18

IT TAKES ONLY A SPLIT SECOND for Dash to realize exactly what I’ve done. He reaches his partially translucent palm toward me and touches the shimmering wall that I’ve brought down between us.

He stares at me. Then he drops his hand and smiles. His teeth are so white in his brown face, so startling. His mouth moves, but I have no idea what he’s saying.

My heart feels like it’s trying to crawl out of place. I strengthen the wall. More water boils up from the river, thickening the barrier. At least this way I can concentrate on something that isn’t the sour taste of betrayal. I swing my gaze away from Dash, determined not to look at him. I’m a coward. A high-Lammer. Just what Dash thinks all high-Lammers are like. My stomach clenches and I swallow convulsively.

Lils and Nala are wrapped in a cocoon of hair, protected from the dreams. They are caught up in a little bubble of safety, and they neither notice nor heed Dash’s presence. In New Town, it won’t take long for the War-Singers to get to their scriv and shore up their defenses, but until then, the city is going to be a chaos of flames and nightmare visions. People will die—throw themselves from buildings, drown themselves in the silt-brown Casabi. How long before my brother comes down to the source of the nightmares, trying to control his losses? How long will Lils’s magic last before the dreams fade?

Dash has to mark my brother—mark someone—before the sea-witch rises. How is he going to do that after he’s been weakened by the insanity of the nightmare visions? I didn’t think, and now more people are going to suffer. For the first time since running away I am almost eager to see my brother. I scan the crowd hoping to spot him among the screaming faces. Dash should have been on this side, ready to give whatever signal he devised to stop Lils’s nightmares. He must have had some plan in mind for after he’d lured Owen into the open. It was not one he shared with me. I’m a traitor, and I am a fool.

Verrel and Esta are also out there. I can’t do this—even Dash doesn’t deserve my disloyalty.

Unless there’s some way I can find the others, bring Dash back to this side, and keep them safe. I press forward tentatively, but the fragile magic can’t take the strain of my losing focus, and I feel it tear, spilling water across my hand. It drips down my arm. An insect-legged flicker of a memory I had thought was buried worms toward me:

my brother’s face as he locks me in a wardrobe to stop me from following him I’m four he left me there for the afternoon it was only when dinner was served that he remembered to free me smell of feces and urine and the snot-stickiness of my skin the burn of thirst and hunger and over it all the black terror the fear that I would be there forever

Shaking, I step back and take another pinch of scriv even though my fingers are trembling so hard that I almost lose the precious dust. My magic bounds up again, and I knit the dream-wall closed. Finally, I force myself to really look at Dash, trapped there in the nightmares. Through the veil of water everything seems distant and unreal, and I can almost persuade myself that it is truly not happening.

How long before the sea-witch comes? I want to scream.

Dash is sitting on the bridge with his knees drawn up to his face. His eyes are blank, and he doesn’t see me at all. Gris knows what horrors live inside his head. The taste of bile is so thick in my mouth that I have to lean over, clutching at a post, so that I can spit on the ground. My skin is ice-cold. Sweat soaks my clothes. If I really needed to punish Dash, I could have waited for a better time.

And now there’s no way for me to open the wall and drag him back—I’ll be overwhelmed.

And if the wall falls … I glance behind me at the crowd, at their pale, strained faces. I wonder if any of them realize that I’ve purposefully cut Dash off, that this was not part of the deal.

The crowd has been almost eerily silent up until now. From New Town there is nothing—the wall has killed all sound. Even if Dash could pull himself together long enough to speak, he wouldn’t be able to tell them what happened or beg me to bring him back across.

“Oi!” someone yells, and then they begin. Someone’s pointed out that Dash is caught on the wrong side of the wall. They jostle, they shout, and through gritted teeth I say over and over, “It was a mistake.”

But no matter how many times I repeat it I will never make myself believe it. Bodies crush around me, and the air is forced out of my lungs. I send the scriv-magic harder outward and upward, siphoning even more water from the river and strengthening the bubble arching over us. I may be able to do nothing for those I have betrayed, but I can still protect the ones I haven’t.

