina held up the diary.

  “It won’t work.”

  “You can’t know that. Look.” Lina grabbed Eva’s hand, the one she’d used to press quiet into Lina’s lips. “If you give me a lock of hair and some of your red strings, your bracelets, I’ll try it myself. I can work knots. You saw, yesterday.” The storm had broken the morning before. Lina had paused her search to help two witch aunties weave a giant web of witches’ ladders, holding the loops as they tied knots to direct the worst of the wind and rain away from the island.

  Lina had looked up halfway through and caught sight of Eva, watching her, an unreadable expression on her face—a look that had turned quickly into one of undisguised amusement when Lina decided to show off a little and instead tied herself into the web.

  She got carried away like that sometimes when she knew people were watching. Mostly other girls. The older, cooler girls at the Conservatoire. She couldn’t stop herself from doing stupid things like talking really loudly, dancing about, flaunting her skills.

  She couldn’t stop herself from blurting out now: “Ma jokes I could have been a witch, I have such a good memory for knots.”

  Eva raised an eyebrow and canted her head to the side. “When were you born?”

  Lina deflated a little but didn’t let go of Eva’s wrist. “Morning. Midmorning.” When the summer sun was shining highest. She wished sometimes that magic were a skill you could master if you only worked hard at it and not something that happened to bloom within you by chance, depending on the hour when you were born. “When were you—”

  “Midnight. At the stroke.” Crimson lips curved into a crescent. “On the longest, darkest night of the year.”

  Of course she was.

  A true nightmare, then. Yet it seemed strangely fitting, mirroring the way they faced each other now. Morning challenging midnight.

  “It won’t work,” repeated Eva.

  “How do you know before we even try it?”

  “Because I’ve tried everything before.” Eva swept out of the alcove, Lina hot on her heels. The salon roof was a drum for the rain, but thick drapes drawn across all the windows hid the storm raging outside. Lightning flickered through a gap and Lina twisted toward it. “So you’ll just hide in here and smoke? What happened to sending away the storm? You gave up on that too? Don’t you care what happens to the island? The flooding’s already so bad, we can’t survive this.”

  It felt like Caldella was caught between two monsters, fighting off a ravenous storm and sea. But if the sea was a monster that swallowed its prey whole, then this storm was a beast that stalked the city’s streets, crunching its victim’s bones.

  Thunder crashed, the great boom of a drum loud enough to wake the heavens, a deafening sound Lina felt shiver through her teeth. “Can’t you let me try?” She hugged the books to her chest.

  Eva stopped at a desk against the wall, back to Lina, gathering up loops of red string and long black hair, winding it all through the sharp teeth of a mother-of-pearl comb.

  “Are you afraid to fail again? Is that it? Like you did the last time? Like your last sacrifice failed?” There was acid burning at the back of Lina’s throat. And fear. That wasted life—a boy her brother’s age, her age, who had never had the chance to grow up.

  His voice seemed to whisper to her, a fellow sacrifice-to-be, his clammy fingers wrapping around her heart.

  A life stolen before it could be lived. An innocent life sacrificed for nothing. Because Eva had to have known she didn’t love him, didn’t she? As she chained him to the pillar, as she fed him to the tide? You could tell when you loved someone, couldn’t you?

  You drowned an innocent boy for nothing.

  As she would be drowned for nothing.

  “If you won’t try the spell I found,” Lina bit out, “then tell me how yours is supposed to work. Because I know you actually have to care about me for the sacrifice to do anything.”

  Eva turned around. “Did you come here just to irritate me? Because that seems rather a sad way to spend your final days.”

  “Maybe I thought we could spend our final days together, seeing as you’re going to let the tide drown us all. We can braid each other’s hair, trade stories about our self-destructive tendencies.”

  Eva’s expression soured. She threw the mother-of-pearl comb at Lina. Lina dropped the books as she scrambled to catch it.

  “If you waited for a breath.”

  Lina blinked.

  “Well? Don’t you want the magic now?” Eva dug a witch’s ladder out of a desk drawer: a skein of silvery cord tied with shells and gulls’ feathers. “You assume I won’t let you try simply to shut you up. You assume you know my feelings.” She pulled two bottled spells off a shelf and left the desk, ripping aside the drapes to reveal windowed doors leading out onto a storm-ravaged balcony. “Are you going to stand there and continue to insult me, or are you going to show me you can work string well enough to be called a witch?”

  23

  Lina

  Lina paused on the threshold of the balcony, amidst the fluttering black drapes.

  Lightning laced the heavens, lit the low clouds from underneath, leaving the sky glowing like the pale underbelly of some gigantic beast. Eva’s hair flew out from her head like a flame, streaming behind her in the howling wind. Yet the rain itself dared not to touch her. No raindrops glittered on her olive skin, kissed the stark line of her neck, pooled in the dark dip and curve of her collarbones. Her black dress stayed dry as she leaned back against the hip-high balustrade, untying a knot in the witch’s ladder, features shadowed and sharp with sudden mischief.

  Lina could feel the ebb and flow of magic rolling off of her, a steady pulse that set the pace of her own heart, that thrummed through her fingers where she clutched the mother-of-pearl comb wound with loops of red string.<
br />
  “What are you waiting for?” Eva’s voice was half drowned by thunder. “A spell of transformation, wasn’t it? Shape a net. And this time, try not to get tangled in it.”

  Lightning cracked.

  Lina took a tentative step forward. An icy pitter-patter drummed the top of her skull, plastering her gold hair to her cheeks. She skittered back beneath the balcony’s awning.

  A wicked smile tugged at Eva’s lips, the same smile she’d worn on St. Walpurga’s Eve just before she vanished in a vicious howl of smoke. “Are you scared?”

  “No!” A little. And I don’t understand you. What did Eva mean by “You assume you know my feelings?”

  “I just don’t want to get wet.” It was more self-consciousness now than fear. Her fingers felt suddenly clumsy, clammy, overly large and all thumbs with Eva staring so intently. Lina wanted to snap at her not to look as she freed a loop of red string twisted with strands of black hair, tucking the comb down the front of her dress and into her brassiere.

  “A net.”

  “I know.” A flush crawled up Lina’s neck. The strands of Eva’s hair were slippery as silk, the red string far more delicate than fishing line, a thousand times finer than rope. Together they were as much a tangle as her thoughts, as the emotions twisting and twining through her head. It was like trying to play cat’s cradle with cobweb.

  Lina cursed as the strings slipped and snarled. The witches made it look so damn easy.

  “Don’t rush.” Eva’s tone was surprisingly patient. She unstoppered one of the bottled spells, placing the bottle on the floor and stepping back as curls of pale smoke spiralled up from it to feed the clouds, in the hope that it would satiate them.

  Some of the tension leeched from Lina’s shoulders. Something like excitement crept in. What charm was Eva having her work? If she proved she could do it, would Eva help her with the spell in the diary? She started again, brow furrowed with concentration. Keeping the long strings parallel, weaving one of the simpler shapes in the Witches’ Game, the fisherman’s net. “Why red string?” She’d always wanted to know why some witches worked magic one way and others another. “Why hair?”