“But what of your gallant air elemental? You cannot think to leave here with both these handsome lads.” Before Bertie could interrupt, Sedna’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “I know. For the sake of a love lost, I will make you a bargain. You will lay your soul and your heart bare to my gaze. The one you love most will return to the surface with you, and the one you love least will remain behind with me.”
“I will leave no one behind!” The matching wounds on Bertie’s palms burned with salt and sand.
“You have no choice in the matter. This is my kingdom, and my will rules here.”
An enormous wave slammed over the three of them, tearing Bertie away from the others. She heard Nate shout, felt Ariel reach for her, but it was Sedna who caught her up and made her kneel in the frothing waters. Insistent currents grasped Bertie’s wrists, tugged at her bridal skirt as Sedna’s moist breath trickled along the sides of a neck forcibly bowed.
“Count to three,” the goddess said. “Open your heart to me.”
The rushing sound again, but is it wind or water?
“One.” Starfish hands crawled over Bertie’s face and covered her eyes. “Two.”
What would be worse? To open my eyes and find myself on the shore with Ariel, or with Nate?
“Three.”
Bertie’s heart opened, and the ocean poured in. The medallion burned into her chest when Sedna peered deep inside her.
“Who do you love most, Beatrice Shakespeare Smith?”
Sedna must have found Nate deep inside Bertie’s heart. Surely the Sea Goddess saw for herself the thousands of smiles exchanged in swordfights and rough play. She saw, as Bertie saw, the wink of white teeth in tanned skin, the muscles that lifted her as easily as they heaved coils of rope. She saw the man who would trade his life to keep a girl-child safe.
When Sedna twisted about in Bertie’s heart, she found Ariel’s voice, his songs, his temper. The games they’d played when she was small, the hours spent leapfrogging the scenery until Mrs. Edith decided it was best to keep them apart. Sedna saw, within every one of Bertie’s memories, the heartbreaking loveliness of his face the day he returned to the Théâtre, and to her.
Sedna saw, the moment that Bertie did, that if love could be measured out in brass weights, in gold coins, in grains of sand, that the scales balanced. She realized, just as Bertie did, that Bertie loved them in equal measure.
Triumphant and terrified, Bertie shoved Sedna out of that intimate place and opened her eyes, but the shore she found herself upon was the one of green and gloom in Sedna’s lair. Nate and Ariel stood on either side of her, each man clasping one of her wounded hands. For another three-count, this one marked by Bertie’s earth-slowed heartbeats, she and Sedna locked fierce stares. She saw at once the Sea Goddess was furious about this turn of events.
But some part of me has always known the truth of it.
“Very well, then.” A terrible sort of calm settled over the cavern: that moment before a maelstrom sucks ships under. Sedna swept her skirts aside and sat upon her throne, summoning a scepter into existence. Dream-emeralds studded the coral length of it, and she used it to stir the waters lapping at the base of her chair. “It’s only fair to offer a similar bargain to your men.”
“What d’ ye mean by that?” Nate still pressed a hand over his wound, trying to staunch the bleeding.
Sedna held the scepter above the water. Bertie could see its reflection shimmering atop the waves, even as it transformed into a sword. The Sea Goddess reached down and plucked the reflection from the water. “One for each of you, my lads. To the death. I shall let whoever wins return to the world’s surface with the fair Beatrice.”
Two flashes of silver spun through the air and landed in the sand at their feet with twin thunks!
“Don’t touch them,” Bertie whispered. “It’s a trick.”
Sedna spoke not to her, but to Ariel, still standing on Bertie’s right-hand side. “You warned her about rescuing the pirate lad, but did she listen?”
“No, she did not.” Ariel had his eyes fixed upon the weapon closest to him.
“Not an uncommon occurrence, I would wager,” the Sea Goddess purred.
Still he stared at the sword, eyes glazing over with its silver-lure. “A wager you would win.”
Bertie tried to kick it out of his reach, half burying it in the sand. “Don’t, Ariel—”
“Pick up the sword, air spirit.” Sedna drowned her out with the command. “Or all three of you shall die.”
