Page 123 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“The controls for that are also in the palace,” she told me patiently. “And it would take some time—time you do not have.”

“W-why do we not?” Enid whispered. She was looking more ghost-like by the moment, with her now clean but still damp hair straggling around her face and her already pale skin dead white around her scars.

Faerie sighed. “Did you not hear me? I explained this earlier.”

“We were looking at the bodies,” I said.

Faerie tilted her head. “Why? They are dead.”

“Yeah, like we’re going to be if we go down there!” Alphonse exploded. “You just said the Margygr kill anyone who comes into their realm!”

Faerie frowned. “Yes, but not you. They should protect you, or at the least, not interfere.”

“And why should they do that?”

Faerie looked at Enid, who stared back in shock.

“You told the others that you wished to fight, did you not?” the zombie pressed.

“Yes, but . . . not them,” Enid whispered. “Not them!”

Faerie looked like we were giving her a headache. “Not fight them, girl. Fight with them. You are one of them, after all, aren’t you?”

But Enid was backing away, was shaking her head, was looking like she was about to—

And there she went, running across the dark floor as fast as a fleeing doe. But Alphonse was faster, and he went after her. And brought her back the same way he’d been carting me around.

Only she was beating on his back, kicking her feet in the air, and making it clear in no uncertain terms that she was not okay with Faerie’s suggestion.

“Enid,” I said, and she stopped kicking for long enough to look at me. “Are you Margygr?”

She didn’t look it. There were no gills I could see, and her features were human, not the human-ish ones of the merfolk. The full-blooded ones had huge eyes for seeing underwater, wider-than-normal mouths, and flat little noses that melted into the skin of their faces the way a human’s never did.

They also had a variety of skin and hair colors, none of which were found naturally on Earth, and subtle scale designs on their skin when they caught the light just right, as I’d seen on some of those in Nimue’s ballroom. And that was in their human form. In their altered state . . . well, then they didn’t look human at all.

None of which was true of Enid.

“Are you?” I asked because she was just looking at me, defiant and proud yet somehow miserable.

“Put me down!” she told Alphonse, who obliged, although he looked pointedly at her legs.

“I don’t have a tail!” she snapped.

“Just checking.”

“Enid?” I pressed. I hated to do it, as she’d been through hell already, as we all had. But if she had any pull. . .

“They hate me,” she said shortly.

“What did you do?” Alphonse asked, which earned him a purely vicious look. If he was trying for boyfriend material, he was missing by a mile.

“I didn’t do anything!” she said bitterly. “Other than being born. My grandmother met one of their emissaries at court and fell pregnant. She was a servant, of course, and he was one of their nobles. But she regularly cleaned his rooms and . . .” she shrugged.

“And when she told him?” Pritkin asked, although he looked like he already knew the answer.

“He gave her a plant they use and advised her to make tea with it. It took her a while to realize what he meant. He wanted her to kill me, as it would make him look bad to have a part-human child. A disgrace, he called it.”

“Here?” I said. Because if ever there was a place that didn’t mind that sort of thing. . .

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