Ours is nothing like decorous voyages of legend.

In those voyages, the ship is always enormous and grand and perfectly outfitted and she is definitely manned by a full crew, who tend not to be runaway slave girls. The harbor is crowded with people who watch them sail away and there usually is some sailor’s wife weeping at the water’s edge. It’s also usually not the middle of the night.

But it’s been a long time since I could be traditional.

Some traditions I would not object to. I rather like the one where there are actual sailors on the ship, and enough to crew her properly. I’m also not against the captain owning the ship, rather than stealing it. But, desperate times. 

We are still in sight of land when the first mermaid escapes. Some captains would have cited bad luck and turned back. We didn’t have enough mermaids to begin with, but we were out of time. Another year without the fae king might just be the end of Tastinace, but that’s not why we are going to find him, not really. We all have our own reasons for risking this voyage.

I can tell the sisters want to turn back, despite their desperation. They would rather spend another winter hunting mermaids, pretending they’re not becoming more and more rare, praying that we can find enough to carry us through the sea-deserts. But no one says anything. Neither of them wants to be the one to suggest it. There’s a degree of difficulty in dealing with me.

Ten hours later, Anika finds the stowaway. He follows her out to stand in the middle of the deck, apparently completely unabashed, watching our reactions. For Anika and her sister, there seems only to be amazement at the sight of the prince in our midst. I have other emotions to deal with.

My first instinct is to punch him in the face. Not because he is the prince and has therefore left the kingdom with no better leader than his grief-stricken mother, but because he is a he and he is on my pathetic excuse for a ship.

That explains the mermaid’s escape. Mermaids hate men; it’s where they got their name. It does not explain why we still have the other four. Maybe because he isn’t truly a man; fae blood has always been stronger in the royal family. I should know.

“What are you doing on my ship?” I snarl at him, getting into his face as much as I dare without risking touching him.

“You are going to find my father,” he says, staring down at me with his too-long blue-white eyes. “I am coming with you.”

“You weren’t invited.”

“Which is why I hid.”

There is a reason I isolated myself for the past three years, and it was not only because I was tired of everyone flinching away from me, afraid to look me in the eyes. It was not only because I was sick of hearing the word that follows me everywhere that I go: cursed.

It was also because people are extraordinarily stupid and I can no longer smack them when they deserve it. Thanks to this horned prince’s father.

I turn to the sisters. “I think we should throw him overboard.”

They both frown.

“He’s the prince,” Anika points out.

“That would be cruel,” Antia says.

“Can you swim?” I ask the prince.

He nods.

“So, he could swim back to Tastinace,” I say to the sisters. “He’ll frighten away the rest of the mermaids if we keep him.”

“We can’t do that,” Antia says.

“We could use his help,” Anika says.

In some ways the sisters are extraordinarily alike. The sound of their voices, for instance. But Anika, unfortunately, tends to use that voice to appeal to my practical mind rather than to my higher nature, which only Antia seems determined to believe exists.

It’s an unfortunate tendency of Anika’s because she also tends to disagree with me but still not be wrong. We really could use his help. Tiny as this excuse of a ship is, it was still intended to be crewed by more than three people.

“He’s my father,” the prince says. “Don’t you think I have a right to be here?”

“Did you go along on any of the other ships that went to find your father?” I know that he did not. I know it because he is alive. Not one ship returned from those voyages, and only one insane sailor.

“No,” the prince says. “But it is time.”

“What makes this one different?” Aside from the fact that we are ridiculously undermanned and also the first ship in two years to set out on this hopeless quest.

He looks at me for a moment. “It is time.”

“What a convincing argument. I am blown away.”

There is really no point in arguing. The sisters will not throw him overboard, and I cannot. Unless I want to be a murderer. 

“Go tell the mermaids why there is a man onboard and ask their tolerance,” I say to Antia, and go back to the wheel. Who knows whether they understand us, but we might as well try.

Over the next few weeks, our voyage progresses with ease. After all the troubles I experienced at sea before my exile and all the rumors I’ve heard since, this calm feels wrong. The common agreement among sea-folk is that the waters are growing wilder every year. Hence the boldness of the sea monster which snatched away the princess, triggering the king’s leaving Tastinace in the first place. In the past three years it’s grown so bad that as I watched from the windows of my solitary shack, I thought I never saw the sea so empty. Our port is closest to the capital city of Tastinace but there was still seldom more than one ship that set sail in a full month, and even those always headed up or down the coast, never out to sea. Exploring is a thing of the past.

