Chapter 15 Bound By Song.
For the first time since I met her, the song isn’t there, just thin, ragged breaths, as if she’s been holding in words for a long time.
“You asked why I brought you?” she says. “Why I kissed you and pulled you here.” Her hands, long and webbed, fold together. “I went to Vasra once. A long time ago.”
My chest tightens. “You went to her willingly?” The word feels like a blade.
Serel nods. “I thought I could bargain for mercy. Or make a trade. I thought I could fix the horror of my song.”
She tells her story quietly, each sentence a small, sharp stone dropped into the water between us. “Every man I ever loved—each one I sang to—went mad with my song. They couldn’t live in my world and not be torn. I thought I was cursed. I thought I had to learn to be better. I tried. I tried to hold back. But you can’t stop the sea from wanting what the sea wants.”
She laughs once, but there's no joy in it. “Then I found him. He was different. He liked the shore, he liked bread crusts and small kindnesses. I didn’t want to hurt him. I could not bear the thought of him gone because of me.”
She looks up at me with those luminous eyes, and I feel the cold find the centre of my chest. “So I went to Vasra, because they said Vasra could bend the rules of magic. I asked to be freed. To be able to love him and not kill him.”
“And?” My voice is small. I don’t want the answer.
Serel’s fingers curl in the water. “She twisted it. Of course she did. Vasra is clever in the way that breaks you. She made my voice safe for him, by safe I mean I could adore him from the depths. I could watch, and watch, and never touch. I could never go above. If I sang to him to bring him down, she ensured I would drive him mad anyway. It was—” She swallows, a small painful sound. “It was punishment and a trap.”
My mind keeps snagging on that image: a woman loving a man across the distance, watching his hands hold another’s, his hair silver, his laugh turning to dust. The idea is a kind of cruelty I can taste on my tongue.
“And then she bound me,” Serel continues. “Not just by promise but—” she lifts her palm. On her wrist, a band of darker skin ripples like ink beneath the surface. “A mark. My song answered her. My soul is threaded to her will. I am her voice when she wants a mouth, her lure when she wants fresh breath for the deep.”
She looks at me, steady and utterly exposed. “I begged. I begged and bargained and gave things I thought I could spare. But under the currents of her hunger, nothing is ever enough.”
“Then why me?” The question comes out sharp because I’m stupid and because I need to know why she thought of me, a girl who can’t even keep her fingers from icing a bucket without nearly freezing the sea, could help her.
“Because you seem honest, and kind...and maybe you could understand what it's like to be trapped by someone else's cruelty,” Serel says simply. Oh, she's good, playing right on my trapped in the tower trauma. She leans closer, and for a moment, the cavern is all hush. “If you could—if you could freeze her so deep she cannot move—maybe the threads would break. Maybe I could be free.”
My stomach turns. “So you want me to—” The idea of freezing Vasra, of ending her… it isn’t simple. Vasra has a monstrous kind of power, yes, but she’s a being too. “You want me to kill her.”
Serel’s face bends with sorrow. “I don’t want murder for the sake of blood. I want to be freed. To be myself, unbound to the hunger in the deep. Vasra took choices from me. She took the right to love without pain. I thought—please understand—I thought you could help me stop her.”
Gilfred claws at my neck in agitation. He chirps something indignant and precise that definitely means you cannot just murder a sea monster because she made poor choices. I swallow. The ethics knot inside me like a fist. In the tower, I made myself practice control until my fingers bled. I taught myself the weight of power—how it wrecks things if you don’t handle it right. I have never killed. I’d rather not start because some lonely siren wants freedom.
“You expect me to be a judge?” I whisper. “Executioner for the sea?”
Serel’s eyes flash. “I expect you to be honest. You have ice in you that does things ordinary hands cannot. You could crush her like a beetle, or you could lock her away. I do not know what will break her bond to me. I only know that I can not break it myself.”
Serel’s fingers brush mine with a light, pleading touch. “If you can’t—” She closes her hand into a fist and hides it quickly. “If you can’t, then tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I invented hope. But if you can—if you think there’s a way—please. Help me be unmade from her.”
My head fills with images: Vasra’s shadow coiling red and hungry through the deep; men swallowed smiling, their mouths full of seaweed; Serel at the shore watching a man grow old with someone else. The ocean outside this cavern is wide enough to drown kingdoms and kind enough to hide a single, ruined heart.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know what freezing her will even mean. Ice can hold things, but it can also shatter. I don’t want to have death on my hands.” My voice breaks on that last word.
"I didn't want to either..." She says softly. "That's why I went to her in the first place, but now I am haunted by the thousands of souls she forces me to lure to the bottom of the ocean."
Ah, and there's the hard part. On one hand, if I kill Vasra...well, I'll be a murderer. On the other hand, if I don't, thousands more souls will suffer at the hands of a sweet girl who only ever wanted love. What a bloody conundrum..
"What if..." I start, avoiding eye contact with Gilfred because I already know what he's going to say. "What if I make a deal with her, for your freedom?"