Chapter Ten: The Drowning
Nobody ever asked why the sea wants ten of us.
Tonight, I find out.
We fall for a long time.
Not the way you fall through air. The water holds us, slows us, turns us gently as we go down, and the green light rises up to meet us from somewhere far below. Caius’s hand is locked around mine, our cut palms pressed together, and through the vow I can feel his heart hammering in time with my own.
The stair spirals past us in the dark. Down and down. Past the palace foundations. Past the roots of the city, great pillars of stone as wide as houses. Past layers of rock so old they’re striped like a cut loaf, and between the stripes, embedded in the stone, I see things. Shells. Bones. A rusted anchor. A small shoe.
Then the stair ends, and we land.
It’s the room from my vision in the Mirror Pools.
Low and round, carved out of black rock, its ceiling so close above us that Caius has to bow his head. The walls are covered in writing: thousands and thousands of tiny marks, cut into the stone in a spiral that starts at the ceiling and winds down and around and around until it disappears into the floor.
“Names,” Caius whispers, running his fingers over them. “They’re names.”
Nine hundred years of them. Nine every century. I don’t need to count to know what they are.
And in the centre of the chamber, in a hollow in the floor, is the thing that drinks.
It’s a shell. A spiral shell, like the seal on my contract, but enormous, taller than a man, carved from or grown out of the same black rock as the walls. Its mouth faces upward, and from deep inside it, from somewhere at the heart of the spiral, pours the cold green light.
And around it, drifting in the green, are the dead.
Not bodies. Something thinner. Shapes, pale and faint, like breath on a cold window. Hundreds of them. They turn slowly around the shell in a great silent circle, round and round, the way the maelstrom turned, being drawn inward toward the light and never quite reaching it.
I see a woman with gold rings in her ears. A young man with fisherman’s hands. A girl with a birthmark on her cheek. A big, broad man with a docker’s shoulders.
And a thin boy with hair that sticks up in every direction.
“Tam,” I whisper.
He doesn’t look at me. None of them do. They just turn and turn, their faces blank and still.
“She keeps them,” Caius says. His voice is shaking. “She never let any of them go. Nine hundred years, and she’s been—” He can’t finish.
“Drinking them,” says a voice behind us.
The queen comes down the last of the stair slowly.
She isn’t glowing anymore. Or rather, she is, but the glow has changed. It’s green now, like the light from the shell, and it gathers in the hollows of her face and makes her look like something carved out of the same black rock. Her crown is gone. Her hair is loose and wild around her shoulders.
Behind her comes Thane, and he’s holding my brother by the back of the neck.
Pip’s face is white. There’s a bruise on his cheek. When he sees me, he doesn’t shout this time. He just looks at me, very steady, the way he did in the Mirror Pools. You said you’d come back.
“I’m here,” I tell him. “I’m right here, Pip.”
“I know,” he says, and his chin wobbles only a little.
Nerissa stops at the edge of the hollow. She looks at the great shell with an expression I’ve never seen on her face before. Something almost like love.
“Do you know what this was,” she says, “before it was mine?”
Nobody answers.
“A god,” she says. “An old one. Older than Veyl, older than the shore. It lived in the deep water and it was hungry, and nine hundred years ago it made a bargain with the king of the drowned city. Every hundred years, ten mortals. Nine for the god. One for the king’s heir, to keep the bloodlines of shore and sea tied together. In return, the god would sleep, and the sea would stay where it belonged.”
She smiles faintly.
“I was the first tithe. My name was Nerra. I was sixteen years old and I sold fish on the docks at Saltmarrow, and I was so frightened. I watched nine of my friends die in those trials. And I won. And on my wedding night, my husband brought me down here, to this room, to see the god we’d paid for.” Her smile widens. “It was so beautiful. All that power, just sitting here in the dark. Waiting for someone clever enough to take it.”
“You killed him,” Caius says. “Your husband. The first heir.”
“I killed the god,” says Nerissa. “The husband was just in the way.” She shrugs. “I learned the binding. I put myself where the god had been. And ever since then, every hundred years, the sea brings me nine lives, and I drink them, and I stay exactly as I am.”
The dead turn slowly around the shell. Tam’s face slides past, blank and pale, and my throat closes.
“And the heirs?” I say. “Your sons?”
