In the Wake of the Ruined (The Siren Mage, #2)(54)

The sailor pointed to a spot straight down. “It was there. I only saw it when it surfaced. Don’t know what it is.”

My stomach gave another deep and terrible twist at the very same moment that something sliced through the surface. It took its time, rolling sluggishly through the dense waves like it wanted to be seen. The thing was pale, its skin reflective and thin, letting me make out the veins beneath. Tentacles splayed wide before us, far longer than any I’d ever seen. One arched from the water, ramming itself against the side of the hull. The strike reverberated through the vessel like a drum.

Like Halla, I bent myself over the Eleuthios’s rail, trying to see the thing better. It surged just then, grotesque body floating on the surface, and as it twisted over itself, it mirrored the twist and roll of my own insides.

I was suddenly—awfully—certain…

Even with how the sea had transformed it—the glittering patches of scales, the haphazard razor-edged suckers dotting it, the pale barnacles clustered over its glossy skin—I could make out the pink curve of a stomach. The dark reddish-brown of a liver. The trailing, ropelike intestines.

I went cold. Rigid. “My Gods…”

“The sea monster Marshal Baros told us of,” Halla breathed.

A sea monster.

How very right—and very wrong—the marshal had been.





16


Imogen


The anchor fell with a clanging that shook through my bones.

Across the deck, sailors continued their work, but now soldiers had come up from the lower decks too. Courtiers had slipped from the safety of their cabins and Theodore’s council had emerged, all to take in with their own eyes the transcendental world we’d slipped into.

Debris and ropes still littered the planks, and I began navigating through the maze of it all, toward the launch hanging over on the ship’s starboard side.

Trepidation crept up my spine. I could see the shoreline, the faint shape of the ruins of my mother’s keep. Its towers and ramparts. Now that I was here, the truth that I’d not wanted to acknowledge reared its grisly head: we might be too late.

Lachlan was already climbing into the launch. By the horrible look on his face, the gray of his cheeks, I knew he had the same fear. The monster in the water was the least of our worries now. The empress’s ship was nowhere in sight. She could be lying in wait among those ruins, ready to ambush me and help bind me to Eusia, or she’d already done what she’d come here to do—gift Agatha to her saint—and left. Both prospects made me feel ill.

I heaved myself into the launch behind Lachlan. As I settled onto the bench, Halla approached me. She still wore the white shell-and-crystal-strewn gown from her wedding feast, but now its silk was deeply creased.

She looked tired, mussed. “I told you I would help.”

I hated that I needed it. Hated that I was willing to trust her. “If I have come all this way,” I said, “only to find that my friend is not here, or worse…” My stomach twisted once more, and I lost my words. When I found them again, I spoke though my teeth. “I will have no qualms with treating you precisely the way your mother has treated Agatha.”

Halla blanched. Nodded quietly. I’d meant the threat and she knew it. The guards helped her into the launch, and she settled onto the bench farthest from me, her gaze stuck on the misty outline of the keep. “What spell will you need me to perform?”

I pressed a hand to my churning guts. “We’ll discuss that later. After we find Agatha.” I’d hardly slept trying to decipher the answer to that question. What would break our bond? The inverse of the spell that had forged it felt most likely, but I expected we would have to fumble through many attempts to get it right.

Lachlan was readying the launch, checking his weapons, doing all he could to keep himself busy. “Let’s go.”

A flash of pale, shiny flesh broke through the water below us as the monster writhed. “I need to get us past that first. Then we’ll start our search in the keep.” I remembered the stones and torches surrounding Eusia’s pool from my vision. “Eusia’s inside somewhere.”

Halla’s head snapped toward me. “How do you know that?” It was remarkable how still she went. She all but trembled with interest.

“Halla,” I said, in a tone that forced her to meet my eye. “The spell I need you to perform will kill Eusia, do you understand? I cannot do it. Only you. And I will only take you with me onto that island if you agree to perform it.”

Her gaze was unwavering, but I noticed how her breaths went thin, how her fingers twisted into her wrinkled skirt. She nodded her agreement. I had no choice but to believe that she meant it, for my alternative was one that I’d not yet let myself fully accept:

That in order to kill Eusia, I would have to kill myself.

Halla looked longingly toward the island. “What I said to you was true,” she said. “I do not wish to see any others harmed by my mother’s schemes.” She straightened on the bench with an ethereal sort of grace. “My husband will join us. In case I’m injured in some way.”

There was no stifling my jolt. “Absolutely not.”

Halla tipped up her chin. “Then I’m not going.”

Before I’d even realized he was there, Theodore gripped the side of the launch, preparing to climb in.