On the other side of the wall, the smoke is turning thick and black, pouring down the alleyways, winding around the houses. The first wave of people run up against the wall, beating their hands against it, bloodying their faces as they smash their heads over and over, as if this time they will get free. They scratch their fingers raw. They turn on one another like animals. I catch a glimpse of Dash, still curled in on himself, before he is lost, trampled under the maelstrom of flesh and fear. Then the area clears, and he is gone. There is no body there, and I cannot see his face in the crowd. Another mass of people rush up to the wall.

The only two people who remain untouched are Nala and Lils, caught up in their own world. They are pale skin and brown, dark hair and red. A tangled geometry of flesh. Is that love? Is that what love can do? Save you from all the horror the world has to give?

The girls spin, a slow intricate dance between the hordes.

The bridge is soon clotted with gore, the cobblestones gleaming with blood. The sky is no longer blue, but orange and black from the fires, and I see people fall from buildings, their bodies nothing more than flaming cinders.

I realize I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek when I taste blood in my mouth. How long before the Houses rally themselves, rise against this attack? How long before the nightmares caught in Lils’s hair are all gone?

Still no sign of Owen. What made Dash think that my brother would come down to the docks and waste magic on protecting the warehouse servants? He should have known better.

My face stings, and I take more scriv.

When the sea-witch finally rises from the Casabi—woken by boggert-deaths and drawn to the shore by the concentration of terror and blood—I stand still. Hold the wall. Her hair is Red Death, her skin and flesh spume and spray.

I witness.

It is the very least I can do.

She walks out of the mingled waters of the river and the ocean tracking black kelp behind her.

Then she is gone, into the nightmares.

*   *   *

MY SCRIV-MAGIC IS FADING. I haven’t moved. I’m as parched and as dry as if I had just crawled across the red desert outside of MallenIve. The wind, finally able to penetrate the fragile bubble of magic, begins to tug at my hair.

I can feel, just faintly, other walls that have sprung up all over Pelimburg as the House War-Singers have protected their own as best they can. I wonder if it will be enough to protect them from Dash’s vengeance. Perhaps. But what little I saw of the violence unleashed by the nightmares does not fill me with much hope for my fellow high-Lammers.

My brother, my mother. Are they safe or is Owen already dead?

The water drops with a sudden crash as the last of my scriv runs out. Brine sloshes across the Levelling Bridge, soaking the people, the bodies, rinsing blood from the wounded and the dead.

I can’t bring myself to care. Inside me is a pit of blackness and it sucks at every emotion that tries to flutter upward.

Nala and Lils break apart, blinking. Nala drops the barest brush of a kiss against Lils’s forehead before gently turning her around and braiding up the mass of dark hair. Moans carry faintly on the breeze coming down the mountain, and the smell of burned flesh, wood, and something sickeningly sweet is carried with it.

My hand is on my mouth. I don’t remember moving it there. The skin is dry, flaked with the ash that is falling faint as a fine rain.

The sound is back. I’m going to be drowned by the screams and panic. I’m free though, I tell myself, I’m free to go look for the others among the bodies. I need to find Dash and see what damage the sea-witch has done.

My legs ache but I don’t let that stop me. I walk straight past the two girls, stepping over the bodies nearest me, and then pick my way through the worst of the slick filth on the ground. No matter where I look, there is no sign of a familiar face. Black kelp ribbons about the bodies, and here and there the eyes of the dead are plucked out, filled with sand and broken shells. This is the way she came. These are her dead. I follow the trail of sea-witch-tainted bodies, hoping that they will become fewer, that the trail will end. Even if that means finding my brother’s corpse.

It does not. All around me people gibber, moan. They’ve seen her walking, spreading the Red Death inland, although the Hobs and Lammers who were caught on this side of the bridge have yet to realize that she is not merely another nightmare.

I walk until I can’t take a single step more and then sit down on a low stone curb and cradle my head in my hands. My tongue feels thick and huge.

So I don’t see him, don’t hear him until his boots are right next to mine and he says “Felicita” in a tone that is heavy with exhaustion and guilt.

