Her future with Ford. Two miserable faces in oil-painted portraits, married until Ford wasn’t useful any longer to whatever Guilford Wentworth planned for his children. 

She had ground her teeth together until her jaw ached as her thoughts once again cycled to a future that she was absolutely determined not to allow. She could not be so easily cowed, and she wouldn’t give in. Not now, not ever. She would leave this place. There would be no portrait painted of her. No hideous Wentworth children at her feet. 

Not that she could bear children anyway, but she had no doubts children would be either made or taken from elsewhere and then presented to her to raise like a happy little wife once she’d been truly lost to the siren’s song. Once her mind had been overrun, overwritten, like painting over the pages of a book until the words vanished beneath smears of color.

Kira had groaned, taking in a deep breath and then exhaling just as carefully, trying to focus on the feeling of lungs expanding and contracting, the cool air over her tongue. She had to stop thinking about it. Fearing the future before it arrived was just a victory for Wentworth, in the end, one she couldn’t afford to give him. 

As she had worked the tangles from her wet hair with the wide teeth of a wooden comb, she found her eyes meeting Atabei Montgomery’s, the small strokes of oil paint seeming to catch Atabei in a moment of solemn contemplation. 

Contemplating her.

“You might have been ruined,” Kira whispered. “But I will not be. I can stop him. I will.“

It seemed, for a moment, like one painted eyebrow and one corner of Atabei’s full lips quirked up in a kind of disbelief, both sudden and new and frozen in time, more than a century in the past. The look had always been there, or it hadn’t, and Kira suddenly couldn’t quite remember which.

The portrait seemed to mock her. Do you think yourself so much stronger than me?

“Yes,” She answered out loud, matter-of-fact, knowing it was insanity to speak to oil paint and canvas as if it was a conversation and doing it anyway, “Whatever you did, it must be undone. You created this monster, and I will unmake him. I will fix your mistake.”

That face seemed to say, You, little girl, will kill his siren?

Kira’s mouth twitched at the corner, a matching wry smile to the implied one Atabei wore. “No. I won’t kill him. I’ll save him, from what you did, and I will see him to the ocean to go home. And then…” She grunted in pain as her comb caught on a knot, jerking at it impatiently until the tangle gave way with a sound not unlike yanking laces too quickly undone. There was a snap.

Kira swore, softly, as she realized she’d broken one of the teeth on her comb. She had to pick it out of her hair and groaned, throwing the chipped triangle of wood right at Atabei’s face.

When she looked up again, Atabei Montgomery’s serious expression looked at her without changing, but she still could have sworn she saw the barest shift at the corner of the dead woman’s lips. Almost a smile.

Kira felt rather than heard a whispered best of luck.

She swallowed, tearing her eyes away from the painting and shaking off the sense of being haunted. The only prisoners lingering in this house were she, the siren, and maybe Ford. 

There were no ghosts here that didn’t have still-beating hearts. 

Right?

In the wardrobe, she found a simple shift of ivory to pull over her head. Once that was on, she dug around further and discovered a dressing gown - or a robe, really - of pale blue silk with embroidered flowers in white that tied at the waist. It had been shoved into a wrinkled pile along the bottom, which was odd. It was maybe the most beautiful bit of silk she’d ever seen. 

The robe had an odd sort of faded scent, sea salt and sunshine, some sort of bleached wood smell. At least she was more or less covered up now, neck to ankles to wrists, just how she wanted.

It felt like, even alone in here, she needed to guard the sight of her skin from Guilford Wentworth’s leer.

Moonlight flashed against the window as the wind blew the clouds above at breakneck speed, and she found herself captured by it as it cut through the bars and fell across her bed. Wind through the trees outside made the silvered light seem as if it were moving, shimmering. 

The moonlight reached for her, the goddess with her cool shimmering fingers grasping at whatever she could find here. The touch just brushed over Kira’s skin, like a nail scraping lightly along the back of one hand.

Somewhere down below, the siren began to sing. His voice was sharp as broken glass, plaintive and sad, and Kira suddenly tasted saltwater on her tongue, felt the tide lapping at her ankles, pulling gently as if to drag her out to sea. When she looked down, though, there was only the bedroom’s wooden floor. The voice rang through her, around and over and beneath. It beat in her blood, calling to the water there. It settled in her, made of her a bit of wood washed ashore after a ship was destroyed by storm.

There was no compulsion in the song, only the depth of the siren’s misery and loneliness, working its way into her. He did not want her to do anything, or he respected her request that he not spell her earlier. He only made her feel.

