THE SEA WITCH
Can love turn you evil ?
THE SEA WITCH
Copyright 2015 S.J. Valfroy
All right reserved.
Published in 2015 by S.J. Valfroy.
THE SEA WITCH
Have you ever wondered why villains are what they are?
Is a villainous heart instilled at birth, or do decisions and actions warp a good heart into a villainous one?
You have certainly already heard of the Sea Witch, but do you know her real story?
Though she works as a palace maid, Serena is no ordinary mermaid. From birth she manifested the magical powers of a sea witch, just like her mother, Moira. But Serena does not want to be like her mother, cruel and selfish, so she rejects her magical powers. At least until her ever growing love for the unattainable Prince Triton pushes her to her breaking point. Just when it seems he’s taken notice, that she could actually win his heart, his mother, Queen Amphitrite, makes it clear her son will never marry a palace maid, much less the daughter of a sea witch with a seedy reputation. Serena’s dreams are slipping through her fingers, and she must decide if she is willing to embrace her magical powers and take her dreams by force. Magic could solve all her problems, or so she thinks, but at what price?
THE SEA WITCH
“ We know what we are, but know not what we may be”
*William Shakespeare*
“ There is no greater glory than love, nor any greater punishment than jealousy”
* Lope De Vega*
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 : Worlds Apart
Chapter 2 : Crowns, Tears, and Tentacles
Chapter 3 : City of Whale Bones
Chapter 4 : Sign on the Line
Chapter 5 : Triumph and Tribulation
Chapter 6 : All Hail Queen Serena
Chapter 7 : Uninvited Houseguest
Chapter 8 : We All Go Tumbling Down
Chapter 9 : Sound the Alarm
Chapter 10 :The Water Runs Red
The Era of Villains series
Book 1 : The Sea Witch
Book 2 : The Queen of Hearts
Chapter 1
Worlds Apart
It was wicked of her heart to ache for him so. Wicked because she could never hope to have him. His crown made him unattainable. It sat atop his golden hair like a warning sign, and the rippled sunbeams that penetrated the water from the surface world above glinted off it, making it almost wink at her, mocking. His friends, sons of royal guards and wealthy families, surrounded him like a barricade as they swam down from the second level of the palace to the large atrium where Serena scrubbed the polished stone floors with a rough sponge, scraping free the algae, polyps, and coral trying to take root there.
Her scrubbing slowed as Prince Triton and his friends drew nearer. She snuck eager glances at him under the cover of her dark brown hair as it swirled around her head in the water. Each time she found herself in the same room with him, she felt as though she had a strong current at her back, pushing her toward him. Everything about him drew her in, and her heart thumped until she thought he must surely hear it calling for him. His tail and eyes were the same rich blue of the ocean—fitting, since he would one day rule it. His thick, golden hair brushed his shoulders, and she longed to touch it and find out if it was truly as soft as it looked. He had recently started to grow a short beard, and she thought it was a good choice. It hugged his jawline, accentuating the strong lines. He exuded power, from his thickly-muscled arms and chest and broad tail, to his high forehead and the intelligent light in his eyes. He held himself with dignity, raised from birth to be nobility. He was sure and determined in everything he did. From the day he was born he was told he was important, special, and it showed in the way he moved and talked.
Serena hoped he would look her way. She hoped he would notice that she’d rubbed down her royal blue tail with jellyfish extract to make the iridescent scales shine. She hoped he would notice that she’d swapped the light blue shell top she usually wore for a new coral-orange one. She hoped, but she knew she was kidding herself. Even if she wasn’t a maid, he wouldn’t notice. She wasn’t his type. She was too thick in the waist, too broad in the tail, too dark in the hair and eyes, and too full-bodied in the brain. Triton liked his trysts to have curves, but small curves. He preferred redheads above all others and, despite his considerable intelligence, seemed partial to girls with a head full of bubbles. He grew bored of them quickly, though, and Serena knew eventually he would quit playing around and settle down with someone who could match him wit for wit—something she would have no trouble with. Unfortunately, she didn’t see him changing his taste in appearance any time soon, unless she could somehow convince him otherwise—a tough feat, since the only words she’d ever spoken to him were, “Yes, your Highness,” “No, your Highness,” “May I fetch you anything, your Highness?” and, “The queen wishes to speak with you, your Highness.” But she watched and listened. She was good at that, always had been, and it was easy to observe and go unobserved as a maid. And all the while her heart went on aching.
“I remember you being much better at Fifty Clams, Triton?” Ira, one of Triton’s friends, said, a teasing half smile on his face as he jangled a bag of pearls in his hand—his winnings from the betting game.
The other young mermen laughed good-naturedly, and Triton grinned.
“I’m still not convinced you didn’t cheat,” he said.
“Of course he cheated; his father’s an urchin salesman,” said another of his friends, whose name Serena didn’t know, and that got them all laughing again, even Ira.
“How about we have another go at it again tomorrow?” said Ira. “If you catch me cheating, you can get back everything I took from you today.”
