34

Lina

When the full moon finally rose above Caldella four days later, there were no dark waves to greet it.

Only a glittering emerald sea, a city sighing with relief, and music. Low and somber. Songs that were more ache than sound. Requiems, buoyed by the salt breeze, twining through the tightly stacked rainbow of town houses, played on a solitary violin. Played for all the boys who had lost their lives to the tide on moonlit nights like this one, boys both brave and frightened, and for all the witches who had sacrificed their hearts and selves to keep the island safe.

Lina tapped the blue window shutters in her cousin Ivy’s room as the final note of Finley’s playing wrung out, a tiny charm to banish bad thoughts, to stifle that creeping fear inside of her. Once. Twice. Three times, because three was the right number. She slid a headband that glittered like stars into her hair and smoothed down her spangled silver dress. Draped a pale feather boa over her shoulders and tied her blood-coral beads in a fancy double knot around her neck.

She hummed along as a new song started. A rowdier tune this time, a melody like freedom and fire, a melody of hope. Her oldest cousin, Julie, on pipes, upstairs in Uncle’s rooftop garden, seated amidst the orange blossom trees beneath the sailcloth awning where Laolao liked to smoke.

Downstairs, the aunties were keeping time; Lina could make out the steady, feverish click-clack of mah-jongg tiles even with the bedroom door closed. She went to open it.

Found it locked.

“Finley!”

No answer. Just the distant, familiar sound of Uncle clearing his throat.

“Finley!” Lina rattled the door handle. “Ivy! David?”

Another pause, longer, and finally a shuffle of footsteps. “Not so fun when you’re on the other side of the door now, is it?”

Lina cursed and smacked her palm against the wood. She could see her brother’s shadow moving through the crack at the bottom of the door. “I’ll climb out the window,” she threatened.

“Aye, and fall and die?” The lock snicked, and Finley eased the door open a smidgen, an impish sliver of handsome face peeking through.

Lina grabbed the door handle and pulled, leaning back on one heel, throwing all her weight into it. Finley did the same on his side, grinning.

“I swear to God!” Lina attempted to wedge a shoulder between the door and the frame.

Finley let go of the handle, and Lina was flung backward with a shriek as the door flew open, landing on her butt with a thump. A small white puff of a dog scampered into the room, yapping and eagerly trying to lick her face. “Tam! Leave off!”

Finley helped her stand.

Lina scowled. “You drew your eyebrow on crooked.”

“Naw, it’s my real brow. It’s grown back.”

Lina squinted at her brother’s face and was sadly forced to admit that the eyebrow in question was indeed the real thing. “Well, it’s grown back crooked.”

“I think you’ll find it gives me a roguish charm.”

“Gross.” Lina elbowed past, whistling for Auntie Van’s dog to follow.

“And who are you all dolled up for? Uncle says you’re grounded.”

Which was why they were staying with him and Laolao and the rest of Uncle’s immediate family. So Auntie Van could enforce Lina’s prison sentence, as well as pop into the room Lina was sharing with Ivy every ten minutes to fuss and scold and pat her, as if to reassure them all that Lina wasn’t a ghost.

Lina paused at the top of the third-floor landing and batted heavily mascaraed lashes. “Would you like to carry me down?”

Finley leaned his hip into the banister and crossed his arms. “Not particularly, no.”

“Even though my ankle’s a little sore today and it’s your fault I broke it?”

Her brother stiffened. Lina’s heart beat off rhythm. The pipes wailing from the rooftop were suddenly extremely loud. But—

The bump in Finley’s throat bobbed. “You’re going to use that excuse for everything now, aren’t you? I’ll never be able to make it up to you.”

“Damn right,” said Lina. “I’m going to hold it over you for the rest of our lives. We’ll be ancient and wrinkled and shrunken to the size of peas, both of us walking with sticks, and I’ll still be whining, ‘Finley, you knob, buy me that necklace there—you owe me. Remember that time you broke my leg?’”

Finley’s mouth twitched.

They were going to be all right. It would always be there, the memory of her fall from the top of the steps of St. Dominic’s sticking like scar tissue. And maybe it was weird to try to make a joke out of it, but it helped ease the stiffness. They would be all right. They would keep working on it, like Finley would work on mastering his temper and Lina would work on her exercises, until they found a new way to move.

Finley swatted down his cowlick. “Hurry up, then.”

“What?” She didn’t actually need to be carried down.

He knelt, hands behind his back, ready to piggyback her. “You getting on or not?”

Lina climbed on.

