Eva
“I would have spared you the choice.” Marcin’s hair twisted in the salt breeze. The rest of his body was unmoving, legs pinned firmly to the ground with frost, with ice that looked black in the moonlight. “I didn’t want you to get attached. I didn’t want you to have to hurt.”
Then why didn’t you help when Natalia was still alive? When I tried to find a way to break the tide’s hold over the island and almost died?
“If you had let me take care of things, if Natalia had left me in charge, I would have set you free from this, but you wouldn’t let me. You know what it costs to calm the dark tide. You know what the magic requires.”
Of course she did. The spell was burned into Eva, listed like the ingredients in a cookbook or an old grimoire.
Take the life of the one you love and mix with the tears you shed for them. Add three drops of blood, three strands of hair, and feed it all to the sea by the light of May’s first full moon.
And so they came to the moment, from which there was no escape. Eva stood, looked down, gaze locking with Lina’s. Lina’s breathing hitched.
Was it love, this searing ache in the hollow inside her chest? This awful twisting in her gut? This absolute refusal to allow that life to extinguish itself for the sake of Thomas Lin? There was certainly something she wanted here—Lina’s fierce devotion to Thomas that she envied and craved for herself.
Eva suspected she had ruined any chance of that merely by being herself.
Black water bubbled through the cracks between cobbles. Ribbons of liquid darkness unfurling like hungry smoke. Spreading and swallowing up the ground. Swallowing up St. Casimir’s Square. Soon to swallow up the rest of the island.
She could not afford to fail again.
She would not fail again.
But she would also no longer give the tide anything more than she was willing to give it.
“Will you do as Natalia did and chain yourself to the pillar in her place?” said Marcin. “Or will you let the city sink to save the two of you?”
Eva looked away from Lina, gaze returning to that flame of red hair, to those fiery hazel eyes. To Marcin, who had raised her, who had betrayed her, who would drown her, punish her, because she would not make the choices he wanted her to make.
Marcin, who had taken a piece of her heart long before she had sealed it inside a bottle and cast it out to sea.
“You forget.” Eva yanked one of her red string bracelets off and tied a knot, and then another, and another, and another, fingers fumbling with the loops. Chains slithered through the shallow water, iron grinding, grating over stone. “You forget that I love you, too. That out of everyone save Natalia, I have loved you most.”
If she hadn’t, she would have taken his magic the second they returned from the spring regatta; she would have thrown him into the sea cave and fed him to her serpent. If she didn’t love him, she wouldn’t have hesitated, and her hands wouldn’t be shaking now.
And if she hadn’t hesitated, things would never have gone this far. The Water Palace wouldn’t have flooded. Her sisters wouldn’t be panicked, divided. Lina would not have been hurt. She would not have been hurt.
Because that’s what caring did, in the end. It lowered your guard and got you hurt, got you killed.
Safer never to care at all.
Chains wound around Marcin’s legs, chipping off shards of night-black ice, snaking around his torso.
“You forget that I will suffer to lose you the way you did not suffer to lose me.”
Take the life of one you love and mix with the tears you shed for them.
If there was one person Eva was beyond certain she loved…
It should have felt like a victory. Like relief. A month ago, it would not even have been a possibility. Black waves roared, wrecking themselves against the edge of St. Casimir’s Square. Crashing, clamoring, rising higher. Spilling over.
The dark tide had come to take what it was owed.
Natalia’s life had calmed it. A witch’s life would work.
She would do as Caldella’s queens had done for centuries. She would let the sea eat her sorrow, taste the salt of her tears. One last time.
Marcin’s eyes were wide as saucers as she moved closer, cold fingers reaching to dust a lock of hair from his pale brow. A single tear raced down her cheek, but when Eva spoke her voice was steady. “My city will not sink. Natalia’s city will not sink. Because I am going to use your life—yours, Marcin—to save it.”