He lifts his gaze, and his eyes are like the deepest part of the sea, cold and unknowable. I realize, His eyes do more to hide his thoughts than his mask does to hide his face.
“But I can explain it to you,” he continues. “Your people suffer not because of any great will of the gods, but because of their own violent acts. They wage the wars that burn the forests and fields. They spill the blood that pollutes the rivers and streams. To blame the gods is to blame the land itself. Look upon your reflection to find your enemy.”
His words ring out across the hall with a bone-chilling truth.
I feel as if I’m back in the sea, the icy water pulling me deeper and deeper.
“You will fail, like all the brides before you,” he says.
No dragon to save me. No hope to hold on to, the world above winking out like a star.
“It is inevitable.” He looks away. “It is your fate.”
My fate?
The feeling of drowning ceases.
This fate was never mine to begin with. I claimed it for myself when I jumped into the sea. But even before then, I wasn’t the one who changed the pattern of the story. It was Shim Cheong, who denied her fate when she wouldn’t let go of Joon. At least, isn’t that why she turned from the dragon? I brush away the thought. I might not understand Shim Cheong’s motives, but I do know my own.
“You’re right,” I say. The boy’s eyes flit back, narrowing as I speak. “I am like the other brides. I know what it is to love someone you would do anything to protect. Who are you to say what my fate is—if I am to fail, or if I am to succeed? My fate is not yours to decide. My fate belongs to me.”
The boy watches me, a slight crease in his brow.
Namgi whistles low. “Never thought I’d see the great Lord Shin of Lotus House speechless before a Sea God’s bride.”
A nobleman. Somehow I’m not surprised. Though undoubtedly the youngest of the three, Kirin and Namgi seem to defer to him in all things.
“Lord Shin,” Kirin says—low, urgently. “The fog lifts.” His eyes are raised skyward, where moonlight breaches the rafters, bathing the hall in light.
Shin steps back. “Keep your fate, Sea God’s Bride. It has nothing to do with me.” He reaches to his side and pulls a sword from its scabbard. The metallic glide is deafening in the silent hall.
“My name is Mina.”
He pauses.
“I am not Sea God’s Bride or No One’s Bride or Magpie,” I say. “I have a name. Chosen by my grandmother to give me cleverness and strength. I know who I am, and I know what I must do.” I raise my great-great-grandmother’s knife. “And I will not let you take my life.”
Reaching up, Shin tugs at his mask. The cloth slips, pooling around his neck. “Mina,” he says, and my traitorous heart skips a beat. “The Sea God’s bride.”
I swallow thickly. His voice without the mask is clear and warm. He has beautiful features—a straight nose and soft lips. With his sea-dark eyes, he’s breathtaking.
“I won’t take your life.”
A painful hope blooms within me.
“Just your soul.”
Wrapping his hand around my wrist, he twists. The knife clatters to the floor. With his other hand, he raises his sword and plunges it downward. I scream. The piercing sound abruptly cuts off as his sword connects with …
The ribbon.
He slices clean through the Red String of Fate.
I gape, watching the slow fall of the severed ribbon like two halves of a broken feather. How is this possible? For a brief second, all is silent and still. Then my scream rushes back, but the desperate sound bursts not from my mouth but from outside my body, in the air above. The scream swirls and coalesces, a mass of bright colors whirling together. The ribbon slips from my hand, rising, followed closely by the Sea God’s half of the ribbon. Together they wrap around the scream, forming a dazzling sphere of light.
Shin steps forward, his hand outstretched.
There’s a brilliant flash of color. In the aftermath, I blink away stars. And my ears pick up a wondrous sound, unexpected in this desolate hall—a bird’s cheerful warbling.
Cradled in the center of Shin’s palm, its wings folded snugly against its sides, is a beautiful magpie with red wing tips.
4
The magpie coos in the palm of Shin’s hand. Unlike the black-and-white magpies that flit about my village, this magpie’s wing tips shimmer a vibrant shade of red—the exact color of the Red String of Fate.
The magpie flutters its wings, and I feel a strange ache in my chest.