Page 29 of A Magic Deep & Drowning

“Yes, I was there. Clara, I’ve always been there. I’m—” He hesitated, decided on another tack. “What do you know of the old ways? Of the gods that ruled the lowlands before the Dutch claimed the territory?”

“Helma used to tell me stories about them.” An uncomfortable knot was forming deep within her chest. Clouds swept across the moon, bringing with them a light rain. The smell of smoke drifted from somewhere far away.

Maurits nodded. The rain began to pick up, rivulets running down the strong profile of his face. She peered at him through the darkness, cataloging his extraordinary green eyes, his regal posture.

“Did she ever tell you of the water folk?”

She didn’t answer him, but threads of memories wound through her mind: Maurits always arriving from the canal. Maurits cold to the touch. His strange warnings, how no one seemed to know him and he always had a different story about who he was. “You... come from the water?” she asked, her tongue struggling to keep up with the staggering revelation that was unspooling before her.

“Clara, Iamthe water,” came his low reply.

He came a step closer, and she could feel the coldness radiating from his smooth skin, his coiled energy.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered, although she was afraid she did.

“It will be easier for me to show you, but you have to trust me.” Gesturing to the hungry water beyond, he reached for her hand, but she drew back.

She gave a vigorous shake of her head. “Fenna died in the water when we were children—I watched her walk right in, never to emerge again.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. So sorry. I never wanted for that to happen, but—”

The blanket slipped from her shoulders as she bolted toher feet. “What do you mean you ‘know’? What are you sorry for?”

“Waves above us,” he cursed. He was all but handing her his heaviest sin, the reason she should hate him above all others. “Nothing,” he said quickly. “I misspoke. Will you please come with me?”

She crossed her arms, glaring at him from under her bedraggled gold tresses. When he realized that she wasn’t going to sit, he tried again. “My mother is Maren, queen of the Water Kingdom.” He paused. “How much do you know about the bargain?”

Her lips were parted, her eyes round and disbelieving. “What bargain? What are you talking about?”

He stared back at her. She didn’t know. Did the Dutch not teach their children about how it came that the lowlands were taken? Then again, she didn’t know of magic and the Old Ones, so how would she have understood the bargain?

He resigned himself to sitting on the ground, just out of reach of the fire’s warmth. This would take a while. “One hundred years ago, the herring fisheries collapsed, whales beached, dikes broke. All that which made the Dutch Republic prosperous and the envy of her neighbors began to diminish.” He chanced a look at Clara, wished that he was in the water where he did not have to worry about his form. But he had to gain her trust first, so he went on. “The burghers and other important men, they knew that their wealth was not a gift from God, nor a reflection of lives lived in piety. They beat back the water into submission, claiming more and more land, plundering her bounty of fish and whales. Oh, there were floods of course. And the basilisks my mother set loose in Utrecht. But for the most part she let the men play at their games. For they had struck a bargain and she knew that everything would come back to her eventually.”

“What bargain?” Clara asked again, this time in a whisper.

Maurits would not meet her eye, and her stomach dropped. “My mother agreed to cede the lowlands to the Dutch, restore the fisheries, in exchange for seven hundred of their children.”

The blood in Clara’s veins went cold, colder, she was sure, than even Maurits. “And they—and they agreed to those terms?”

He nodded. “Yes, they did.”

Clara pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, desperate for something real to hold on to, something to shield her. That day with the moss woman, or whatever it had been—hadn’t she known then that there was more to the world than just what she had been taught? And her parents—they had knowingly entered a bargain, let children die so that they could be prosperous.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Maurits said, cutting into her runaway thoughts.

“I very much doubt you could even begin to comprehend what I’m thinking,” she said coldly. Clara held her head in her hands. “I don’t believe it,” she murmured. “It’s not true. It can’t be.” She looked up at him. “Fenna,” she said. “Fenna was one of the poor children that was taken as payment.”

He could not deny it, so he said nothing. He had thought that nothing could hurt him after his mother’s punishment, but the way Clara was looking at him with such betrayal made him feel as if he were the worst villain in the world.

“Why are you here?” She gestured around them at the little hill, her voice cracking with misery. “Why did you save me?”

Water was creeping ever closer, turning the small hill into an island. They had little time, perhaps an hour at most, but Maurits knew that she would not move so long as he had not told her everything.

“My mother tasked me with retrieving you.”

“The day you came to the kitchen...” She trailed off, her words small in the darkness. “You meant to take me.”

He gave a tight nod. “Yes.”

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