Sea Witch Rising

by Sarah Henning

  “Pearls, then,” I say, gesturing to the one hung by golden thread at my throat. All of us—including our mother and half sisters—have them, a favorite gift from Oma Ragn. “We can easily obtain a large number of pearls in a matter of hours.”

  A flicker of disgust moves across the sea witch’s face. “Definitely not pearls.”

  My confidence begins to slip. Inside the safety of my rib cage, my heart stutters and teeters. “I returned with the ríkifjor. We refuse to make the same deal our sister did—you shall not make our entire generation voiceless. We’ve brought you items of great value that could buy you freedoms you haven’t seen in decades,” I say, frustration and exhaustion making my voice thick, yet higher than I’d like. I can’t sob in front of this woman. In front of my sisters. I look her dead in the eye. “What will be enough for you?”

  The sea witch’s answer is immediate. And I wonder if she always knew I would return with my sisters, just like she knew I would come in the first place.

  “It’s not much that I require, and it means more to me than it does to you.” She could say the same thing about our voices, so I do not find comfort in this statement, clamping my lips shut, waiting impatiently for her to go on. “All I want is the same thing from each of you: your hair.”

  At this, Eydis’s breath catches. “Our hair? But why our hair—it’s not precious; it’ll grow back. You could magic it back.”

  The sea witch’s face remains placid—no reaction. Simply a tilt of her head. She’s nearly the definition of bored, settling on a throne of writhing black.

  “That’s exactly right; it is of no consequence to you. Hair grows. But that is what I request for what you want me to do.”

  This can’t be right. It can’t be. From all of us? Something that isn’t precious, endangered, or rare?

  This has to be a trap. A trick. Wrong.

  The sea witch just watches us, no concern crossing her face or posture, as she waits to be paid.

  Unease growing in my belly and in my teetering heart, I nod, telling myself it’s not what she wants; it’s what she needs for the antidote. Maybe she needs a piece of us to return our missing piece.

  The witch seems to sense the tide turning her way. She extends a hand to me. “Come then, let us take your hair.”

  One by one, the witch seats us on a sandstone block next to her cauldron and, using a plain knife fashioned of razor-thin coral, slices our hair up to our chins. Eydis sits first, and, without planning it, we go in birth order. Ola next. Then Signy. Then me. Every lock is tossed without a second glance into the cauldron.

  When she’s finished, I straighten, nose to nose with the sea witch, awaiting our antidote. The murky water feels cool against my neck, and I tell myself it’s simply a new sensation and not my nerves settling in. We’ve done our part; now she will do hers and then we’ll save Alia from her quest.

  “Very good then, my girls. You’ll have what you need, along with instructions as to what must be done.”

  I expect the sea witch to return to her cave, rifle around, and come back to us with another little glass bottle filled with a shimmering liquid.

  Instead, the witch hands me the knife she used to cut our hair. I stare at it, the words dying in my mouth. The witch brings a silky tentacle to my chin and tips my head up so that I can do nothing but stare into her dark blue eyes.

  “Find your sister at the waterside and give her this knife. If she does not gain the boy’s love in return by the end of her fourth full day on land, she must plunge this knife into his heart, letting the blood drip upon her feet. When his life-force is gone and his blood has anointed her new body, she will be human for the remainder of her days.”

  “She can’t come back to us?” Eydis asks. “She can no longer be a mermaid?”

  The witch’s voice is level and clear. It’s a dagger to each of our hearts. “Oh no. Never. That isn’t how the magic works.”

  No. That’s not right. The words tumble out as I try to grab a breath.

  “But Queen Mette—”

  “Queen Mette’s magic was something else altogether—the joining of this world’s magic with the magic above.”

  She says it like it’s a fact. That Father’s first queen was able to achieve something we can’t. My guts sour and pucker. I glare at the knife in my palm, wondering whether, if I murder this witch right now, my sister will automatically sprout fins and be called home. The weapon is sharp enough to slice a finger straight through with barely any pressure. There’s definitely magic in it, but it isn’t what we asked for.

