Salt & the Sisters: The Siren's Curse 3 (The Elemental Origins Series Book 9)

by A. L. Knorr

  Shaloris found Valgana’s body far from where she had imagined it had come to rest. But Atlantis was no longer recognizable and already her memory of the city’s geography was fading.

  Valgana was wrapped and buried along with the rest, but Shaloris stood at the grave for a long time after her people returned to their makeshift camp. She wept until she felt she could weep no longer. She apologized to all of them, and to King Bozen, who had never been found. She cried until she could hardly see, until the sun touched the horizon. She cried until the time for crying was over, and then she wiped her eyes.

  When her vision cleared, she saw a silhouette among the rocks at the edges of the city ruin. Someone was standing there. Gooseflesh rose on her body. It was not one of her people, she could feel the menace baking off the person like heat waves. Sick with grief and unafraid, she walked toward them. The shape was familiar. A slice of setting sunlight lit the curly red hair for a moment.

  Eumelia.

  Emotions tumbled her––hatred, rage, confusion, disbelief. There was a sliver of hope, too. Hope that she was wrong, that Eumelia was somehow not responsible for this disaster, for killing everyone she loved and burying her home.

  Her footsteps on the sand made Eumelia turn and look, and in that moment Shaloris knew. It had not been a mistake. Eumelia looked like an artist pleased with her latest sculpture.

  Shaloris hissed as she came to a stop a few feet from her half-sister. “Are you proud of what you have done?”

  Eumelia stared calmly at Shaloris, her expression vacant. She looked almost bored.

  “The king did this,” she replied. “We warned him of what would happen. He did not believe us.”

  “You…warned him?” Shaloris asked in a tone of disbelief. “This was your plan all along? If you were not given the kingdom, you would destroy it?”

  “My mother was right,” Eumelia went on, seeming to ignore Shaloris’s words. “Those gifted with power have a right to change the course of destiny. Otherwise, we would not have power at all. It is gods-given. We warned him, and he did not heed us.”

  “He was your father!” Shaloris cried. It dawned on her that she was not dealing with a sane being. And still she tried to find some sense, to make Eumelia understand. “These people were your people. Atlantis was your home!”

  “Admittedly, I did take things a little further than we intended,” Eumelia replied in that stony way she had. “I only wanted to prove that I was the rightful heir.”

  Shaloris was so angry she could not speak. Her fingers curled into stiff fists, the hairs on her body spindled to standing.

  “Death is too good for you,” Shaloris said. Inside her chest came a blooming, a warm surge of power opening outward like her heart was unfolding like a flower. Her body grew warm. Tingling energy swept up from the soles of her feet and raced along her bones, lighting her up inside.

  “Listen to me now.” That heat coming from her heart swept up her throat and warmed her tongue and teeth. It poured from her mouth like it was an open oven.

  “A curse will fall on you and all of your kind…”

  Eumelia’s eyes widened and the sunlight cooled, the rays slicing across the horizon dimmed as the sun sank.

  “You will never have a home, as you have taken my home from me. You will never have a family, just as you have taken my family from me. Just when you think you are happy, you will be uprooted. Just when you think you have found love, you will lose it. Your daughters will be born under this curse and will pass it on to their daughters. Your sons will be powerless and your heart will be broken with the birth of every son. You will be a slave to the seasons, and to the salt that gives you your power. You will never feel genuine joy again, for you will know that just as happiness comes close it will be snatched away. This curse is my answer to what you have done, and the misery every siren must bear in her long lifetime is thanks to you. Remember it. Bear it. Forever.”

  The sun dipped fully below the horizon and shadows swept over both of them.

  Shaloris was shaking, but she found that the fiery rage that had risen up in her at the sight of her half-sister had abated. She’d claimed her magic, and it had satisfied her.

  Eumelia stared at Shaloris for a long moment and then crossed her arms, her lip lifted in a sneer. “Is that all you’ve got?”

  Shaloris turned her back on her sister and walked away. All she wanted to do was lie down and sleep for days on end.

