Lina
Scores of candles had strange shadows dancing across the walls of the book-lined study. Together with the flickering flames, they kept Lina company. She tapped a finger on the spine of each book as she tried to decide which might help, which of the countless grimoires might hold an answer. The only sounds in the room were that and her breathing, a distant but steady plink-plink-plink of water dripping, and a sudden muffled shuffling that might have been someone’s shoes marching across the carpet.
Did your mother never teach you not to wear shoes indoors?
“What do you think you’re doing?” Eva gritted out. “What have you done to the study?”
Lina smiled without turning. “It’s getting late. I just lit a few candles. It was so gloomy and dark in here.”
“I like the dark.”
Lina hauled a heavy tome off the shelf and sank cross-legged onto the carpet, back against the edge of a low lounge, flicking carefully through the pages. More books made untidy towers on either side of her, dusty hundred-year-old diaries, leather-bound grimoires, and tide charts, their pages folded or bookmarked. “I’m researching.”
“In my private study.”
Now Lina did turn, looking up, gray eyes wide and innocent.
Eva wore a real crown, a narrow thing of scorched steel and spikes, and her hair was loose. Long, long, dark fairy-tale hair rippling down her back in impossible waves. Lina had a sudden terrible urge to tangle her hands in it.
She cast a glance around the study instead, soaking in everything: The faint lingering scent of bittersweet smoke, the record player in the corner, turntable still spinning. A brass telescope for stargazing. A discarded coat and a stray slipper, a message sealed inside a cloudy bottle.
Tiny forbidden glimpses into Eva’s life.
There was so much Lina still didn’t know about her. But it satisfied her in some small way to know Caldella’s infamous Witch Queen was as messy as she was. The fact brought her down to Lina’s level.
“The doors brought me here. I didn’t know it was private.” Although she had realized, with no small amount of glee, that she’d finally managed to find her way into the Queen’s Tower. After that glimpse of the coming storm in the sea cave, Eva had vanished as abruptly as she always did, before Lina had had a chance to ask any of her questions.
“Is that from Jada’s shop at the floating markets?” She pointed at the bottle with the message sealed inside. It was not the kind of bottle you’d expect to find in a witch’s house. Not a round-bottomed spell bottle filled with baby teeth and wishes.
The bottle in question was old. Ancient. Cloudy green and crusted over, stoppered with wax and cork. The type of bottle that might have been brought up from a shipwreck like sunken treasure or discovered buried in the sand along Caldella’s rocky shore. A bottle filled with crumbling love letters or murderous confessions rolled and tied with twine. Never meant to be read, cast into the unforgiving depths of the sea. Decades, even centuries old.
“I love going there,” said Lina. Each of Jada’s bottles had its own secret story sealed inside.
Eva looked startled, then uncomfortable. “Me, too.”
“Really?”
“I’ve always thought there was something…”
“Romantic,” prompted Lina.
“Tragic,” said Eva, lip twitching. “Macabre. About sealing something inside a bottle and casting it into the sea. Or maybe I just worry my own bottle will wash up there one day.”
“Your bottle?” Lina couldn’t picture Eva writing anyone a love letter. A murderous confession, on the other hand…
The thought crossed her mind in jest, but it spoiled as it lingered, bringing her back to herself, to the reason she was here.
It had been so easy for a moment, in this shadow-filled, candlelit room, with a dusty grimoire on her lap, to pretend that they were just two witches discussing spells.
So easy to pretend she wasn’t a prisoner here—a prisoner of her own making—and that the moon wasn’t growing fatter and fuller, and that every breath wasn’t another grain of sand trickling to the bottom of an hourglass. Her life, running out.
A fresh wave of panic made Lina’s skin flash hot and then cold again.
She stabbed the pages of the grimoire in her lap with her finger. “I’m finding another way to calm the dark tide. One that doesn’t require someone dying.”
Eva glided away from the low lounge and Lina. “There is no other way.” The words had the ring of an adage oft repeated, a finality, a tired note of resignation.
“Maybe there is.” Lina caught the singlet strap slipping off her shoulder as Eva stopped before one of the book-lined walls and very deliberately started snuffing out the candles resting on the shelves, pinching the flames between her thumb and forefinger. A moody silhouette in a long, cascading black lace dress. It was quickly becoming apparent that she was allergic to color.
Lina had taken several books down from that shelf; they were on the floor to her left, on top of an illuminated text from the mainland, a tome so large Lina could have curled up inside its gilded covers and drawn the pages over herself like a blanket.