  What’s more—it won’t work.

  Alia’s face on the balcony when I suggested this as an option flashes through my mind. I know my sister, stubborn and romantic to the core. She won’t murder Niklas under any circumstance, even if it means she’ll rot from the inside out.

  This was supposed to be an antidote—an alternative to get her home.

  “But that describes your magic too,” I say, lobbing the sea witch’s logic back to her. Reminding her of who she was. I move from my seat to my full height, daring to bear down on this witch, reclined on her stupid tentacles. “Which means you have the antidote. You have what Mette had. We kept our end of the deal. This isn’t an antidote; it’s a murder weapon. We agreed on the antidote.”

  The witch straightens herself to her full length, giving me a taste of my own medicine, staring down her nose at me. Her presence is more than her frame—the entire cove seems to join her in staring me down, the weight of it all pressing into me. On all sides, her strange trees seem to curve inward, their skeletal limbs reaching out for me, my sisters, our anger.

  “You know nothing of my power. And it was you who said the word antidote, Runa. I did not,” the sea witch says. “I told you I’d give you what you need. And what you need is this knife.”

  7

  Evie

  OUR CONVERSATION IS OVER, AND THE MERMAIDS swim away, their new chin-length hair streaming lightly behind as they navigate my polypi forest. But our visit is not over. I can feel it from the tip of my tentacles to the very ends of my curls.

  “Why do you need their hair?” Anna asks.

  “You’ll see,” I say, hoping that will stop the questions. The Anna I knew wasn’t full of questions, but that seems to be who she’s become since I gave her a voice. I suppose if I’d been left as a silent polypus, I’d have many too.

  “You’re not . . . you wouldn’t . . . you can’t. If you leave us, we’ll be turned to rubble. Father—the sea king—he’ll decimate your lair.”

  “I can’t leave unless he frees me, Anna,” I say, fishing the hair out of the cauldron before tying it all together with twine. Once wrapped, I tuck it into the remaining ríkifjor blooms, ensuring that it’s snug and hidden. “No spell of mine will change that.”

  “That doesn’t mean you aren’t preparing to leave. Why else would you need that hair? I know you’re not going to use it to bring me back.”

  “Létta.”

  I silence her not a moment too soon. Runa has returned. I can only hope she believes she’s imagined her twin’s voice.

  Runa has my knife clutched carefully, tightly between both palms before her chest, like she’s praying. The confidence has faded from her features, but here she is again. Unsatisfied with the bargain. She looks to me, eyes shining, and I know before she speaks that her voice will be the weakest I’ve heard it.

  “She won’t,” Runa says, bottom lip rosy and trembling, her voice barely loud enough to be heard over the near-stagnant tide of my home. “She’s loved him since the moment she first saw him last year. She’s the only reason he didn’t die in that storm this summer. She wouldn’t let him die then, and she won’t kill him now . . . even if means her death.”

  My breath catches. “This summer?”

  The girl nods. I knew Alia had lied about the boy already loving her; she all but admitted it, but I at least thought the details of her story were true. I cock a single brow and ask a question that�
�s already been answered in the pit of my stomach. “And I don’t suppose she’s had a statue of him in her garden since she was ten?”

  Runa glances down at the knife in her hands and then back to me. “Alia does have a statue, but only for the past few months. She pulled it from the wreckage and dragged it over to her garden like some sort of altar.”

  I inhale deeply, closing my eyes. Beneath me, my body becomes perfectly still, tentacles like cut stone. Even my uncut curls feel weighed down by whatever is moving through my belly. Anger and revulsion—both directed at myself, not the little mermaid. I should’ve known the girl was trying to manipulate me. I’ve had sixty-six years on this earth to know better.

  Finally, after a long moment, I open my eyes. “Alia told me she saved him a year ago, on the first night she saw him. She told me she’d had a statue of his likeness in her garden since age ten. And she told me that when she left him on the beach, he was found by a girl—one he believes rescued him, and therefore loves. She said she’d watched that love for a year.”

