Chapter Seven: Trial of Tides
Trust no one in the drowned court.
I forgot that once. Once was enough.
The queen receives me in a room full of mirrors.
They cover every wall: tall ovals of polished silver in frames of black coral, dozens of them, so that when I walk in I see myself a hundred times over. A hundred shore girls in borrowed grey silk with blue scars on their throats and thin new scars on their cheeks, all trying to look calm.
Nerissa sits at the centre of the room on a low couch, alone. No guards. No Maren. No man in grey. She’s in the dark robe again, the one she wore in the garden, with her hair loose. She looks younger like this. Softer.
“Come,” she says, and pats the couch beside her. “Sit. I don’t bite.”
I sit. I keep my hands in my lap, where she can see them, and my face as empty as I can make it.
“You’ve done so well,” she says. “Five trials. I don’t think a tithe has impressed my court this much in centuries.”
“Thank you, Majesty.”
“And you’ve impressed my son.” She smiles. “I hear he’s been keeping you company. Late at night.”
There it is. I keep my breathing slow.
“He’s curious about the shore,” I say. “I’ve been telling him about it. Stories. He likes stories.”
“He always did.” She sighs, fond and faintly disappointed, the way you’d talk about a dog that keeps digging up the garden. “Caius has a soft heart. It’s his great weakness. He falls for things that are going to hurt him.” Her eyes, dark and bright, rest on my face. “I would hate to see you make the same mistake, Wren.”
My real name, in her mouth, lands like a slap. I don’t let it show.
“I haven’t forgotten why I came,” I say.
“I’m so glad.” She reaches into the folds of her robe and brings out something wrapped in a strip of dark velvet. She lays it in my lap. “A wedding gift. For the night itself.”
I unwrap it.
It’s a knife. Plain, old, shore-made: a wooden handle worn smooth by someone’s grip, a steel blade gone dark with age. It doesn’t belong down here among the pearls and coral. It looks like something my father would have used to gut fish.
“It has a history,” the queen says softly. “I thought it might bring you luck.”
I know whose it was. I know whose heart it went into, a hundred years ago. I wrap it up again, carefully, and I don’t let my hands shake.
“Thank you, Majesty.”
“Your brother is well,” she says, as if she’s just remembered. “Thane checks on him. He’s grown very thin, I’m told, but he’s a strong boy. He’ll be so glad to see you.”
I nod. I can’t speak. If I open my mouth, I don’t know what will come out.
She leans toward me then, and puts one cool hand against my cheek, just where Caius touched me. Her thumb traces the line of Sable’s scar.
“You remind me of someone,” she murmurs. “Someone I used to be. Stubborn. Clever. Willing to do whatever it took.” Her smile widens, just a little. “She did very well for herself, in the end.”
In a hundred mirrors, a hundred queens touch the faces of a hundred frightened girls.
In every one of them, just for a moment, I could swear her reflection is younger than she is. A girl with black hair and a stubborn mouth.
Then I blink, and it’s gone.
I don’t tell Caius about the mirrors. I don’t get the chance. The next morning, before the tide bell, the servants come for us early, and the four of us who are left, me and Tam and Hollis and Maren, are marched out past the edge of the city to the sixth trial.
Maren doesn’t look at me. She hasn’t said a word since she interrupted us.
“This is the Trial of Tides,” says Oriel.
We’re standing on a ledge of black rock above a valley in the seabed. And in the valley, the sea is moving.
It’s a maelstrom. A great slow whirlpool, the width of a town square, spinning around a dark centre. The water in it is full of sand and shattered shell, so that the whole thing glitters grey and gold as it turns. I can feel its pull even from up here, a steady tug on my clothes and hair, like hands.
“In the heart of the maelstrom,” Oriel says, “on a pillar of stone, there are two silver crowns. Bring them back before the tide turns. The tide turns every hundred heartbeats. When it does, the maelstrom reverses, and anything caught in it is torn apart.”
“Two crowns,” Hollis says. “For four of us.”
“You will go in pairs,” says Oriel. “Bound together. Each pair must bring back one crown. The pair that fails does not return.”
She lifts her coral staff and points. “Hollis with the boy. The girl called Liss with the girl called Maren.”
The servants come forward with ropes. Silver cord, fine as hair, strong as chain. They loop one end around my waist and the other around Maren’s, leaving a length between us of about four paces.
Maren still doesn’t look at me.
“We’re going to need to talk to each other in there,” I say quietly.
“No,” she says, “we aren’t.”
The tide bell rings, and we jump.
The maelstrom takes us instantly. There’s no swimming against it, there’s only going with it and trying to steer. It drags us round in a great spiral, faster and faster, sand and shell stinging my face, the dark heart of it swinging closer with every turn. I count heartbeats as I go. It’s something to hold onto.
Twenty. Twenty-one.
I can see the pillar. It rises out of the eye of the whirlpool, a finger of black rock, and on top of it two small silver shapes gleam in the churning grey.
Thirty-four. Thirty-five.
Across the spiral, I glimpse Hollis and Tam. Hollis has one arm locked around Tam’s chest and is kicking with everything he’s got, steering them inward, his big body cutting through the current like a ship’s prow. Tam is clinging on with his eyes squeezed shut.
Fifty.
Maren and I hit the pillar together. I grab rock with both hands and hold on, and the current tries to peel me off it like skin off a fruit. Maren lands above me, gets a hand on the top, and pulls herself up.
Sixty-one.
She takes one crown. She looks down at me.