I raise my head, dragging my gaze away from those polished black boots, gray now with ash and muck, and up to Jannik’s drawn face. His cheeks are thinner. He looks older. His pale skin is marred by red streaks.

He crouches. Balances his hands on his knees. “What are you doing here?”

“And I should ask you the same thing.” My words have no bite to them, even though I clearly remember Dash telling Jannik to stay in Old Town.

“I’m doing what I can.” He rocks a little, exhaustion almost overwhelming him. “Everyone is. Even my mother stepped out of our house to do what she was able.”

Around us, people are passing, some carrying the injured, the dead. Others already with wood and stone in their hands to shore up the worst of the crumbling buildings.

“The bridge and the docks were hardest hit,” he says. “Seems the dream-fever didn’t reach all the way to the Tooth.” His eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them. “So certain Houses suffered hardly at all.”

He doesn’t know that my brother is a marked man.

“Good for them,” I say dully. “Wait.” I stare into those indigo-dark eyes and he flicks the membrane down, hiding his thoughts. “How do you know it was dream-fever? You were on our side of the river. There was no way for you to feel that.”

“People are talking about it.” But there’s something there in his face that even his slicked-over eyes can’t hide. Pain and suffering.

I stand. He doesn’t. We stare at each other, and I know what he’s keeping from me. “I need to find Dash.”

“And you think I know where he is.” Jannik looks at his hands instead of my face.

I remember something he told me last night, and the pieces click, fall into place. Jannik and Dash, and the things Jannik has been carefully not telling me. Why his mother was so determined he stop feeding off one particular Hob. “I know that you do.” I bend down to touch his face so that he cannot lie to me by looking away.

His third lids are still down, and the day’s sunlight has left a fine blistered rash over his skin. Jannik draws a deep shuddering breath. “Follow me.”

Together we make our way back toward the riverside warehouses, and this time I cannot pretend that there are fewer bodies. The sea-witch is taking them indiscriminately—old and young, Hob and Lammer. Dash has failed. All around us, Hobs are working to help who they can. The Lammers too, and among them the pale bats. We head down to one of the oldest warehouses, and I pull my shawl closer about my head and keep my neck bent. There are servants here who might recognize me. Quickly, Jannik and I thread through the maze of buildings till we find a long-abandoned storage facility, a relic of better years.

Under the fading red light of the last sun, the leaping dolphins of my House crest glint feebly from beneath decades of black grime. It’s been many years since anyone used this place. The door is old wood, heavy and splintered and tacky. Someone has been here. There are footprints in the dirt.

I don’t want to go in.

“Come on,” Jannik says, and tugs at my hand. I’m glad of his presence, of the comforting familiarity of my poet mathematician. No. It’s the magic that’s comforting, the subtle play of his bat-nature through my palm, tingling my arms, and making the hairs on my body prickle.

I shake my head. Truth can wait for another day.

We go farther into the darkness, all the way to the back, where I see a familiar figure shining in the gloom. My heart leaps.

I let go of Jannik’s hand and run forward.

Ilven turns to me, looking over her shoulder through a fringe of hair so pale it gleams like surf. I pause in my headlong flight.

“Ilven?”

Her eyes are silvered coins, blank and expressionless. Although she’s ghost faint, there is color in her cheeks. She’s fed. And I know that Dash is gone. I stand, waiting for the boggert to come closer. She drifts toward me, her feet leaving the sandy floor untroubled. One eyebrow is arched in a question. It is a familiar look, and it’s this, more than anything else, that makes me bite at my lip in an effort to stop the tears that are stinging the corners of my eyes.

“It’s me,” I say. “I know why you did it.” Her leap from the cliff has plagued me, left me feeling guilty every night. “I used to think I should never have left without you, that I should have waited.” My voice trembles. “And then I’d—I’d have seen you, stopped you.”

The boggert is a breath away from me, and she pauses, hovering.

“But that’s not true, is it?”

“Felicita.” Jannik’s voice is soft, warning. “Step away from her.”