Kira’s breath caught.

Give him back.

A second melody cut in, and it wasn’t Areyto singing.

The new voice Kira did not hear - not with her ears, anyway. It snarled and snapped. It was not human, and yet she understood it all the same. It was a voice so old it existed before the vibration of sound through the throat began in even the smallest animals. It sang in melodies no human had ever heard or could ever have recreated.

Kira fell back onto her back on the bed, the moonlight cutting across her and pressing with the weight of hands against her shoulders. The voice’s song felt like she tossed and turned in heavy white-capped waves even as she laid motionless. Her eyes were wide, staring up from the drifting dark to the hope of sunlight shimmering on waters far above.

She choked on saltwater down her throat even though her body breathed slow and even, unchanged.

Sirens sang like this, and not like this at all.

This was a song that came into being a long time before the waters did. It was the song that created them, the ancient power that gave life to the ocean’s waters and disdained the way people tried to invade it. This voice was a ringing bell everywhere and nowhere at once. It was the first man frightened of dark waters that seemed to never end, hesitantly putting one toe into cool tidewaters. It was the song of the first siren who reached long-fingered claws out to close slowly around his ankle. 

It was the first siren’s mother, the mother of all sirens. It was her all-consuming rage. Cooler than the sun but far deadlier for it. A reflection of light from the sun, but turned to her own purposes. 

She thought of Lord Wentworth declaring there were no gods or goddesses, and caught herself in a giggle, slapping her hands over her mouth to capture it. 

If she laughed now, it would come out like a scream.

Instead, she swallowed and forced herself to take deep breaths, again and again, until her head felt too light and dizziness swept her. She rocked in the waves that fooled her by holding her like a mother’s arms. Lulled her into complacent near-slumber as sharks circled, hoping to scent blood and open their mouths to bare their rows of razor-sharp teeth.

Just like Areyto, in the room downstairs - opening his mouth too wide, ready to tear out her throat.

But the sense of water was only in her mind. 

Below, Areyto’s song continued, lilting higher, harmonizing with the heavier voice. Begging and pleading in words that Kira didn’t know. The way that gods spoke to their children was not meant for man’s mind to grasp.

“I will not go mad,” She said, hoping that the determination she pushed into her shaking, weak voice would help her keep the promise she was making, if only to herself. "I am imagining this. I am tired and frightened and this is not happening to me. It’s only his singing, he is driving me mad.”

She closed her eyes.

He wouldn’t do that, would he? Areyto wanted her help.

How could she help if she went insane?

The voice snarled, dark at the sightless deep far under the waters, with a fury that made Kira’s very bones shake beneath her skin. The moon scratched along her scalp with a hint of claws that could not quite break skin. 

Give my daughters back my son. 

Kira hitched in a breath. "Please,” She whispered, voice breaking, creaking and cracking like a ship rocked by waves. The goddess spoke like a hurricane, and it would rip her apart and leave driftwood bleached to wash up on shore, a memory of lives lost disappeared into the deepest oceans where bones dissolved in days and there was no light at all. There is a cost to risking the waters. “Please, please let me not go mad here. Please, please, please…”

Give. Him. Back.

There was the sound of a great crack against the window from the outside and Kira jumped, letting out a breathy scream, shooting upright.

Below her, Areyto’s song cut off at once.

When she sat up, nothing was there but the night sky, the moonlight covered up by clouds. It was suddenly so dark in the bedroom that Kira could barely see to light an oil lamp, and even then its bouncing light seemed so faint and so small. 

How long she sat there, staring at the window terrified that the moonlight would come back, she didn’t know.

It was only interrupted by a knock at her bedroom door. 

Kira swallowed, pulling the robe tightly around herself. Her heart raced so quickly it all seemed to be one long beat. “Come in,” She called, and found a weak smile for herself when her voice came out perfectly steady and strong despite the fluttering beat of her heart and the way her hands were trembling.

The lock turned, and then the doorknob. First inside was Ford, wearing the same clothes he’d worn to dinner, disheveled and in disarray with a bit of hair hanging into his face. He came to a sudden stop as soon as he saw her, and she blinked back at him. His red-rimmed eyes weren’t on her face, but on the robe she wore. Something about his expression - startled and strangely foggy - made him seem much younger, like a child waking from a nightmare, or walking into one.

His pale skin made the new bruise on his face from his father’s anger at dinner stand out even more. She followed his gaze, frowning down at her robe, and then looked back up. “Ford?” She said, a little hesitant now. “What’s wrong? Is something wrong with my clothing?” 

