Think about the Dutchman. Think about the figure on the beach. Think about being free. The curse choking my bloodline like weeds dies here. I can breathe. I can live. I scrub a hand over my eyes, not sure if I’m crying or if it’s the water. My shirt squelches against my skin and I tip my head back, staring up at the jagged cave ceiling and thinking of my mother.
I have to find a way out of here. There has to be a way.
The current has pushed me toward this sandy strip of detritus. Water would be flowing into this cave, not out of it—I can tell by the direction of the rippled patterns in the ice. Which means I have to swim against the current. Just the thought makes me want to give up. I want to stay here. I want to sleep. For the first time in weeks, I feel as though, were I to lie still here, I would drift off.
I force myself to sit up. There’s no point waiting for my breath to even out or my limbs to warm. I have to go now.
I lower myself back into the freezing water and strike out, pushing against the waves in a clumsy stroke. My muscles have stopped shaking, which I know in some instinctive part of my brain is worse than the trembling, and even as I paddle forward, I know I won’t make it very far. I’ve already spent too long in this cold. My lungs are burning. Fog is starting to gather at the corners of my vision, and I think of Persephone running through a field of red ranunculus, smoke rising from beneath each footfall, hell always on her heels.
Breathe, Adrian.
I struggle forward, clutching the spyglass. The black sand slope reappears along the ice walls at random intervals, and I crawl along it when I can, though it quickly becomes more exhausting to pull myself out of the water again and again than to stay in it. I swim through the ice cave, wondering if I’m simply climbing farther into the glacier, but I can feel an inexplicable pull. I can still see the faint outline of the stave drawn on my hand, not entirely washed away. Even when the way is not known.
And then I see the light.
Relief floods me, loosening the grip of the cold enough that I actually swim forward for the first time rather than the pathetic combination of bobbing and paddling I have been barely managing. A wave strikes me, shoving me under, but when my head breaks the surface, there’s sun on my face. There is sky above me—wide, brilliant sky—and light so bright and thick I feel as though I could drink it.
But then I realize—I am not on the lagoon beach as I expected, but have been spat out into the open ocean. The bar of sand separating the bay from the sea is far behind me, and when I turn in the water, searching the shores for a figure, there’s no one there. The captain is gone. I manage to hook myself on one of the chunks of ice that has flowed off the glacier, this one smaller than the elephantine bergs in the lagoon, and scan the horizon, searching for sails. For anything.
But there’s nothing. Just sea and sea and goddamn empty sea and that golden, sunless sky.
I’m too late.
All this way, and all this time, and all my mother’s goddamn life, every second she lost a prisoner of this curse and this ship and her own mind. Fearful of what would happen if she could not see the ship she was sure was hunting her, fearful of what would happen on the day she did see it. Afraid of the choice she had made, and the choice she hadn’t, and obsessed with wondering if she should have done it differently. I understand it all, in a way I never have before. My whole life and hers unfurl side by side like manuscripts. Scribbled runes translated into a language I understand when held up against hers.
It isn’t the cold or the water or the sheer exhaustion that leaves me sagging, barely able to hold myself above the surface. It’s the weight of the whole goddamn world. It’s how hard it is to get out of bed. To believe people who say they love me. To believe my ideas have value or that I am capable of speaking them. The certainty that I’m silly and odd and wrong, a body and soul incorrectly assembled with all the right pieces in the wrong places. The urge to scratch myself until I tear away my skin, to bleed myself dry and starve myself and look away, to say the cruelest things possible to myself before anyone else has a chance, to keep saying them until they’re all I can hear. All the simple things that seem as easy as breathing for everyone else.
It’s so hard to breathe.
And then I see it, butting up against the horizon. The sky turns pink and gold behind the sails.
The Flying Dutchman glides forward, eerily fast and the color of a storm cloud, as though no matter how close it draws, it will never be more than a silhouette. From the prow of the ship, the painted masthead stares down at me, a woman with flowers in her hair and one hand to her heart. A ripe pomegranate bursts between her fingers, the juice dribbling down her like blood.
A line drops from the side of the boat. The captain swings down, hand over hand until she stops just above the waves. She’s wearing a tricornered hat and a heavy sea coat, her boots pulled up to her knees over her breeches. She braces herself with her feet planted flat against the side of the ship, the bristly rope knotted around her wrist. I could not have conjured her face before this moment, but when I see her again, it’s like I’ve always known her. Her hair the color of a sunset, her eyes dark and her mouth set. She looks like a woman who has fought wars. Who has lost them.
This is the woman I saw at the prow, the night of the storm aboard the Eleftheria. The one who called me to her deck in a voice that rang through my heart.
I manage to drag my hand from the water and hold out the spyglass to her. She takes it, and when her fingers close, I feel like I’m being lifted. Like she could pull me aboard her ship as though I weighed nothing. My head rises high enough that I stop swallowing seawater, and I take a deep, clear breath.
Adrian.
I let go of the spyglass, and the iceberg bucks, throwing me off. My head slips under the waves, and I fight toward the light again. I can’t feel my limbs and my heart is beating too slowly.
When my head breaks the surface, she’s still there. She reaches into her coat and pulls out the other half of the spyglass. I watch her long fingers as she tightens the fastening between the two pieces, then unfolds the lenses. The cracks along her piece and mine align perfectly, and I can see the words spelled out there. The Flying Dutchman.
“Help me,” I gasp, reaching out to her.
She stares at me, then raises the spyglass. My vision blurs. I’m not sure if she speaks aloud or if the words are only in my head.
Is that what you want?
I want to sleep, I think. I want to stop struggling and give in. I want to let the water take me and never have to be in my own company again. I want to stop dragging myself around, stop feeling the weight of every thought like they’re stones pulling me farther and farther under, the seafloor and surface both out of sight. I want to stop feeling weak just because some days, I can hardly carry my heavy heart.
You can.
But more than that, I want to see the stars. I want to eat syllabub and rye bread and drink black tea with three lumps of sugar for my breakfast. I want to feel grass on my bare feet, and wear a red suit and high heels and dance until I’m breathless and hot. I want to kiss Louisa on our wedding day. I want to ride along the banks of the River Dee with her and share a bottle of wine and buy her libraries of books. I want us to make a life together, to fill our home with ideas and curiosities brought back from our travels and off-key singing, to challenge each other and speak our minds and put my lips to her palm when we disagree. I want to scatter handfuls of wildflower seeds over the manor gardens that have wilted since my mother died, watch them bloom, chaotic, and sparkle with fireflies on heady summer nights. I want to stand up to my father. I want to stand up in the House of Lords and speak my mind. I want to take the raw ore I have been given and forge it into a blade. I want to be brave enough to think I can do any of that. To believe that it is a life I deserve.