So where are the monsters? We cross the first sea-desert with no greater pain than the endless, blinding light. There are no nights in the sea-deserts. Even after three years ashore, everything in me knows and loves this world, and I feel the weight of the sleepers lessening slightly as I stand haloed in brilliance. This is why I ran away to the water all those years ago. Out here, I can forget sometimes. Just for a moment, I can forget that I am cursed.

Anika is not so delighted with it. The unrelenting light gives her an equally unrelenting headache, and she has to stay belowdecks until we find night again. It is fortunate that we have the prince with us, though I wouldn’t say so to him.

To his credit, he is very little annoying even to me. I haven’t associated with the royal family enough to know what to expect, but he apparently does not think himself above the work of a common sailor. Partly because he is man and partly due to his fae blood, he is bigger and stronger than all of us, and he does more than his share of the work with apparent ease. He speaks little and does not challenge my authority at all, apart from the bit where he snuck onto my ship without my permission. On the second day he asks us to call him Gunnar rather than ‘the prince’. This is agreeable to me, since it is easier to command a Gunnar, but the sisters struggle with it. They seem to feel more awe of his royal blood than I do. Perhaps they are unaware that royal blood does not make someone kind or just or good. Only powerful.

The calm continues through the second sea-desert, and my unease grows. We have a vague idea where the sea monster’s lair is, thanks to the mad sailor, who also reported that the king was alive and imprisoned there two years ago. We are not concerned that we won’t be able to find it; when something as powerful as the sea monster rules, all things are drawn towards it.

So are we. Two months to the day since we found the prince, we come across the first sign of it – a swarm of stryx. These tiny, vulture-like sea-bats are common enough; they will happily attach themselves to any creature of moderate size and power, and act as mixture of guard-dog and garbage disposal for it. One stryx alone is a minor inconvenience, easily killed if you can catch it. It’s rather like a large mosquito in that it will try to bite you and if it does, you probably won’t die but you will be in pain for several days. Most of the time they can be found in groups of three or four; few creatures have the might to sustain more than that. I have never seen a swarm of this size – sixty at least.

There is no question that they have seen us; they are headed straight for us in a foul-scented cloud, and there is nothing we can do except arm ourselves and wait for them to reach us. And then we fight, dodging their dives and slashing at them. They are about the size of a man’s fist and as swift as punch, but the air is thick with them and at first it is almost impossible to miss. Once a dozen of them have been killed, however, the rest grow more cautious and our work becomes more difficult.

It is then that it happens. I am battling seven stryx at once, paying little attention to my companions, when my backwards dodge causes me to stumble into something. I grab at it to keep myself upright, but it moves and we both fall onto the deck and I see what it is.

It is Anika. 

And the moment my skin touches hers, she goes limp.

Antia shrieks and darts to her sister’s side. Two stryx divebomb us and I instinctively slash at them, hitting one and causing the other to swerve away.

How is it that a moment ago we were far too busy fighting to even acknowledge each other’s existence, but now both Antia and the prince have all the time in the world to stare at me? I cannot tell what they are thinking, but I can tell what they are not thinking: they are not thinking that they expected this.

How could they not? Surely the sisters knew I am the cursed captain. Everyone else in the port knows it. And the prince? Does his father go around cursing people so regularly that he would not know of me? I have never met anyone else cursed by the king, but maybe they are fortunate enough to be able to hide it. I certainly tried to.

Antia has lost all interest in the battle, but the same cannot be said for the stryx so the prince and I resume fighting. He is good with a sword, almost as good as I am, and after several more stryx meet their end, the rest decide to leave us to the sea monster. Guard-dogs, but not particularly skilled ones. But sea monsters don’t really need guards to defend them, and you can bet that the stryx will alert this one to our presence.

The live stryx fly off in the direction they came from and once I have thrown all the dead ones into the sea, all I have left to do is return to the wheel and avoid looking at Antia and the prince. It is the same as always. Once people see my curse in action, they become terrified of me. They won’t even meet my gaze, as though I can destroy them with my eyes.

“Is she dead?” Antia asks.

The prince crouches next to Anika and examines her briefly.

“She sleeps,” he says. “She is not dead.”

“Can you wake her?”

No, he cannot. Nor can I. No one can wake her, except the king.