“What?” It seemed to jerk him out of whatever daze he had briefly fallen into. He flushed, shaking himself like a dog shook off water. “Ah, nothing. My-... my apologies-... you just-... I’ve seen that fabric… before, haven’t I?”

“Ah, I don’t know… I mean, I assume you have, but I found it in the wardrobe…”

Ford shook his head again. “I’ve seen it before. I know I have.”

“Perhaps your… your mother wore it…?”

“No.” His voice was sharp, and Kira nearly flinched away from it. It made him sound like his father, in a way she knew she could never tell him. He might never speak again if she did. “My mother never wore that. Who did…? Who wore…?”

Ford kept looking at her, and Kira shifted, slightly uncomfortable. It was an intense stare, but not the sort of stares she had fielded from men for years now. Nothing like Guilford Wentworth’s sneer. No, there was something  about this stare that looked the way she had felt when she’d heard the moonlight speaking.

She knew without having to touch him that his heart would be racing, too.

“I’m sorry,” Kira said, almost sincerely. She pulled the robe as tightly around herself as she could. “I don’t know who would have worn this before. One of the wives, maybe, or… I don’t know.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t. It doesn’t matter, of course it doesn’t, it’s… it’s only that I-”

“Ford, stop frightening her and get out of my way.” A young woman shoved Ford unceremoniously to the side. Ford’s younger sister, clearly - and never had two siblings so clearly come from the same parents. They had the same sort of hair, the same jawline and shape of their eyes. The younger sister had simply been drawn with a gentler hand. “You big oaf, you’re frightening her. Let me be introduced before she decides to hate us both!” 

“I-... yes.” Ford’s voice still sounded a little airy, but he must have been pulling himself back together. He cleared his throat, gesturing to the young woman beside him. It occurred to Kira that Ford was still just as drunk now as he’d been at the awful circus that had been their evening meal. “Ah, Miss Losna, this is my younger sister, Nat-” 

“Nathalie, please!” The younger sibling was smiling before Kira ever got a full look at her face. She wore an echo of Kira’s own nightclothes but in a beautiful burgundy instead and the hem billowed like a ship’s sails as she came forward all in a rush. She wore her hair in a braid that hung down over one shoulder. She shook Kira’s hand with a firm, strong grip, before Kira had been able to even track her quick steps across the room.

The cool touch of her long fingers briefly made Kira think of the moon again, as did the shimmering light in her eyes. Nathalie Wentworth seemed like a softer sort of goddess. The way it might have been if the moon were gentle. She would have been the ocean, if the ocean carried men with a mother’s care to distant lands, rather than the way it roiled and toyed with sailors the way a cat might play with a mangled mouse. 

“Hello,” Kira said, voice slightly faint. Ford was handsome, in a tragic noble sort of way. Nathalie, though, was effervescent. “I’m Kiraya Losna, the magician, your father… ah… hired me. Sort of.”

“The magician he lied to, more like. You can be honest with me.” Nathalie smiled, giving her hand one more squeeze before she let it drop. “We know what our father is. Also, I’m honestly only two years younger than Ford, so don’t let him act like he’s in charge of anything. I’ve got a better head for business anyway. Always have.” 

“That’s true,” Ford said wryly, unoffended. His crooked, inebriated smile for his sister was warmer and far more genuine than any Kira had seen before. “I’m hopeless with sums. If it weren’t for Nathalie, I would’ve bankrupted our properties in the Colonies.” He turned away and back into the hallway, gesturing. “Come, siren. Kira, you’ve met it before.”

“It?” Kira frowned.

Ford shrugged. “Well, you know, Lord Wentworth’s… creature.” 

The siren appeared in the doorway. 

He did not move with the easy confidence of the other two, who were after all in their own childhood home. Instead, he stepped with careful feet, his eyes slightly down as if watching for a trap, and only lifted his gaze once he came to a stop. 

Those dark eyes met hers, and not for the first time, Kira felt a shimmer of something like a net over her skin. One she didn’t even try to resist.

Areyto’s injuries from dinner were all healed, beyond some faded, faint bruising at his wrists and the careful way he held himself suggesting the cuts from Wentworth’s knife might still be lurking beneath his black silk robe. It matched his hair, set off his brown skin, but none of his handsome face or form captured her as much as the intensity in the way he looked at her. 

“You heard?” He asked, not bothering to greet her. 