  Runa’s lips drop open, color coming again to her cheeks, the fierceness in her eyes returning.

  “That story isn’t correct—he’s marrying a girl from somewhere else. But”—her voice is trembling along with everything else—“if you knew all that and what she had to do in four days—why on earth did you say yes? Why on earth did you send her up there knowing she’d fail? That she’d die?”

  Because I believed her love was worth it.

  Because I saw myself in her. And his grandfather in him.

  Because I still believe in happy endings, even when I’m a nightmare.

  Runa is staring at me, and I wonder if she can see it in my face—the girl behind the years. The one who gave herself for Nik more than once and who would do it again.

  “I thought her heart had had enough,” I say, and now my words are weak and threaded with all the exhaustion I don’t have the strength to hide. “I thought that she deserved a chance at love.”

  “A chance?” Runa advances on me, what’s left of her curls swirling around her like a lion’s mane. “You heard all that, with all your fabled wisdom and reputation, and you knew she didn’t have a chance.”

  “None of us knows anything for sure, Little Runa. But your sister was resolute. She sought me out, willing to fight for something she believed in. Whether she wins that fight or not, it wasn’t my place to tell her she shouldn’t try.” I clench my teeth, my fists, my tentacles. “Love is worth suffering and sacrifice if it’s true.”

  “Love is worth nothing to a life if you aren’t around to live it!” Her face is screaming at me: Why can’t you see this? Haven’t you lived long enough, suffered long enough, to see that death is permanent? Haven’t you lived long enough, suffered enough, to see that death is death? “Alia should’ve been here for three hundred more years. How many times could she have loved in all those decades and not paid so dearly?”

  Runa is heaving now, the knife deadly in her grip. I’m not afraid of her, but suddenly I am afraid for her.

  “You don’t believe in love, do you?” I ask.

  Her fingers clench white-tight around the knife. “I love my sister.”

  “Runa,” I say, wanting very much to lay a calm hand on her heaving shoulders, though it won’t help dull the abandonment she feels. “If you truly love her, the best you can do is give her that knife and accept her choice.”

  “No. I won’t accept that. I gave you my father’s flowers, endangering him and me in the process. We gave you our hair—and you didn’t even use it for anything.” Runa raises the blade. “And now I have a knife but a sister who would die before wielding it on the only damn Øldenburg available.”

  The mermaid isn’t done. She’s pausing to make sure it sinks in for me. Everything she’s lost, laid out plain.

  “I only have one more thing to give you, and if you don’t take it right now, you’ll find out how talented I really am.” Her nostrils flare, and she advances on me, knife out. “Change me. Change me and I’ll do it. I’ll kill the boy if it means she’ll be saved.”

  The girl’s amber eyes bore into my face, her shoulders and chest heaving.

  I truly believe she will kill the boy for her sister to live.

  I am both impressed and completely heartbroken over this. No matter what she may think of me, my motives were pure in sending her sister above. I firmly believe my heart was in the right place when I gave Alia legs. Though now I realize I shouldn’t have worried as much about her lying on land as lying to me, though either way her manipulation may be Nik’s grandson’s undoing. Somehow, I wish Niklas were anyone else. Maybe he is—maybe the little mermaid told me one more lie to get her way, knowing my history with his family and how I loved Nik.

  “You’ve seen this boy above, and yet you will do it?”

  Runa nods, fury hot in the set of her shoulders. “Oh, I saw him. He acts like she’s a prize pet. Something shiny he found on the beach. A nice complement to his stupid sapphire crown or dumb red ring.”

  My breath catches. “Red ring?”

  “Yes, it’s not rubies or garnets but something else. He rubs it like a two-bit moon play villain.”

