I pause. Sakura isn’t refusing to help. She’s simply giving me the opportunity to make it worth her while. Everyone has a price, even the forgotten Págese princess. I just have to find out what hers is. Money seems irrelevant, and the thought of offering her any makes me grimace. She could take it as an insult （she is royalty, after all）， or see me more as a child than a captain, which I so clearly am in her presence. I have to give her something nobody else can. An opportunity she’ll never get again and so won’t dream of passing up.
I think about how similar Sakura and I are. Two royals trying to escape their countries. Only, Sakura hadn’t wanted to leave Págos because she disliked being a princess, but because the job had become useless once her brother took the crown.
No taste for the life of a royal who would never rule.
I feel a sinking sensation in my stomach. At heart, Sakura is a queen. The only problem is that she doesn’t have a country. I understand then what my quest will cost me if I want it enough.
“I can make you a queen.”
Sakura arches a white brow. “I hope that you’re not threatening to kill my brothers,” she says. “Because the Págese don’t turn against one another for the sake of a crown.”
“Not at all.” I compose myself as best I can. “I’m offering you another country entirely.”
A slow look of realization works its way onto Sakura’s face. Coyly, she asks, “And what country would that be, Your Highness?”
It will mean the end of the life I love. The end of the Saad and the ocean and the world I have seen twice over and would see again a thousand times. I would live the life of a king, as my father has always wanted, with a snow-born wife to rule by my side. An alliance between ice and gold. It’d be more than my father imagined, and wouldn’t it be worth it in the end? Why will I have to search the sea once all of its monsters have been destroyed? I’ll be satisfied, maybe, ruling Midas, once I know the world is out of danger.
But even as I list the reasons it’s a good plan, I know they’re all lies. I’m a prince by name and nothing else. Even if I manage to conquer the sirens and bring peace to the ocean, I’ve always planned to stay on the Saad with my crew – if they’d still follow me – no longer searching, but always moving. Anything else will make me miserable. Staying still, in one place and one moment, will make me miserable. In my heart, I’m as wild as the ocean that raised me.
I take a breath. I’ll be miserable, then, if that’s what it takes.
“This country. If there’s a map that shows a secret route up the mountain so my crew and I can avoid freezing to death during the climb, then it’ll be a fair trade.”
I hold out my hand to Sakura. To the princess of Págos.
“If you give me that map, I’ll make you my queen.”
13
Lira
I’VE MADE A MISTAKE. It started with a prince, as most stories do. Once I felt the thrum of his heart beneath my fingers, I couldn’t forget it. And so I watched from the water, waiting for him to reappear. But it was days before he did and once he had, he never neared the ocean without a legion by his side.
Singing to him by the docks was risk enough, with the promise of royal guards and passersby coming to the young hunter’s rescue. But with his crew there, it was something else. I could sense the difference in those men and women and the way they followed the prince, moved when he moved, stayed still in rapt attention whenever he spoke to them. A kind of loyalty that can’t be bought. They would jump into the ocean after him and sacrifice their lives for his, as though I would take such a trade.
So rather than attack, I watched and listened as they spoke in stories, of stones with the power to destroy worlds. The Second Eye of Keto. A legend my mother has been hunting for her entire reign. The humans spoke of heading to the ice kingdom in search of it, and I knew it would be my best opportunity. If I followed them to the snow sea, then the waters would be too cold for any human to survive, and the prince’s crew could do nothing but watch him die.
I had a plan. But my mistake was to think that my mother didn’t.
As I watched the prince, the Sea Queen watched me. And when I ventured from the Midasan docks in search of food, my mother made herself known.
The smell of desecration is ripe. A line of bodies – sharks and octopi – scatter through the water as a trail for me to follow. I swim through the corpses of animals I would have feasted on any other day.
“I’m surprised you came,” says the Sea Queen.