The Dark Tide

by Alicia Jasinska

The name slid between her ribs like a blade, sinking through tender flesh to puncture something vital.

  Marcin, who had spat into his silver hip flask and offered it to her. Marcin, who had spoken those nonsensical words.

  I can’t watch this island destroy you. Can’t you see what it has done to you?

  You made me do this.

  Marcin, who had brought her to the island as a witchling, who still tugged her braids even though she was all grown up, even though she was queen. Marcin, who had raised her alongside Natalia, who was more truly her family than anyone she had left.

  Betrayal cut so much deeper when you loved the hand that held the knife.

  A part of her refused to believe it. Couldn’t.

  And Lina kept staring at her with those eyes, waiting, searching for an answer to her question. An answer Eva did not want to give.

  An apology she did not want to give.

  A thousand words balanced on the tip of Eva’s tongue, but she didn’t know how to say any of them. She had never been good at apologizing or explaining herself; a queen never had to.

  And a part of her did not think she had anything to apologize for.

  Eva’s face was a mask as she withdrew into herself. Chill air and shadows wrapped around her like a cloak, nipping at anyone who dared come close.

  Finley finally released her. Yara darted in to sweep a supportive arm around Eva’s waist. Finley stepped back with one final warning.“You hurt my sister again, and, witch or not, I will kill you.”

  “I don’t want to hurt her.” A lie. Eva wanted to hurt her. She wanted to hurt him. Right now she wanted to hurt the whole world. She wanted to find Marcin and tear him apart. She wanted to rip him into tiny pieces and shred those pieces into tinier pieces. She wanted him at her feet bruised and bleeding. Begging.

  Lina’s face shuttered.

  Behind Eva, someone moaned. Jun, cracking open his eyes. Still cowering, still curled in on himself.

  More witches were arriving, exclaiming, surging through the empty archway at the top of the staircase, spilling down it in a living black tide. Echoes bounced strangely off the water and the walls. The scene unfolding with a slow, surreal, almost dreamlike feel. So many voices ringing and melding into one.

  “Eva! Thank all the gods. Yara said Marcin attacked you?”

  “The doors were sealed. We couldn’t find you. Marcin said—”

  “Where is he?” cut in Lina.

  They ignored her. “Are we really leaving the island? Cyla says we’re heading to St. Casimir’s Square, that we’re performing the sacrifice now.”

  At the mention of St. Casimir’s Square, Finley surged forward. “It’s not a full moon. You can’t do the magic without the full moon. And Yara told me how you tried to find another way to calm the tide.”

  The words cut like a second betrayal. A betrayal from Yara this time, giving away Eva’s past, her secrets, her failure. Yara, who wouldn’t meet her eyes. Yara, who’d maybe been walking the same path with Finley that Eva had with Lina.

  Another way. Eva slowly replaced the crown on her head as Finley babbled on, as the rest of her witches stared at him blankly. “Where did he come from?” someone muttered.

  Another way with no blood price.

  “What if we all gave something?” said Finley. “Each of us folk from Caldella. A tithe taken from every person, young and old. One of our treasures. Something it hurts to lose. The dark tide has a taste for suffering. So we each give it a small bite to sate it. We just need to gather offerings. We just need time to convince people.”

  There was no time.

  A shock of icy black water splattered the backs of Eva’s legs. Her serpent stirring, churning white water from black. A strange hunger seeped into her bones along with the wet and the cold, a craving she didn’t think was her own.

  She could hear it again, that drumming, that ravenous heartbeat. And she knew that if she left the ballroom, stepped out onto one of the palace’s countless balconies and looked toward the city, she would hear flood sirens threading through the storm.

  There was no time.

  She could not afford to fail.

  There was no guarantee the tide could be satiated with anything but the life of the queen herself or the person she cared about.

  Another way.

  When had she stopped fighting for that? When had she bowed her head to the tide? A queen should answer to no one. When had she decided to give the sea anything more than what she wished to give it?

  “Then where did you see Marcin last?”

