Chapter 18 Sofie
Chapter eighteen
Sofie
My dreams were strange that night. So peculiar, I understood they weren’t natural dreams at all just from the sharp nature of it, contrasted with the darkness misting the edges.
It was her again. The Bride.
“Poor dear,” she said. “You still think he’ll choose you over the treasure, don’t you? He won’t. They never do. He never does.”
She said this as though we were in mid-conversation, an exchange that began while I was still lost in actual dreams.
“He’ll pick me,” I found myself saying, sure despite not quite knowing what we were discussing. And then, suddenly, I did. “Jax loves me. He loves me more than an enchanted bit of treasure.”
My own words took me by surprise. I was so certain of them—and moments later, so awash in doubt. Jax loves me. He did, didn’t he? We hadn’t known each other long, but the gods knew we’d spent more time together than most courting couples. Love matches were formed on less.
He loves me. Aestas help me, but I loved him, too.
What I did not know was whether I could trust him. In this not-quite-a-dream, I sounded awfully certain that I could.
“But she is the Queen of the Sea,” the Bride said, her face wreathed in shadows. Still, I could see the sadness in her eyes. “She is freedom, and pride, and power, and wealth beyond imagining. They will always choose her over us.”
“He didn’t choose you, did he? Your bridegroom. Is that why you set that curse?“ I hesitated. “You must’ve been a fearsome sorceress in your day.”
“I was all that and more.” Her ghostly form grinned. “But I had a weakness. My heart. And it was that he used against me.”
I wanted to close the roiling distance between us, as if I could keep her from leaving before I got the answers I needed. But it was as if there were an invisible barrier between us—or as if she wasn’t really here in my dream.
She was a magical projection. I could only imagine how powerful she was, keeping this much of herself alive while her body was long-since buried and decayed.
Goddess help me, I hoped he’d the decency to bury her. Whoever he was.
“You do know it is the heart, don’t you?” she asked.
I didn’t understand.
“The weakness. The unraveling thread you seek. If he chooses you, he can never possess it, but the curse over him will end.”
“Do you swear it?” I asked, trying and failing once more to take a step forward in this black abyss.
That was when I recognized it. The Bride wasn’t in my dreamspace because my own magic was keeping her out. Protecting me.
If that wall didn’t exist between us, I had no doubt she would’ve attacked me.
“I don’t need to swear to anything,” the Bride said, smiling slowly as if she knew I understood the real reason she was here. “It is the way of this death curse. To break it, he must do what my husband would not.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then you will die like the rest of them.”
It was hard to sound fearsome in dreams. “You won’t find me easy to kill.”
The Bride laughed. “Little girl, I have so much more power than you. I am a thousand times the sorceress you’ll ever be. You can’t keep me out forever.”
“Magic is different now,” I said, showing my teeth in a false grin. “This is my era, not yours. And you don’t have that power any longer. You’re just a ghost.”
“Am I?” Her laugh echoed, growing distant. “He cut out my heart, and gave it to the Queen of the Sea. But I had the last laugh. He may have unlocked the Queen’s power, but he never got to use it. Come to my cavern, little sorceress, and you’ll see just what I am.”
“You’re just a ghost,” I repeated, like a frightened child in the dark. The dream was shifting, threatening to end.
“Let me do you a favor, child. I think you already know the answer. You just don’t remember.”
“The answer to what?”
“To the question you’ve been wrestling with: Why can’t he have the treasure and you, too? For you know he’ll never choose you. You’ll do anything to convince yourself it won’t matter. But you know. You know. You know…”
As her words faded, the void crashed over me like a wave, and my eyes fluttered open, unsure what to make of the light.
I woke to Jax standing at the side of my hammock.
“There’s a sunrise you should see,” he said, his voice particularly low and rough.
I blinked away sleep, only to find the pirate captain looking like a nervous schoolboy at my side.
“You woke me up to see the sunrise?” I mumbled. “I’ve seen them before.”