“Funny, how he’s not saying he doesn’t cheat,” said Kale, who had recently become one of the Royal Guard just like his father. “He’s just saying we’re not going to catch him.”
Ira shrugged and smirked again, which set off another round of laughs.
“Get out of my house before I hook you like a trout, your dirty cheat” said Triton, a grin on his face.
They all exchanged a few more insults before saying their goodbyes, leaving Triton alone in the atrium with Serena. He spared her his first glance, and she snapped her eyes back to the floor and revitalized her scrubbing. His eyes only rested on her for a moment. He looked absently around the large atrium. The entire palace was carved out of a rock that was once a mountain before it was eroded and submerged by the sea. The water gave the grey stone a pleasant greenish hue. The atrium was the main entrance that the merpeople of Adamar flocked through when the palace doors were opened for parties and coronations and audiences with the king and queen. The palace was very open with very few doors. Light poured in from oval windows not quite large enough for a merperson to swim through. The atrium had no ceiling, and the very roof of the palace could be seen from the floor. Triton’s eyes flitted up past the seven different stories of the palace, denoted by the carved banisters that ran in circles up and up to the base of the largest central spire of the palace. The balconies all led off to corridors and countless chambers, all with stone ceilings, but the atrium was wide and open like the ocean itself.
Triton seemed to be deciding what leisurely activity he would do next. Serena snuck another look. He caught her eye and gave the smallest of nods with his head. Her heart leapt to her throat and continued pounding there, making her short of breath. He began to swim off across the atrium to the corridor leading to the kitchen, and a cr
azy, desperate idea took hold of Serena. He had acknowledged her, but it would mean nothing if she let him swim away without some other form of contact. He was already forgetting her; she could feel it. She had often tried to get his attention in small ways: stopping her work to fuss with her long hair, swimming into his field of vision as often as she could, shining her scales and making new tops. That wasn’t enough. He’d never once even asked her name. When he needed something, he addressed her as “maid,” or “you there.”
She swam as fast as she could without looking odd, shooting across the atrium with her stone scraper held in her right hand under the pretense of going to scrape a barnacle off the far wall. She watched Triton’s powerful tail from the corner of her eye and made sure to swim too close to the two back fins on the end of it. As his tail swept upwards in an arch, preparing to thrust down again to propel him forward, his fins smacked into her arms, and she dropped her scraper and her sponge. The scraper sank to the floor with a small clank, but the sponge hovered near her tail, it’s descent to the floor much slower. Triton whirled around, confused and then surprised.
“I do apologize, miss,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Oh no, your Highness,” she said, feeling the blush on her cheeks brought on by the racing of her heart at his proximity and the sound of his voice, “it’s entirely my fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going. I beg your forgiveness.”
“It is you who must forgive me, miss. You aren’t hurt, are you?”
“Not at all, Prince,” she said, struggling to keep up the nerve to go on looking him in the eyes.
“I’m glad. I would never want such a pretty face to come to harm.”
He gave her one of the flirtatious smiles he bestowed on all his lady admirers who flocked to the palace for parties and dinners. It was mischievous and playful. It was not even her favorite smile of his (her favorite was the beaming, caring one he gave to his subjects when they came up to him to shake his hand or wish him well), but just the fact that he was smiling at her threatened to make her faint, or perhaps vomit up the kelp she’d had for breakfast.
“Your Majesty is too kind,” she said, her smile so full of joy it hurt her cheeks. She stifled a nervous giggle, refusing to be anything like the bubbleheaded girls he usually surrounded himself with.
“Nonsense, just speaking the truth. Now please grant my wish and give me your forgiveness. I won’t sleep well if you don’t.”
“Your Majesty had it before he even asked it.”
Triton smiled her favorite smile and stooped to pick up her scraper and her sponge, which had finally completed its slow descent. He offered them to her, that same smile still on his face, and she took them with shaking hands.
“Thank you, your Highness.”
“You’re most welcome…”
At first she didn’t understand his pause. Mostly because she couldn’t believe it was real, but it was. He was asking for her name. She forced herself to look at him confidently, rather than turning her face into her hair or shoulder in nervous delight.
“Serena, your Majesty. My name is Serena.”
“You’re most welcome, Serena. Good day.” He gave her an easy, friendly smile and headed off toward the kitchen.
By the time she managed to whisper, “Good day, Your Highness,” he was already gone.
— — —
Serena had always loved living in the kelp forest. The green and brown stalks grew up to two-hundred-and-sixty feet tall, reaching for the sun from their roots in the sand. She loved to feel them brush against her, soft and ticklish. The shadows they cast as they waved back and forth and the dark green tint they gave the surrounding water as the sun filtered through them was eerie to some, but she found it peaceful and beautiful. Fish of every color darted amongst the leaves, eating, laying their eggs in the shelter of the massive stalks, and talking with one another. All talk would cease and all the bright colors would vanish as the fish took shelter if a barracuda or a small leopard shark wandered through, but Serena was a regular and welcome sight. Many fish paused mid-conversation to greet her. She answered them all with an extra bright smile and cheery note to her voice.