Ariel’s hand closed around the grip, and that which had been bland and featureless transformed into a rapier with an elaborate hilt, thickly decorated from crosspiece to pommel. He smiled at the pirate, deceptively careless. “And what will you have?”
Nate’s eyes were also lit by the sword’s light, and he came up holding the cutlass he’d worn every day at the theater: a short, broad saber, gently curved along the cutting edge, a weapon so much part of him that it was an extension of his arm.
“Don’t do this.” Caught between the two men, the two blades, Bertie refused to move, refused to give them a clear path to kill each other.
“Get out o’ th’ way, Bertie.”
“I will not, you idiot. You’re both hurt—”
“Is he now?” Nate’s gaze skimmed over Ariel until he saw the blood-rose that bloomed at the knee of the air elemental’s wedding trousers. “That’s good t’ know.”
“Your own weak spot is bleeding,” Ariel pointed out with jovial good humor. “What happened there, my friend?”
Nate’s glance flickered down to the wound under his heart. “None o’ yer damn business.” By far the more experienced with the sword, he normally fought with a stance fluid as the water, body relaxed to permit quick movement. Now, shirt hanging in tatters, every muscle was bunched in anger. “Get her out o’ th’ way, Sedna, if ye want this t’ happen.”
“With pleasure.” In place of henchmen, Sedna sent another wave to capture Bertie. Foam and sand filled her mouth when she tried to protest, seaweed coiling around her ankles and dragging her into the shallow water at the base of the throne. Spitting and coughing, she scrabbled at her bonds even as the men circled each other, shades of Montague and Capulet.
Ariel spoke Tybalt’s line, “‘Have at thee, coward.’”
“Save yer breath for a pretty death rattle.”
Their weapons met with the metal-clash that would not end with curtains falling, bows, applause, but with the fury of a wounded beast smashing against a wall of wind. Nate hacked and slashed the way he would at an enemy who’d boarded his ship. Lightning quick, Ariel dodged and spun, dipping in to land swift cuts when he could before dancing back, only slightly favoring the leg hurt on the obsidian knife-crossing.
Tugging at the seaweed, managing to pry loose the first of a dozen slime-slick ropes, Bertie would have screamed at both of them to stop, but she could see there was no use. This never would have come to pass at the Théâtre, each of them bound by formalities, restrained by the parts written for them. Sedna’s bitter hatred had filled them the moment they picked up the weapons, a magic more powerful than Serefina’s draught for making them forget Bertie was not a prize to be won with violence.
When their swords locked, Nate pulled his head back and smashed it into Ariel’s nose. Blood poured down the air elemental’s upper lip and dripped into the sand as he backed away, looking far more wary—and furious—than before.
“I told ye once I was glad t’ see ye bleed like any other man,” Nate said. “Now I’ll see ye dead like any other man.”
The crimson droplets that spattered on the sand turned into rubies that scuttled through the water toward Sedna. She winked down at Bertie. “Such a merry tournament, is it not?”
“What would he say, if my father could see the changes in you?” The churning water hid the fact that Bertie had loosened her bonds enough to start pulling one foot free.
Sedna reached down. Starfish hands crawled over Bertie’s neck, gras
ped her hair, pushed her face into the shallow water to grind it into the harsh black sands. After a moment, Sedna pulled Bertie back up to hiss, “You will be silent and watch them die, then I shall claim them both.”
With a shout that echoed in the cavern, Ariel swung at Nate’s sword arm. The pirate blocked, then backhanded the air elemental into the sand, immediately swinging the cutlass in a downward arc. Ariel brought up his sword in both hands, using Nate’s momentum to turn the cutlass aside before ramming the rapier’s pommel into the pirate’s ribs. Nate wheezed with pain and stumbled back, the hole left by the arrow bleeding freely.
Sedna loosed Bertie to clap her delight, and Bertie launched herself from the water to intercept Nate. They collided, the pirate swearing in three languages and Bertie only one.
“You have to stop.” She scrabbled at his sword hand, but he would have none of it.
“I’ll see this finished.” He caught her around the waist and slung her out of the way, propelling her into the cavern wall.
