Lina
Lina couldn’t fight it.
That balcony over there? You’re going to crawl to it. And then you’re going to cast yourself off it, into the sea.
Marcin’s will was like a weight pressing heavy on her body, rough fingers forcing their way into her mind, wrenching control of muscle and bone, commanding her to crawl, forcing her to keep going.
She couldn’t stop herself. She couldn’t stop her body. She was a prisoner inside of it, screaming herself hoarse. Terrible things were happening to Thomas, to Eva, and there wasn’t anything, anything, she could do to stop it.
Why are you so weak? Why are you letting this happen? Fight it. Fight.
Lina’s dress dragged across the rain-slick stone, knees and palms scraped raw. Why couldn’t she stop this? Why wasn’t she as strong as the girls in the stories?
But this wasn’t a story. This was really happening, and she was too damn weak.
Her nails splintered and bled as she fought to dig them into the floor, to claw them into some crack, trying desperately, fighting every inch of movement as her body dragged itself to standing and clambered onto the slippery, icy balustrade.
For the space of a breath, she halted there, seated astride it, as if she’d merely skipped outside to idle and kick her legs over the storm-dappled sea. Wet hair plastered her cheeks. Every nerve screamed no. Rain slipped between her lips as she swayed, tilted, buffeted by the wind. She looked down and knew, knew she was going to shatter when she hit that roiling liquid darkness far below. Knew she would feel it, hear it, that terrible wet crack as she broke across the waves.
Please. Don’t.
Her body didn’t listen. There was no one there to help. Lina tipped forward, legs and body sliding, slipping off the balustrade with a whisper, a regretful sigh of silk.
She fell like a star, faster than the rain, plunging, plummeting toward midnight-black water.
Moments passing in rapid heartbeats, wind shrieking in her ears. Plummeting down, down, down. The sea rushed up to meet her, the inky surface separating into white-crested waves, each tiny individual ripple cast by the rain.
The tide rose up. Eager. Hungry.
From the depths, two great watery arms shot skyward, slim and elegant as waterspouts. The outline of wrists and hands shaped from water and sea foam, delicate half-moon fingernails etched in sea lace. Two giant palms cupped, catching Lina as she had once caught flame.
She pooled in the liquid curve of those palms for an instant, another agonized heartbeat. The strangely solid sea was cool and alive against her bare skin, pulsing as if blood raced through it.
The dark tide was so eager to taste her that it hadn’t waited for her to fall but had plucked her from the sky like some ripe fruit.
But it didn’t swallow her, didn’t gulp her down. The hands gently lowered and dropped her with a small wet smack into the bottom of a familiar red-and-gold broom boat. A puddle pooled beneath her shocked body, saltwater washing the tears from her eyes.
“Well, now,” said Finley shakily. “Don’t you look like absolute shit.” But his voice broke. And his eyes were glassy.
The water puddling beneath Lina swirled and gathered itself, receding over the broom boat’s rail as if from a sandy shore. Her body was her own again. The vile weight of that twisted will had finally let her go.
And Finley, Finley was here. Her brother drew her into the warm circle of his stupid strong arms, crushing her to his hard chest so tightly that all the air squeezed out of her lungs and her throat burned with the scent of that awful overpowering perfume he poured on by the bottle. Vanilla and smoke and spicy cedar. Because he thought it made him irresistible to girls.
Lina started to cry. Not tears of frustration or fury, not one or two tears escaping to slip silently down her cheek, but rasping, strangled, full-body sobs. Wrenching and raw and aching. Her nose was a tender mass of swollen flesh. It felt like someone had taken a hammer to her face. Pain throbbed through her when she tried to breath. Everything hurt so, so much. She’d been so, so scared.
Finley held her tighter.
“What was she thinking?” A husky voice was asking him. “Was this your plan to rescue her? What happened to her face?”
Lina blinked rapidly, the blurred shadow looming over her and Finley spiraling slowly into focus. Darkly painted lips against brown skin. Black hair set in perfect finger waves, sculpted to frame a questioning face. A long black dress fluttering in the wind.
A witch.
Lina’s chest constricted. Paralyzing fear turned her entire body to ice, vomiting up her throat before recognition clicked. Yara. Yara, who’d said her brother was handsome, who had made sure no harm came to him at the palace.
“Why in hell would you jump from there?”
Finley tensed. “Don’t you yell at her!”
“I’m not yelling.” Fat drops of rain spat from the sky, trailing down Yara’s neck like tiny diamonds, dripping from the end of Lina’s nose.
In one white-knuckled fist, Finley clutched a length of braided hair and twine, knotted and threaded through with mother-of-pearl and bone. The witch’s ladder he’d won all those nights ago at the revel for Mama and Ma, a charm for sailing safely through storms.
The broom boat rocked as he struggled out of his raincoat, draping it over Lina like a blanket. A small white puff of a dog wormed between his shins—Auntie Van’s dog, Tam, shoving his icy wet nose into the crook of Lina’s knee, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing.
“I just want to know what happened?” Yara’s voice, that voice that pitched at the end of every sentence, making every phrase sound like a question, didn’t fit with the intensity in her eyes, the anxious rigidity of her spine. She perched at the prow like a mermaid figurehead, both fierce and fragile. “You said Thomas went in to get her.”
Cold fingers squeezed Lina’s throat. Tears blurred her vision. “Marcin. It was Marcin. He wants the island to sink. He wore my face. He said Eva—he took—” She choked on the words, on Thomas’s name.
Yara’s face was grim. Her black hair melted into the rain-shrouded shadow of the palace beyond, its wicked spires crowning her. She cursed loudly, fluently, then bent to rap her knuckles urgently against the side of the boat, attempting to steer it, to urge it forward.
But the little skiff was enchanted to follow Finley’s orders, spelled to listen to him and Lina and Ma and Mama alone.
Shouts and sharp staccato barks, louder than thunder, trembled in the air. Lightning scorched the scene into Lina’s eyes: Tam scampering from one end of the boat to the other, tail wagging madly. Yara beating her fist on the wood, shouting at Finley that he owed her for the magic she’d just done, for saving Lina. Finley shouting back that Yara owed him for his saving her from Eva’s sea serpent. Amber lantern light winking in the palace windows ahead like guttering candles.
“We’re not going in there,” Finley bellowed. “I’m not taking her back there. Lina, Uncle’s evacuating. Don’t worry, we’re not going back.”
Lina did not want to go back.
The broom boat rolled on the waves, the sea sloshing against its sides. Water slapped the hull, burst over the bow. She could fall asleep to that familiar cadence. Wanted to so very badly. She wanted to curl up here in her brother’s strong arms, blanketed by the oilskin raincoat, and let Finley sail her home. She wanted to let her eyelids flutter shut and sink into peaceful blackness, to not think, to forget everything, to imagine it had all just been a bad dream.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She reached out with a shaking hand and rapped her knuckles against the broom boat’s side.