Chapter 24
In the end, for all August’s grand ambitions, all he needed to bend finfolk magic to his will was a knife.
He and I sit in the back of a whaleboat while Silas stands in the stern, forced to manipulate the tides to carry us soundlessly out into the bay.
My back is to August, his knees on either side of me.
His knifepoint is pressed gently against my spine, hidden under my jacket so nobody sees.
Beneath us, a multitude of whales—dozens and dozens of them—socialize close to the surface.
Under other circumstances it would be beautiful.
They bob gently in and out of the water, which is clear enough to see them beneath the surface, nuzzling one another familiarly.
I could reach out and touch them if my hands weren’t tied in front of me.
Instead I watch them and try to breathe through the rising tide of rage and terror.
Think of Kit and Lydia and the others, who August has assured us are locked safely in one of the Kielstraat outbuildings until all this is over.
All this. Two words containing the promise of so much blood.
The whalers have lined up along the beach, weapons at the ready; a few at a time, they push rowboats out into the water.
Silas’s tides pull them out into the bay without the need for noisy rowing; they simply trail oars in the water to steer.
Thus we can surround the whales, hem them in, all in near-silence.
August has sent around the instruction not to strike until everyone is on the water.
Which will allow us to kill as many whales as possible as they try to flee.
Silas is pale, jaw set in concentration as he helps the small army of whalers get into place.
His hands tremble as he raises them to either side, beckoning the tides.
This will be a massacre, I think numbly.
He will never forgive himself for it. But he didn’t hesitate to do as August said. Not with my life in the balance.
The whales breathe and click to one another all around, paying no mind to the little creatures in their little boats on the surface, at least not now. Whaleboats fill the water around us, cutting through the forest of spouts. The men hoist harpoons and lances, wordlessly testing their heft.
My heart stutters when I notice a bank of fog forming out on the ocean, out to the northwest. It’s subtle, just a smudge of gray on the water in the distance.
No one else notices. The men’s eyes are on the water, tracking the progress of our prey.
A cry of alarm builds up in my throat; I ignore every scrap of instinct and swallow it down.
Then something seems to shift in the bay. Maybe the whales notice us, because their clicks swing up and then fade, the spouts flagging as the whales turn beneath the water. The men tighten their grips and raise harpoons.
All the whaleboats are out here now. August stands and raises a hand, counts down on his fingers. Boats creak as men lean forward, arms drawn back, weapons ready. Five.
Silas’s body goes rigid as he watches the water.
Four.
What does he see?
Three.
He drops into a crouch, gripping the sides of the boat.
Two—
It happens so fast.
A great scaled hand shoots from the water and pulls down a nearby boat. Waves slosh angrily into the vacuum left behind.
The men inside don’t have time to scream before the water closes over their heads. For a stretching moment, no one else does either.
Then the wind picks up, the fog rolls in, and everyone starts screaming at once.
August’s hand, still raised for the countdown, falls slowly. He’s slack-jawed, face pale, entirely dumbstruck in a way I’ve never once seen him. Finfolk aren’t supposed to attack this close to land. And whatever’s under the water—
The fog barrels out from the horizon, spreading across before pouring into the bay toward us.
Dark figures streak out from it as a tail shoots from the water—not a whale’s tail; it’s long and thin, eel-like—and slams down on another boat.
One of the men is caught beneath. His scream lasts a second, then is horribly extinguished.
Panic rips across the harbor like an oil spill catching fire.
A few yards away in another boat, Mance heaves a rifle over his shoulder and starts firing straight into the sea, blasts echoing across the water.
Others take aim with lances and harpoons.
More grab for their oars instead, wheeling their boats toward shore.
Not us though. August wanted to humiliate Silas, to force him to use his power only to bring us out to the whales. Meaning we don’t have oars. We are dead in the water as waves buffet us, as projectiles fly, as gunfire and whale clicks batter our ears.
“Get down!” Silas cries.
I duck down the instant before a lance whistles over my head. I feel fear but it’s muffled somehow, distant. Kit and Lydia and the others are imprisoned onshore, safe from this. Silas might survive a finfolk attack. Let the finfolk wipe the rest of us out, it would probably be for the good.