  Twenty-Five

  Shaloris and her remaining people went north to the coastal city of Hirion. There, they were given shelter and food. Six years passed, and in that time Shaloris assembled something that looked like a life.

  Nestor asked if he could work on assembling a fleet with which he would take Okeanos by force, and she agreed without hesitation. Shaloris had no city over which to rule, but she had some sway as the daughter of the great King Bozen, last ruler of Atlantis. She also had her magic, which grew stronger as the years passed. She became a woman to respect, even to fear. She spent her days and nights drumming up support and making deals on behalf of Nestor. It would take years, but what else did they have but time? They were the last of their kind, the last Atlanteans. Their nation had been destroyed by a siren, they’d been refused aid by a siren; it was only fitting that they take the sirens’ home for their own.

  Nestor spoke of mines full of orichalcum, and sold shares of those mines as payment for military and naval support from the wealthy citizens of Hirion and beyond.

  Every year, Shaloris made a pilgrimage by ship down the coastline, back to the place of her birth. She took Epison with her. She visited her mother’s grave and wept with fresh pain. She mourned her father, her people, her city, and in this way kept her ire and grief alive.

  No one returned to Atlantis with her aside from Epison and two Atlantean guards. No one seemed to wish to return and Shaloris could not blame them. But she felt some responsibility as the queen to keep the memories of the fallen alive.

  On this day she visited the temple and made gifts of flowers and fruit, though she felt the gods were no longer resident in this desolate place. The clifftop temple had begun to age and decay. Weeds and vines sprang up around it, covering it with greenery. Water pooled in the worn places in the stone floor and the fountains grew furry with moss.

  With only Epison for company, she made her way down to the graves. It seemed to her that the ruins were sinking deeper every year, and very little vegetation took root in the salty soil. She knelt at the border of the wasteland, sitting in the lush low grasslands which once stretched out beyond Atlantis for miles. Before her was nothing more than a scar on the land, beneath which all the dead lay entombed, the buildings and beautiful architecture of Atlantis broken and crushed under the earth.

  She should have died––she told herself––alongside her father and mother. But then she would remember Nestor and the seeds of hope he’d planted in her heart: Atlantis would one day rise again. They would make a new home for their people, on the bones of the ones who’d taken their own away.

  Shaloris had hired a scribe to write down her version of events, and in turn that scribe had taken the story to an artist to render into beautiful mosaics. The work had only just begun, but one day she planned to set that story into the very walls of Okeanos.

  “Sister.”

  The word was so soft it sounded like the wind. Shaloris was shaken from her meditation, her eyes opened but she saw no one. She had imagined it. She closed her eyes again and went back to making plans for Okeanos once it was hers.

  “Sister.”

  Her eyes flew open. In front of her stood Eumelia.

  She was barely recognizable.

  She was thin and pale, her hair hung well past her hips. It had lost its curly spring and hung from her head in lank strands. Her eyes appeared hollow and haunted. Strife hung from her, so heavy her once straight shoulders seemed to sag under an invisible yoke.

  “What are you doing here?” Shaloris snapped, hardenin
g her heart toward the pitiful creature.

  “I came to find you.” Eumelia’s voice was soft and dry, like a weak wind. She sounded like an old woman. “I know that you come here every year.”

  Shaloris said nothing, not caring to ask how Eumelia had come by this information. She supposed it was no great secret. Mer had the run of the oceans and saw all passing ships.

  Eumelia got to her knees and bowed her head. “I came to beg your forgiveness. I have never been more regretful for anything than for what I have done to our father and our people.”

  “Good.” Shaloris bit the word off. “Now go away and let me mourn in peace.”

  Eumelia lifted those haunted eyes. “I beg of you, remove the curse.”

  “I seem to recall your response to the curse was something to the effect of, ‘Is that all you’ve got?’” Shaloris sneered.

  “You were right to do it. I deserved to be punished. I never thought—” Eumelia swallowed so loudly that her sister had no trouble hearing it. “I would rather have death than this.”

