Chapter 58
The sea serpents are still circling my body. Blood seeps from the gash in my arm.
Everything goes into hyper speed.
Breathe
Everything is pain, everything hurts. But the voice refuses to give up. It presses and roars, commands me.
Breathe
The water in my lungs drags me to the bottom of the sea, and the scars on my neck burn.
Suddenly, instinct takes over.
I force the water up through my lungs and expel it from my body.
My throat is burning with fire and acid, but I don’t stop. I strain and push it out, and I have never felt such pain in my entire life, but as my throat explodes, something bursts open.
A cloud of blood blooms in the water around me, and I think I must be dying, but something else happens instead.
I can breathe again.
When I bring my fingers to my neck, I find open wounds, and the slightest touch is so excruciating that I almost faint.
But water moves through me with each breath.
I have gills.
Everything has stopped. The sea serpents slow almost to a standstill.
Nurmand?r
I breathe deeply and take pleasure in the water flowing through me, despite the intense pain. I am part of the cycle, and it’s part of me.
This is my sea
I fix my eyes on the giant sea serpents.
They are all around me, and they could tear me to pieces with one bite. But they are a few seconds too late. The shock has slowed them down.
So I open my mouth.
The first note is so soft that I barely notice it slipping out. But I let it grow and intensify until I am singing directly at the hard black mass, which suddenly splits apart with a roar.
My notes strike them, slice right through them, until they have no choice but to back away. A scream is brewing, a collective wail that troubles the waters and breathes pain and death.
It doesn’t belong to me.
I know now how it’s supposed to sound.
It was supposed to be a shared song, a chorus of thousands upon thousands of interwoven voices.
There should have been a multitude of us singing in this moment.
But it’s just me. My song resonates with grief for what was, and for what is.
I close my eyes and sing. My voice is mournful and sharp, like shards of glass.
I banish them—their vibrations, black scales, and evil intentions—from my sea. Let them disappear back into the deep, dark grave from whence they came, never to return.
My blood merges with the water coming out of my renewed gills, and I feel the rhythm of my heartbeat weave itself into the force exuding from me.
I am alone, yet not alone. Others are singing through me, their voices joining in the melody that streams forth.
The voice, that soft female voice, sings inside my head.
The sea serpents twist and writhe, trying to get away, but they have nowhere to hide. The sound is everywhere; there is no escape.
I ignore their cries:
stop
stop
Stop
Then I hear a prolonged wail, so wild that it almost stops me in my tracks.
I am struck by a shock wave of hatred and rage, but I don’t stop singing. Instead, I continue with my eyes open, watching their convulsions, their spasmodic writhing, without mercy.
When the song in my head changes to a more even drone, I follow. I am singing them to sleep, dragging them down toward the bottom, deeper and deeper.
The water is filled with electricity. It’s coming from me.
I separate them from the group, one by one, littering the seabed with their sleeping forms, forcing them into the darkest abyss.
Their deep watery grave
I would much rather destroy them forever, but the voice in my head is leading the song, and I must follow.
There is no melody that will kill them, no matter how much I would like to.
The deeper they disappear into the depths, the more muffled their vile sounds become. When they are all gone, there are no more notes to sing.
You cannot kill them, only put them to sleep. It will be a very long time before they return.
The water tastes different now. The evil is gone.
The voice in my head has grown weaker and sounds painfully sad.
Everything comes rushing back, and I am overcome by tremendous weariness. Pain wells up in my lungs and throat. But I can’t give up yet, even though my body is racked with agony.
I have to ask. Who are you?
I have to ask.
You do not need to know . . . not yet
Can a voice smile?
You must carry on
The voice is weaker now. Weary, like me.
They have been defeated. Now everyone knows you exist.
Everyone?
But no answer comes, and I find myself floating on my back in vast silence. My throat is scratched and raw. I start to feel dizzy and wonder how much blood I’ve lost. Is it really over, or have I already drowned?
No
The final, brief whisper may just be my imagination. I’m too dazed to be sure.
The underside of a boat looms above my head, and I stretch out my arms to swim a few strokes with strength that I don’t really have. When I finally break through the surface, the air is bitingly painful. It’s raw, so dry that I start coughing and have to dive under again.
I swim over brownish-white sludge strewn with garbage in various stages of decay. Paper, newspapers, rusty cans. I see no life, no plants, no fish. No one like me.
It makes me desperately, indescribably sad.
I’m so tired.
Eventually, I make one more attempt to surface. This time I’m prepared, and manage to do it.
I breathe very carefully, with short, shallow breaths.
With my last ounce of strength, I drag myself up onto the beach, toward the haphazardly beached boat, with Iris and my mother beside it.
Mom is staring out at the water, where Old Man Ingvar’s boat is drifting.
A dark abandoned silhouette in the clear white moonlight.
Iris has a phone pressed to her ear.
“She must have been under for fifteen minutes or so, we can’t be sure.”
When she sees me, she covers her mouth with her hand and drops her phone in the sand.
“Mom,” I squeeze out.
Mom stares at my soaked underwear; my wet, matted hair; the bright-red blood still oozing from my neck.
“Tuva.” She leaps to her feet, wraps her arms around me, and sobs loudly.
I take in a mouthful of air, and a strange, constricted feeling comes over my throat. My gills are closing up again.
“My Tuva,” she whispers into my dripping-wet face. “My baby.”
Blood runs from my neck and down her arms. Over her shoulder, I can just make out a few faint points of light floating in the distance. Were they there the whole time? Were they watching over me? Did the voice in my head come from the fairy queen?
“It’s over now,” I manage to say before everything turns black.