“Maybe I could have saved you once. Twice, even.” I want to reach up and brush back a lock of pale hair that has fallen over her face, but I hold my arms still. “In the end, we make our choices on our own. And no matter how stupid they are, we have to live—or die—with what we’ve done. Sometimes choosing our moment of death is the only freedom we have left.”

The boggert blinks, and for an instant I see Ilven’s blue eyes, a flash of summer.

“And I’ve no right to try to save you from that.”

She’s barely there, her body misted and irregular. She’s dissipating, dissolving into nothingness. “No,” she says, and I know that she has remembered. “Goodbye, Felicita,” the boggert says in Ilven’s cotton-soft voice. She has remembered that she’s dead, and I can feel the change that ripples through her and then she’s gone and all that is left is the remains of her last victim.

Sitting with his back to the wall and his knees drawn up against his chest is Dash.

Like Rin, like the other two corpses that were found, he is ghostly, barely there. He manages a weak smile at my approach.

We must have interrupted Ilven—no, the boggert—before she finished feeding.

“Hello,” he says.

It’s so incongruous that I stare at him. “Hello?” I say after a few moments. “Hello?” After everything that happened and what we did to each other, he greets me like he’s just stepped out for a few hours and now he’s back.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” he says, and coughs. “Although you can believe I’ve a choice few words stored up.”

“I had to stop you,” I say. “I had to make you see.”

“And what good did it do?”

I say nothing. Dash opens one clenched hand and drops Ilven’s hairpin on the ground between us. The scream is trying to come out. It can’t. My fingers shake as I scoop the Gris-damned thing up and hold it tight. I want it to prick me, to mark me, and make this whole thing over. Only I’m too much of a coward.

“It’s always easier when someone else makes the hard choices. Right, love?”

“I can’t.” I choke the words out.

“Well it ain’t going to be me. You saw to that, you silly flick.”

“Dash,” says Jannik from behind me, “I shouldn’t be feeling this death.”

“Oh, but you are.” He grins. A sickly thing, with no real humor to it. “Sit down,” he says. The vampire walks past me and obeys. “You can sit on the other side,” Dash says to me, and pats the empty space next to him.

Exhausted, too tired to argue with him, I fold my skirt over my legs and sit down. My skin crawls at the strange texture of his body against my arm.

“Why?” asks Jannik. “Why am I feeling you die?”

“You should know, better’n me anyway.”

The bat shakes his head. “I fed off you, that’s it—it means nothing.”

Dash tilts his head back and takes a rough breath. “So why did your dear mother insist that you stop feeding off me? There are reasons for your stupid laws.”

“Shut up,” Jannik says, but there’s no strength to it.

“You’re not going to die,” Dash says. His voice is getting weaker. “I don’t think we’re that far gone.”

“Well I’m so relieved now I could vomit. Thank you for clearing up that little worry.” Jannik’s voice is thick. I glance past Dash. The vampire’s white eyelids are down, and he stares ahead, not moving his face to look at either of us.

“What do you want us to do?” I whisper.

Dash sighs. “There’s nothing to be done. I just didn’t want to die alone.” He takes a sharp breath, almost as if he is in pain.

He reaches out suddenly and takes both our hands in his. The touch of his icy flesh makes me start, makes me try to jerk my hand away, but I still myself and accept that this is my apology. And his. Silently, I squeeze his hand once in reassurance.

“You changed things,” I tell him softly.

“Did I now? So it was worth it, was it?”

I think of the dead, of the wounded, of Dash’s own death waiting for him. The thing that I still have to do. I am filled with an ache so vast that it strangles me. “No.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” Then he falls into silence.

We sit together, the three of us, and pass vigil in the dusk.

The sun has just set when I hear Dash’s breathing change. I swing my head up from where I’ve rested it against the wall, and I can just make out the dark gray shadow through Dash: Jannik.

The bat is sitting with his head bowed and his knees drawn up in a mirror of Dash’s pose. We are all still holding hands: me on Dash’s right, Jannik on his left.

