Lina
Finley was shouting and lunging for her, but Eva pulled Lina close. No time for second thoughts, no time for hesitation, no time for fear. If there was even the slightest chance it was not too late…
Lina’s stomach performed a tiny flip, and then she was coming undone, being unmade, folding into wisps of pitch-black smoke with only the feel of Eva’s fingers laced tight through her own as an anchor.
They ghosted through the bones of the Water Palace, seeping through stone and wood and mortar, spiriting through abandoned salons and flooded hallways, snaking under the gaps beneath shimmering, glyph-engraved doors. Moving as air and darkness, as shadow and smoke, as one.
Lina didn’t dare breathe or speak or swallow, lest she break apart the magic and forever be trapped as something neither solid nor spectral. As form and nothing, both and neither and something in between.
It was terrifying, intoxicating. The darkest kind of thrill.
Pure magic.
Her heart—if she even had a heart right now—pounded hard enough to burst.
And then all of sudden they were outside, spinning amongst the Water Palace’s wicked spires, the night breeze chilling them, blowing them higher, silver cobwebs of low cloud left torn and twisting in their wake. The rising moon peaked through the fissures, so luminous, so close to full now, it set diamonds in the inky surface of the sea.
The waves looked so flat from up here. The dark tide was nothing but a darkly sparkling stage to dance upon. The rain had turned to pearly mist. Lights winked in the storm-ravaged city as the wind pushed them closer and closer.
The Witch Queen comes on wings of night…
Never had the lyrics felt so true. They descended on St. Casimir’s Square in a great cloud of whirling black smoke. No bonfires here now, no dancers. No wild drums or wail of pipes, only the distant, desperate shriek of flood sirens.
Magic gathered Lina back into being, air and darkness pouring into the contours of a girl with bobbed blond hair, gray eyes, and a stubborn chin.
Eva let go of her hand, and the sudden absence of that touch left Lina strangely bereft.
But she immediately started running, limping, crying out. Deserted shops flashing by, her steps slipping on slick stone cobbles. She flew past the column-lined arcades that enclosed the square on every side but one, falling into the long shadow cast by the pillar in the center, racing for the prone figure chained at its foot.
Thomas.
She made it halfway.
Black water lashed out, a liquid whip snaking around her ankles and yanking her off her feet. Her chin cracked against the cobbles, but the hot stinging in her palms and knees hit first. Agony flared on impact as Marcin materialized from the shadows.
Wind gusted, slamming him back, away from her. Eva swept past, coalescing from sea and sky in a wild whirl of ash and wind, black hair streaming, a single glowing strand of red string floating free from her fingers, silver dancing shoes landing with a lethal click.
Marcin staggered to a knee, spat and smeared a hand across the cobbles in a single fluid gesture. The stone beneath Eva softened, crumbled to sand. She sank in up to her ankle, stumbling off balance. More cobbles ripped free of the earth. Solid. Glistening. Sharp. Firing like bullets.
Lina threw up her arms, covered her head with her hands.
Eva dissolved into smoke, parting around the projectiles, freeing herself from the sand. For a breath, the raging smoky air held the vague shape of a body. A featureless form and face. Then it whirled into a towering, shrieking black cyclone, bearing down on Marcin.
Sand and stone rose to form a wall around him. But air and darkness needled through the cracks, sending tendrils spearing at his arms, his throat.
Lina seized the chance, pushing to her feet, crossing the last distance to Thomas. His chains rattled as she yanked on them. They were wrapped around his chest, his waist, his ankles, iron rubbing tanned skin raw where it shackled his wrists.
Rust flaked and stuck to her palms and fingers, a sharp metallic taste burning the back of her throat. A sickening suspicion knotted her insides. Were these the chains Natalia had worn? The chains that had held her to the pillar as the dark tide came crashing down, as the black waves swept in to take what they were owed?
The sea roared, pounding and smashing against the edge of the square that led straight onto the waves, sending up sweeping crests of crystal spray, spilling and spitting sea foam over the cobbles.
Too far away to feel.
But Thomas was drowning anyway.
Coughing and choking and retching brackish water down his front as magic filled his lungs with saltwater. His body jerked against the chains, one eye bulging, the other swollen shut.
