Sea Witch Rising. Sarah Henning
in all those decades and not paid so dearly?”
Runa is heaving now, the knife deadly in her grip. I’m not afraid of her, but suddenly I am afraid for her.
“You don’t believe in love, do you?” I ask.
Her fingers clench white-tight around the knife. “I love my sister.”
“Runa,” I say, wanting very much to lay a calm hand on her heaving shoulders, though it won’t help dull the abandonment she feels. “If you truly love her, the best you can do is give her that knife and accept her choice.”
“No. I won’t accept that. I gave you my father’s flowers, endangering him and me in the process. We gave you our hair—and you didn’t even use it for anything.” Runa raises the blade. “And now I have a knife but a sister who would die before wielding it on the only damn Øldenburg available.”
The mermaid isn’t done. She’s pausing to make sure it sinks in for me. Everything she’s lost, laid out plain.
“I only have one more thing to give you, and if you don’t take it right now, you’ll find out how talented I really am.” Her nostrils flare, and she advances on me, knife out. “Change me. Change me and I’ll do it. I’ll kill the boy if it means she’ll be saved.”
The girl’s amber eyes bore into my face, her shoulders and chest heaving.
I truly believe she will kill the boy for her sister to live.
I am both impressed and completely heartbroken over this. No matter what she may think of me, my motives were pure in sending her sister above. I firmly believe my heart was in the right place when I gave Alia legs. Though now I realize I shouldn’t have worried as much about her lying on land as lying to me, though either way her manipulation may be Nik’s grandson’s undoing. Somehow, I wish Niklas were anyone else. Maybe he is—maybe the little mermaid told me one more lie to get her way, knowing my history with his family and how I loved Nik.
“You’ve seen this boy above, and yet you will do it?”
Runa nods, fury hot in the set of her shoulders. “Oh, I saw him. He acts like she’s a prize pet. Something shiny he found on the beach. A nice complement to his stupid sapphire crown or dumb red ring.”
My breath catches. “Red ring?”
“Yes, it’s not rubies or garnets but something else. He rubs it like a two-bit moon play villain.”
I work to keep my face plain, though at my back I can feel Anna yearning to scream. When Nik was alive, he would visit often. He’d dip the toes of his oxblood boots in the water, rear end in the dry gray sand, and tell me about his life. Within a year of my absence, he told me how a maid had found a red crystal rock in the old dresses I’d left at the castle the night that my time above ended. It was the stone the sea had given me when I practiced my first exchange spell—Annemette’s life for what the sea had already claimed. He remembered me wearing that dress when he’d spotted me while readying Iker’s boat for the Celebration of the Sea.
My heart lurches for all the things I would’ve done differently that morning on the dock. I should’ve kissed Nik when he brushed a curl from my cheeks, his fingers lingering long enough that we both turned nearly as red as the stone in my pocket. The stone that Nik fashioned into a ring, that now sits atop his grandson’s finger.
“What else do you know about him?” I ask the girl.
I’m worried I’ve gone too far and that her frustration won’t stand it, but Runa bites her lip, her interaction above running through her mind. Though she’s thinking hard, I find it difficult to believe she’s forming a lie. She badly wants to save her sister, and it’s enough to keep her honest. It wouldn’t do to exaggerate.
“These other boys, they were talking about something called a U-boat.”
My heart stops. U-boat? It had been invented when I was a girl—it wasn’t common, but Father had done his research on them for King Asger, believing he might be able to better spot whales while working in tandem with them.
They weren’t widespread then, but now, with time and improvements in technology? They might be. That possibility looks much different to me from my vantage point under the sea. The danger they might pose to the merpeople is great.
“They’re ships that can stay underwater for weeks at a time,” I say, my memory shooting back to drawings Father got from a sailor near the mouth of the Rhine in the North Sea. Runa startles. “Yes, what you’re thinking is correct—they’d be extremely dangerous to your people in the water.” A shock of realization goes through me. “And the kingdom is building U-boats for the war effort?”
Havnestad always put its people to work on boats in times of famine. Times of war may be no different.
The girl nods. “All of Denmark, including Havnestad, is officially neutral, though boys in the southern regions are close enough to Germany that they’re being conscripted. So, Havnestad—all of Denmark, really—is in the war, whether it wants to be or not.”
Boys, stolen for war. They’re just bodies. Bodies upon bodies. I don’t think it would be much of a stretch to believe Niklas or any other ruler losing civilians to a foreign power would want to make sure that power succeeds.
“Niklas is king of Havnestad now, not simply a prince.” More news to me—news that would explain his impending marriage. “So, he would have to approve these U-boats—I don’t know how it works above, exactly, but here Father would have a say on anything that could be a potential pain—or profit.”
Profit. In war? I can’t reconcile this thought with my Nik. Though his grandson is not the boy I loved. “And you believe he could be making a profit?”
“Why else would he help without declaring war himself?” she says, anger flaring, though it’s not for me. “He’s probably even making a profit on the mines he’s set in the waters.”
I know all about the mines. They go off daily outside my lair, a sign of what rages above.
Runa shakes her head. “They’re meant for enemy ships, but they’re dangerous to all of us down here. There’s something unsettling to me about a man who would place live bombs in the sea without a care for who or what might detonate them.”
“And your people have died from this practice.”
“Not yet, but there have been injuries. Whales, sharks, and fish from the smallest to the greatest have been killed. If a ship explodes, the projectiles can wipe out anyone or anything in their wake.” She takes a shaky breath. “It’s bad enough already, and who’s to say how long the war will last?”
The meaning of all of it piles between us, shadows dancing in the almost-dawn. In some ways I’m protected here in my prison, protected from the outside by buoys Nik erected long ago, my cove off limits to anyone who would want to wade out into the black tide. They do toss Sankt Hans Aften dolls into my waters each year though. Not everyone, of course. Only those who believe the tale of the witch, the prince, and the spell that plucked him from the brink of death.
The mermaid stares at me. “Let me do it. Help me save her. Change me.” She dares to grab my hand in the one that doesn’t hold the knife. “Please, please. Please let me make this right. I can’t lose Alia.”
Something Tante Hansa once told me breaks loose from the memories of old, falling into the forefront of my mind.
Loneliness is the weakest excuse for magic there is, and it mixes horribly with pride and ignorance.
She’d meant it as a rebuke of me while I tried to help Annemette, yet I know this is different. This girl is lonely because this is her sister. Her twin. Her other half.
She’s not prideful. She’s not ignorant—she knows much more about the situation than I did about the girl I once knew. That much is for sure.
And she’s given