I squeeze again, harder this time, and Dash laughs a soft moth-laugh that flutters against my cheeks and makes me too scared to cry in case I wash it away.

After that, he doesn’t breathe again.

Jannik pulls his hand free and folds his arms over his head. After a moment, I realize his shoulders are shaking, and he’s making a choked noise.

Do bats cry? Do they feel like we do? I brush the back of one hand across my eyes and stand, careful not to touch the jellied corpse next to me. “We have to go.”

Jannik doesn’t look up or take his arms from over his head. “Go where?’ His words are muffled. “Are you planning on flying us home?”

“We can walk—”

A hysterical laugh escapes him. “I am not fucking walking anywhere,” he says.

“Have you suddenly gone lame?” Grief makes me hard and angry, hating myself and him for feeling anything, especially when I still have Dash’s sentence hanging over me, his final gift to my House.

Jannik lowers his arms and looks up. There is blood smeared across his face. “No,” he says. “But his death has near killed me.” He makes a hiccuping sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

“What are you talking about?”

The bat leans his head back and stares at the shadowed ceiling. “I’m talking about my own stupidity. I fed too much from one donor, and ended up becoming too … attached.”

There’s something he’s not telling me. I wait.

“I’m not going anywhere unless I feed again,” he says, still carefully not looking at me.

Anger flares sharply. “You’re—no.” I cross my arms over my chest. “You’re lying,” I say. “I’m not fooled.”

Jannik twists his head and stares at me with his awful blood-covered face, his eyes white blanks in dark sockets. His cheeks look pinched, thin. “Why would I choose now to lie to you?” he says, and I see the tips of his fangs. “Not everything in this world revolves around you, high-Lammer.”

He’s right. I sink to my knees. “Feed? Like you did with—” I glance nervously at the corpse. There is nothing of Dash left in it. “What happens if you don’t?”

“For all that Dash was so certain that his death wouldn’t kill me, it may just do so in the end.” He’s matter-of-fact, bitter. I reach out and touch his hand.

“I—I can’t do it.”

“Then go away,” he says dully.

I stay where I am, still crouched before him, still touching his wrist with my fingertips. I could go now, leave Jannik here, find Owen, and mark him. Dash couldn’t destroy us on his own. And now it’s up to me. I can’t leave the sea-witch to run through Pelimburg unchecked, not when I know how to stop her. If I could lecture a boggert about choice and death, then I can damn well face up to it myself. I will wear my guilt, and I will make my choices.

Me or Owen. It should be easy. Except that it isn’t.

I don’t want to do it alone.

“No.” My voice is a bell shiver, a high tone. “Do what you have to.” Even as I say it, fear and revulsion twine in my stomach: two snakes, twisting and coiling over each other.

“You’re certain?”

“No,” I say. “Quickly, before I change my mind.” It comes out of me in a rushing breath, too fast and frightened. I shove my hand out, my wrist toward his face, and look away.

One breath. Two. My arm is shaking. Is he never going to do it?

Then I feel warmth on my skin as he takes my wrist, pulls it closer. The tingle of magic is almost overwhelmed by the hammer of my heart, the strange bellow wheeze of my lungs. “Shh,” he says, and sinks needle-fangs into the raised blue vein. My arm throbs.

We stay like this—a tableau vivant—for more breaths than I can count. To keep myself calm I imagine that the air filling my lungs is red, then orange and yellow. I work through the rainbow and each breath is filled with clean vibrant color, and I send that brightness curling through my body, stretching out to the very limits of every limb, and then I breathe it out again, fouled, faded, and grayed, taking away with it all my fear. My thighs begin to ache, the strained muscles cramping, and I breathe through that too.

He lets me go, and I tumble backward, dizzy and emptied.

The sand bites into my palms, scraping them raw.

“Here,” says Jannik. His voice is back to normal again. He’s untying his olive necktie. “Hold out your hand.”

I obey, and he carefully binds the wounds on my wrist. I don’t really want to look, though I do anyway. There are two neat punctures, and the blood wells up in thick dark rivulets, running in ticklish streams down my arm to drip and puddle in the sand and dust.

