Sea Witch Rising Read online

  Dedication

  To my sister Meagan—

  I miss you every day.

  And to Justin—

  the car chase happened. Kinda.

  Epigraph

  Come away, come away—

  O’er the waters wild.

  Our earth-born child

  Died this day, died this day.

  Come away, come away—

  The tempest loud

  Weaves the shroud

  For him who did betray.

  Come away, come away—

  Beneath the wave

  Lieth the grave

  Of him we slay, him we slay.

  —A sailor’s shanty known as “The Mermaid’s Vengeance”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1. Evie

  2. Runa

  3. Runa

  4. Evie

  5. Runa

  6. Runa

  7. Evie

  8. Runa

  9. Runa

  10. Runa

  11. Runa

  12. Runa

  13. Runa

  14. Evie

  15. Runa

  16. Runa

  17. Evie

  18. Runa

  19. Runa

  20. Evie

  21. Runa

  22. Evie

  23. Runa

  24. Runa

  25. Evie

  26. Runa

  27. Runa

  28. Runa

  29. Runa

  30. Runa

  31. Evie

  32. Runa

  33. Runa

  34. Evie

  35. Evie

  36. Runa

  37. Evie

  38. Runa

  39. Evie

  40. Runa

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from Sea Witch

  About the Author

  Books by Sarah Henning

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  “You will have your voice for only a few more moments, my dear. Use the time wisely.”

  The girl swallows again and then takes a heavy breath.

  “I first saw Niklas on the day I turned fifteen. It could be called love at first sight—but I’d seen his face before. In a statue I’ve had in my castle garden since I turned ten. Those red flowers I brought you, they grow—”

  “Yes, the Øldenburgs love their statues,” I say, sounding again very much like Hansa. “There is yet to be love in this story. Only coincidence and horticulture.”

  The girl licks her lips and recasts. “I stayed beside the boat all night, watching this boy. Then, after midnight, a great storm came, waves crashing down so hard, the ship toppled onto its side. The sailors were in the water, but I didn’t see the boy.” Here, her voice hitches. “I dove down until I found him. His limbs were failing him, and his eyes were closed. I pulled him up to the surface and held his head above water. We stayed like that the whole night. And when the sun returned and the ocean calmed, I kissed his forehead and swam him to land.”

  Reflexively, my tentacle tightens around her waist as I’m reminded of Annemette, even though I’ve read enough to know this story by heart. A storm, a shipwreck, a savior.

  “And?” I ask.

  “I placed him beside a great building. I stayed to watch, hiding among some rocks, covered in sea foam. Soon, a beautiful girl found him and sounded the alarm. I knew then that he would live. He awoke, and was smiling at the girl.”

  “No smile for you?”

  “No.” The determination returns to her voice. “But I wanted that smile—I want it now. I want him to know that I saved him. That I love him. And I want him to love me.”

  Ah. She’s lied to me.

  “But you said he already does.”

  The girl looks away, caught. Finally, she continues. “For the past year, I’ve watched him. And I know if I could just be human, he would love me. He thinks he’s in love with the girl from the beach, but I saved him. I saved Niklas.”

  Like Anna, this girl believes she deserves something and she’s willing to risk her life and all she knows for it. But this girl doesn’t crave revenge.

  She wants a happily ever after.

  And for that, I cannot blame her. Even after all these years, I still wish for my own.

  “It is very stupid of you,” I say finally, “but you shall have your way.”

  —From the final pages of Sea Witch

  1

  Evie

  THE SHARPEST OF THINGS KEEPS ITS EDGE EVEN IN THE dullest of settings.

  And so, my coral knife shines through the shadows I call home. Rendered ghost white with magic, the serrated blade sharp is enough to cleave a single hair in two.

  Beautiful. Deadly. Perfect.

  I only hope it’s enough for when they arrive.

  Because in the hours since the little mermaid left the sea for land, chasing her true love, I felt it. A tug. A thread pulled clear and released.

  I felt it in my bones, rotting through the marrow, septic in my lungs, gut, and heart, and yet, this jolt of pain was bound to come. It needed to come. The sea’s monopoly is not sustainable.

  In the time that I’ve lived below the surface, the magical balance has shifted, the power slowly tipping from land to sea, until the majority of the land’s magic had sunk to the depths of the sea king’s domain, destined to obey an unnatural master. Now the imbalance is so glaring it’s all I can see beyond the lair that is my cage, beyond my forest of polypi, the fissures in the earth bubbling with turfmoor, and the violent whirlpools spinning sirens in the deep. Past the eerie blue radiance of the sea king’s castle and its grounds, magic teems, heavy, overflowing.

  After the little mermaid left, I began to think how impossible it is that the magic on land has all but died away, though it’s simple, really. There were so few of us witches. Hunted, killed, banished. We were eliminated one by one for centuries, until the land was nearly drained of its magic and those who knew how to control it. From Maren Spliid and her death at the hands of the witch-hunter king, all the way through the years to me, each of us cast into the afterlife. But I did not die, not in every way, and so my magic is still my own, a mix of land and sea.

