Prince of Song & Sea
: Chapter 3

EMBARRASSMENT burned in Eric’s chest, and Max let out a low whine as he fled. He could still see the embarrassment and confusion on Angelina’s face, Luna’s red eyes, and their father’s anger. The mem-ory carried him through the quiet hallways of the castle until he was far away from the dining hall. It had been too much to hope for a normal meal.

Even if Grimsby offered a good enough explanation and Angelina and Eric came to an agreement, any hope for a friendship was strained. It wasn’t as if he could blame the curse; they had no idea about it. Angelina would want nothing to do with him now.

No, now there was simply another noble on the council who thought Eric was an odd one. Too odd to rule, certainly.

Eric finally came to a stop. He looked around, spied no one, and let his forehead thunk onto the wall.

“Go replace Carlotta. Go.” Eric nudged Max, but the dog didn’t budge. Eric sighed.

He wasn’t even sure what part of the castle he was in, but he needed to be alone.

His mother had been scared of someone replaceing out about his curse, but wasn’t that why he was in this situation? He was so afraid of letting anyone near that he could barely handle normal situations. What was the point of anything if he didn’t have anyone to share it with?

It wasn’t fair. He had liked the dinner with Angelina more than any of the others and enjoyed her company. His curse had ruined any hopes he had of getting to know her.

Eric laid his head against the door in the hall and brought his hand to the bronze plate upon the door.

ELEANORA OF VELLONA

It was his mother’s old study. He hadn’t touched it. Not since—

“What would you do?” Eric asked, staring at his mother’s familiar name.

Not be afraid to enter a study. Well, he had probably ruined his last chance at replaceing a queen. If he had ever needed his mother, now was the time.

He pushed open the door and braced himself for the heavy wave of grief, but it didn’t hit. Only a dull ache flared in his chest. Eric rubbed his heart.

It still smelled like her, tuberose and plum with ambergris beneath. He shut the door, taking a deep breath, and made his way to her desk. Grimsby had retrieved all of Eleanora’s important notes on ruling Vellona, leaving the top of the desk nearly empty.

His fingers skimmed the edges of the wood, feeling the slight dents from her chair and scratches from constant use. Here she had nicked a drawer with her penknife, and there she had banged her staff against the edge when sparring with him. His mother had never let anyone clean or repair this desk; it had been his father’s. Carlotta even kept the little bowl of licorice full.

Eric took one of the licorice candies and sucked on it, sinking into her old chair. His knees shook.

“How could you leave?” he asked his mother’s empty desk. “Some nonsense journey to verify reports about Sait, and a storm kills you? After everything, a storm?”

A few half-finished letters stuck out of the top drawer. Eric ripped the drawer from its slot and dumped out the contents. None of the letters were for him and most were reports made irrelevant by the last two years. He tore the second drawer from its place, pocketing a bundle of notes from his father to his mother, and tossed it aside. He moved on to the third. Two old forks with the tines bent to make them look like dog ears and painted-on eyes courtesy of four-year-old Eric. Dozens of old drawings from Eric to his mother over the years. A quill with the tip nearly chewed off.

“Nothing.”

Max let out a low huff and wiggled his way beneath the desk. Eric patted his head.

“Not that I expected anything, but it would’ve been nice,” he said. His fingers traced the lines of the desk. The shutters clattered in the breeze, and gulls cried from the towers. Waves crashed against the cliffs below. He felt as worn as the rocks.

“She was checking on the northern holdings and trying to spy on the ships attacking them,” he told Max. “You remember her talk?”

Eric hadn’t been paying attention the last time he’d spoken with his mother. It had been a normal day, and Eleanora had moved as if to hug him but held back.

“She said she’d be back,” Eric told Max. “I don’t know if I can do this. I couldn’t even get through a meal. How am I supposed to be king?

It had never been fair, and it wasn’t now. He didn’t want a crown and responsibilities; he wanted to remember his father’s voice and wake up to breakfast with his mother still here, alive and well. He wanted a coronation only when his mother was old and ready to step aside. He wanted and wanted, and it was never enough. He had so much.

Guilt gnawed at his stomach. He had everything. He shouldn’t want.

“Why couldn’t you have left me something to help?” The licorice left a bittersweet taste in his mouth, and Eric leaned his forehead against her desk. “Anything would’ve done.”

Lightning flashed outside, and Max yelped, leaping up. He smacked his head against the bottom of the desk and scrambled away. Something thunked against the floor.

“Max,” Eric grumbled and peeked under the desk, “if you broke anything…”

A needle was on the floor that hadn’t been there before. The wrinkled corner of a scrap of paper hung down from the underside of the desk, and Eric knelt for a better look. Pinned underneath the desk by three other needles, far away from prying eyes, was a piece of paper with his name written across it. Eric ran his hand over his mother’s slanted script.

“You’re joking,” he whispered.

Eric yanked the needles free and caught the letter. His breath hitched.

“Mother,” he whispered, eyes burning.

Oh, he was so thoughtless. Of course she had left something. Secrets were as common to her as breathing. He should’ve known she had saved one more.

With a deep, steadying breath, he opened the letter and began to read.

Eric,

I’m so sorry. If you’re reading this, I am almost certainly dead. I promise that I intended to return from my voyage, but I knew it was dangerous. I hope the risk, however, was worth it.

Now, darling, I have so much I wish to tell you that cannot be placed within a letter, but I have urgent matters I must relay to you. I know I have never been forthcoming with the events surrounding your curse. I always hoped that I would break you of your enchantment myself and that you would never replace out what I am about to reveal to you. If I have failed, though, you will have to finish what I started, and to do that, you will have to know everything.