Kira thought of the voice in her head, the sense of being blown off course by the storm, the grip of watery claws demanding and dragging her down. Areyto’s harmony, dipping over and under the stronger voice, begging it for… what? Rescue? She swallowed and looked away, feeling an odd sort of heat in her cheeks. “Yes,” She answered, half-whispering, glancing back at him. “I heard.”

Areyto brightened. It was a subtle shift of expression, and yet it changed everything. Harsh lines held with careful hostility softened. The sense of the weight of his captivity faded, and she could see beneath the surface the irresistible beauty he must have been, out on the water with his own kind, singing sailors to their deaths with joy in his heart.

She might have died happily with that hand closed around her ankle, those arms locked around her neck, letting his mouth against her ear singing his song be the last thing she knew.

“Heard what?” Ford blinked, looking between them, and Kira shook herself from the strange thoughts that seemed to come to her unbidden whenever Areyto was near. Ford’s words didn’t quite slur, but something about his speech seemed like his voice moved faster than his mouth. “What did you hear?”

Nathalie’s eyebrows were furrowed in confusion, but she took her brother’s arm. Kira was struck by the knowledge of what she witnessed as she watched the siblings move to the small table at the side of the room. 

Wordlessly, Nathalie balanced her brother’s unstable steps as she led him to a seat, and she made it look like he wasescorting her. It was a move she’d probably used a thousand times at events or in public to cover Ford’s drunkenness. Ford’s younger sister seemed, in her way, a dozen years older than she should be. 

The opposite of the way Ford seemed much younger.  

“I heard…” Kira trailed off, wondering how to explain what had felt like madness overtaking her to a half-soused man years her junior and his lovely sister. Would it sound any less crazed if the siren understood her, but they didn’t? “The siren singing,” She said, finally. “Didn’t you hear his song?” 

Areyto’s eyebrows shifted upwards, just slightly. 

“Oh. Yes.” Ford nodded after a moment of blank nothing. He sighed, relaxing back into the rounded wooden back of the chair, toying with an empty glass that was there, next to the decanter filled with amber liquid. “I heard him. He sings when Lord Wentworth sleeps, sometimes.”

“I am forbidden from singing without his command,” Areyto said, stepping further into the room and walking past them all to the window. “But at night, it… loosens. A little, more and more. When I can sing in ways that are not his songs… I have to sing. I must."

He looked outside. Kira watched his black silk robe slip off one shoulder, baring the unmarked brown skin on his unpainted side. She knew his skin would be just this side of too warm, if she touched him.

“I understand,” Ford said. "Me, too."

Areyto glanced back at him over his shoulder, and the two shared… something Kira couldn’t quite read.

Ford coughed. "Not-... not singing, but drawing. I used to stay up all night when he was abed, sketching anything I could think of. He would tear the papers up if he found them, beat me black and blue for being useless, but my mother-”

His voice caught, his eyes watering a little. 

Kira stayed at the edge of the bed, a safe distance away, even as part of her longed to lay a hand on Ford’s shoulder. 

“My mother would hide them, if she found them first,” Ford finished, rubbing at his temples. “After my father died.” Kira knew that he was hiding tears, not embarrassment. Nathalie leaned over and whispered something, so soft it didn’t even travel across the bedroom. Ford nodded in reply, clearing his throat and straightening his shoulders.

The siren watched, looking thoughtful and not particularly sympathetic. “I remember your father.”

Ford winced. A cloud moved over his expression, a depthless bitter anger taking over the pure grief he had been far more ashamed of. Whatever connection he and Areyto had shared shattered at the words. “I am aware of why you remember my father, monster.”

The siren blinked, and then turned back to the window. Dismissing Ford's anger as if it didn't exist, darkening the cloud of it that weighed down the room.

Kira swallowed. “Please, let’s… we have much to talk about. I’d offer you a drink from what I think might be cognac in that decanter, but I’m… not sure that it is only cognac.”

“You shouldn’t trust anything my father-... not my father. Anything that Lord Wentworth gives you,” Ford said with a firm nod. “We’re all just pieces in a game, to him. If he must add something to your drink to keep you from walking off the board before he has finished playing, he will, and he’ll feel no guilt whatsoever when it’s done.”

Ford pulled the stopper off the decanter, giving a sniff to its contents.

He and Nathalie shared a look. 

Kira watched the younger woman shake her head - only slightly. Ford exhaled, then replaced the stopper and turned away. “We should… talk about how we might play the game, too, then, and take it from him.”

