In the Veins of the Drowning(85)
“You gave your word—you would not interfere.” Her sweet, melodic tones were gone. Now she spoke with the crackling voice of a crone.
Theodore’s eyes widened at the sound.
“Answer me.” My hand fisted into the front of her robe, jerking her. She could not move at all now. The entirety of her body’s weight slumped in Theodore’s strong arms.
Halla let out a screeching yowl of frustration, of pain. “Do something, Your Majesty.”
“Imogen.” Theodore’s voice was alarmingly even. I met his gaze over Halla’s shoulder and there was something in it that stilled me. Disorientation. The steady, noble man did not know what to do. “Let her go, Im.”
I couldn’t bring myself to obey. My voice turned heavy and begging. “She worships Eusia.”
“Eusia.” Halla’s red eyes rounded at the name, and her jaw went slack. “You know Eusia?”
“I know her well.” My chest heaved with quick breaths. “Why do you worship her? What magic did she perform for you?”
Halla gaped, affronted. “She performed a miracle. For our family.”
“She performed a spell,” I said through my teeth. “What was the payment required for it?”
Some realization crashed over her at my question. Her face went blank. Her mouth closed into a thin, refusing line. My talons slipped from the tips of my fingers and sliced through the front of her robe.
“Imogen,” Theodore yelled, “let her go.”
I shook my head, and with a jerk, I forced her easily from his hold. He wasn’t expecting my force. Her body crumpled into the water, but I held her above the surface as I strode in deeper. It was cold and cutting when it reached my thighs. “What did your family pay for the spell?”
The water obeyed when I told it to envelop her like a coiling serpent, and she sucked in a rattling, terrified gasp. “Get me out of the water,” she cried in terror. “Please.”
“You should fear the water, Halla.” I pulled her nearer, locked my eyes with hers. “It belongs to me.”
I sent another current to wrap and writhe around her body. Her trembling cry cut through the morning mist.
“A body,” she finally said. “The price for her miracle was a body.”
“Whose?” My voice was strange to my own ears. I sounded as vast and powerful as the crashing sea. I blurred into it, losing myself.
Halla jerked in my grip like a fish snagged at the end of a line. Tears poured from her reddened eyes. “My father’s. Eusia ensured that my mother would finally have a child. She became pregnant with me. And as payment, she gave her my father.”
My face bent with disgust. I looked up to Theodore, who stood frozen behind her, and our gazes stuck for a long, awful moment. “Eusia is a monster,” I said to Halla, “and you worship her all the same?”
Even at the stomach-knotting thought of what the empress had done, my mind still slunk back to Nemea. How the empress had said he’d been attentive while she’d mourned her husband. I thought of that disemboweled family, of my ring, plucked from one of their limp fingers. I thought of the red sash that ran down the front of Halla’s robe. Of the story of Eusia’s execution, her body sliced open and flung into the sea. I thought of the prayer Halla had spoken over the water and how Nemea had taught me the very same one when I was a little girl, bouncing blithely on his knee.
Below the plucking in my chest, below the oily darkness of my bond with Eusia, and the shining warmth of the one I shared with Theodore, was a knowing. A sudden, terrible clarity.
“Imogen.” Theodore’s voice was an anchor. It brought me back to my flesh and bone. I could feel the distinction between the water and my skin once more. My gaze fell upon him, standing before me like a signal fire, and my eyes burned at his radiance. “Bring her back to the sand, Immy.”
I couldn’t make myself move. For one step would beget the next, and now I knew where the heartbreaking path forward led.
Theodore walked farther into the waves, and I watched him with studying eyes. The slant of his nose, the hard cut of his jaw, the dark hair that edged his furrowed brow. I thought of his breaths in my ear and his lips on my skin and the shape of my name on his tongue when he’d whispered it in the darkest hour of the night.
“Now, Imogen. I am your king.” He said it firmly, as if the statement were a solid grip on a trusty hilt. A weapon that had never failed him.
I towed Halla a step closer to the shore. “And what am I?” The question was strung through with more emotion than I cared to reveal. His brow smoothed at the question. “Your subject? Your mistress? Your queen? The heir of Seraf and queen of Sirens? I am none of those things and all of them at once. I belong nowhere and everywhere.”
Hurt passed over his face like a storm cloud. “You know where you belong.”
“I don’t.” My throat narrowed. “The only piece of me that has found a true home is my heart.” A breath trembled through my lips. “But I am more than that, aren’t I? You want this to be tidy and painless. You want things to stay as they are, but I fear everything must be undone before either of us can hope to have what we want.”
There was a war within him; I could see it in his eyes. Halla shook in my grip, and I hauled her up, so her face was mere inches from mine. “I will see an end to your saint.” Unceremoniously, I released her. She fell with a shriek below the surface, and I sent a wave to carry her back to the sand.