  I remember my time above, and the thaw inside me crystallizes, clear and blue. I was a witch turned underground by fear—I didn’t even know how to use my strength. It was how Tante Hansa tried to keep me safe. Hiding away my power, repressing it. As if it were something that could be shuttered away in a cupboard from prying eyes. Out of sight, out of mind.

  But now, my eyes are open.

  The balance of magic has always been precarious. Built on exchange, all of it. Not just the spells, the whole system. And the ebb and flow of power is skewed toward those who seek to own it. Yet as the little mermaid set foot on land, taking her powers with her, the scale tipped back toward the land just a sliver. The land’s shockwave of relief sent a jolt of fire through my bones, but my brief pain is of no concern. I do not need this magic to live.

  There is another who has much to fear.

  I tuck the knife away, safe in my cave, and pull out my spell books, presents from Tante Hansa, one in each tentacle, plus two in each hand. I settle into the pewter sands and thumb through them. Tante Hansa always told me that magic will forever seek equilibrium. Now that the door has finally been opened, perhaps I can hasten the land’s gain.

  That’s when the polypus closest to my cave clears its throat, and the voice I took from the little mermaid cuts into my insulated world. “Weren’t your efforts to curb the Tørhed enough of a disaster? You want to try again?”
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  I startle a little—so used to fifty years of silence. Anna. She can surely feel the imbalance too. Though I gave her the little mermaid’s voice, we’ve yet to talk much about what she did, why she did it, and why I did what I had to, to save Nik. But now is not the time to start.

  “This is different,” I say. My spell of abundance to end the sea’s Tørhed and bring life to our fisherman’s nets created an imbalance that angered Urda. My desire here is just the opposite. “I have to try.”

  “Fine,” Anna goes on. “But you won’t find what you want in those books.”

  I turn a page of my spell book in defiance.

  Almost as an exclamation, there’s the distant sound of an explosion, big enough to push the whirlpools off axis, turfmoor burping, sea floor quaking into the water and then drifting into a new arrangement. My polypi forest—like Anna, bodies discarded and moored by magic—twists and hisses, waving in the disturbance.

  Yet another sea mine—a bomb hidden in the water, eager to blow a hole in the right ship and make bones of targeted men.

  There’s a war raging on the surface. Over land and sea, and even in the air, humans under many flags have banded together to kill one another. There is no magic involved, of course. If there were more than a meager amount of magic left on land, perhaps this war might not be waged. Still, the search for power—magical or not—will always be. Once the mines and the bullets stop, lines will be redrawn, and a different type of power will shift. Another imbalance.

  Anna starts a tart reply. “Evie, you—”

  “Létta.” Stop, I command. Because something’s not right.

  Then, as if in answer to the sudden silence, a great voice booms into my lair, echoing hard enough to rattle my teeth and bend the branches of my bone-thick polypi forest.

  “It can’t be—the great sea witch talks to herself?”

  I freeze as he comes into view, power and magic dripping off him in a terrible wake.

  The sea king.

  His hair is the color of snow in the thick of winter, eyes crystal blue, skin glowing with almost too much life, flush and vibrant. Atop his head is a crown of pearls fitted to a cluster of eel skulls, jaws pried open in wide V shapes, their teeth on edge. I have never seen his crown in person before, but it is the very semblance of life and death, and power. A reminder of what can be taken—the fruits of one’s labor, sucked out, even when one bares fangs.

  The sea king smiles, and it is as brilliant and deadly as one would expect. “It must get so lonely, stuck in the shadows by yourself.”

  He would know. It’s not my magic or memories that keep me here, it’s the king’s. So afraid of what I can do, though he floats before me, amplified in a way that isn’t natural, even for magical creatures.

  He has a penchant for the nectar of the rare ríkifjor flower—a drug that both harnesses magic and intensifies it. But surveying him now, it’s almost as if the ríkifjor has fused to his blood, bone, and skin. That imbalance I feel, it leans hard into this man, who has absorbed as much magic as his body can hold and then doubled it through the constant, steady ingestion of ríkifjor.

  Looking at him can only be compared to staring directly into the sun.

  He is power.

  But if he’s here for the first time in fifty years, there is something his power cannot hand him.

  “At times, Your Highness, this cove has felt like a prison,” I say, and his smile curls up. “But just because I cannot leave doesn’t mean I don’t receive visitors.”

  The sea king’s posture stiffens. Yes, this is why he’s here. This powerful man has lost something important to him. His daughter is gone, and perhaps more importantly, so is her magic, which shares a direct tie to his. As I suspected, the thread pulled from me must have been so much worse for him. “Reverse the spell and bring her back. Now,” he commands.

  I smile, reclining on my tentacles like a queen. I cock a brow. “Do you even know which one is gone?” He notoriously treats his daughters like pawns in a game, using their beauty and their talents when convenient.

  “Insulting me will bring no good to you,” he says, but my smile doesn’t waver except to grow with satisfaction when he says her name. “Alia belongs in the sea. Return her.”