Bertie’s head collided with the volcanic rock. She fell to her knees, stars cascading through her vision, a lightning bolt traveling from behind her eyes down the length of her arms and into the sand. Air and water trapped there exploded with the heat of her pain, her fear, expanding to form a dagger of glass, the milky white twin of the obsidian knife.
The fight continued behind her, with grunts of pain as Sedna’s weapons did their work. The Sea Goddess coaxed them to further violence with empty promises and gleeful laughter. “Lovely, my handsome knights. But your work isn’t done. Only one can claim the maiden fair.”
Bertie shoved blood-sticky strands of hair out of her eyes in time to see Nate duck under a wild swing of Ariel’s sword, rapier sliding along cutlass. With a twist, a grunt, a heave, Nate cast aside both swords, sending them flying in twin parabolas to land in the water. Grappling now, he grasped the elemental by the shirt and his silver hair, bringing his knee up over and over again into Ariel’s stomach. The air elemental’s weak leg buckled under him, but he returned the kicks, favor for favor, landing punches wherever he could and then jamming his thumb into Nate’s arrow wound.
Dizzy, stomach twisted at the sight of them, goddess-goaded, trying to kill each other, Bertie drew the still-warm weapon from the sand. When she stood, blood wended a warm and sticky trail from her temple to her chin.
“Stop,” she said, “or this happy dagger will have a new sheath.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Sea, All Water
So like Juliet’s words, they rang through the cavern with the power of a death knell. Ariel and Nate hesitated, the clouds chased from their eyes as they registered the threat.
Bertie dug the tip of the knife into her skin just above her heart until blood welled up around the glass. “Would Romeo have stopped her, if he could?”
“Yes.” Hoarse whispers from both men.
Sedna rose from her throne, face contorted with thwarted bloodlust. “I command you two to fight!”
Bertie issued a command of her own. “Move away from each other.”
Each man fell back a few steps.
“I tire of this game.” The Sea Goddess snarled, displaying all her jagged teeth as water began to pour in from unseen channels. “I will kill the three of you and be done with this.”
Bertie looked at Ariel and Nate, seeing they were hardly able to stand after the damage they’d done to each other and understanding they certainly wouldn’t be able to swim for long.
Say ye love me. Even if it’s not true, let me take th’ words back wi’ me.
The wounds on her palms blazed hot and bright, twin reminders of two ceremonies, two sets of promises exchanged. She scraped the glass dagger over both wounds, opening the handfasting scars until the blood ran free.
Tell me you love me, at least as much as you love him.
Blood-magic and bone-magic, earth-magic and word-magic; Bertie prayed that together they would be enough. She closed her bleeding hands around the medallion and willed the sands of the shore to enfold both men with the arms of the earth. “Get thee gone.”
Black glittering bits of rock crawled over Nate and Ariel, swarming up their legs, sealing their wounds. Their faces contorted first with panic, then horror as they realized what she was doing.
“Bertie, no!” Their cries of protest echoed off the cavern’s walls.
She imagined them in another place: a beach covered in sand as white and pure as the cliffs that rose high above the shore. Gripping the medallion, blood oozing between her fingers, Bertie banished them. “Get thee gone.”
Sedna uncoiled from her throne with a screech. “What are you doing?”
“The waters may be yours to command,” Bertie answered, “but the rocks are mine. The sands are mine.”
“Don’t—” Ariel managed to say when the rock reached his chest.
She wouldn’t stop. “The blood is mine. The words are mine.”
“Lass!” Nate cried out before his features were granite-written.
The Sea Goddess sent wave after wave at the men, smashing water into the still figures, but they melted like sand carvings as she screamed her displeasure.
Swaying, utterly drained, Bertie watched the statues dissolve. “I couldn’t let you kill them. They are mine, and mine alone.”
“You have used up all your magic.” Sedna’s gaze sliced through Bertie’s skin, nicking her heart. “I didn’t think you’d be the sacrificial sort.”
Bertie tried to twist away. By now, the rising tide had reached her waist. “You’re just jealous because I can love two men in equal measure and you couldn’t even manage to love one properly.”
