Page 35 of Waves
“Bring the girl back?” Lizza stared at me, aghast.
I paced in the small sitting room where I’d first met the mayor, the curtains on the walls swaying as my wings fluttered back and forth in distress and sent water rippling outward. A soft, puffy white dress with a skirt that resembled a cloud and a band of multiple colors stretching like a rainbow across my hair made me look like the sky on a happy day when I was anything but.
Since the tournament wasn’t scheduled to begin until tomorrow, the mayor had kindly given us the room for the morning, and I’d summoned my mage the second Gita had finished getting me ready.
Hair hanging down my back because I’d been too impatient for a braid, I stalked back and forth, feeling as trapped as a fish in a net. My thumb kneaded into the opposite palm in sharp jabs, and I chewed on my lip, a jumble of frayed nerves. “If I was able to get more information from her or get her to testify that I wasn’t the one who killed her?—”
My castle mage cut me off, both verbally and physically. She stepped right into my path and said, “First off, I’m no Donaloo.I can’t do that. Raise her from peace. Even if I had that power, I wouldn’t. Eternity should be a choice.” She gestured up and down at her own rotting body. “This life isn’t as glamorous as it looks.” The bit of skull peeking through the skin of her forehead reinforced her statement.
My hands went to my hair in frustration. “I know! I just—I need people to know it wasn’t me, Lizza. Down in my bones, I know they think it’s me.”
Sahar set down the tea she’d been pouring for herself and straightened, her hands smoothing over her skirts as though she might physically straighten this entire sarding mess out.
But she couldn’t. No one could. Watkins, whether he’d intended to or not, had bored a hole in my confidence and now everything felt so damned impossible. I wasn’t sure if I appreciated his words right now or hated him a little for them.
Staring up at my adviser, I lifted my shoulders in askance.
“We’ll convince them. It’s impossible to know you and not know you have good intentions.”
Closing my eyes, I struggled to keep my face neutral as I recalled what Knight Lewart always used to say.Good intentions are a fool’s excuse. Actions are what matters.
But what options were there? If we couldn’t rouse this siren from the dead, how could I prove I didn’t kill her?
“Did you determine her cause of death yet?” I turned to Lizza.
My mage shot a look at Sahar.
“What. Is. It?” I repeated through gritted teeth.
Lizza clacked her tongue but finally spit out the truth. “The girl drowned.”
My hands went to yank out my hair, to rip it right from my scalp because that fact was certain to fuel all the horrible accusations that I’d stolen water—“Wait. Drowned?” The word finally registered—and it wasn’t suffocated. “How does a siren drown?”
“When a siren is no longer a siren.” Lizza contorted her face in a manner that told me I should understand her cryptic statement. But all it did was make me want to shake the woman.
“And that means?”
Sahar took over, clearing her throat and again running her hands down her skirt. “It means she was turned human.”
Fainting was an unexpected reaction on my part and when I came to, it was with more than a little embarrassment. At least in Okeanos, I didn’t fall and immediately smash my head on the floor, I sort of drifted down instead. The difference between air and the water current was enough to prevent adding injury to insult.
Cheeks burning, blinking at Sahar, who’d dragged me over to a couch and held my lolling body as upright as Lizza rustled through her black bag of horrors, I tried to process what the wordhumanmeant and failed.
“How?” Still stunned, that was the only word I uttered.
“Not sure. We can look through my scrolls and grimoires in a minute,” Lizza grunted as her potions ominously clinked together.
“Who around here has that level of magic?”
“I said I wasn’t sure. Do I need to get some extra worms to eat through your earwax, child?” my mage scoffed as she headed toward me with a rosy potion that looked like liquefied fire.
“What is that?” I asked, ignoring her pointed jab and wishing my skirt was black—that way, the contents of that vial spilling onto it would go unnoticed.
“Will help with your constitution,” she replied. “Stop this fainting nonsense.”
Struggling to sit upright despite the fact that my temples were pounding like a set of stairs under soldier’s boots, I argued, “I’ve fainted once.”
“Twice. You fainted when we were practicing your magic.”