I grip the wheel tightly and stare at the horizon with unseeing eyes. At least we know exactly where to go now. We can follow the stryx home.

I don’t look at them, but I still see the prince carrying Anika down into the hold. Antia follows, and though the prince reappears in a moment, she does not. Does she intend to stay by her sister’s side until Anika wakes? Which might be never. Our quest is far from likely to succeed.

The prince walks past me and stops by the railing to my right, slightly behind me. He is just out of my range of vision, not that I would look at him anyway, but I can feel his eyes on me. I’m certain that if I would turn to meet his gaze, he would look away so quickly he might even fall overboard.

That would almost be worth it. Except for the bit where we really need him to help sail the ship now that Anika is asleep.

“I didn’t realize that you are the one with the cursed touch,” he says.

I turn my head to look at him. He stares back at me with his pale eyes, unflinching. 

“Who did you think I am?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I thought it was just a rumor. Captains who lose ships tend to get reputations, whether it was their fault or not.”

No, it wasn’t exactly my fault, but for a captain to lose two ships in the space of one year is enough to have her be labeled cursed. Which, ironically, is true in my case, though my curse and the loss of my ships are almost completely unrelated.

Maybe I am double cursed.

“That’s why you’re willing to go look for my father,” the prince says. “You think he’ll lift your curse.”

“He promised,” I say. I don’t know if that actually means anything, but after fifteen long, lonely years, I am desperate enough to face death for my own chance of freedom.

“My father never cursed anyone with no way for them to break it,” he says. “He didn’t intend for you to see him as your savior.”

“I don’t,” I say, turning back to the horizon. “He was the one who cursed me.”

“I know, but he did it because he wanted you to break it.”

No, he did it because he wanted me to suffer. He wanted to punish me for being a bully.

“My father only cursed people because he thought they needed to learn something,” the prince says. “When you learn it, you break the curse. That’s the whole point.”

“Then I’m guessing I haven’t learned it. But we can shake hands if you want to check.”

He moves up along the rail until he can see my face. I don’t look at him.

“You can break it,” he says with sudden intensity. “You don’t need him. You have the power.”

“I’ve been looking for a way to break this curse for fifteen years,” I tell him as coldly as I can. “You’ve known me for two months. Don’t tell me what power I do or don’t have.”

He shakes his head and, pushing away from the rail, he comes to stand directly in front of me, much closer than I expected him to now that he knows what I am. I could reach out and touch him.

“No,” he says. “You’ve got to understand this. You don’t need him to save you.”

“I don’t want him to save me! I just want him to take back what he gave to me. I didn’t get myself into this mess. Why should I have to get myself out?”

How dare he speak to me as though I am being weak? He has no idea what I have had to live with, thanks to his judgmental father. This is not my curse. This is the king’s curse, and he should be the one to get rid of it. According to the queen, he is the only one who can get rid of it – him or me.

And I have tried! Fifteen years I tried. I consulted everyone who I thought could help. I spent all the money I made in all my years at sea in trying to find a cure for my curse. And nothing.

“What if my father is dead?” the prince asks. He does not sound tortured by this idea, but rather as though he is trying to prove a point.

“Then I may as well be too.”

“You can’t just give up like that,” he says. “Curses were made to be broken. It’s not as strong as you believe it is. Its strength comes from you – from your fear of it.”

“I’m not the one running terrified,” I say coldly, trying to look beyond him. He really is quite enormous, and still standing too close.

“You look like it.”

“You’re making me want to hit you, and you’re standing close enough that I could. Do you understand why that is a bad choice on your part?”

He shakes his head. “You don’t put people to sleep on purpose. You could rule the sea with your power – have everyone be terrified of you. You could have touched me the moment you found me. Why didn’t you?”

I grip the spokes of the wheel tightly. “It’s a curse, remember? I don’t win when I put them to sleep. I carry them all with me. Every single person that is asleep because of me. They’re heavy on my spirit all the time. They haunt my dreams.” I don’t need to add another soul to that load. I’m foundering already.

He tilts his head. “What made my father decide to curse you?”

“Arrogance, I assume.”

“Yours or his?”

I pause. “Both.”

“What did you do, though?”

“I was a bully. I hit other children if they crossed me. He thought I didn’t value the gift of human touch.”

“Do you now?”

I swallow. “Can you value what you don’t have? I can touch no one, and everyone is terrified of touching me. As they should be.”

