Sea Witch(76)

Then, a darkness fell across the pewter light of her vision. The end, pulling the curtains shut.

No.

The octopus. The giant one. The one that haunted the cove. Her beast—a product of her spell of abundance. A mistake. An aberration.

The animal was swift. Vengeful. Spiteful.

“Líf . . . líf,” the girl started, the words dying in her mouth, drowned in salt water. She wasn’t sure what to say other than to tell the octopus to go. Live. Live away from this battlefield. Let her rest with her father in peace.

But the octopus smelled the ink in her veins and the magic it held, and it began to feed. The beast’s tentacles trembled with power as they slithered across her wounds, mingling with the water, with her blood, with her spell that controlled its life for the past few months. The girl’s eyes rolled back into her head as fresh magic entered her veins.

“Líf. Líf.”

Suddenly, a great spasm of white light shot up between them. Connected them. Magic as old as the sea itself threaded the octopus’s life and hers.

The light drew the great beast closer to the girl’s prone form, barely alive. Barely anything at all. The tentacles reveled in her blood. Tried to capture it. The magic between them was a magnet, pulling all of it to all of her.

“Líf . . . ,” she repeated again, no breath in it. Seawater washed the word down her windpipe, pushing the oxygen out of her heart, her blood. Until she was one with the sea. Her soul water itself.

The light flickered and grew, engulfing both the girl and the octopus in its warmth, shooting past the water’s surface, to the moon and the magic still hovering in the air above. With the light came an equal darkness, seeping across the cove in a sheet of black.

The people on the sand scattered then, knowing it wasn’t safe. All but the boy and his cousin, still watching the water as if the girls might resurface. So many questions on their lips as the black water feathered out toward the ?resund Strait.

And down under the surface, the water roiled and turned until great whirlpools twisted from cove bottom to top. Scalding gas from deep within the earth shot up through the deadened sand, violent geysers forming between the whirlpools. The cove’s sand began to rot, all the color washing away until nothing but gray remained. And when the light faded to nothing but the obsidian of the ocean, something peculiar happened.

The girl with raven curls was no longer a girl.

She still had her raven curls, her beauty, and the upper body of a woman, but where her long legs had once been were eight tentacles, onyx black and shiny as silk. They plunged from her waist, unlike anything the ocean had ever seen.

And, with magic swirling around her, through her, from her, the creature opened her eyes.





Epilogue—Fifty Years Later


THE SEA KING AND HIS PEOPLE CALL ME THE SEA witch—though I’m still surprised to be anything at all.

I was prepared to die that day in the water.

I’d given my life to Nik. I knew what that spell would do.

But something happened in the swirling magic—mine, Mother’s, Hansa’s, what was left of Annemette’s. The octopus haunting the cove had something to do with it too. All combining to leave me with the body I have now.

Not the body of a mermaid.

Not the body of anything else seen in these waters.

I am my own magic.

I spread out my tentacles beneath me: eight, shiny and black, and as voluminous as one of Queen Charlotte’s gowns, each plucking a shrimp from the seafloor. I am quite the sight, though very few have laid eyes on me. I am tied to the cove, something keeping me here. Magic or memories, or both.

My lair is a sunken cave, surrounded by bubbling mire—turfmoor—and violent whirlpools. The water here is a flat black—Havnestad Cove now a sunspot on the sea.

Around my cave, strange trees have grown from the bones of Anna and the guards, though my father’s bones never changed, buried gently as they are. These trees—polypi—are half-plant, half-animal, like serpents rooted to the pewter sand, a hundred heads where branches should be.

The T?rhed died in the magic that made me this way, the sea rid of both drought and abundance. And so, the whirlpools draw fish into the polypi’s clutches, keeping me well fed without ever having to hunt.

Feeding on my strange forest’s catch, I study magic. I’ve learned everything I can about the sorcery beneath the waves, though new mysteries present themselves to me daily. And so my power has grown, but so has my reputation.

The merpeople are frightened of me—time and tales building upon each other. They’ve been told to stay away from the witch powerful enough to ruin the sea as soon as save it. The sea king knows of the magic I’ve done—of the black death and then the famine—and he also knows of me and his Annemette, memories of her resurfacing when my name is spoken aloud. But that is rare. No one dares.

It, too, has been long enough that no one on land knows me as Evelyn. Evie. That girl.

They know the story of the mermaid and the witch and King Niklas. They know of—and dare to visit—the strange cove with ink for water and sand as gray as steel. Now they forgo the bonfire and toss their little wooden dolls into the cove every Sankt Hans Aften. Presents to the witch who saved their kingdom.

But they don’t know me.

My people are long gone, or so I’ve heard from pieces of conversation floating down from above over the years.