Lina
All she would remember afterward was a flash of light and the sudden absence of sound. An all-encompassing silence, a deafening ringing in her ears, the hush and stillness that followed the final note of a performance. That anxious heartbeat before applause. Black waves struck the stone edge of St. Casimir’s Square, salt spray holding a pose in midair, a million glass shards frozen.
Then the world rushed back, and Lina knew what was happening even before it happened. She had sung this song. She had danced this story. She knew it as well as she knew her name. Chains clanged and shattered. Muscle and bone shifted beneath her hands. Agonized screams ripped from Thomas’s throat as his joints popped and ligaments snapped. His back arched, skin stretching and shredding, fading to a horrible gray. Hardening into crusted, sea-slick scales.
He was a giant adder writhing in her embrace. A sea serpent stranded on land. A soaring, sinuous monster with dripping venomous fangs. Hissing and twisting.
Lina held on, held tight. She had sworn she would all those nights ago. But her arms could no longer fit around his body, and her nails scrabbled frantically, fruitlessly to find a grip on his scales. She slid and slipped, clinging to the monster’s neck as it uncoiled, as it and she rose high into the air.
She dug her nails in. She would not lose him now, not when she’d come so far, not after everything. She would not lose here.
The serpent dashed its head against the ground, the impact jolting through her bones, rattling her teeth. Something in her rib cage screamed. Lina clenched her jaw.
It was an illusion. It was magic, a spell cast to make her let go. She knew what she was holding. Knew the true shape of the boy she held in her arms.
“Thomas.” His name was a ragged gasp.
The monster shuddered and melted in her arms. A pulsating mass of hot sinew and skin. It grew hair. Matted fur reeking of rot and musk, pricking and scratching her palms and cheeks. Her eyes watered at the stench. He was a rabid brown bear. Eyes rolling, jaw snapping, claws raking scars across the cobbles.
A voice shouted at her to remember what she was holding. And she did, she did, she was holding Thomas Lin. The boy who had won his freedom from a witch. The boy she’d admired for two long years. A boy with sun-kissed hair and sea-tanned skin, with dark brown eyes that held a hundred untold secrets.
Lina bit through her bottom lip. Hot blood dribbled down her chin.
The bear tossed its head. Her arms felt like they were about to break.
Hold on.
The bear sniffed the air. Its spine contorted. Twisted. Disappeared.
She was standing, holding fire. A white-hot coal burning bright between her cupped palms.
Flames engulfed Lina. Scorched through the layers of her skin as if it were paper, curling it, blackening it, flaking it into glowing ash. Wave upon wave of furious heat. Her cheeks blistered.
She spun, flailing in terror, trying to beat the flames away.
Where—
The flames snarled. A sea of roiling red and orange stretched in every direction, endless. A fire that would never burn out. The illusion was made real because she’d started to believe in it. Lina’s eyes stung with smoke. She stumbled and fell, squinted at her grazed palms and found them empty.
Her fingers spasmed, opening and closing on air and flame. On emptiness.
Gone.
Thomas was…
When the queen turned the lad into fire, the girl’s heart failed her. She lost herself to fear and forgot what she was holding. She and the lad burned alive. Burned until there was nothing left.
Lina’s throat seized with anguish, with heartrending panic. She tried to recapture the feel of him in her arms, his weight, his shape. But it was like trying to embrace the reflection of the moon on the sea, to clasp smoke or hold hands with a shadow.
Who was Thomas Lin? How well did she really know him?
She pictured herself holding him, kissing him, as she had imagined so many times before, her favorite daydream. How many times had she spun in her head how it would happen, how it would all unfold? The details and scenery changed, but the ending was always the same…save for this time.
Because now she could only remember kissing Eva. The swoop of heat in her stomach, the dark thrill of lips and teeth and tongue. Of a sky set ablaze and eyes that gleamed like starlight on the sea at night. The silky feeling of black hair tangled between her fingers.
Thomas Lin had always been a daydream. A dream that paled in comparison to a memory that was so much more real.
She’d lost him. She would burn here forever. Because her heart and courage had failed her. Because she had not held on. Because she had let go, and the fire was all around her, burning her to ash. She did not love him enough to keep him. She did not even know if she loved him at all.
Lina let out a sob. Heat boiled the tears off her cheeks.
Arms snaked around her waist from behind. Hands cupped hers, cold and steady and unwavering. “You know what you are holding. Did you cause me so much trouble over him for nothing? Do you dare think you can disappear from me without finishing what you started? Keep fighting.”
Lina felt like she was coming apart, and coming back together.
She shut her eyes and remembered the sunburst of warmth in her chest when Thomas had carried her home, remembered him following her into the revel despite his fears, remembered him coming to rescue her with Finley. She clung tight to those memories, clung tight to him.
Thomas. I’m holding Thomas Lin.
Maybe she didn’t feel the same way about him that she once had. But those feelings had still been real, even if they’d shifted, even if they’d changed. Love or not, naive or not, foolish or not, what she had felt for him was still real. And she had come all this way to save him, so she would. She’d made him a promise. She’d dragged him back into all this, and she would drag him back out.
Darkness smothered the flames. Black smoke ruffled her hair.
She held on to the shape of him while Eva held on to her. The Witch Queen burning with her, the tight embrace keeping her safe and whole. The blistering heat faded. The smoke started to lift.
The air tasted of salt and sea, of rain, and of that first fresh inhale after the rain, after the storm had washed the world clean. Lina knelt at the foot of the stone pillar with Thomas in her arms. His eyes were shut, but he was breathing.
Eva relaxed her grip on Lina.
Everything had gone quiet save for the waves lapping hungrily against the fourth side of St. Casimir’s square. The shadows grew deeper, darker, and more velvet, clouds chasing across the surface of the nearly full moon.
But a faint glow still leaked through, limning the words carved deep into the pillar’s stone with silver. Marcin, standing watching them, read aloud: “‘Our love keeps us from drowning.’ Or should it be ‘Our love keeps us from burning’? Seeing as you would jump through fire for her.” He looked past Lina. “So, Eva, what will you do now?”