  Shaloris felt a slow smile creep along her face. She leaned forward. “That was the point.”

  “You don’t understand,” Eumelia whined. “Something you could not possibly have intended has happened because of your cursing us.”

  Shaloris cocked her head like a curious bird.

  “We have become…unnatural.” Eumelia’s voice dimmed to a husky whisper, and shame burned in her cheeks. “The salt––it sends us away to—to mate.”

  It so pained Eumelia to say these words that Shaloris almost laughed. “Sends you to land, you mean.”

  Eumelia nodded, looking relieved. “I’m glad to see you understand. Now you must lift the curse, for nature did not intend us to live this way.”

  Shaloris drew herself up to standing. “All curses go against nature; that’s what makes them curses.”

  Eumelia stared in disbelief. “You cannot have meant it. It’s too horrible. It makes us mate with humans. Humans!” Disgust filled every word and marred her once beautiful face.

  “That’s what I would call poetic justice,” Shaloris replied, growing bored of the conversation. “What you did was unforgivable. I will not lift the curse. Your kind will pay for all time. Now leave this place. You have no right to set so much as one miserable foot here.”

  Eumelia’s expression transformed slowly into something less hurt and more angry.

  “I left a son,” Eumelia croaked, her eyes dark with pain and rage. “Because of you. I have urges I cannot control. My memory fades and returns with the salt like a siege-engine to torture me. I gave birth to a child who was not like me, was nothing more than a human boy. Gods help me, I loved him, but I left him. It rent my heart into pieces. This is what you have done.”

  Shaloris looked down her nose at her sister. “Live with it. At least you have your life. With every season that passes and every child you leave behind, remember that it is your penance.”

  Eumelia bared her teeth, her fingers curling into tense claws. She stepped forward.

  Shaloris put a hand up. “Don’t tempt me…”

  But she stopped talking when she realized her feet were wet. Looking down, her eyes widened in surprise. Water was seeping up from the ground and swirling around her ankles. Cracks appeared in the sandy soil, spreading outward from where she stood, lifting at the edges like a pie splitting in the oven.

  “What are you doing?” She glared at Eumelia. “You can only destroy Atlantis once. You want me to drown? Go ahead. I welcome the chance to join my father and mother.”

  But she didn’t want to die anymore, not really. She backed away from Eumelia. The water was now at knee height and rising fast. It seemed to be crawling up her body unnaturally, against gravity. Horror clawed at her throat and her very flesh crawled. She made to run but at the twitch of Eumelia’s fingers, the water hardened and became a bright blue stone.

  Epison began to bark shrilly and run back and forth along the edges of the strange water. He seemed to understand he shouldn’t touch it. He whined and growled and snapped at the water, seeing it as more dangerous than the woman who was making it come.

  “You wanted to rule Atlantis?” Eumelia’s voice shook with righteous anger. “You can rule it from your prison. I’ll make you a crown unlike any a ruler has had before you. You make me a slave to the salt? I’ll make you a slave to your own dead kingdom.”

  Shaloris screamed then, struggling to free herself. Her panicked mind grasped at understanding as the stone reached her waist, locking her in place. The aquamarine split off and crystalized, shooting this way and that, forming six-sided columns. They spiked into the sky and locked hard around Shaloris’s body, growing as rapidly as water could flow. Her screams were muffled as the gemstone closed over her head and still the crystal grew and grew.

  The soil cracked and bubbled as saltwater shot through it, clawing its way toward the crystal to transform. The crystal spiked outward and expanded as Eumelia stepped back from her work.

  A bubble of space formed around Shaloris as the blue walls thickened and expanded, cracking and groaning. She found she could move again. She railed against the crystalline walls, the sounds of her breathing and her screams coupling with the otherworldly crackling sound the water made as it transformed into stone. The room inside grew and became a huge hollow cavern lit with the blue of the stone. The sun overhead penetrated the gem and sent beams shooting every which way like a prism. And then darkness crept in, as the gem continued to grow and the earth and soil crept up around it.