  Eva turned. Lina had a hand fisted in the fabric of Omar’s coat. The sight might have surprised her once; Omar was well over six feet tall with muscles to rival a pirate’s. But this was Lina, the girl who had stormed her palace, who had faced down a sea serpent and offered up her own life to save the boy she loved.

  The girl who had danced magic on the bloodstained deck of Eva’s ship, who had made her feel things she hadn’t thought possible for someone without a heart. The girl who had come back to warn her, save her, even knowing Eva had deceived her, instead of seizing on her one chance to escape being sacrificed.

  Foolish, infuriating Lina Kirk.

  “St. Casimir’s,” Omar huffed. “Okay, lass? Marcin heard our talk and said he’d go ahead to check that everything was all right.”

  Of course he had.

  It had probably amused him: Eva out of commission and Thomas in his hands, everyone talking about performing the sacrifice.

  The bells in Cyla’s silver locks jingled as she came to stand with Eva and Yara, something like understanding passing between all three in a glance. Because they too knew where Marcin would go. He wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to perform a little sacrifice of his own in Eva’s place, to drown Thomas Lin as she had promised they would at the start.

  Lina’s head swiveled toward Eva.

  Cyla draped a heavy coat—black, as always, with a fur collar and cuffs—around Eva’s shoulders, then handed her several braided lengths of hair: brown and blond and black, rich red and palest silver. Eva could see the magic in the strands. A blink and you’d miss it glimmer. A thread of cobweb catching a slant of winter sunlight. A ghostly gleam.

  Tithes from her sisters to help with the magic, to bolster Eva’s own as she offered the sacrifice, to help cast the spell that would calm the dark tide without the full moon’s sway over the sea.

  “It can’t wait any longer,” said Cyla. “Take Lina with you. Save the island first. Deal with Marcin when it’s done.”

  Yara cut a glance to where Finley was arguing with Omar now, lips parting, looking anxious. “E, what Finley said—”

  Cyla shoved a small, poison-green bottle into Eva’s palm. A chill raced through her, a hint of frost blossoming on her skin, a sense of what magic lurked inside. “To hold her still if she makes trouble.”

  To hold Lina still while Eva chained her to the pillar.

  The chill carried through to her marrow.

  Perhaps, in the end, she was more like Natalia than any of them had thought.

  “You’re all to wait here. I’m going ahead to deal with Marcin.” Eva’s voice held an order that carried through the flooded ballroom, then dipped too low for anyone but Yara to hear.

  Yara’s lips formed an O as Eva whispered in her ear. Cyla’s eyes narrowed.

  “I’m coming, too!” said Lina, pushing closer.

  Finley burst into protests. But Eva took Lina’s hand, unable to resist lacing their fingers together for the first and final time.

  31

  Lina

  Finley was shouting and lunging for her, but Eva pulled Lina close. No time for second thoughts, no time for hesitation, no time for fear. If there was even the slightest chance it was not too late…

  Lina’s stomach performed a tiny flip, and then
she was coming undone, being unmade, folding into wisps of pitch-black smoke with only the feel of Eva’s fingers laced tight through her own as an anchor.

  They ghosted through the bones of the Water Palace, seeping through stone and wood and mortar, spiriting through abandoned salons and flooded hallways, snaking under the gaps beneath shimmering, glyph-engraved doors. Moving as air and darkness, as shadow and smoke, as one.

  Lina didn’t dare breathe or speak or swallow, lest she break apart the magic and forever be trapped as something neither solid nor spectral. As form and nothing, both and neither and something in between.

  It was terrifying, intoxicating. The darkest kind of thrill.

  Pure magic.

  Her heart—if she even had a heart right now—pounded hard enough to burst.

  And then all of sudden they were outside, spinning amongst the Water Palace’s wicked spires, the night breeze chilling them, blowing them higher, silver cobwebs of low cloud left torn and twisting in their wake. The rising moon peaked through the fissures, so luminous, so close to full now, it set diamonds in the inky surface of the sea.