“Call the tide!” August roars at Silas. He’s still behind me, knife in hand, unsteady in the rocking boat. “You wretch! Get us to shore!”
Abruptly, he shoves me aside and lurches toward Silas, knife raised.
Instinct seizes me and I slam my body into August’s knees as hard as I can, knocking his feet out from under him. The breath leaves him with an oof. He grabs at my hair but misses, pitches into the water as I catch myself with tied hands against the side of the boat.
Later I will wonder if this saved his life. He surfaces; for an instant our eyes lock together, his full of hatred, then he kicks out and starts swimming for shore.
Just as fingers long as legs, fingers with too many joints, close over the sides of our boat.
I curl my legs to me just in time to avoid losing them as the boat snaps in two, Silas on one end, me on the other. Hands still tied, I topple backward into freezing darkness. Shocking cold. The noise of the world suddenly deadened.
Silas’s arms find me, wrap around me. For just a moment, silence.
Then a barrage of clicks pummels my eardrums, rattles my bones. The being beneath blinks up at us, haloed in sinking pieces of boat like falling snow.
A woman’s shape, vaguely, but of a scale with the whales that surround us. Greenish-gray skin, spine and arms and legs edged with rippling fins. Fins flaring out from a breath-stealing lovely face, black depthless eyes like a shark, wide lipless mouth.
As I watch, that mouth stretches and unleashes another blast of hideous clicks, like the whales’, but somehow even louder. Silas’s arms tighten around me but he can’t shield us; for a moment I’m sure our teeth will fall out, our bones judder apart.
The queen’s eyes—for I know with deep, instinctive certainty she must be the queen—glitter with intelligence. As the clicks echo and dissipate through the water, I have the feeling that every part of me has been perceived, inside and out. From my numb fingertips to my ragged heart.
HELLO, LITTLE ONE, says a voice in my head that is not mine, resonant and unearthly. I’VE BEEN WAITING.
Silas kicks up; my head breaks the surface.
He shouts something to me, but I can’t make sense of the words; my skull feels like a church bell just struck.
Everything is noise and chaos and indistinct shapes—men shouting, weapons blasting, boats rushing past us in the fog.
Pale and dark finfolk faces tip up toward us, unearthly eyes travel over us.
Some of them sound like they’re singing in thin voices, haunting music that winds up to the sky like smoke.
Even as some of the whalers reach shore, the finfolk still give chase. They mean to continue onto land, I realize with a stab of terror. Like in the old stories. They’re going to destroy Kielstraat. Kielstraat where my siblings and the Whistler crew are still imprisoned.
Debris surfaces with us, seaweed and waterlogged wood and white bones. It coalesces and takes the shape of a finfolk rowboat bearing up under Silas and me, pitching in the waves. He unties my hands, then pulls me to him in the boat, wrapping his arms around me, both of us shaking with cold.
My mind is still a jumbled mess, but a flash of bright red catches my eye, focuses my attention.
Curled against Silas’s chest, I blink until my vision clears a little.
I see that his bone pendant has slipped from the collar of his shirt and is no longer blank.
Not one or two but three red dots cluster at its heart.
“Silas,” I croak, lifting my hand to touch the pendant as fog wraps around our boat like a shroud, muffling all other sights and sounds. “Your favors.”
An unsettling feeling inches over me as he looks down, eyes flaring wide. Just a few days ago, his pendant was blank, his favors undone. Now all at once he’s done three.
And his face—he’s gone pale, lips parted, shock and fear playing through his eyes. What did the finfolk ask of him? Or did he somehow complete the favors without knowing it, as his expression suggests?
“No,” he whispers, as the sea bubbles off to the side of our boat and the crown of a great head rises.
WELL DONE, CHILD, that unearthly voice sounds again in my head. Yet there’s warmth in it too, a kind of affection somehow, and it makes me understand she’s not addressing me. YOU HAVE RETURNED TO US.
Not me at all, but Silas.