Dark bubbles boiled around Sedna, her face convulsing with fury. “I am going to enjoy watching you die.” The water still poured in all around them; before long it would reach Bertie’s chest, her neck. “I will fill your lungs and watch you drown. Once you are dead, I will rouse the waves to a suitable funeral procession so as to deliver your corpse to your father.” Sedna paused for effect. “You can picture it, I think?”
Yes, Bertie could imagine the Aerie filling with water, the same as it had when the puppets danced in the hatbox theater. Except this time the ocean wasn’t fabric streamers carried by stagehands, and the broken, bloated body the Scrimshander cradled wasn’t Ophelia. Bertie slogged to the double doors and tugged upon them.
Sedna’s expression shifted with currents of malice and cruel satisfaction. “There is no way out of this place.”
Buoyant now, Bertie kicked her feet feebly. She wanted to summon the sands to her, wanted to escape through the same earth-portal, except there was too much water, and she was too weak. The Sea Goddess’s seaweed hair snaked around Bertie’s waist and neck in sodden ropes so she could heave Bertie up, as though examining a fan or a comb in the marketplace, twisting her this way and that to get a better look.
“You are alone, truly alone, perhaps for the very first time. So I ask you, Beatrice Shakespeare Smith, who will really miss you? Who will mourn your passing?”
Against her will, Bertie imagined the Company ranged along the shore, staring at the water, waiting for her to return.
“Think of them,” Sedna crooned.
The fairies will cry, won’t they? Peaseblossom’s prone to heartfelt tears, and the boys might sniff when they think no one is looking.
“The one who stood alongside you.”
Hard to imagine tears suiting Ariel’s lovely face.
“The one you hoped to save.”
Nate will rage. Yes, he will mourn.
“The ones who await your return.”
Bertie thought of Waschbär’s merry black eyes, of Mrs. Edith, with her stern looks and years of affection freely given, and Ophelia, the mother she’d hardly known.
“And your precious father.” Sedna towed Bertie through the dark, rushing water. “They have all abandoned you.”
“I don’t need anyone to save me.” But she couldn’t summon the sands to he
r, couldn’t concentrate with Sedna’s tentacle grip squeezing the air from her lungs. Bertie could taste nothing but ocean when the water closed over her head. Just as it had when Sedna invaded the theater, everything churned with foam and bubbles. Through stinging eyes, she saw the Sea Goddess, a creature of purple ink and glittering emerald scales. The medallion floated up around Bertie’s neck. Water poured into her lungs. Her body jerked in protest. Her heart beat an erratic tattoo, and she could hear her pulse slowing in her ears again.
But it did not stop.
Through the dark eddies, Sedna gazed at her in horrified fascination. “This is no bird magic,” she whispered, words audible even through the salt water. “Who was your mother?”
A week ago, Bertie couldn’t have answered that question. But now the knowledge was hers, as well as the triumph. “Ophelia, the ever-drowned.” The water moved in and out of her lungs, heavy and thick, like the sugar syrup the fairies used for stage blood.
“I will remove all that is your cursed mother from you, like cutting the soft bruises from the flesh of an apple.” The Sea Goddess wrapped her starfish hands about Bertie’s throat and squeezed. “If you will not die for me, I will kill you myself.”
Everything shifted: What had been water and salt, emeralds and onyx and obsidian, was now only dreamy dark.
Sedna tightened her grip. “You are alone now, and you are mine.”
I am alone, but I am not yours.
Power surged through Bertie, drawn from the ancient trees rooted in her heart of hearts. It sizzled through her limbs and poured through her hands as Bertie pried Sedna’s starfish fingers from her throat. “I belong only to myself.”
Sedna lunged at Bertie again. “You will die alone!”
“That is your fear, not mine.” Bertie’s words shoved the Sea Goddess against the far wall. The cavern shuddered and shifted.
If the ceiling caves in, we’ll be trapped together, forever, in an underwater cairn.
Sedna gave Bertie a slow, horrible smile that twisted her pale green lips. She curled her fingers in to form tremendous fists.