I smile faintly. “That sounds like quite the plan. If only it was what I had in mind.”
The Sea Queen holds out her palm, fingers sharpened to the bone. A hand of knives. “Daughter,” she commands, “give me the Second Eye of Keto while I’m still being pleasant.”
“That’s a little impossible, since I don’t have it at the moment.”
The Sea Queen’s sculptured face cracks. A small twitch in her grooved brows and the tight pull of her lips too sudden to be a smile. She angles her head, studying my rigid stance. Assessing this sudden change in me. Still the insolent child, but with something far more duplicitous to my gaze.
Slowly, the Sea Queen arches forward. Her eyes gleam against the light. “Where is it?”
I summon the parts of myself best learned from Elian. The well-practiced bravado that comes from a knack for survival and the notion that luck may never end. Just this once I want to see something true from her. A reaction she hasn’t measured or calculated.
“It’s with the prince who came looking for it,” I say. “I let him have it in exchange for my life.”
I feel the impact of the ground before I register the blood. When I open my mouth to breathe, it pools from my nose and onto my tongue.
“Insolent trash!” the Sea Queen screeches.
Her tentacles thrash wildly, pounding through the air between us. I feel her boiling against my skin as she locks a tentacle around my neck and squeezes.
“Do you think your life is worth more than that eye?”
My mother lunges forward and her fingernails slice across my wrists like razor blades. I try to snatch myself free, but her grip is unbreakable. The more I struggle, the harder she presses, until I feel that with one more movement my bones will snap.
She drags me across the way, closer and closer to the ice palace. My joints crack with each violent jerk, feet dragging along the water. My throat burns in her grip, but I don’t let my smile falter. I don’t do anything except wait until she comes to a halt and tosses me back to the ground.
I don’t even think of telling her that it was me who freed the eye and that when I’m reunited with it, its power will belong to me. Admitting that would put Elian’s life at risk. Right now my mother sees him as the threat and that’s exactly what I need.
Misdirection, Elian said. He’ll be proud to see how well I’ve learned.
The Sea Queen regards me like a disease. “Do you think your life is worth anything?”
“Maybe not to you,” I say. I angle my head to the side and spit. “But to him it might be.”
“I knew you were weak,” she says. “But I never realized the extent of it. The heir to the sea kingdom of Keto, who I had to beat into brutality. Who would sooner see a young prince drown than rip out his heart while it still beat. Who cried while she murdered my sister.”
At the mention of Crestell, my chest heaves. The Sea Queen looks at me like I am a pitiful thing, no more her daughter than any other creature in her dominion. The complete opposite to the way Crestell had looked at Kahlia when she saved her life.
“I thought I clawed it out of you,” the Sea Queen says. “Yet look how much survived. Like a plague, this humanity infected you long before I stole your fins.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I say. “You wanted me to learn a lesson through this punishment and I have. I know that the prince isn’t my enemy. In fact, he’s just a more honorable version of me.” I stare into her stone-glazed eyes. “And in another life, if I ever had a choice about who to be, maybe I would have been like him.”
“Enough!” she demands. “You will give me what’s mine before I kill you.”
“No,” I say. “I think first I’ll take what’s mine.”
A derisive sound punctures from her lips. “You want my crown?”
“It’s my crown, actually.”
The points of her fangs glisten in the daylight. “You think you can kill me, Lira?” she asks. “The very one who brought you into this world?”
No fear, just curiosity. Layered in as much amusement as disbelief.
“If we were in the ocean, you would have an army,” I say. “But this is the Cloud Mountain, and we’re the farthest we can possibly be from home. In this place, with Elian and his crew, you’re practically carrion.”
“Elian?” She says his name with bile in her mouth. “You and your filthy human prince think I need the ocean for my army? Wherever I go, my power follows and so do they. If you truly want to end this war, then I’ll oblige. As a mother, I must grant my daughter her wish.”