  The waves looked so flat from up here. The dark tide was nothing but a darkly sparkling stage to dance upon. The rain had turned to pearly mist. Lights winked in the storm-ravaged city as the wind pushed them closer and closer.

  The Witch Queen comes on wings of night…

  Never had the lyrics felt so true. They descended on St. Casimir’s Square in a great cloud of whirling black smoke. No bonfires here now, no dancers. No wild drums or wail of pipes, only the distant, desperate shriek of flood sirens.

  Magic gathered Lina back into being, air and darkness pouring into the contours of a girl with bobbed blond hair, gray eyes, and a stubborn chin.

  Eva let go of her hand, and the sudden absence of that touch left Lina strangely bereft.

  But she immediately started running, limping, crying out. Deserted shops flashing by, her steps slipping on slick stone cobbles. She flew past the column-lined arcades that enclosed the square on every side but one, falling into the long shadow cast by the pillar in the center, racing for the prone figure chained at its foot.

  Thomas.

  She made it halfway.

  Black water lashed out, a liquid whip snaking around her ankles and yanking her off her feet. Her chin cracked against the cobbles, but the hot stinging in her palms and knees hit first. Agony flared on impact as Marcin materialized from the shadows.

  Wind gusted, slamming him back, away from her. Eva swept past, coalescing from sea and sky in a wild whirl of ash and wind, black hair streaming, a single glowing strand of red string floating free from her fingers, silver dancing shoes landing with a lethal click.

  Marcin staggered to a knee, spat and smeared a hand across the cobbles in a single fluid gesture. The stone beneath Eva softened, crumbled to sand. She sank in up to her ankle, stumbling off balance. More cobbles ripped free of the earth. Solid. Glistening. Sharp. Firing like bullets.

  Lina threw up her arms, covered her head with her hands.

  Eva dissolved into smoke, parting around the projectiles, freeing herself from the sand. For a breath, the raging smoky air held the vague shape of a body. A featureless form and face. Then it whirled into a towering, shrieking black cyclone, bearing down on Marcin.

  Sand and stone rose to form a wall around him. But air and darkness needled through the cracks, sending tendrils spearing at his arms, his throat.

  Lina seized the chance, pushing to her feet, crossing the last distance to Thomas. His chains rattled as she yanked on them. They were wrapped around his chest, his waist, his ankles, iron rubbing tanned skin raw where it shackled his wrists.

  Rust flaked and stuck to her palms and fingers, a sharp metallic taste burning the back of her throat. A sickening suspicion knotted her insides. Were these the chains Natalia had worn? The chains that had held her to the pillar as the dark tide came crashing down, as the black waves swept in to take what they were owed?

  The sea roared, pounding and smashing against the edge of the square that led straight onto the waves, sending up sweeping crests of crystal spray, spilling and spitting sea foam over the cobbles.

  Too far away to feel.

  But Thomas was drowning anyway.

  Coughing and choking and retching brackish water down his front as magic filled his lungs with saltwater. His body jerked against the chains, one eye bulging, the other swollen shut.

  “Eva!” The cry wrenched from Lina. She fell to her knees, fingers scrabbling over the ground, searching for a loose cobble, for something to use to break the chains. Knowing with a piercing, heartrending certainty that Eva wasn’t going to help.

  Because she didn’t care. Because she had always been planning to give Thomas to Marcin.

  She felt it again, that same awful splintering in her chest when she’d searched Eva’s face in the flooded ballroom, waiting and hoping desperately for a denial. Because some foolish part of her had started to trust the other girl, because some foolish part of her had started to care.

  Lina caught up a loose end of chain, bringing it down on the cuffs linking Thomas’s ankles. Rusted iron shrieked and clanged like a bell again and again, sparks firing off the metal.

  All while Thomas was still drowning, still choking, briny water spewing down his front, flecking the base of her neck, the crown of her bowed head.

  Still drowning, until he wasn’t.

  The first great shuddery gasp of air split the night.

  Lina looked up, looked behind her. That wild tempest of dark smoke had poured itself back into a body. The whole world stopped as she met Eva’s eyes.