She heard a merman’s voice as she approached the mouth of the cave her family lived in. Most merpeople carved their homes from rock or constructed them from sediment and ocean plants. Others lived in reefs. If they decided to make a home out of a cave, they usually carved out windows and doorways to let in the light (or petitioned the royals to do so with the magic of the king’s Trident in order to speed up the process considerably, for a high price of course). Serena’s mother, Moira, did nothing to change the integrity of the cave. The opening was a rounded, natural mouth. The four chambers and the corridors were eroded by time, not magic or tools. The lights in the cave were her mother’s creations, extracted from the fluorescent skin of deep-sea creatures. They glowed blue, purple, green, and red from orbs that floated throughout the cave, suspended by her mother’s magic. From out of the dancing, multicolored glow of the cave opening, a merman emerged, his eyes darting around nervously. He let out a small scream when he saw Serena.
“Oh, it’s just you,” he said.
Serena recognized him. He wasn’t one of her mother’s regular clients, but he’d come before. He held something wrapped in giant kelp leaves. She gave him a look of disgust and swam past him, not wanting to know what sort of potion or magical relic he had in the package, and absolutely refusing to think about what he’d had to give up to get it. Her mother’s cruel games and hard bargains churned her stomach.
Moira was sitting on her favorite chair in the foyer when Serena entered. It was the preserved husk of an orange sunflower starfish she’d enlarged with magic before drying it out and killing it. Its sixteen limbs stood up on the ground, arching its large, round, velvety back for Moira to rest on. Serena had always thought it looked as though the starfish was arching its back in dreadful, writhing agony. Moira perched atop it, her pitch black tail flipped out in front of her, with all the air and dignity of the queen she so wanted to be. Her long hair, just as black as her tail, whipped around her violently no matter how small the current. It seemed to be alive, and it had always reminded Serena of a roiling hive of sea snakes. A three-pronged crown of purple coral that she’d fashioned for herself (which looked suspiciously like the crown of Queen Amphitrite) sat perched atop her swirling mass of hair. She had the features of a barbaric queen, sharp and aquiline. Hers was a fierce beauty, almost too terrible to look at. She looked like a predator, her strange violet eyes (just a shade darker than her shell top) assessing everything and everyone with voracity. Strange symbols and patterns—Celtic knots, sea flowers, sea serpents, and ancient Atlantian runes— tattooed in squid ink wrapped themselves around her arms and torso, in stark contrast to her milky skin. Staring at them too long made Serena’s eyes hurt. They seemed to move, too, almost vibrating, if she concentrated on them too hard.
In front of Moira was the stone cauldron she’d shaped from a stalagmite with magic. It looked like the top of a jellyfish flipped upside down and rested atop a thin pedestal. Potion ingredients in bottles she’d salvaged from shipwrecks were scattered on the floor against the wall behind her. Only a few were still on the shelves or in the recessed holes in the walls where they were supposed to be. Whatever she’d cooked up for her client had been something big. Serena shuddered to think what he had paid for such a tall order. His darting eyes and nervous scream had told her enough. Perhaps he’d promised the scales of his first born. They were a rare and powerful ingredient Moira was always trying to get her hands on. She had the most luck with foolish mermen who hadn’t even thought about having their firstborn yet. Oh, how they would regret it later. Moira’s contracts were eternally binding, and breaking them was close to impossible and required terrible suffering and usually bloodshed. Of course, she made far le
ss serious deals on a regular basis, otherwise she would not stay in business. Many people flocked to her for simple concoctions like anti-aging potions, talent-granting spells, and healing balms, and chose to ignore the nervous whispers of dark tales about her harsher bargains.
“Where have you been?” said Moira. “I was expecting you an hour ago. I could have used your help with my last client. Surely you don’t like scrubbing floors so much that you stick around after hours doing it for free.”
“Perhaps if you like it that much you could scrub our floors, too,” said Hazel, Serena’s younger sister, appearing from the corridor leading to her bedchamber. Her laugh was shrill and had all the charm of a seagull’s call. When she realized Moira was not laughing along with her, she pouted. “What did you need her help for anyway? I helped you like I always do.”
“What you do can hardly be called helping,” said Moira. “Your magical ability is so limited and so faulty you can hardly call yourself a witch.”
The hurt on Hazel’s face and the way she shrank back from their mother, slightly raising her arms as if to protect herself, made Serena both furious and disgusted. Furious at the pain her mother caused her sister; disgusted at the way Hazel went belly up and took it every time. Hazel looked about as frail as her mental state. She was stick thin. The only curve she had was the slight size discrepancy of the width of her tail meeting her waifish torso. Her hair was the same color as Serena’s, but it looked a shade lighter because it was unhealthy and dull. Serena figured it was the stress of being under Moira’s fins all the time. Her hazel eyes (for which she got her name) and dark green tail were the only colorful things about her. Even her shell top was a bleak black.
The Sea Witch (The Era of Villains Book 1) Page 1