She had grabbed anything and everything she could find that had to do with human sacrifice. And animal sacrifice. Bloodless sacrifice. Offerings made to stave off drought, wildfire, storms. Libations to placate earthquakes and volcanoes. Sacrifices made for good fortune, for good harvests. To please malevolent gods and vengeful spirits.
“Here.” Lina held up a different grimoire, flipping to a page she’d marked. “A different kind of sacrifice. ‘The witches of Skani sheared the fair locks from their skulls and with them wove a net of hair to cast upon the waves, calming the vengeful sea,’” she read out.
“You want us to shave off all our hair,” said Eva flatly.
“There’s also teeth!” Lina grabbed a gold-edged grimoire. “Witches on the desert continent used to brew a potion, there’s a list of ingredients here. They’d add a few teeth and pour the mixture at the foot of Mount Coroban every solstice to stop the volcano from erupting.”
“Not to stop it from erupting, to honor it. The volcano is their goddess. They don’t see destruction in the eruption, only beauty. Strength.”
“Well, there are more things, too,” said Lina, determined. This bored detachment was not the reaction she’d hoped for. A tiny part of her had even wanted Eva to be impressed she’d thought of this, to leap at the opening she was giving her. “There are plenty of other examples: witches giving up their voices, their beauty, trading away their memories, sacrificing their—”
“And why is it,” said Eva, eyes narrowing dangerously, “that in all your grand schemes, it’s we who have to give something up? Our hair. Our teeth. Our voices.”
Lina pressed both palms to her bare knees. “And how many of our lives have we given up? Every year. Every May. For hundreds of years. It’s only we islanders who—”
“Only you? Are you forgetting my sister? The girl you so admire and aspire to be like? I’ve been meaning to ask, is your life truly so boring that you’re determined to live hers for her? Even going so far as to pine pathetically over the boy she loved?”
Heat scalded Lina’s cheeks even as the words set her mind racing. Natalia had sacrificed herself, and that had settled the tide for a time. Would the sacrifice work again with another witch?
Why didn’t the witches ever pay the price with one of their own?
“Every year, our queen surrenders pieces of herself,” said Eva, as if she could read Lina’s mind. “Only the destruction of the city or her suffering can quench the tide’s hunger. Her tears. Our magic. We spend ourselves, trading pieces until there’s nothing left. Until we have no magic left and fade away. We already give enough. We have saved this island.”
“And in doing so, you made the sea a monster!” Lina flipped open yet another book, rising to standing. “I’ve been reading these old diaries.” She probably should have paid more attention before now instead of just rolling her eyes in class and when Finley gibbered on about his theories as to why the island was sinking. She should have listened to her aunties, who talked about the tide like it was some kind creature cultivating its power. “The island was already flooding two hundred years ago, yes, and it was almost lost. But the tide wasn’t like this before the first queen cast her spell. You witches gave it life. You gave it power. And now you keep feeding it.”
With more lives, with sorrow, nourishing it with tears.
“In the past, there didn’t even have to be a sacrifice every year. An islander was given to the tide once every decade or so.” Lina slammed the diary closed.
Eva had gone still as stone. It was possible that Lina was about to be cursed, or worse. Eva might summon the wind or sand to scour the flesh from her bones, scrub them smooth as sea glass.
Lina dropped her gaze. “Sorry. I just… I have to find another way.”
I really, really don’t want to die.
“I offered to let you go,” said Eva tightly, running her finger up and down the edge of the shelf, her back half turned. “You asked for this. You wanted to take Thomas’s place. I told you to put yourself first.”
She had, and the same frustration painting Eva’s tone was tying knots in Lina.
“I don’t regret it.” She’d made her peace with it. Even after hearing the witchlings’ story about how Eva had nearly died trying to find another way to calm the tide for the sake of her sister, for whom she’d even fought to save Thomas. The same way Lina had fought for Thomas and for Finley.
The way Thomas hadn’t fought for Natalia or, it seemed, for her.
Thomas, who maybe wasn’t who she’d thought he was.
But what he’d done and was doing now had no bearing on her choice. Maybe he wouldn’t risk his life for her, as she had done for him. Wouldn’t trade his life for hers, as Natalia had done for him. But that was him and what he could live with.
“I’m not going to be made to feel bad for saving someone’s life. No matter how afraid I am now, I would still make the same choice. I’d rather die knowing I saved the person I loved than live knowing I abandoned them to save myself. But that doesn’t mean that I want to die.” Lina twisted her necklace into a stranglehold. “I want there to be another way. I need there to be.”
Eva pressed a thumb to her bottom lip in thought, in frustration, in an eerily familiar gesture.