The pale skin of his hands is marred with a fine red rash. The tiny blisters spread even as I watch.

“Thank you,” he says very softly as he pulls the binding tight.

I swallow and nod.

“What about this?” I raise one hand almost to his cheek, where more of the blisters are spreading fast.

He shakes his head. “Scriv in your blood.” He stares down at his fingers, flexing them and watching the raised blisters burst. “It will pass.” His voice is tight, controlled, and I wonder if they burn. Jannik helps me to my feet. All I want to do is get out of here. I’m shaky and weak.

“Wait.”

He crouches and slips his arms under Dash’s body, easily lifting him. The boggert drained her final victim well, and it seems to me that he is nothing, an empty husk that she has left behind.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking him to Whelk Street.”

“We’ll come back for him,” I say. “Jannik, please, there’s something I have to do. Something—I can’t do it alone. Please.”

And he seems to understand. He sets the corpse back on the ground and crouches there for a moment to straighten Dash’s collar.

I want to point out that Dash will never care now, but I bite the words down and wait.

He stands, offers me his arm. “Where do we need to go?”

And because I know my brother far better than Dash ever did, I know that we will not find Owen by the docks, looking over the remains of his burning wherries and warehouses. He will be with his wife, with the little unborn Pelim heir.

*   *   *

I DON’T THINK OF OWEN as we walk through the twilight to the Pelim residences in New Town. I think of the dead, I think of the sea-witch walking through Pelimburg and claiming our people. I picture the faces of Hoblings I have never met. Esta’s brother, Rin, a gelatinous mess of a body, sacrificed to Dash’s cause. I picture the Whelk Streeters. I even manage a little pity for Dash.

Owen opens the door himself, something I did not expect, and the act throws me off course. I stand on his doorstep, one hand in Jannik’s, and I can think of nothing to say or do.

“What is it?” he snaps. “I’ve no time for this. Go find some other House to beg from.”

“Wait,” I say, before Owen can close the door. “I—”

He frowns, recognition warring with disbelief. I don’t give him time to say anything, just thrust out my hand, the little hairpin held tight, and stab it into his cheek.

It clatters onto the stones between us, and all that shows of my ill-timed attack is a meager kitten-scratch below his right eye.

It’s enough.

The air booms, and I feel the magic take. It’s as if all the winds have changed direction at once, drawing the sea-witch here. My skin crawls and sweat prickles up my spine between my shoulder blades. She’s coming.

“What have you done?” Owen whispers. It’s a pointless question—any War-Singer worth his scriv can taste what’s happened here, and Hob fancy or not, Owen knows as well as I do that there is a sea-witch walking through Pelimburg and that she is no longer aimless.

The drag of her tidal magic claws against us both. Perhaps she senses that I am bound to Owen by blood, perhaps she is too wild and blind and uncontrolled an entity to understand who her true target is.

She could take me instead.

This realization comes to Owen at the same time. I see the knowledge light up in his eyes, and he lunges forward to grab at my collar. “Oh no you don’t,” he says.

I try to jerk out of his grasp and the fabric tears, but he catches at my arm and pulls me closer to him. The blood on his face is running thicker now, dripping down his chin. I did not think I had struck him so deep.

Jannik grabs at Owen’s wrist and tries to pry the two of us apart, but Owen has always been strong, even without scriv, and Jannik is weary from a day of sun and the poison of the scriv in my blood. Neither of us makes a good warrior.

And perhaps it’s only fair, after all. What made me think I was more worthy of life? I’m just a runaway girl. Owen has a family, he carries our name forward. Who did I think I was?

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, and stop struggling.

He looks at me in disbelief, then releases his hold. I drop to the stone steps, bruising my knees. The hairpin lies at my fingers, glinting like a green eye. Accusing. I’m no better than Dash, it says. I’m no better than Owen, than all the men who have tried to manipulate me into doing their dirty work or my so-called duty. And I am so tired of men always deciding my path.

Fingers shaking, I pull the hairpin toward my knee. It scrapes along the stone. Somehow, I make myself pick it up. It feels heavier than it should, weighed down with all the things that have been laid upon it—such burdens of death it has carried. So what’s one more?