Finley fake staggered and heaved an exaggerated groan. Lina smacked him. He took the stairs carefully, one at a time, passing by the living room and then the first-floor foyer, passing aunties laughing and ranting and gossiping, their voices so loud they likely carried all the way back to the Witch Queen’s palace. They dodged uncles hiding in armchairs with their fat fingers laced atop their rounded bellies; cousins and random kids, yawning and looking bored, playing cards or taking the piss, gnawing on gingerbread cookies and the flaky remains of egg tarts.

Of them, only Jana looked up and narrowed her eyes. Their cousin pushed what Finley teasingly called her doctor’s glasses up her nose.

Lina ducked her head. She’d already gotten the biggest scolding upon their return about taking better care of herself. Jana had given her strict orders to rest and a whole new set of strength-building exercises for her ankle.

Finley passed right out of the house and into the street with a promise that they were only popping out to check on the tide. Lina was unreasonably annoyed that they believed him, that they let him out. Because of course her brother had managed to weasel his way out of being punished for anything that had happened. He’d come back with her from the Water Palace like some kind of hero.

Auntie Van’s dog, Tam, scampered after them.

“Where are you—”

“Where were you planning on slipping off to?” Finley cut in. “Josef tells me Thomas Lin’s leaving the island tonight on a fishing trawler bound for Skani with no plans to return. He also said he heard Lin ask a certain someone to go with him.”

The wooden walkways leading down to the quay creaked, groaned. The fall of Finley’s steps and the click of Tam’s claws were washed away by the soft shushing of saltwater lapping at the boards.

Water no longer black as deepest midnight, as dark as a starless, moonless sky, but calm and shallow and shimmering. A brilliant emerald green set alight by the amber lanterns laced between the town house rooftops like bunting. Water a color Lina had only ever seen in the months after a successful sacrifice.

The first successful sacrifice in two long years.

And the last, if the rumors were true. Caldella’s Witch Queen had sent word: She would bow to the tide no longer. She would feed it no more lives. They would find another way to break this yearly curse that plagued their island.

No more boys given to the sea. No more glorifying death and striking bloody bargains with the tide. No more trading innocent lives for safety.

Lina drew in a breath. “And what, you think I’m going with him? Like this? With just the clothes on my back? Like Mama stowing away on Ma’s ship?”

“You’ve always liked a good story.” Finley set her down by the red-and-white-striped post where his broom boat was moored.

Lina hesitated, but when her brother did nothing, she started to unmoor it, rope landing in the bottom of the boat with a thud before she paused a second time, tugging at a strand of freshly dyed hair. She was still unsure about its new bright, silver color. Maybe she should go natural, or grow it, or chop it all off. She could never decide. For a second, she faced the gray spires of the Witch Queen’s palace, which you could see no matter where you stood on the island. Then her eyes flicked back to her brother.

Finley had crouched down to cup a handful of water, letting it trickle through his fingers as if he still half expected the darkness to start creeping back. As if he expected the water around the broom boat to all of a sudden bruise black, tendrils of shadow snaking across the surface, spreading like an oil spill.

“You’re not going to stop me? What if I said I was going with him?”

Finley looked up as Lina clambered into the boat. There was something solemn in the set of his shoulders, an out-of-character sternness in his storm-gray eyes. And then he grinned, a flash of perfect teeth, reaching out to put a hand on her head and muss her hair, eliciting an outraged squeak. He kicked the broom boat away from the quay. Tam barked.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

Lina’s reaction was immediate. “You don’t know that!”

“’Course I do. I’m your brother.” Finley cracked his neck. “An hour, and then I’m whistling for the boat to come back. You know Uncle’s going to skin you alive.”

Lina shrugged as the broom boat swung out into the current. “I’ve faced worse things.”

“For now,” Finley called after her. “Ma and Mama dock at dawn. You’re going to have to face them.”

At dawn. A thrill of longing, relief, and nerves shot through Lina. Her mothers home tomorrow, home and safe. She made a face at Finley and rapped the side of the boat with her knuckles, sending it surging through the water. There were so many things she had to tell them, so many things she was never ever going to tell them unless she wanted to be grounded for a million more years.

She could imagine what the rest of the family would tell them. One day, Lina vowed, she would stop being the cousin everyone gossiped about, the cautionary tale the aunties whispered about to their own children.

There were things she needed to ask Ma and Mama, too, but she didn’t know if she could. Lina admired her parents plenty, and she wouldn’t mind being like them, but at the same time, she didn’t want to be them. She wanted to be herself. She wanted her own story. She wanted to be different.

And a part of her was pretty sure she was, different from them, because she’d liked Thomas, too. She didn’t think she was going to stop liking boys even if she wanted to kiss girls now as well. And she wasn’t sure if that made her, well, enough to fit into her mothers’ world.