The pendant slips from Silas’s trembling hands as the queen surfaces.
Not all of her, just the top half of her head with its crown of fins, her black eyes.
The fog circles us. Beyond it, I can hear the muffled sounds of battle, more gunfire and screams and eerie finfolk song.
I have to get back to shore before they make landfall.
I have to get my siblings away from here.
But I know in my bones that if I leaped from this boat, the queen would strike me down like an insect.
“My queen,” Silas whispers. His voice is barely audible even to me, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the queen can hear. “I had planned to come to you in Drekja.”
His arms loosen around me and the suspicion grows in me that something is happening here that I don’t understand. Something is irretrievably wrong.
WE COULDN’T LET THE HUMANS’ SLAUGHTER GO UNPUNISHED.
She drifts up right next to the boat. Lays one great fingertip delicately over its edge, tilting the boat slightly down so she can see us.
Panic speeds my heart; I brace my legs against the side of the boat to stop myself from sliding in.
Screams float over the water from shore. Kit. Lydia.
Silas lets go of me and turns to face the queen. He’s pale, breathing fast. He lifts the pendant from around his neck and holds it out to her. “I’m sorry,” he says. The pendant dances, hanging from trembling fingers. “I can’t fulfill our bargain.”
Fogged, semitranslucent eyelids sink slowly down over the black eyes and then rise up again. The fins sprouting from her head twitch and shiver inquisitively. BUT YOU HAVE brOUGHT WHAT WE ASKED FOR.
“I can’t give them to you,” Silas whispers.
“Silas,” I say, voice scraping out; I feel like my chest is still half full of water. “Silas, what is she—”
“Please.” He’s not talking to me, he doesn’t look at me, I’m not sure if he even hears me. The pendant slips from his fingers and disappears into the sea. “I accept the curse. Or we can make a new bargain. I’ll do anything you ask.”
THE BARGAIN IS BINDING.
“Silas?” My voice comes out high and frightened. He turns toward me and his eyes are anguished.
“I made a mistake,” he says, shoulders hunching inward. “I promised what wasn’t mine to give.”
A strange sound rises from the water, like the chattering of dolphins mixed with the strings of a harp breaking. Laughter, I realize with a bolt of dread. The queen is laughing.
SHOW HER.
A thin layer of water washes over the boat, surrounding Silas and me in an icy tide. When it recedes, a seashell lies there at our feet. Silas and I both grab for it at once, but I get there first, his hand coming down on top of mine, and I am plunged into memories not my own.
The secret chamber beneath the Spout in Abbonheim.
Silas floats alone in the pool, and I see the ceiling through his eyes, the glowing water casting strange dancing patterns on the stone walls.
The nightmares are getting worse, spilling over the boundaries of sleep to haunt him in the daytime.
He’s exhausted, making greenhands’ mistakes on the Whistler, losing minutes at a time when he’s plunged back to the sinking Volyar.
The icy water grasping at his legs, the screams of his dying crew all around him, the merciless shapes of the finfolk silhouetted against the dusk, just watching, just waiting.
And then there are the visions of things that haven’t happened yet.
Abbonheim in flames, Abbonheim crumbling, the sky choked with smoke, human blood and finfolk blood staining anew the cobblestones that have already absorbed so much Livyati blood.
Flames racing across the oil-soaked water of the harbor, eating up ships and people like so much kindling.
It’s intolerable. He closes his eyes, willing the visions to come that will tell him how to end it.
And they come.
He sees a little boy curled in a hammock belowdecks in a ship, consulting a map with the utmost seriousness, never mind that it’s upside down.
He sees a laughing girl in a yellow dress seated at a grand piano, playing an idle melody with one hand while she holds a flute of champagne in the other.
He sees me dancing with him on the beach by the light of a bonfire, flushed and grinning, and he wants to draw me closer—but—
He is standing outside Fairfax Manor, the night dark and cold, contrasting the music and laughter coming from inside, the windows lit up in celebration. He looks down at the bone pendant, held in the palm of his hand as if it’s a compass pointed toward our home, toward us.