“Not like this you haven’t.” He cleared his throat, as if nervous. “Are you coming?”
Grumbling all the while, I let Jax help me out of my hammock and lead me outside onto the deck.
We weren’t the only ones viewing the sunrise. The crew seemed transfixed by it.
“The magic centered on this Isle is what makes it so red,” Jax explained, standing behind me. “Like a storm coming.”
To my surprise, he wrapped his arms around my waist.
“I’m aware.” I couldn’t quite find it in me to sound more caustic. “The sunsets at Dewspell are beautiful like this.”
“Ah, but this is different. This one goes up instead of down.”
I flared my nostrils, resisting a laugh. His arms tightened around me. “It’s not a competition.”
Unwittingly, my own words had brought back the dream I’d had of the Bride. There was a competition. I was competing against the treasure Jax desired.
But what had she meant? Why could Jax only have me or the treasure, and never both?
A vague memory from my student days at Dewspell began to tickle the back of my mind—then crashed over me like an ice-cold wave.
“I know how the Bride died,” I said suddenly.
I felt Jax’s body go rigid. “What? How?”
“I read about the Queen of the Sea once,” I said, “when I was studying legends of cursed objects.”
Jax hummed. “I thought we were past that whole ‘it’s only a legend’ thing.”
“Listen,” I snapped, shaking my head as if to clear it.
His arms loosened around me, and I found myself stepping out of them.
“The text was one of the restricted books—restricted because they came from the First Library, the one whose knowledge was the foundation for Dewspell’s libraries.
It was an old labyrinth of a place, guarded by a monster, and not all of the information could be relied upon.
It was said some of the texts had come from the world of monsters itself. ”
“Are you sure you want to waste this beautiful sunrise discussing academia?” Jax asked, lifting a brow. “Not one of my favorite subjects, if you must know, since women like my mother could never afford the chance to study.”
That admission nearly toppled the forming thoughts from my mind—but I couldn’t let him change the subject. This was important.
“The Queen of the Sea is not a natural enchanted object. Some accounts say it was made cursed—even before the would’ve Bride found it. Others say it was forged in the world of monsters and brought to our realm for safekeeping. But it was never meant to be used here.”
“So, what then? The Bride died because someone tried to use it?”
“The Bride died so someone could use it.“ I found myself stepping back from Jax, almost into the ship’s rail. “The Queen of the Sea cannot be mastered except by sacrificing the heart of a lover.”
Jax stared at me, as if he did not follow. But he did. I knew he did.
“Are you saying all this is because the Bride is a woman scorned?” There was laughter in Jax’s eyes, and skepticism in the line of his mouth.
“No, Jax. I’m saying he actually took her heart. You’ll never master the Queen of the Sea unless you cut out my heart.”
Jax stared at me, his eyes widening.
And then burst out laughing.
“Dear Sofie, if you could see your face! Of course I’d never do such a thing. You’re an accomplished sorceress of Dewspell, as you so often remind me. You’ll break the curse, just like you’ll break the Bride’s curse.”
“I can’t break the Bride’s curse,” I rejoined, an annoying, soft tremble touching my lower lip. “Not without your help.”
“You found a solution?” Jax’s dark eyes went from laughter to genuine joy. He pulled me into a fierce hug, squeezing me tightly. “Sofie, that’s wonderful! You are a wonder! I knew you could do it. Mind, you waited until the last possible moment. A few doubts were starting to creep in.”
I wrenched out of his grasp, leaving him with a shadow of hurt in his eyes—as well as confusion on his brow.
“You don’t understand. There’s only one solution,” I said.
“What, Sofie? What is it?”
“You have to stop seeking the treasure and choose me instead.”
For several heartbeats, Jax just stared at me, his expression morphing from humor to horror, then something even worse: an unreadable, guarded blankness.
“We had a deal, pet,” he said, the nickname sounding not at all endearing. “We don’t change the plan, remember?”
My heart sank, followed immediately by my stomach. It was just as the Bride said.
He was choosing the treasure over me.