“Eva!” The cry wrenched from Lina. She fell to her knees, fingers scrabbling over the ground, searching for a loose cobble, for something to use to break the chains. Knowing with a piercing, heartrending certainty that Eva wasn’t going to help.
Because she didn’t care. Because she had always been planning to give Thomas to Marcin.
She felt it again, that same awful splintering in her chest when she’d searched Eva’s face in the flooded ballroom, waiting and hoping desperately for a denial. Because some foolish part of her had started to trust the other girl, because some foolish part of her had started to care.
Lina caught up a loose end of chain, bringing it down on the cuffs linking Thomas’s ankles. Rusted iron shrieked and clanged like a bell again and again, sparks firing off the metal.
All while Thomas was still drowning, still choking, briny water spewing down his front, flecking the base of her neck, the crown of her bowed head.
Still drowning, until he wasn’t.
The first great shuddery gasp of air split the night.
Lina looked up, looked behind her. That wild tempest of dark smoke had poured itself back into a body. The whole world stopped as she met Eva’s eyes.
And then Marcin was striding past Eva, toward her, hair as wild as flame. Anger rippling off him like heat. Elegant ash-black clothes askew and skin so pale he looked more ghost than living creature.
Was he starting to fade away? Did he have so little magic left?
“You would take even this away from me.” He spat into his hand.
And again Eva moved between them like a shield, a pace in front of Lina, a pace away from Marcin. Wisps of black smoke coiling off her olive skin like steam. “Oh, I am going to take much more from you than this,” she said.
And yet she did not move.
Eva’s fingers were frozen mid-spell; strands of hair and red strings stretched taut, but she did not tie a knot. It was as if some invisible force were holding her back.
Lina wanted to scream at her. He tried to kill you. He tried to kill me. He wants to let the island drown.
Sweat glistened at Marcin’s temples. The bump in his throat bobbed up and down. “Eva, please. Do you think this is what Natalia would have wanted? For us to fight like this? For us to waste ourselves, our magic, on some silly quarrel?”
“Silly quarrel?” said Eva. “You left me to drown.”
“You didn’t give me a choice! I did it because you would have let us all drown. Because I didn’t want you to have to suffer anymore. I did it because I care about you. Because I couldn’t bear to watch you hurt. Give me Thomas Lin, Eva. And then we’ll go back to the palace. He’s the reason we lost Natalia. And this island is what destroyed her. This cursed city ate away at her piece by piece, just as it has eaten away at you. Do you think she wanted this for you? Do you think she wished to chain you here, always at the mercy of the tide? For you to suffer year after year, as she did? You were never meant to be this island’s queen. You should never have been queen.”
Marcin took a single step forward. “You helped kill her, Eva. You and Yara. All that talk about finding another way, giving her hope and then failing so spectacularly and snatching that hope away from her.”
Eva’s face was stricken. Marcin drove the knife home.
“She would never have done what she did if you had not encouraged her first.”
Eva’s lip trembled, the sight making something pinch inside of Lina.
“If Natalia had left me in charge,” finished Marcin, “we could have escaped all this.”
Lina wobbled to her feet, hands on Thomas’s shoulders for support. He slumped against the chains, against her, eyelids fluttering. Her name a soft exhale.
Marcin’s gaze snapped to her, and her heart lurched. “Is that why you won’t let me kill him?” he said. “Because of her? You’ve truly managed to make yourself care for one of the sacrifices, haven’t you? For someone other than yourself.” His tone was half-incredulous, almost disbelieving.
Lina stared at Eva, her pulse falling in and out of rhythm.
“And yet she loves someone else.” Marcin wiped a bloody cheek with his thumb, spat into his hand. “But does she love him enough?”
Eva’s head jerked toward the stone pillar, toward Lina. She yanked a glass bottle from the pocket of her coat, hurling it at Marcin. Glass exploded at his feet, plumes of fog twisting free of the shards. Where liquid had splattered, frost formed, a pale glaze staining his boots, stealing up his legs, his torso, hardening like ice.
But not before he painted the air with blood and spit and will, not before a savage smile stretched his lips and magic thrummed through the air like fire.
Lina braced herself, blinding light illuminating the shock on her face, but the magic was not aimed at her.