  I work to keep my face plain, though at my back I can feel Anna yearning to scream. When Nik was alive, he would visit often. He’d dip the toes of his oxblood boots in the water, rear end in the dry gray sand, and tell me about his life. Within a year of my absence, he told me how a maid had found a red crystal rock in the old dresses I’d left at the castle the night that my time above ended. It was the stone the sea had given me when I practiced my first exchange spell—Annemette’s life for what the sea had already claimed. He remembered me wearing that dress when he’d spotted me while readying Iker’s boat for the Celebration of the Sea.

  My heart lurches for all the things I would’ve done differently that morning on the dock. I should’ve kissed Nik when he brushed a curl from my cheeks, his fingers lingering long enough that we both turned nearly as red as the stone in my pocket. The stone that Nik fashioned into a ring, that now sits atop his grandson’s finger.

  “What else do you know about him?” I ask the girl.

  I’m worried I’ve gone too far and that her frustration won’t stand it, but Runa bites her lip, her interaction above running through her mind. Though she’s thinking hard, I find it difficult to believe she’s forming a lie. She badly wants to save her sister, and it’s enough to keep her honest. It wouldn’t do to exaggerate.

  “These other boys, they were talking about something called a U-boat.”

  My heart stops. U-boat? It had been invented when I was a girl—it wasn’t common, but Father had done his research on them for King Asger, believing he might be able to better spot whales while working in tandem with them.

  They weren’t widespread then, but now, with time and improvements in technology? They might be. That possibility looks much different to me from my vantage point under the sea. The danger they might pose to the merpeople is great.

  “They’re ships that can stay underwater for weeks at a time,” I say, my memory shooting back to drawings Father got from a sailor near the mouth of the Rhine in the North Sea. Runa startles. “Yes, what you’re thinking is correct—they’d be extremely dangerous to your people in the water.” A shock of realization goes through me. “And the kingdom is building U-boats for the war effort?”

  Havnestad always put its people to work on boats in times of famine. Times of war may be no different.

  The girl nods. “All of Denmark, including Havnestad, is officially neutral, though boys in the southern regions are close enough to Germany that they’re being conscripted. So, Havnestad—all of Denmark, really—is in the war, whether it wants to be or not.”

  Boys, stolen for war. They’re just bodies. Bodies upon bodies. I don’t think it would be much of a stretch to believe Niklas or any other ruler losing civilians to a foreign power would want to make sure that power succeeds.

  “Nik
las is king of Havnestad now, not simply a prince.” More news to me—news that would explain his impending marriage. “So, he would have to approve these U-boats—I don’t know how it works above, exactly, but here Father would have a say on anything that could be a potential pain—or profit.”

  Profit. In war? I can’t reconcile this thought with my Nik. Though his grandson is not the boy I loved. “And you believe he could be making a profit?”

  “Why else would he help without declaring war himself?” she says, anger flaring, though it’s not for me. “He’s probably even making a profit on the mines he’s set in the waters.”

  I know all about the mines. They go off daily outside my lair, a sign of what rages above.

  Runa shakes her head. “They’re meant for enemy ships, but they’re dangerous to all of us down here. There’s something unsettling to me about a man who would place live bombs in the sea without a care for who or what might detonate them.”

  “And your people have died from this practice.”

  “Not yet, but there have been injuries. Whales, sharks, and fish from the smallest to the greatest have been killed. If a ship explodes, the projectiles can wipe out anyone or anything in their wake.” She takes a shaky breath. “It’s bad enough already, and who’s to say how long the war will last?”

  The meaning of all of it piles between us, shadows dancing in the almost-dawn. In some ways I’m protected here in my prison, protected from the outside by buoys Nik erected long ago, my cove off limits to anyone who would want to wade out into the black tide. They do toss Sankt Hans Aften dolls into my waters each year though. Not everyone, of course. Only those who believe the tale of the witch, the prince, and the spell that plucked him from the brink of death.

  The mermaid stares at me. “Let me do it. Help me save her. Change me.” She dares to grab my hand in the one that doesn’t hold the knife. “Please, please. Please let me make this right. I can’t lose Alia.”

  Something Tante Hansa once told me breaks loose from the memories of old, falling into the forefront of my mind.