And I see it in her face, a heartbeat before it happens. That tightness around the eyes. The look of someone who’s made a decision and doesn’t much like it.
I’ve seen that look on my own face in mirrors.
Sixty-four.
“Nothing personal,” Maren says. “You chose him.”
The knife comes out of her sleeve and goes into my side.
It doesn’t hurt at first. That’s the strangest thing. It feels like being punched, a hard, blunt shove just under my ribs, and then a spreading heat. I look down and see the coral hilt sticking out of me, and a cloud of dark red blooming out into the grey water around it, and I think, very calmly, Oh.
My hands slip off the rock.
The maelstrom grabs me. The silver cord snaps taut between us, and for a moment I’m hanging off it, spinning, bleeding, while Maren braces herself on the pillar above.
She has a second knife. Of course she does. She sets it against the cord.
“She’ll just find another, you know,” she says. She sounds almost sad. “Whoever wins. If it isn’t you, it’s me. It was always going to be one of us. At least I’ll do it right.”
Seventy-eight.
“She won’t keep her promise,” I gasp. “Whatever she promised you. She doesn’t keep promises. I heard her say it, Maren. I was there—”
Something flickers in her eyes.
Then she cuts the rope.
I spin away into the grey.
The current throws me outward, round and round, and the pillar shrinks behind me, and the blood from my side trails after me like a ribbon. My breath-shell is fluttering wildly. I can’t tell up from down. I can hear the tide bell starting to ring, far away, which means the maelstrom is about to turn, and when it turns—
Something grabs my arm.
Hollis.
He’s cut himself free of Tam. I see the frayed end of his cord trailing. He’s swimming across the current to reach me, and it’s tearing at him, and he holds on anyway, his big hand locked around my wrist like an iron cuff.
“Got you,” he grunts. “Got you, girl.”
He hauls me in against his chest. With his other arm he’s reaching for something, and I realise it’s Tam, it’s Tam’s end of the cord, and Tam is holding it out to him from the pillar, where he’s clinging with the silver crown in his fist.
Ninety.
And above Tam, on top of the pillar, Maren has seen us.
She’s still got her own crown. She turns to Tam, knife raised, and I understand what she’s going to do: take his crown too, cut him loose, and swim out alone with both, the last tithe standing.
Tam sees her coming.
And this time, he doesn’t freeze.
He lets go of the pillar with one hand and grabs her ankle. He pulls, hard, with every ounce of his skinny body, and Maren, who’s balanced on the top of a rock in the middle of a whirlpool, goes over.
She falls past him, into the current. For a moment our eyes meet, hers and mine, across the grey. She doesn’t look angry. She looks like someone who’s just understood something.
Then the tide bell rings its last note, and the maelstrom turns.
I don’t remember much of the next part.
I remember the whole sea reversing, a wrench so violent it feels like my bones are being pulled in two directions. I remember Hollis’s arms around me, locked tight. I remember him shouting at Tam to hold on, hold on, and the cord between them snapping taut, and the three of us being dragged out of the spiral like fish on a line.
I remember black rock scraping my back. The ledge. We hit it, and Tam scrambles up, and Hollis shoves me up after him, and I’m lying on stone with the maelstrom roaring below.
And I remember looking back and seeing Hollis’s hand on the edge of the rock.
Just his hand. His big, scarred docker’s hand, gripping the stone, and the rest of him still down in the churning grey. Tam’s grabbing his wrist, pulling, screaming for help. I try to reach him and my side explodes in white-hot pain and I can’t, I can’t move.
Hollis looks up at us from the water. His face is very calm.
“Tell my Bess,” he says. “If you get home.”
Then his fingers open.
And the sea takes him too.
I wake up in a room I don’t recognise.
It’s small and pale and full of soft light. There’s a bandage wound tightly around my middle, stiff with some kind of green paste that smells like kelp and stings like a hundred bees. My whole body aches.
Caius is sitting beside the bed.
He looks terrible. His silver hair is tangled, his black coat stained with something dark. I think it might be my blood. He’s holding my hand in both of his, tightly, like he’s afraid I’ll float away.
“You’re awake,” he says. His voice cracks on it.
“Tam?” I croak.
“Alive. Asleep in the next room. He brought you in himself. Wouldn’t let anyone else carry you.”
“Hollis.” It isn’t a question.
Caius shakes his head.
“Maren?”
“Gone.”
I close my eyes. Hollis’s hand on the rock. Tell my Bess. Maren’s face as she fell, looking at me as if I’d finally told her something true.
“She said she’d do it right,” I whisper. “Kill you. If I didn’t. She was the backup.”
“I know,” Caius says. “I’ve known about Maren for a long time. She was raised in my mother’s household. I thought—” He stops. “I thought she might choose differently. In the end.”
His thumb moves slowly over my knuckles. I let it.
“How many left?” I ask, even though I already know.
He takes a long time to answer.
There’s a knock on the door. Soft, polite. It opens without waiting for a reply, and Oriel is standing there in her grey robes, her coral staff in her hand. She looks at Caius holding my hand, and her ancient face doesn’t change at all.
“Forgive me, Highness,” she says. “The queen has asked me to deliver the news to the tithe myself.”
She turns to me.
“Two remain,” she says. “The court has decided there is no need for further trials. There will be one more. The last. The Trial of Crowns.” She pauses. “Two will enter. One will walk out, and wear the veil.”
Two.
Me and Tam.
See next: Chapter Eight: Trial of Crowns