  “I can curse, too, oh Queen of Atlantis,” Eumelia said quietly, though Shaloris could hear it clearly, as the earth bubbled and settled over the massive stone coffin she’d made. “If I must live out my life in a prison, then so must you. These walls will hold you for thousands of years.”

  Twenty-Six

  I was sitting. That much I was aware of, because I could feel the pieces of broken crystal pressing into my hips.

  There was a crack in the darkness, a lightning shaped fissure through which light leaked. I could hear the sound of my own breathing, and that of Shaloris nearby. The fissure turned blue and widened. Slowly the black bled away and my vision returned.

  Shaloris’s face began as a blur of pale skin and dark hollows for eyes. A mass of darkness surrounded her head. Slowly, her features sharpened, and the planes of her face and the details of her––her little moles, her eyelashes, the flecks of color in her irises––coalesced to make the woman whose memories I had just lived.

  I stared at her and she stared at me. Her chest moved in and out as she breathed and I realized we were breathing in time. Her hands held mine gently, her skin exactly the same temperature as mine. I watched as she blinked and felt myself blink in the same moment. We were fused, she and I. I had had her thoughts, her understanding, her memory, blow through me like an ill gale, and it left me speechless.

  “Now, you know what you must do.” Slowly, she straightened and released my hands. Her gaze didn’t leave my face. “You must free me, if you wish to be free yourself.”

  But for her, free meant kill.

  Kill. Was I capable of it?

  Sensing my hesitation, she grabbed my hands again and held them so tightly I winced. Her expression was fierce, her eyes like fire.

  “You must do it,” she said.

  A crackle like birthday sparklers sounded over our heads and echoed throughout the big blue room. Dust and small particles landed on the floor around us. High above our heads, the crevices and valleys of the crystal snaked this way and that. Long, sharp stalactites of aquamarine hung down from the ceiling. I half expected to see bats fluttering among the columns of crystal.

  Another loud snap echoed and a long, sharp stalactite broke off and plummeted point-first to the floor.

  A scream tore from my throat and I turned my face away from the stalactite, throwing my arm up as it struck the floor a few feet away. Shattering into a million tiny shards, it peppered us with tiny bl
ue scimitars. I peeked around my arm at Shaloris. She reached up a hand and pulled a small sharp sliver from where it had penetrated her cheek near her jaw. A thin trickle of blood snaked down to her jawline and dripped. In the blue light of the crystal, her blood appeared a dark green, almost black.

  She dropped the bloody sliver and gazed at me expectantly. “Why else did you come here?”

  “I’m not a murderer.” I lowered the arm that had been protecting my face and shook shards from my hair.

  Overhead, a gritty groan echoed through the eaves.

  “You’ll die here, if you cannot kill me.” She got to her feet and shook out her clothing. She cast about on the ground where shards of all shapes and sizes spread out around us. She bent and picked up a long, nasty looking blade of blue. She turned it in her hand and held out the dull end to me. “Your people will go on suffering unless you can do it.”

  I got to my feet, my chin trembling. Taking the shard, it was all I could do to look at the sharp edge and picture it slicing into skin, spilling blood, ending a life.

  A greater fear than I had ever known before welled up inside of me like the swell of a growing wave. I was afraid of what I had to do, afraid of who I would become if I did it.

  Shaloris took a step closer to me. “Think of the suffering, think of the madness, the abandoned children. I did that. Me.”

  A crack overhead was followed by a long groan and another stalactite broke off and shattered behind Shaloris. A spray of aquamarine spattered across the floor, skidding to a halt at her feet.

  Shaloris stepped even closer, so close she could have wrapped her arms around me. She lifted her chin, exposing her throat. With a finger, she lifted the gleaming blade in my hand and directed its tip toward her neck.

  My hand tightened on the dull end. My heart sped up. I sucked in air through my nose. My skin felt clammy and my mouth felt dry. I pressed the sharp end into her skin.