As you are already aware, you were cursed before you were even born, but here is how it happened. A month into my journey across the seas after your father’s death, I was walking on a beach at dawn, no one in sight, and saw a body floating in the surf. It was a child, small and chilled to the bone, and when I pulled them to shore, they weren’t breathing. I breathed for them, and eventually they coughed up the water from their lungs and lived. It was then a woman appeared.

“It’s mine,” she said. “It is owed to me.”

I don’t exactly know why, but in that moment I did not believe her. I refused to hand them over. The woman grew angry. She revealed herself to be a witch. She claimed I had taken a soul from her, and that she would steal a soul from me in return.

“If that thing in your belly ever kisses someone without a voice as pure as their spotless soul, someone who isn’t its true love, then it will die, and I will drag its soul to the bottom of the sea.”

I know I never mentioned anything about a pure voice. Please forgive me my lie of omission. I feared if I told you all of what the witch had said that day, you would think of nothing but replaceing this person. I dreaded your obsessing over someone’s singing voice rather than their heart.

I have spent every moment since that day trying to uncover more about the witch who cursed you and how to break her enchantment. I am afraid her curse was frustratingly vague, and the details of her existence are even more murky. I have found many stories of her appearance throughout history, but never have any of these tales called her by name.

According to some, she was a princess who sunk into dark magic. She was a commoner who used it to break free. She was the lost child of an old sea god. She was the old sea god who gifted weather magic to humans. She was denied her throne, her freedom, her godhood, and when deprived of what she had earned, she took it by force. In one story, she snuck into the heart of the sea and stole magic from the gods. In another, her brother was gifted a kingdom and she was gifted nothing, so she instead learned forbidden magic. Most tales involved her making deals that favored her, unbeknownst to the person she made the deal with. Regardless of which stories are true, I do not trust those who believe children are things that can be owned.

Recently I have found one promising lead, a mention of a home she keeps called the Isle of Serein. There are few details about this place. All I know for sure about it is that it is an island in the seas to the northwest of us, protected by storms and something called the Blood Tide. But it is the closest thing to a clue that I have, and I will be going on this voyage to try to replace it.

I do not want to ask this of you—I could hardly ask it of anyone—but this witch is a threat to not only you and Vellona but to people everywhere. Once you read through my research you will see that her stance on others is clear—they are tools to be used and discarded. She makes deals and takes the souls of those who break them. Worse, there are signs she is hoarding power for reasons I don’t yet fully understand, and knowing that her might comes from the souls she steals, I fear there is only one way forward. She must be imprisoned or killed.

If the stories I have read about magic are true, killing her will break your curse, save the souls she has stolen, and free anyone trapped in one of her deals. Even if the deals aren’t unfair, she plays games with souls, Eric, and we cannot let that stand. Whatever her ultimate aim, it is not peaceful.

Uncover what the Blood Tide is, replace the Isle of Serein, and kill the witch. If you can replace a less murderous way to undo her wrongs, so be it. She must be stopped whatever the costs.

There is a compartment in the back of the bottom drawer. Inside is everything I’ve collected about your curse and the witch who enchanted you, including the potential locations of Serein that I hoped to check with this journey.

And I am so, so sorry to leave this duty to you. I wish I could be there with you now. I wish I could have fixed everything on my own.

Whatever happens, I love you.

Eric traced the looping lines of her handwriting. The ink was smeared near the bottom, water damage marring the paper. He buried his face in his hands.

He wasn’t sure if her traveling to replace the witch and kill her made him feel worse or better. His curse had taken so much from him, and now he knew it had taken his mother, too. But this was the most he had ever known about it—a pure voice and the name of the witch’s home.

“Thank you,” he whispered, and tucked the paper into his chest pocket. “Thank you.”

Lightning flashed again outside, and rain pattered against the windows. Max whined.

“It’s all right, boy.” Eric dragged his hands from his face. “Better, really.”

A pure voice wasn’t a lot to go on, but it was more than nothing. Eric had never had even a hint of how to replace his true love, but now he knew two things about them—they had a good soul and a good voice. Both attributes he could replace out about someone with enough effort.

In the hidden compartment his mother had mentioned, he found maps pocked with patches of corrections. There was even a list of the greatest singers around Eric’s age. He found a journal full of stories about sea witches, weather witches, and magical dealmakers. There were dozens of legends and rumors about people being forced to do terrible things against their wills, and that terrified Eric. In one, a mermaid implied the witch was beautiful but not as lovely as the mermaid’s wife, so the witch took her wife’s beauty for her own and then took her soul. The sheer needless cruelty of it made Eric shudder.

With every story, this witch degraded people’s very sense of self until they were unrecognizable. Apathetic. Wretched. More like sea grass caught in the current than people. She ruined them.

And the area around Vellona was her hunting ground. If she was so cruel and so active to have all of these stories about her, then some of the missing and dead had to be her fault. Many people from Vellona had been lost in pirate attacks and storms recently, but many of them were just assumed to have been lost to them. If the witch was responsible, it might have been even worse than his mother had thought.

“Mother is right,” Eric said aloud, trying to sound braver than he felt. He tucked several of the stories into his pocket to make sure he always remembered why he had to finish what she had started. It wasn’t just for him. “She has to be killed.”

Grimsby was going to hate it, but without his curse, Eric would be free. He could befriend people without fear and let his feelings take him where they might. He could marry without having to worry about his true love. Or he could replace his true love, this person with a pure voice and soul who was somewhere out there.

Intimacy and falling in love had always terrified him, and he had resisted it for so long to save himself from other’s expectations—how could he prove to friends, families, and lovers he loved them if he couldn’t express it in a way they wanted? If he did this, he wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore.

“The Isle of Serein,” Eric said. He took Max’s face in his hands and kissed his nose. “You ready to go on a trip?”

Max licked Eric’s mouth.

“Gross,” he said, “but I’ll take that as a yes.”