He looks at me, blinking those too-long eyes. This close, it looks like someone slit the inside corners of his eye sockets. And rimmed them in gold.

“For most people, it is easier to value what you don’t have than what you do.”

I shrug. “I don’t know exactly what he meant, but apparently I haven’t attained it. I’m still cursed.”

“Thinking something isn’t enough,” he says. “You can say that you believe anything. It’s what you act on that shows what you truly believe.”

“I don’t touch people,” I say. “Doesn’t that show I’ve learned not to abuse the gift of touch?”

“That wasn’t exactly what he was trying to teach you, though, was it?”

I lean around him, squinting. “I think we’re coming up on something.”

It’s a dark shape on the horizon that eventually resolves itself into an island of rock, rising jaggedly from the sea. As we draw nearer, a black hole appears at the base of the cliffs; the entrance to something. Something that is quite likely to turn out to be our tomb.

“It will be in there,” I say, nodding my chin towards the hole. “The sea monster, and your father. And maybe your sister.”

Something creeps over his face and he walks away to stand at the bow of the ship, looking towards the island.

“You should get Antia,” I say. “If we have to fight the beast, we will need all the swords we can muster.”

He goes below, but it takes a while for them to appear. Antia is pale and she does not look at me.

We are nearly at the island and I aim our boat at the cave entrance. Nothing hinders our entering, but we are still in the dim light of day when we have to stop. The water becomes so narrow that I could touch the stone on either side if I could walk on it. But there seems to be a path of sorts, winding up the cliffs and disappearing into the darkness.

I anchor the ship as close to the stone shore as I can, but we still have to lower a skiff to take us there. Once on the rock, Antia turns to look back at our vessel.

“I don’t like leaving her alone.”

“She’s fine.” I know it. I can feel her pressing down on me. No one I have put to sleep has ever died yet; I don’t know if they can. If not, Anika is safer than we are right now.

What happens to them all if I die? Do they wake, or do they die with me? I never thought to ask the king that.

The prince is squinting into the darkness ahead.

“We need torches,” I say, turning back to the boat.

“I can see,” he says.

“Well, we’re not all fae,” I point out, handing an unlit torch to Antia, though she is still more focused on the ship than on the path ahead.

The prince starts up the path without waiting for us, and I hurry to light our torches so we can follow. It irritates me that he thinks he has the right to go first; it is the first time since boarding my ship that he hasn’t deferred to my authority.

“Come,” I say briskly to Antia, and she does follow me, but not without several backwards glances.

The path climbs steeply, soon becoming stone steps set into the side of the rock wall. There are no railings and the path is narrow; I don’t like to imagine climbing it without torchlight, though the prince is several yards ahead of us and climbing with no hesitation. How well can he see in the dark? Is there no night for him?

I increase my speed in an effort to catch up with him, and Antia falls a little behind.

The path reaches a crest. Here it widens into a flat space about the size of our ship deck. Two steps across it, the prince freezes. I would walk past him, but he throws out an arm to hold me back. A bold move. I stop before I touch it.

“There’s someone coming,” he breathes.

Weapons drawn, we wait. After a moment, Antia comes up behind us, panting slightly. We both make hushing movements and she stops behind us. I’m squinting into the darkness but I can still see nothing.

“Are you sure?” I whisper.

He waves a hand at me to be quiet, which I also find irritating.

And then I see it. A hunched, manlike figure, moving slowly towards us. As the light from our torches finally reaches him, I see horns protruding through his matted white hair.

The king.

I take a step forward, lowering my weapon slightly, but the prince springs past me, charging towards his father, and his weapon is not lowered at all.

What?

Instinctively, I lunge after him, grabbing for his arm before he can strike. He jerks away before I can touch him, but the delay gives the king time to move out of reach with surprising swiftness.

“What are you doing?” I demand, grabbing at the prince’s arm again and forcing myself between them.

Antia is close behind him. “That’s your father!”

“That is not my father,” the prince snarls, weapon still raised, trying to move around me.

I didn’t learn to fight on a ship’s deck for nothing, and I hold my own sword against him. “What are you talking about? Of course it is!” Has he gone mad?

“His spirit is blackened! You don’t understand; he is not my father anymore!” He can’t touch me, can’t force me out of the way with his hands, and he seems reluctant to attack me with his sword. His eyes are fixed on his father.

“We need him!” I say.