  And then Marcin was striding past Eva, toward her, hair as wild as flame. Anger rippling off him like heat. Elegant ash-black clothes askew and skin so pale he looked more ghost than living creature.

  Was he starting to fade away? Did he have so little magic left?

  “You would take even this away from me.” He spat into his hand.

  And again Eva moved between them like a shield, a pace in front of Lina, a pace away from Marcin. Wisps of black smoke coiling off her olive skin like steam. “Oh, I am going to take much more from you than this,” she said.

  And yet she did not move.

  Eva’s fingers were frozen mid-spell; strands of hair and red strings stretched taut, but she did not tie a knot. It was as if some invisible force were holding her back.

  Lina wanted to scream at her. He tried to kill you. He tried to kill me. He wants to let the island drown.

  Sweat glistened at Marcin’s temples. The bump in his throat bobbed up and down. “Eva, please. Do you think this is what Natalia would have wanted? For us to fight like this? For us to waste ourselves, our magic, on some silly quarrel?”

  “Silly quarrel?” said Eva. “You left me to drown.”

  “You didn’t give me a choice! I did it because you would have let us all drown. Because I didn’t want you to have to suffer anymore. I did it because I care about you. Because I couldn’t bear to watch you hurt. Give me Thomas Lin, Eva. And then we’ll go back to the palace. He’s the reason we lost Natalia. And this island is what destroyed her. This cursed city ate away at her piece by piece, just as it has eaten away at you. Do you think she wanted this for you? Do you think she wished to chain you here, always at the mercy of the tide? For you to suffer year after year, as she did? You were never meant to be this island’s queen. You should never have been queen.”

  Marcin took a single step forward. “You helped kill her, Eva. You and Yara. All that talk about finding another way, giving her hope and then failing so spectacularly and snatching that hope away from her.”

  Eva’s face was stricken. Marcin drove the knife home.

  “She would never have done what she did if you had not encouraged her first.”

  Eva’s lip trembled, the sight m
aking something pinch inside of Lina.

  “If Natalia had left me in charge,” finished Marcin, “we could have escaped all this.”

  Lina wobbled to her feet, hands on Thomas’s shoulders for support. He slumped against the chains, against her, eyelids fluttering. Her name a soft exhale.

  Marcin’s gaze snapped to her, and her heart lurched. “Is that why you won’t let me kill him?” he said. “Because of her? You’ve truly managed to make yourself care for one of the sacrifices, haven’t you? For someone other than yourself.” His tone was half-incredulous, almost disbelieving.

  Lina stared at Eva, her pulse falling in and out of rhythm.

  “And yet she loves someone else.” Marcin wiped a bloody cheek with his thumb, spat into his hand. “But does she love him enough?”

  Eva’s head jerked toward the stone pillar, toward Lina. She yanked a glass bottle from the pocket of her coat, hurling it at Marcin. Glass exploded at his feet, plumes of fog twisting free of the shards. Where liquid had splattered, frost formed, a pale glaze staining his boots, stealing up his legs, his torso, hardening like ice.

  But not before he painted the air with blood and spit and will, not before a savage smile stretched his lips and magic thrummed through the air like fire.

  Lina braced herself, blinding light illuminating the shock on her face, but the magic was not aimed at her.

  32

  Lina

  All she would remember afterward was a flash of light and the sudden absence of sound. An all-encompassing silence, a deafening ringing in her ears, the hush and stillness that followed the final note of a performance. That anxious heartbeat before applause. Black waves struck the stone edge of St. Casimir’s Square, salt spray holding a pose in midair, a million glass shards frozen.

  Then the world rushed back, and Lina knew what was happening even before it happened. She had sung this song. She had danced this story. She knew it as well as she knew her name. Chains clanged and shattered. Muscle and bone shifted beneath her hands. Agonized screams ripped from Thomas’s throat as his joints popped and ligaments snapped. His back arched, skin stretching and shredding, fading to a horrible gray. Hardening into crusted, sea-slick scales.