Familiar because it was a gesture Thomas always made. A gesture, Lina realized with a jolt, that Eva must have picked up from him. Or was it something Thomas had picked up from Eva when he’d been here last?
She shook the thought free, gnawing the inside of her cheek. If she didn’t find a way, if she didn’t survive this…was there a part of her Thomas would take with him? A part the next girl he kissed wouldn’t know belonged to Lina Kirk? Her habit of chewing her cheek? The way she hummed when she was nervous?
What part of me are you going to share with someone else once I’m gone?
Her eyes followed Eva’s hand as it dropped and the other girl bent down, picking an open book off the carpet, fingers standing out against the yellowed pages.
What parts of you have I known through him?
“I will find another way,” said Lina.
Eva shut the book with a clap and drew a circle on its dust-clouded cover, fingertip coming away with a silver film as if she’d pinched a moth. “Do you think you’re the first to try? Do you think it a coincidence that there happen to be so many books and letters here on the topic? Accounts and grimoires from all over the world, all here in my study.” Her voice was soft, even, deadly. “Do you think so little of us, that we haven’t tried it all before?”
“I know you tried.” Lina’s voice was just as even. “The witchlings told me what you did, what you tried. But you gave up. You failed, and then you stopped fighting.”
Eva’s eyes flashed with such fury that Lina shrank a little inside her skin. Eva’s anger could put even Finley’s to shame; it seethed like the tide in a tempest. “I do not need to be told that by someone who never fought at all before this. There are islanders who have protested the sacrifice, islanders who petitioned Natalia, yet I never saw you or your name listed among them. You were happy enough to let lives be taken until it was the life of someone you cared about. Until it was you. And now you dare lecture me? You, who’ve never fought and lost anyone? You, who never tried to change anything?”
Lina’s heart pounded. Her mouth opened and snapped shut. A pang of shame twisted her stomach.
Because it was true, and she really wished it hadn’t taken Thomas being chosen and being trapped here herself to realize that maybe they should try to find another way. Instead of merely accepting the yearly sacrifice as something that was necessary. Never questioning it, because this was the way things had always been done.
“You know nothing,” said Eva. “You heard one story, and you understand nothing.”
“Fine.” Lina threw her hands up, slumping back down to the floor, tucking one leg beneath her. “Fine, I don’t. But I will. I’m going to keep searching for a way. I know I should’ve before. I know it’s probably too late now. But I’m not giving up.”
“And you think I’ll just let you stay here all night, picking through all my private belongings?”
“If you want me to leave, you’ll have to carry me out,” said Lina, tensing a heartbeat later when she started to wonder if Eva really would try and drag her out of the study.
But a second heartbeat passed, and then another. From over by the bookshelves came a long and exasperated exhale. Lina relaxed a measure, yanking a stack of folded letters into her lap, ruffling through their crackly pages.
She discarded them when she realized they were written in another language, one she didn’t recognize. She reached for another diary instead.
Anger was still singing through her, and the words were almost a blur. Though to be fair, words often looked that way to Lina: fat paragraphs of black letters squiggling eel-like, attempting to swim off the page. She loved stories but preferred hearing them or watching them danced out onstage. She was not a big reader.
She chewed her cheek, trying to concentrate. But buried below that song of anger was a sharp, stabbing disappointment. Why had she thought Eva anything more than a heartless nightmare? Why had she gotten her hopes up? Why had she wanted so badly for her to be something more?
She couldn’t stop herself from chancing a last glance across the room.
Eva had slouched ungracefully into a high-backed armchair and was gnawing on a thumbnail, staring studiously at the ceiling and ignoring Lina.
Lina looked at the ceiling, too.
And then back.
And then away again quickly as she caught Eva doing the same, stealing a glance at her.
Their eyes caught for the briefest awkward beat.
Lina’s cheeks heated, and she really focused on the text this time, searching for clues, for magical solutions hidden in delicate lines of curving script as the candles slowly melted down to stubs. Rubbing her stinging eyes and humming to keep herself awake.
The Witch Queen comes on wings of night.
The Witch Queen has your heart’s delight.
She did fall asleep at some point, jerking awake minutes or hours later, drool making ink weep through a page. Eva was very likely to drown her just for that.
But the armchair was empty, and when Lina sat up, a blanket smelling faintly of smoke slipped off her shoulders.
Twists of dark smoke were dissolving in exactly the space where someone might have stood if they’d tiptoed close to tuck it gently around her.
Lina blinked, heart falling into a strange, unsteady rhythm. She clutched the blanket, not knowing if she wanted to tear it off or draw it snugly around herself. In the end, she did draw it snugly around herself, lit fresh candles, and continued to research.