I kick at his knee and Rycroft stumbles back with a hiss, but it’s only seconds before he’s on me again, slashing and swiping with his sword. Lethal blows primed to kill. I jump back and his blade slices across my chest.
I don’t take my focus off him to register the pain. He’s mad to try this. To attack not just a prince, but a captain. Spilling royal blood is punishable by death, but spilling mine . . . well, my crew would think death was too kind.
I thrust my arm forward, aiming my dagger for his stomach. Rycroft twists out of the way, barely, and I feel my ankle slip. Saving what little grace I have, I plunge the blade into his thigh. I feel the jar of bone as it settles inside his leg. When I pull, my hand comes away empty.
Rycroft clasps a hand around the knife. He looks inhuman, like even pain is too scared to touch him now. Without ceremony, he yanks on the handle, hard, and the blade oozes from him. It comes away clean and for a moment I worry that Rycroft will see the otherworldly shine of the steel, but the pirate barely glances at it before tossing it across the ship.
“What now?” he asks. “No more tricks.”
“You’d kill an unarmed man?” I raise a taunting finger.
“I think we both know that you’re never unarmed. And that when I kill you, it’ll be a damn sight slower than this.”
He lurches his head in a gesture to someone behind me. I’m able to spare one last look to Lira, taking in the blinding light of her eyes, flared in warning, before a shadow pitches toward me. I whip my head back a second too late, and a blinding pain explodes against my skull.
27
Lira
I BRING MY TONGUE to the cut on my lip. My hands are secured to a large beam, and on the other side of the room, tied to an identical shaft, Elian sags on the floor.
He looks every bit the handsome prince, even with his head slumped against the splintered wood, his injury matting his hair. His jaw ticks as he sleeps, and when his eyes flutter as though they’re about to open, something snags in my chest.
He doesn’t wake.
His breathing is hitched, but I’m surprised he’s even breathing at all. I heard the crunch as the bat connected with the back of his head. A coward’s blow. Elian was winning, and in just a few more minutes – even without that knife he loves so damn much – he would have killed Tallis Rycroft. With his bare hands if he had to. And I would have helped.
If I had my song, I wouldn’t have even wasted it on a man like Tallis. Let him drown knowing the horror of death, without the comfort of beauty or love. Elian has an army and we should have used that to attack Rycroft, but the prince prefers trickery to war.
Get away clean, he said. Before anyone can notice what we’ve taken.
I look to my hands, smeared with Elian’s blood. This is not getting away clean.
In the sea, mermaids sing songs about humans. There’s one they hum like a child’s lullaby, which weaves the story of Keto’s slaughter. In it, the mermaids speak of human bravery and how they claimed victory against all odds, but until I was dragged onto Elian’s ship, I’d never seen courage from a human. Even the strongest men fell under my spell, and those I didn’t lure were too scared to challenge me. Elian is different. He has courage, or recklessness masked as something like it. And he also has mercy. Mercy even for creatures like Maeve, whose life he took as a last option. He didn’t want to savor it; he just wanted it over with. Like I had with the Kalokaírin prince. With Crestell.
I wonder if I’d be that sort of a killer if I had been raised human. Merciful and hesitant to shed blood. Or, perhaps, if I wouldn’t have been a killer at all. If I would have just been a girl, like any other who walked the world. Keto created our race in war and savagery, but it was the sea queens who took her hate and made it our legacy. Queens like my mother, who taught their children to be empty warriors.
Elian’s family taught him to be something else. The kind of man willing to throw a strange girl out of harm’s way and battle a tyrannical pirate in her place. The chivalry I used to scoff at has saved my life twice now. Is that what it means to be human? Pushing someone else out of danger and throwing yourself in? Every time I protected Kahlia, the Sea Queen chided me for my weakness and punished us both as though she could beat the bond out of us. I spent my life rethinking every look and action to be sure there wasn’t any visible affection in either. She told me it made me inferior. That human emotions were a curse. But Elian’s human emotions are what led him to save me. To help me. To trust that I’ll do the same when the time comes.