Page 94 of A Curse of Salt

My fingers shook as I clutched its thick yellow pages. I’d almost forgotten about it, about my hollow promise not to read it until I was weeks away from the truth it would reveal.

I’d be damned if I let him tell me what to do, especially now.

The brittle pages of Sebastien’s story leafed open before me, coloured with age and inked with promises of the world I hungered for more than any other. I inched towards the solitary candle, its sputtering flame casting just enough light to read by. The words coiled around my heart, doing something to heal the wound there; a wound that ran deeper with every passing minute, with every billowing breath of the sea as it pulled me further from home.

The world around me melted away, dissolving into another . . .

The sea slipped over the stone walls of that kingdom and into its briny heart. She came as she did for every sailor, when their lungs loosed one last breath to the skies.

Long she had been nothing more than a tide. Now, she rose.

Roiling waves lapped at the rocky shores of the Sinking Cities as Nerida came to stand before their boy king. She had seen king turn on queen, son turn on father. Who was to stop it from being her tides they turned on next?

They had proven true what she had always known, that she was wise to keep her magic to herself, to safeguard it against poisoned human hearts. If the child king could not repent, his people would join her below, where they belonged.

He stood tall for one so young, blocking Nerida’s path at the city gates. There, he swore to restore the balance between her waves and his people, and promised to show her she had been right to choose his kin as her guardians.

Nerida had come to reclaim them, but when she heard the pleas of those who lived to worship her waters, she relented. The little king vowed she would know only peace from that day forth.

For a time, the marble kingdom flourished. Its people were voyagers, wanderers, and their king fought and ruled alongside them, guided by the ocean that wove through his cities’ cobbled hearts.

Each year, he returned home from the seas a little more a man. A decade passed and Nerida came to know him well, poised proud like the figurehead of a great ship, the wind curling around him as if he were impenetrable, unshakeable, even to her touch.

The sea knew his eyes, knew well the love that swirled within them as he gazed into her depths. And because the hearts of gods are fickle, too, she loved him back.

But ten years did little to wash the tint of betrayal from her blue waters. And so, when she came once more for his kingdom, the goddess came for him, too. For his heart.

The sea spoke to her king, to the only mortal she believed worthy. And when she professed her love to him, he knelt before her and swore that if it was his heart that she desired, she would have it – have it, in exchange for the safety of his kingdom.

Nerida accepted. Seeing how her tides hungered for his heart, but knowing he could only ever belong to his kingdom, the king unsheathed his dagger and plunged it into his chest. He tore himself open, pried out his beating mortal heart and threw it to the planks of his ship before her.

When he did, it was love – pure, crimson love – that flowed from him. It coated the deck, weaving like briars into the fabric of the ship he called home.

‘I belong only to my people,’ he told her, blood dripping from his chin, his hands, his broken ribs.

The goddess, enraged by his rejection, turned his people to stone. As promised, her waves would never harm them, for water could no longer breach their pebbled lips.

It was only then that the light the sea had loved in her king winked out. Still twisted with spite, she relinquished, at last, a little of her magic. To serve him in his torment. To turn him into something that could not be mended. To remind him of her love for him, each and every day.

‘Live on,’ she told him. ‘Learn to love as you have claimed to love me, or your people shall remain stone forever. Bare your hateful soul to another and see if you will ever find one as worthy as me.’

‘But I don’t have a heart,’ he tried to plead, feeling the rift of his new emptiness breaking open from within.

Nerida’s laugh was an echo in his hollow chest. Three hundred years she gave him, to learn that he could not live without the love he had let slip through his fingers. Three hundred years of flesh before he, too, would be stone.

He woke the next dawn in a body fraught with shadow. The two most loyal to him stood by his side, watching as his new powers clawed at the mortal within.

The Sinking Cities crumbled beneath the ocean’s choking waves without a king to stand in their way. Only when he found a love as true as Nerida’s, without a heartbeat to guide him, would his kingdom see the light of the surface again.

And so, those cities of rust would lie in the greatest depths of that mournful sea, awaiting the return of their king . . .

The storm outside was mirrored in my unwanted dreams. I spent the pitch-black hours tossed between broken kingdoms and bloody hands. It was in a thicket of shadow that I found myself, surrounded by wind and rain and anguish.

But I wasn’t alone – Sebastien was with me, his hands warm and reassuring on my cheeks. Until darkness tore its way between us. I heard his voice, a shout of pain in the wind, the fury of the tempest that roared around us, stealing the cries from my throat.

I jolted awake.

Centuries of pain sat heavy in my chest, Sebastien’s cry still echoing through me. My turbulent dreams were nothing compared to what was real – what I’d turned my back on.

---