“He can’t help you!”

“We can’t kill him!” Antia says, trying to grab the prince’s arm.

“I can,” he says.

“That’s why you came?” I ask, sword at the ready. “So you could kill your father before we can bring him home?”

“He can’t be allowed to return to Tastinace. You don’t understand.” His eyes flash between his father and me.

Is he insane? I truly don’t understand. How could I have brought an assassin with me without realizing it? How could I have been so blind?

“You can’t kill your father,” Antia insists, still clutching at his arm.

“I have to,” he says. “He made me swear.”

All this time, there has been no sound from the place behind me where I last saw the king, but now I hear footsteps retreating rapidly, deeper into the cavern.

The prince lunges forward, but I block him with my sword.

“I need him, Gunnar!” I don’t know why I expect that to make a difference.

He pauses, and then, reaching back, he grabs Antia’s wrist and swings her forward, straight at me. Caught off guard, she can’t stop. I can’t stop her. She smashes into me and instinctively I catch her as she crumples against me. And the prince dodges past us and runs after his father.

“Stop!”

But it’s useless. He’s gone, and Antia is asleep in my arms, heavy on my heart.

I lower her gently to the ground. “I’m sorry. I’ll make the king lift the curse and wake you and your sister. I promise.” Not that she can hear me.

I had to drop my torch to catch her. I am in darkness and it takes some minutes for me to find the torch again and light it. The king and the prince are both long gone, but I pick up my sword and follow them into the darkness.

It seems like a long journey to me, alone on the narrow cliff path with the uncomfortable awareness of a sea monster yet unseen. I can feel both sisters weighing me down.

Early on, I learned that the better acquainted I was with the person I put to sleep, the more distinctly I can feel them on my soul. I haven’t spent so much time with anyone in the last five years as I did with the sisters. And I haven’t put anyone to sleep for three years. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to add to my load. How much more can I carry?

What if the prince kills the king before I find them? What if the king refuses to lift my curse? What if the prince is right and the king cannot lift my curse? His spirit is blackened, the prince said. Whatever that means.

A faint sound of battle comes to my ears and I increase my speed, as close to running as I can. The path has become a tunnel, too low-ceilinged for me to stand straight. It’s sloping upwards, and is it my imagination and fear, or is the rock unsteady beneath my feet? There are great crashes coming from up ahead.

And then, all at once, silence.

I come suddenly into an enormous cavern filled with dazzling sunlight. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, and then all I can see is dust. Slowly it settles, and the cavern resolves itself into a vast space with high walls and a hole in its stone roof. Down in the bottom, the river runs through, and on the stone banks of it lies a colossal skeleton of unfamiliar shape. The dust, it seems, was caused by stalactites breaking off of the roof and falling to the rocks below, scattering some of the bones of what I assume was once the sea monster.

“Zara!”

I cannot find them at first; the dust turns them almost the color of the rock. The path I stand on curves with the cavern and keeps climbing on the wall, and there they are. The prince and the king. Both clinging to the stone wall, several feet below the path. Dangling over the sharp rocks and bones more than a thousand feet below.

They’re slipping. Even as I watch, they’re slipping.

I begin sprinting towards them.

There’s no way I can save both of them. I won’t have the time.

No. There’s no way I can save either of them. As soon as I touch them, they’ll be asleep and even if I could haul their deadweight to safety, what good would it do? If I pull up the prince, the king is doomed. And if I pull up the king, I am doomed.

“Zara!” the prince calls again.

Is there fear in his voice? I was beginning to suspect he did not know what fear was. He stowed away on the cursed captain’s ship and showed no fear at all when I found him and threatened to throw him overboard. He faced and fought the stryx with flinching. And when he found out what I am, what I do to all who touch me, he did not recoil from me. In all my cursed years, he is the first person who chose to stand close enough to touch me even after he saw my curse at work. He is the first person who did not look away from me. He is the first person who told me that I could break my curse myself.

I am there. They are only feet apart. I have to choose now.

Flinging myself down on my stomach, I peer over the edge into the prince’s pale blue eyes.

“You know what will happen if I touch you.”

“I know,” he says. “Give me your hand.”

Setting my teeth, I stretch my hand down as far as I can reach. With an effort, his fingers close around my wrist, his eyes still locked on mine. I brace myself.

A scream rips through me. The king has fallen.

I don’t look.

I can’t look.

The prince is awake.