When he dropped his sword, there was something so utterly depleted about it that I can’t find the words to describe it in any language. The idea that he doesn’t want me dead is impossible, but I hold on to it more desperately than I have ever clung to anything in my vicious life. He kissed me, after all. Brushed my cheek so delicately and pressed his lips to mine in a way that shot fire through me, melting away any pieces of the mountain that had slicked itself to my skin.
Things like that can’t be forgotten any more than they can be undone.
I break free from the ice palace and grab the oars to one of the small rowboats. I reach the other side of the great moat breathless and clutching the seashell necklace in my hand. The thick grooves of it press against my palm as I debate the choice ahead of me. Elian will think he can use the eye to kill my mother and every single siren in the ocean. He’ll risk his life, believing he has a weapon, when in fact that weapon is useless in his hands.
With my blood coating it, it can have no other master.
There were a lot of things the Sea Queen told me about Keto’s eye, but the one I remember most clearly is this: Whoever frees the eye will become its master. I hadn’t lied to Elian when I said blood was needed; it just didn’t have to be siren blood. If Elian had sliced his own hand across the waters, the Second Eye of Keto would have been his to use. It would have given him the same powers my mother’s trident gifted her. That was how the original families planned for the humans to take down the Sea Queen: an even battle of magic.
I thrust the seashell necklace into the moat as I did in Eidyllio, only this time I focus on my mother’s image. I call to her inside my mind, loud enough to have it puncture through an entire mountain and spread across the seas. At first, I’m not sure if it will work, but then the water begins to boil and around me the ice that scatters over the moat melts.
It singes like an invisible fire and a gust of water spouts up. Black flows like shadows spilling into light. I hear a familiar humming and then, unmistakable, the sound of laughter.
From the abyss, my mother appears.
She is still beautiful, as all siren queens are, and horrifying in a way that only she has ever managed to be. Her eyes burnish mine and her long fingers stroke her trident like a pet. All the power in the world at her fingertips, ready to bend the seas and its monsters to her whim.
For some reason, she looks so strange to me now.
The Sea Queen smiles with fresh blood on her teeth. “Are you going to speak?” she asks.
I glance back to the palace, expecting Elian to come hurtling out at any moment, but the entrance stays clear and the water is steady by its feet and the Sea Queen simply waits.
“Do you know where we are?”
She casts an unconcerned look at her surroundings, resting her long, webbed fingers on the trident. There is barely a flicker in her chiseled eyes when she says, “The Cloud Mountain.”
“This lake” – my breath rattles between us – “is where the Second Eye of Keto was hidden. I followed the prince whose heart you wanted me to take and he led me here. To the very thing you’ve been searching for. I found this place when you failed to. Couldn’t you sense it with all of that power in your damn trident?”
It is not until she blinks that I realize I’m screaming.
Suddenly every deception and excuse I was so sure I could weave doesn’t seem important. My mind is blank, save for one thought: how unreasonably righteous I feel. When the water parted, I thought there was something odd about her. A small change in my absence that I couldn’t quite place my finger on. Now I realize it isn’t that she looks strange, but that she looks like a stranger.
The Sea Queen laughs and the ground cracks by my feet. She reclines and the water bubbles up to meet her like a throne.
“You’re still the stupid child,” she chides. “Can I sense every cup of water a human presses to its lips? You think this is part of our world just because it flows the same way?”
The Sea Queen scrapes a fang across her lip. “All of it is a disguise,” she says. “This mountain – this moat – is not ours. It’s theirs. The original sires of this infestation of human kingdoms. Man-made; magic-made. There is nothing of our goddess in these waters. I wouldn’t have been able to surface here if you hadn’t used the seashell to call me. I wouldn’t have known such a place could be reached.”
“And now you do.”
“And when you give me the eye, I can bring it all crashing down to the depths of Diávolos.”