I jab the pin down into my thigh and it bites deep. The pain is less than I expected. When I can make my fingers move again, I let the hairpin go and look up at my brother. His face is white, almost as pale as Jannik’s. They’re both staring at me.

“I’ll wait here,” I say, and the words seem to drift out of my mouth, puffing up. The world is spinning around me, and I place my hands against the ground and try to keep myself from flying off into the skies. “You should go.”

The magic of the sea-witch is drawing closer, smothering the air. It’s like a huge wet blanket has dropped over the city. There are no stars above us, no clouds, just the implacable weight of her approach. “She’ll take me.” I’m sure of it, and it feels good and right. Guilt I barely knew I had lifts from me, and I am released.

Owen doesn’t move.

The street goes black.

She’s here.

“Run,” I say, my voice breaking. I don’t understand why he won’t leave. I’ve given him a chance. No matter how small it is, he should take it. After all, I’m already dead.

“No.”

“Felicita, this is madness.” Jannik kneels down to try to force me to rise. “You marked him first, it’s not going to matter what you do now.”

I pull my wrist out of his hand, shaking myself free. “You’re wrong, and if Owen would just listen to me for once in his life—”

The witch is upon us. The air is thick with the smell of iodine, of rotten fish, of the peculiar stink of seals and seaweed. I turn my head, determined to face her.

She’s a swirling black mass, vaguely Lammic in shape, and colors slide under her liquid skin—sea colors: greens and reds and grays. There is a shimmer to her, and her eyes are fish scales. She’s wreathed in dark brown and orange kelp, and strands of fine red weed hang from the arm she reaches out to me.

Yes.

I’ve tricked her. I’m closer to her than Owen, and my blood is enough to make her think I’m the sacrifice.

Then she reaches past me and Owen is consumed.

There is no breath in me to scream. The winds that have been tugging me go still, and the veil drops from the sky, revealing again the stars and the grinning moon.

The weight that was pressing down on Pelimburg—all that wild magic—vanishes. I look to where my brother was standing just seconds ago, and there is nothing there to indicate that he ever existed. They are both gone. She has returned to the sea with her sacrifice.

In a daze, I allow Jannik to help me to my feet. The hairpin is still sticking from my thigh like a tiny dagger, and I pull it out viciously, wanting it to hurt me more.

“She’s gone,” Jannik says. “There will be no more deaths.”

And that, at least, is true.

I sob once, then with Jannik’s hand still in mine, I turn and run away from what I have done this day. A strange excitement is burning through me, and it seems all my earlier tiredness is gone, replaced now by this madness. We run through Pelimburg breathlessly. I’ve saved them, all of them. I pretend that I did not really kill my brother in order to do it.

When we stop, panting, I do not even know where we are.

“We—” Jannik huffs, tries to catch his breath. “What do we do now?”

“Jannik?”

He raises an eyebrow.

“What would you do to change your future?”

“We’ve discussed it. There’s nothing I can do. My mother is free to do with me as she wants.”

“Like mine was with me?”

He stays silent.

Owen’s death has made me realize one thing. No matter what the results, it is my choices that define me. And I will fight for them, even when it seems that failure is inevitable. Perhaps most especially then. Jannik is staring at me, waiting for me to talk, and so I make my first choice as Felicita, returned. “Then what if I could give you a huntsman’s gambit?”

“Explain.”

I take a deep breath and plunge into a strange new world, one where I awkwardly knit together the holes I’ve ripped. I talk fast, hoping to make him see the sense of this partnership I propose, despite how bizarre it must sound. At least he listens, saying nothing, although his face gets more and more serious as I speak.

Afterward he says, “It’s not much of an offer.”

“It’s better than what you have here!”

“Is it really?” he says. “Just what does either of us gain in this scheme of yours?”

“Freedom.”

“A strange sort of freedom.”

“Better than none at all.”

That makes him smile, just a quick flash of fangs.

“Well,” he says, “I believe that our bargain is settled.”