  “Your Highness, you should know better than anyone that even you can’t control a strong-headed woman,” I say, and I know he’s thinking of his first queen, Mette, the human he saved but then couldn’t keep, her heart cracking as she longed both for him and for the life she was meant to lead. “Alia must be free to make her own choices and live her own life—experience love and freedom. But instead, you trap her, and all your people, under your thumb with false promises of protection from humans. Not since Annemette—”

  “Never speak that name to me again,” he growls, his fury sputtering between us. She’s the one who left him, betraying him, his family, and the secrets of the mermaids. I hope Anna is really listening to him now.

  As his nostrils flare, I look him dead in the eyes. “Like Annemette, Alia has four days to make the boy love her and live, or fail and die. Either way, you’ll never see her again.”

  “I can destroy you!”

  I bare my teeth. “Ah, but you haven’t. Even with all the power you steal, you still need me.” My voice gains strength with each word. He’s desperate. He can’t retrieve Alia on his own. There is an element of my magic he will never master. “I can bring Alia back, but I will need something from you in return. I have my price.”

  The sea king’s lips drop open. I have him backed into a corner, and he knows it. My ask is simple, and only he can do it. He can’t give me my life back, my lost time, or Nik—may he rest in the tide—but he can unchain me from my lair. The words are on my tongue, ready, when something nasty ticks across his handsome features.

  “You have your price, Witch, but you forget your place.”

  His teeth click together, and the blue of his eyes goes cold. It’s then that the wet, hard certainty of my mistake reveals itself to me. This man won’t kill me, but for the abundance of magic that he is, heavy and unwieldy, he can hurt me so badly, I will wish I were dead.

  The power within him—amplified, multiplied, looted from land and sea—expands, bursts outward, like a living bomb. A sea mine of magic, aimed straight at me.

  “Morna, herfiligr kvennali∂!”

  Waste away, wretched woman!

  The words hit my ears with a force of magic I’ve never felt, slamming into me with the power of the sun falling out of the sky and barreling toward the earth, bringing enough light to dissolve all of us the instant before impact.

  And then my world, already so dark, fades to complete, flat black.

  2

  Runa

  I SHOULD’VE KNOWN I WOULD LOSE HER THIS WAY.

  To him.

  The boy. That stupid boy. With his stupid dark hair and sparkling eyes and regal blood.

  The one she saved in the height of summer, during a ferocious storm when she’d been stalking him yet again. Living in the wake of his ship, hoping for a glimpse of him with his brothers, with their cheekbones and songs and dogs. As if they’d been created from her heart’s desires and plunked onto the earth, just close enough for her to want, just far enough—different enough—to escape her.

  Always fascinated with humans, Alia.

  Always fascinated with what she shouldn’t have. Riding the edge of what was acceptable down below—testing our father’s kingly patience and personal leniency. Rescuing that boy and then all but bragging about it by lugging into her garden that stupid statue that went down with him.

  I was there when she first saw him above. Her eyes shone with immediate curiosity. We’d turned fifteen at the same time—twins so alike and yet more like two sides of the same coin. We had gone to the surface together, but the fascination with the world above was hers alone.

  Once she learned his name, it wouldn’t leave her lips.

  Niklas.

  Now she’s gone to him, I’
m sure of it.

  It’s been a day since I’ve seen her, the longest we’ve ever been apart. I have no choice but to believe I’ve lost her to him, because the alternative—that she’s dead or dying somewhere and my heart has yet to realize it—is too painful.

  Not that it feels fantastic knowing that my twin left me, our family, our world for a boy.

  A stupid human prince of a boy who doesn’t even know her name.

  “Oh, Alia. How could you do this to yourself?” I mumble into the morning tide, mermaid tail swishing hard, fists balled tightly at my sides, nails digging crescents into my palms. “How could you do it to us?”

  The magic to become human has been banned forever by our father’s own hand. He invented it himself, after he brought home his first queen, but the last time it was done, it nearly brought our people to ruin. Four days, one knife, and the truth about life beneath the sea spilling from the lips of one of our own, nearly exposing and endangering us, if Annemette had lived.

  So, here I am, closer to land now than I’ve ever been, swimming in the shadows of a new morning, staring at the place I know in my gut Alia will be.

  Øldenburg Castle.

  Home of stupid Niklas and his stupid laughing smile and stupid dimples.

  The castle is just as Alia said it would be. High on the hill and old enough to have Viking bones in its crypt. It’s the biggest thing in sight, dwarfing the mountains at its back simply by a purposeful trick of perspective. The town below it is a warren of stone houses, shops, and the like. Bricks line the streets, slick under the weak light of a rising morning sun as the people of Havnestad run out for their errands.

  I sink back below the surface. The waters will be safer near the castle—buoys keep ships from docking too close, so none will mar my path, even with the bustle of the morning. Plus, there are mines out here, bombs meant for ships in the humans’ great war. I doubt they know or care how these hurt us below.

  I set a course straight for the castle, my path clear though I’ve never swum it before, but still I know it. Late at night, Alia would whisper tales into my ear while our sisters slept. Tales of watching the grand summer parties from beneath a marble balcony, something new added onto the old castle in recent years.