Lina shook her head quickly. She didn’t want to think about it. Liking boys or kissing girls. Kissing witches. Kissing Eva. She didn’t want to think about Eva at all.

Because it wasn’t as if Eva was thinking of her.

The Witch Queen hadn’t looked at Lina once while she performed the sacrifice. Not when she’d chained Marcin to the pillar. Not when she’d stood stiff and silent as she fed him to the sea.

Lina had been busy herself, dragging a half-conscious Thomas into the shelter of St. Casimir’s column-lined arcades as the black waves came crashing down.

But even afterward, when she had left him, splashing through the water toward that bowed figure with its streaming hair and crown of scorched steel and spikes, Eva hadn’t turned. And by the time Lina managed to reach the place where she’d stood, there’d been nothing but curls of vanishing smoke.

There’d been nothing the day after, either. No sign of any of the witches. None of the usual festive celebrations that followed a successful sacrifice.

Lina had been left with a strange, hollow kind of emptiness, and she’d wondered whether she would catch a glimpse of Eva if she joined the revel a year from then. A glimpse of the wicked Witch Queen as she danced in and out of the revelers in disguise, appearing one second as the person you loved, transforming the next into the person the boy beside you loved, tricking you into taking her hand, tricking you into kissing her.

Lina bit her lips and tasted salt.

She wondered now if it was really true that there would be no more sacrifices. If there really would be no more revels and bonfires and dances on St. Walpurga’s Eve. She wondered if she would ever see Eva again.

She shouldn’t want to, but she did. Her heart beat faster when she imagined it, and her mind kept drifting, conjuring up images of a girl with a smile so sharp it left teeth marks in her daydreams. She didn’t know what this thing was between them. She didn’t know if there was anything between them, what Eva really felt for her.

But she wanted to find out. And she had a feeling that whatever did happen, no matter if it was the most complete and spectacular disaster, it would be a story worth telling afterward.

A cloud passed over the moon as Lina drew nearer her destination, Caldella’s longest pier. Icy spray caressed her cheeks, set crystals in her lashes.

The broom boat bobbed alongside the wooden planks, slowing as it drew even with a figure walking along the pier’s edge. A boy with sun-kissed hair and sea-tanned skin. A boy with a guitar case slung across his back.

Thomas Lin’s steps slowed, too. “Did you do something with your hair?”

Lina’s hand went automatically to her head. “Sort of. I’m still not sure about it.”

“It looks good.”

“Thank you.”

The pier creaked. The breeze whispered, rustling Lina’s dress. A quiet stole over them. Thomas took smaller and smaller steps. You couldn’t freeze a moment or stop the world from turning, but you could hold on for as long as possible, absorbing every last breath before things changed.

A lump formed in Lina’s throat, and she was filled with the same overflowing sadness she felt when she reached the end of a story, when she realized something was ending.

“I hear it’s cold in Skani,” she tried.

Obviously. It’s the land of frost and ice. Stop talking. Just stop talking.

“I meant it,” said Thomas, “when I asked if you would come with me.”

“I know, but I—I know, but I can’t.” Lina couldn’t bring herself to say aloud that she didn’t want to, that she wasn’t willing to give up her family, her friends, that she wouldn’t leave the island she loved for him, the island where she’d learned to dance. Her sinking city with its ravenous sea, its witches and enchantments.

And she didn’t think she could tell him that she wasn’t sure she still wanted him. And that maybe she wanted to figure out more about who she did want and who she was first, before she made that kind of decision.

Thomas stopped and sat suddenly on the edge of the pier, guitar case scraping the wood, long legs dangling out over the water. Lina wobbled to her feet in the boat.

The tide was high, and their heads were almost level. Thomas leaned forward, reaching out. For a wild second, Lina thought he was going to kiss her. And for a second, it seemed he thought so, too.

Her heart skipped a beat. But Thomas hesitated, and the moment broke.

He held out his hand instead.

Lina took it, his fingers twining together with hers. Palm rough, warm, and a little clammy.

“I asked too late, didn’t I? If I’d said something about how I felt before all of this…” He looked up at the sky, at the full moon, letting a breath out, letting go. “I can never repay you.”

“It wasn’t meant to be a trade.”

“Still.” Thomas squeezed her hand. “I won’t forget it. Any of it. I won’t forget how we danced at the revel. I won’t forget how you came after me. I won’t forget you, Lina Kirk. Never. For as long as I live.”

Lina swallowed.

Thomas untangled his hand from hers. Hitched the strap of his guitar case higher on his shoulder and, turning on unsteady feet, walked fast this time, without looking back.

Lina waited until he reached the shadow of the fishing trawler, then rapped the broom boat with her knuckles and sailed away.