“Oh, they’re not mine. Not really.” She waves a hand. “Veyl needs a royal line, and the binding needs the vow to stay sealed. I adopt a child. I raise him. Every hundred years, he marries a tithe, and every hundred years, a shore girl kills him on his wedding night, and the court rages, and the shore is punished, and everyone remembers why the sea must be obeyed.” She tilts her head at Caius. “Most of them never even come down here. They never wonder. You wondered. I should have drowned you as a baby.”
“Yes,” says Caius. “You should have.”
She moves before I see it coming.
She doesn’t draw a weapon. She doesn’t need one. She just lifts her hand and closes it into a fist, and the breath-shell on my throat goes still.
It’s like being strangled. Worse. There’s no hand to pull away, nothing to fight. The water around my face goes thick and dead and I open my mouth and nothing comes in. My knees hit the stone. My vision fills with black spots.
“I made those shells,” the queen says pleasantly. “Every breath you’ve taken since you came down here was a gift. From me.” She squeezes her fist a little tighter. “I can take it back.”
I’m dying. I know what it feels like now. I felt it in the kelp forest with Edric on my back.
And then Caius’s hand tightens around mine.
What I carry, you carry.
It comes through the vow. Through the cut on my palm, pressed against his. A warmth, a fullness, like my chest is being filled from the inside. I’m breathing. He’s breathing for me. His breath, flowing through the bond between us, into my lungs, cool and steady and tasting of salt.
I look up at him. He’s gone pale. His jaw is tight. It’s costing him.
“Go,” he gasps. “Now, Wren.”
The queen’s eyes go wide.
I’m already moving.
I go quiet. Everything slows down. All the noise in my head just stops.
The shell is six steps away. The queen is between me and it. Thane is behind her with my brother.
And my brother, my twelve-year-old brother with his stupid hair, does the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.
He bites Thane’s hand.
Hard. Right through to the bone, by the sound of the scream. Thane lets go. And Pip doesn’t run away. He runs forward, straight into the back of the queen’s knees, the way we used to tackle each other in the dunes at home, and she staggers.
It’s only a moment. It’s enough.
I go past her. She grabs for me, and her nails rake across my arm, and I don’t stop. I jump down into the hollow, into the green light, into the cold circle of the dead, and they turn around me, and for one moment I see Tam’s face right beside mine.
He looks at me.
He looks at me. His eyes focus. The corner of his mouth lifts, crooked, the way it always did.
I pull Hanne’s knife from my belt. Plain, old, shore-made. A wooden handle worn smooth by a girl who swore she didn’t do it.
“This is for her,” I say. “And for all of them.”
And I drive it into the heart of the shell.
For a moment, nothing happens.
The blade sinks in to the hilt, into the black rock, easy as cutting bread. And the green light pours out around it, bright and cold, and it doesn’t stop.
Then the shell cracks.
A line runs up from the knife, jagged, like lightning. Then another. Then a hundred. The spiral splits open with a sound like the whole seabed breaking, and the light floods out of it in a wave that knocks me off my feet.
And the dead go free.
They rise. All of them. Nine hundred years of them. The circle breaks and they pour upward out of the hollow, not pale anymore but bright, silver-bright, like the bubbles that come out of the mouth of someone drowning, except they’re not drowning. They’re going up. Up the stair, through the stone, through the roots of the city and the floors of the palace and the whole weight of the sea, toward the surface.
Until the sea gives back what it has taken.
I lie on my back on the floor of the chamber, and I watch them go, and I cry. I finally cry. For all of them. For Tam and Hollis and Nell and Ada and Bram and Sable and Maren and even Edric. For Hanne. For my father.
And then I hear the queen scream.
She’s on her knees at the edge of the hollow.
The green light has gone out of her. So has everything else. As the dead rise, I can see it happening: nine hundred years, coming back to her all at once. Her skin goes grey, then paper-thin. Her glossy black hair turns white, then brittle, then begins to fall away in drifts. Her hands, reaching out toward the broken shell, wither into claws.
“No,” she’s saying, in a voice like wind through dead grass. “No, no, it’s mine, it’s mine—”
She looks at me. Her eyes are the last thing to change. Wide and dark, in a face gone old and crumbling.
The eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl who sold fish on the docks at Saltmarrow and was so, so frightened.
“I just didn’t want to die,” she whispers.
Then she’s gone. Not dead. Just gone. Her body goes white and crystalline and cracks like dried mud, and between one breath and the next the Queen of Veyl collapses into a small heap of salt on the black stone floor, and the water stirs, and the salt begins to dissolve.
As it does, a single thread of silver drifts up out of it. Thin as a hair. It wavers in the water for a moment, as if it’s looking for somewhere to go.
Then it drifts toward me, and slips into the cut on my palm, and vanishes.
I look down at my hand. There’s nothing there. Just the cut, and a little blood.
I tell myself I imagined it.
Thane is gone. I don’t see where. Up the stair, maybe, running. It doesn’t matter.
Pip is kneeling on the floor where he fell, staring at the salt. I crawl to him and pull him into my arms, and he holds on so tight I can’t breathe, and I don’t care.
“You came back,” he says into my shoulder.
“I said I would.”
“You said a lot of things.” His voice is muffled. “You said you were going to be a merchant.”
I laugh. It comes out wet and cracked. “I’m a queen now, I think. That’s better.”
He pulls back to look at me, scandalised. “You?“
“Me.”
Caius is sitting against the wall of names with his eyes closed. He’s grey with exhaustion, and there’s blood on his palm and on his white wedding coat, and he’s smiling, faintly, the way he did the first time he laughed.
I go to him. I kneel in front of him and put my hand on his face.
He opens his eyes.
“Did we do it?” he asks.
Above us, far away, I can feel the city changing. I can feel it through the vow, through him: something heavy lifting off it, something that’s been pressing down on every mind in Veyl for nine hundred years. Up there, right now, a whole court is remembering. Every tithe. Every trial. Every prince who died on his wedding night and every shore girl who hanged for it.
It’s going to be a very long night in the palace.
“We did it,” I say.
And then I kiss him.
Properly, this time. Not in front of a court. Not in a trap. Just him and me, on the floor of a broken god’s chamber at the bottom of the sea, with his blood and mine on our hands and nine hundred years of the dead rising around us like stars.
When we finally break apart, Pip is staring at us in open disgust.
“Is he coming home with us?” he demands.
Caius and I look at each other.
“Something like that,” I say.
Six weeks later, I walk out onto the seabed at Saltmarrow at low tide.
It’s a normal low tide. The sea has pulled back the way it’s supposed to, just past the black rocks, and it’ll come in again the way it’s supposed to. It doesn’t take anyone anymore.
The town knows. The whole shore knows. The story came up out of the sea with me and my brother and a silver-haired prince, and it’s been told in every tavern from Saltmarrow to Corlen by now, and it gets bigger every time. Last week I heard a fisherman swear I killed the queen of the drowned city with my bare hands and then married a whale.
I don’t correct anyone. It’s a better story than the truth.
I’ve done what I came up here to do. I gave Hollis’s Bess his last words and a purse of Veylish pearls, and she held my hands and cried. I found Bram’s brother’s children and made sure they’ll never go hungry. I gave Essa Brine back her little blue glass charm, and told her I’d come back, just like she asked, and she laughed and threw her arms around me in front of the whole fish market.
Pip lives with Essa’s family now, near the harbour. He wanted to come down to Veyl. I said when he’s older. He said that’s what I always say. He’s right.
Tomorrow, I go home. Down. To a city that’s still learning what it is without her. To a husband who waits on the cliff steps every time I come up, pretending he isn’t worried. To a throne I never wanted, and a court that bows when I walk into a room, and flinches, too, a little, which I don’t mind.
But tonight I’m here, on the shore, alone.
I kneel beside a rock pool. The water in it is still and clear, full of stars. I lean over it, the way I used to when I was a girl, to see my own face.
It’s the same face. Scar on the cheek. Blue scar on the throat. Dark hair blowing in the wind off the sea.
I brush the hair out of my eyes with my right hand.
My reflection doesn’t.
My reflection keeps perfectly still. Its hands are folded in its lap. It’s looking up at me out of the water with wide dark eyes, and a stubborn mouth, and a patience that’s nine hundred years old.
And while I kneel there, frozen, with my heart pounding in my ears, my reflection smiles.
Hello, Wren.
End of Book One.