Lina’s heart pounded as she ran through all the battle dances she knew, traditional flings and jigs where you flourished a blade, imitating the use of the weapon in fighting. It wasn’t as good as knowing how to fight, but it was certainly better than nothing.
Finley’s eyes flicked to her and away as she drew even with him. He opened his mouth, then shut it abruptly.
Footsteps. Percussive. Heels clipping stone.
Lina grasped for the handle of the nearest door, nearly collapsing with relief when it opened. Finley shoved her inside ahead of him. Lina drew the door closed with excruciating slowness so it wouldn’t slam and give them away.
They held their breath as the footsteps grew louder and louder. Closer and closer.
Pausing.
Before starting up again, a little faster this time. Fading, finally.
The breath Lina let out blew the bangs off her forehead. Finley cracked an uneasy, relieved grin.
They were in somebody’s bedroom. Their tiptoeing, waterlogged steps left damp prints on creamy carpet. Their anxious faces flashed like ghosts in mirrored wall panels, in the glowing amber sunburst stamped on the ceiling and the silver filigree screen standing guard over a merrily crackling hearth.
Lina and Finley rushed past the massive canopy bed to hover around the flames, hands outstretched toward the glorious, glorious heat.
They both kept looking over their shoulders.
The room had an eerie, just-vacated feel, like a still-warm chair. The bedsheets were flung back in a tangle. The air was heady, as if someone spritzed in sweet perfume had just moved through it. Smoke curled from a long, ebony cigarette holder left idling on an ashtray.
A record was spinning on the player in the corner—silently now, save a barely audible crackle.
Lina set the knife down and picked up a half-empty teacup from a tray on the dressing table. Crimson lipstick stained its porcelain rim.
She gulped the contents down. Choked and pounded her chest.
Cherry liqueur?
Oh, thank God.
She reached for the teapot, refilling the cup to the brim, drowning fear and worry with liquid courage. As she often did before a performance, a classmate’s secret hip flask passed from dancer to dancer, anxious mouth to anxious mouth. She hadn’t had anything to drink since before the revel. Her throat was desert parched.
Finley struggled to keep his voice down. “Hey, don’t drink it all.” He spied the plate of egg tarts at the same time as she did and lunged.
“Halves!” hissed Lina.
“I think the hell not,” said Finley, and crammed one into his mouth. “It’s punishment.”
Lina cursed, and when he darted close and stole the teapot, too, she kicked him in the shin.
Finley skipped back out of reach, sculling straight from the teapot’s spout. But then he relented and gave her the remaining two egg tarts.
Lina ate them, sipping from her cup, savoring the burn in her throat, the warmth starting to curl in her belly. Her eyes skimmed their surroundings. Even in disarray, this bedroom was much tidier than hers. No clothes were spilling out of the wardrobe. The shelves were dusted, strung prettily with bundles of dried seagrass, stacked neat with rows of bottled spells and old jam jars containing tiny, luminous jellyfish.
So this was a witch’s bedroom? A little part of her couldn’t help thrilling at the thought. The same part that had thrilled when she’d danced with the Witch Queen in disguise at the revel.
Though the islanders lived in peace with the witches, they still lived somewhat separately. The queen and the rest secluded themselves in the palace, coming to shore only for festivals and to sell their magic at the city’s markets. And though the islanders might bow and be grateful to the queen for keeping Caldella from sinking, they were not overly grateful. There was still dislike and superstition.
There was something so deliciously forbidden about being here.
“It’s not like how I imagined,” said Finley quietly. His expression was calmer now, pinched by something that might have been wistfulness. Or longing. It brought back memories of when they were little and had played at being witches, watching for pictures in plumes of candle smoke, climbing the slick, crumbling ruins in the sunken harbor and pretending the old bell tower was their Water Palace.
“Why?” said Lina. “Because the room’s not full of decapitated heads and all the different faces the queen wears?”
She trailed her fingers over the rouge and mascara pots on the dressing table, over vials of strange perfume and a gold compact shaped like a seashell, eyes lighting up when she spied a blush-pink sugar bowl labeled “Sweet.”
It was overflowing with fat black pearls. Each one flawless and shiny as a promise.
Lina couldn’t help herself. She shot a glance at Finley in the dressing table mirror—he was frowning at the door they’d come in—then plucked a pearl from the bowl and dropped it into her teacup, snatching a spoon from the tray and stirring as the pearl dissolved. Red cherry liqueur turned an oily midnight black, tiny rainbows dancing across the liquid’s surface.
She licked the spoon and downed the entire cup. It tasted like seaweed and licorice, like enchantment. “Finley,” she whispered afterward.
His head snapped toward her.
Her voice was not her own. It was warm honey, hypnotic. “Fetch me a coat?” She batted her lashes.
Finley’s eyes glazed over.
“A nice one! And some house slippers?”
He’d taken a sumptuous fur coat down from the witch’s ash-wood wardrobe and was obediently helping a gleeful Lina into it before the charm’s effects faded and his face turned suddenly to thunder.
“It’s harmless,” she said quickly, the words tripping over one another in their hurry to leave her mouth. “A spell to make your voice sweet. Irresistible. The sopranos at the Conservatoire are always accusing each other of buying them.” Usually when they were vying for a solo. Lina grasped a handful of the black pearls, letting them fall through her fingers and clink back into the sugar bowl. “You take one too. If we meet anyone, we can charm them, compel them. It’ll help. Don’t be mad.”
Anger and uncertainty warred on Finley’s features, fighting the cloying sweetness of her voice. “Don’t be mad,” she stressed. “Please.” Every muscle in her body had braced instinctively at the first sign of his temper rising. She wondered if it would always be this way between them now. As if it wasn’t just her ankle that had broken, but something else, something irreparable.
“I’m not angry,” said Finley, sounding slightly dazed, words sticking to his tongue like thick molasses.
Lina pulled the fur coat tight around her shoulders, pushing away the question of whether things would ever go back to normal, growing angry at herself now for getting distracted. Thomas was here somewhere, alone and in danger.