“My mother is dying,” Armand replied, his voice flat. “Hoffman is—”
“Your mother trusts these women,” Danielle said. “So do I. Please let Snow save her.”
Snow wasn’t waiting for his answer. She knelt beside the queen and spread her hand over Talia’s. “Press harder. Everyone else get back and give me light.”
“Will she live?” Talia asked.
Snow didn’t answer. She touched her choker, a band of oval mirrors connected with gold wire. Light flashed from the mirror in the center, illuminating the wound. “Pull your hand away now.”
Talia drew back, and Snow clapped her own hands down over Beatrice’s chest. Her hair fell like black curtains to obscure her actions.
“Talia?” Danielle asked.
Talia’s hands had begun to shake. She picked up the broken spear and stepped toward the railing.
Danielle followed. “What are you doing?”
Talia jumped lightly onto the rail, one hand holding a line as she searched the water.
“They’ve already fled. You’ll never catch them.” Danielle reached out, but Talia slapped her hand away with the spear. “Even if Lirea remains, she’ll kill you. You can’t fight them in the water.”
Talia might as well have been deaf. She paced along the rail, every step deliberate.
“Snow will save the queen,” Danielle said. “Don’t leave me to explain to her why you threw your life away.”
If Danielle hadn’t been watching so closely, she would have missed the faint slumping of Talia’s shoulders.
“The sea folk have been known to poison their blades,” whispered one of the crew.
Snow shook her head. “It’s not poison.”
Armand stood. The crew fell silent as he turned to face them. “Make sail for home.”
When leaving the docks at Lorindar, he had shouted orders for a quarter of an hour. From the way the crew worked together now, unfurling the sails in near silence, those detailed commands had been little more than a formality.
“What about her?” One of the crew gestured at Talia with her crossbow. “It was her who fought the mermaid and got the queen stabbed.”
Talia turned on the balls of her feet. Her expression made Danielle pray the man had already prepared his will and made peace with God. Then Talia looked at the queen. She bowed her head and dropped to the deck, her anger disappearing.
No, Danielle corrected. The rage wasn’t gone. It was simply turned inward.
“I said take us home.” Armand’s voice was soft, but the crew scrambled to obey. He crouched beside Snow. “What can I do to help?”
“Give me space,” Snow snapped.
Danielle took Talia’s hand and pulled her toward the ladder. It was a measure of Talia’s shock that she didn’t resist as Danielle led her away.
Snow had spent most of the day in the galley, reading a treatise on the development of marine navigation, from simple star charts to celestial globes of enchanted quartz to the first astrolabe.
The oven had been extinguished after breakfast, as the growing winds made the risk of fire too great, but the smell of fresh-roasted sausage lingered in the air. Snow sat on a wooden bench in the corner, knees pulled close to support her book. She was so absorbed in her reading that she barely noticed the gentle clangs of the pots and pans hanging on the wall.
Her choker cast a soft beam of sunlight on the pages. Each oval mirror was an enchanted twin to the magic mirror she had inherited from her mother.
This was her second choker. The first had been destroyed a year before. Snow had spent several months working to create a new one. To Snow’s surprise, Danielle had proved quite helpful. Her father had been a skilled glassmaker, and though he had died long ago, Danielle still remembered much of what she had learned from watching him. She had shown Snow several tricks to help her improve the quality of the mirrors.
These were slightly larger than the mirrors from Snow’s first choker. The gold-rimmed edges dug into her chin and throat if she bowed her head too far, but the larger size made it easier to manipulate their power. In the days leading up to this voyage, she had used the mirrors to capture several days’ worth of sunlight. This wasn’t her first time at sea, and despite what certain people might think, she couldn’t spend the
entire
time flirting with the crew. Three more books waited for her in her cabin.
The first scream shattered her spell, plunging the galley into darkness. She pressed one hand to the wall, rising on unsteady legs. There had been a magical element to that scream, but it was a damaged magic, like an injured boar, wild and enraged.
She waited for the sound to fade, then touched her choker, restoring enough light to make her way safely out of the galley. She passed other crewmen rushing to and fro. “What’s happening?”
“Out of the way, girl!” Strong hands shoved her aside.
Snow muttered a quick charm beneath her breath. The man yelled as his boots slid out from under him.
“Excuse me.” Snow flashed a friendly smile as she stepped over the groaning man and climbed up into the sunlight.
The scream came again. This time, Snow was able to brace herself. This wasn’t a deliberate spell. Her own magic drew on various energies, from the sun’s light to her own will, weaving them into whatever pattern she chose. These screams were . . .
snarled
. Power without form.
At the front of the main deck, Prince Armand was shouting to the crew. Snow climbed onto one of the longboats for a better view. A canvas tarp covered the boat, and she moved carefully, feeling for the crossbeams until she found a comfortable spot to stand and watch.
On the forecastle, a half-naked woman holding a spear was fighting with Talia. The stranger appeared human, but her nudity marked her as undine, as did that sharkskin harness. Royalty, judging from the oyster necklace. This had to be Posannes’ daughter Lirea.
Queen Beatrice stood behind Lirea and Talia, unable to get past. Already the crew had gathered, blocking Snow’s way. She turned to the nearest crewman. “I’ll wager a dozen crowns on Talia.”
Talia soon ripped the spear from her opponent’s grasp, delivering one blow after another. Lirea screamed again, then drew her knife.
Snow’s breath caught. Unlike the screams, the magic woven into that knife was deliberate and precise. She could feel only a faint shadow of the knife’s power, little more than a whisper, but it was a whisper full of pain and despair. Snow leaped from the longboat and tried to shove her way to the forecastle.
The mermaid lunged, and Talia broke the spear over her back. An instant later, the magic in the knife flared up like oil-soaked rags.
“Bea!” There were too many people in her way. Snow jammed her thumb beneath one man’s jaw, a dirty trick Talia had taught her years before. A whispered spell caused another to leap back, even as her illusory spiders flickered and vanished. Tossing spells with abandon, Snow cleared a path to the forecastle, heedless of the injuries she left in her wake.
Moments later Snow knelt beside the queen, her hands over the gash in Beatrice’s chest. She sent the others away. Even as she frantically drew on her magic to chill the wound and slow the bleeding, panic threatened to unravel her spells.
The knife couldn’t have pierced the heart, or Beatrice would already be dead. Snow grabbed the large mirror at the front of her choker and pulled. The wires untwisted, releasing the mirror into her palm.
She placed the mirror on the back of her other hand, directly over the wound. “Mirror, mirror—” Her mind went blank. The rhymes weren’t necessary, but they helped focus her spells. She needed that focus right now. “Dammit, what rhymes with blood? Wait, I’ve got it.”
Snow concentrated on the mirror. “Mirror, mirror, hear my need. Show me whence the queen does bleed.”
The mirror’s surface frosted, then cleared again. Blood filled the glass, but Snow peered deeper.
There.
One of the smaller arteries leading from the heart had been cut, but not completely severed. She could see blood pumping from the cut with each beat of the queen’s heart.
There was no way for needle and thread to reach such a wound. Snow touched her choker again. A length of gold wire unbraided itself, coiling around the index finger of her left hand. “Hurry, curse you.”
She snapped the wire free, then pressed her finger against the wound. The wire grew hot, remembering the heat of the forge until it was soft and pliable as silk. The tip of the wire snaked into the wound, growing longer and thinner as it sought out the cut.
Six times the wire pierced the artery. More finely than any human hand could sew, it stitched the edges together, gradually slowing the flow of blood. A thought severed the wire, melting the ends together so that no sharp points remained. Snow continued to watch through her mirror until she was certain the bleeding had stopped. Only then did she reach up to touch Beatrice’s face.
What she sensed was like a physical blow, knocking her back. “She’s gone.”
“Nobody’s dying if I have anything to say about it.” Gentle hands slowly pulled her away. The ship’s surgeon, an older man named Hoffman, sat down beside her. “She’s still breathing. I’ll take over from here.”
Snow started to argue, but the words wouldn’t come. She squeezed her eyes shut, then nodded.
Someone else helped her to her feet. Her mirror slipped from her hand and broke on the deck.
“Sorry about that,” said the crewman.
Snow barely heard. Beatrice’s face was pale and still. Her blood covered the forecastle. It had gotten onto Snow’s hands, soaked into her sleeves and trousers. She could smell it in the air, the sharp tang overpowering even the salt of the sea air.
“Will she live?” asked someone. The prince? Snow wasn’t sure.
She pulled away, trying to get to Danielle and Talia. “The surgeon . . . will do what he can.” With those whispered words, Snow fled.
Danielle had seen death before. Her stepsister Stacia had died in front of her only last year. Her father died when she was ten, her mother even earlier.
She had wept for them all, in very different ways. Her mother’s death was less a memory than a collection of impressions. Broken glass . . . her father had dropped the bottle he was working on when he heard her mother fall. The bottle had been such a vivid shade of blue. Still warm from the fire, the softened glass had absorbed some of the impact before shattering, spreading shards of oddly warped glass across the floor.
Her father’s death had been a slow thing. Danielle had known what was to come, even if her stepmother refused to acknowledge it. Danielle had stolen every moment with him that she could. When death finally came, it was almost a relief, releasing him from his pain.
For her stepsister Stacia, Danielle had wept at the pointlessness of it all.
Sitting on the edge of the cot in the cabin she shared with Armand, she refused to cry now. Snow would save Beatrice. She had to.
“Beatrice found me.” Talia’s accent was thicker than usual, elongating the vowels and slurring the harder consonants. The finely woven carpet muffled the sound of her footfalls as she paced. She still carried the broken spear she had taken from Lirea. “Four years ago, when I first fled to Lorindar. I was so frightened I nearly killed her.”
“This isn’t your fault.” Worrying about Talia’s fear helped Danielle to ignore her own. “You can’t blame yourself.”
Talia stabbed the tip of the spear into the wall. She twisted, prying up a long splinter. “Lirea didn’t intend to kill Beatrice. She wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t—”
“Beatrice isn’t dead.”
Talia’s jaw quivered. “I’ve killed before, Princess. I saw the wound. With so much blood—”
“Snow will take care of Beatrice,” Danielle said. “You were trying to protect us.”
“And what a marvelous job I did.” She punctuated her words with another blow to the wall. “I should be on deck. The merfolk might come back.”
“You’ve seen the undine before. Did you know they could take human form?”
Talia shook her head. “They can’t. Otherwise King Posannes could have picked his own strawberries. This was something else.”
At least she had stopped pacing. Danielle spoke quickly, hoping to keep them both distracted. “Lirea had two tails.”
“Most have only one,” said Talia. “The royal blood-line has two. They believe it makes them superior, closer to being human. They’re faster swimmers, too.”
“Beatrice said she was one of Posannes’ daughters.” Had Lirea killed her own father to take command of her tribe? “Lirea was asking about her sister.”
“Power passes through the females.” Talia twirled the broken spear in one hand. “Posannes only led the tribe after his wife died. Even though he wears the crown, his daughters hold the true power. The eldest would have taken over in another year or two. If Lirea is looking for her sister, she’s probably trying to eliminate her competition.”
Beatrice had known. She had been searching for Posannes, and she had recognized the danger Lirea posed. “Did Beatrice ever say anything to you about Lannadae?”