“Scatter the pieces,” Nathalie said, smiling. “Leave him with nothing but the ruined board. Let him rule nothing, and die with nothing, and become nothing."

Kira found her eyes returning to the siren.

Areyto stared outside, and she knew without having to be told that he was praying, in his own way, for the clouds to shift aside and let the moonlight return. Let the goddess see her stolen son, here, waiting for rescue. His prayers went unanswered the cloud cover seeming only to deepen and leave him even more alone here on land, where he had never been meant to stay. 

When the robe slipped off the other shoulder, too, Kira’s eyes widened at the sight of fresh, new red welts just peeking up over the neckline.

He’d been whipped as well, after she’d gone. After-dinner entertainments, perhaps. Kira’s stomach flipped and twisted. He'd been brutalized, while she was up here thinking she had anything to recover from. All she'd had to do was make unwelcome conversation with a man who couldn't seem to look at her face while Areyto bled for their entertainment.

Areyto had been bled, hung by the wrists, cut open, and even after she was gone... whipped raw.

While she soaked in the bath and soothed her tired muscles, the siren had no doubt been in saltwater that stung like acid trying to clean out the new wounds. He hadn’t been singing because of her or because he’d heard the moon, at first - he’d been soothing himself, trying to heal new pains and old ones. To remember, maybe, times when he had not lived every day in pain.

He deserved to know a life without pain.

“I will go further,” Kira said, voice hushed. She kept her eyes on a trickle of dark blood that moved like a touch, a tongue, down over the siren’s shoulder blade, disappearing back under black fabric. She watched his muscles shift, unconsciously, against the tickling sensation, the subtle wince that followed as his back protested even that slight movement. “We will not simply take Lord Wentworth’s game from him. We must do more than that."

Ford and Nathalie followed her gaze, looking over at Areyto as well.

The siren did not turn back, but Kira knew he was listening, even as his chin tipped up, and his eyes sought the moon that could not see him. 

“We will make sure that the man is utterly undone,” Kira said, voice low. She was making a promise, and maybe Ford and Nathalie didn’t hear it, but Areyto did. He had to, or he might kill them all afterward because of what they knew, because of what could happen if he didn’t. “But if someone like Lord Wentworth discovered this, someone else smarter than he is might do so again and be more able to protect himself. We will do this, and free Areyto, and then we must make sure that no one else can ever do such harm to sirens again.”

This made Areyto turn around to face her.

Once again, the net over her head, the dark eyes on hers, as if the two of them were entirely alone in here. Something cold and briefly frightened shivered down her spine, meeting the warmer flame lit within. The two feelings warred for which would rule her thoughts.

He wasn’t even human.

“You have sisters,” She said, and the siren nodded without seeming to even blink. It felt like neither of them was quite breathing. “There are other sirens who could be captured like this. Marked and bound. We have to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

“Yes,” Areyto said, voice low. A bass note, a vibrato that stole down her throat. “How do you protect my sisters?”

Kira swallowed, and thought of her hours of studying the old magic books, even the ones that she had never been meant to read. She found, within herself, a smile. 

To her shock, Areyto smiled back. Thin, and without quite showing his teeth.

“I think,” Kira said, “That I am going to need to learn how to paint a curse.”

“That’s impossible,” Nathalie said, eyebrows nearly to her hairline. “We can’t make those. It’s part of how it all works, I remember learning about it with my tutors, we can’t make curses with magic. It's not something magicians are even capable of.”

Kira found it hard to hold Areyto's gaze, now. The look in his eyes was a painful, weak sort of hope. He understood what she was thinking. She knew that he was scared to feel like anything good could ever happen to him again - it was a look Ford himself wore, too. Her eyes flickered to him, and took in the nearly identical expression he and the siren showed her.

Man and myth, beaten and bloodied, bruised and brutalized until neither believed that life could be anything but suffering as long as you were useful and discarded afterward. Toys tossed aside when broken.

The two were far more alike than they were different, even if one was not even truly a man, only a siren wearing a man’s face, and the other hated him for past transgressions that hadn't even been his own.

Both of them had suffered in ways meant to snuff out any hint of hope completely. They had been left so little of the future to believe in. It was hard to look at them and see it rekindled, fearing she would fail them and destroy it for good.

But Kira suspected that she held something, within herself, that Areyto could see fully and Guilford Wentworth hadn’t quite understood.

They had to use that advantage while they still had it, before even Kira was just another piece on the board, used to knock Guilford Wentworth’s opponents away until only he remained to rule. 

“I need to know what is within me,” Kira said, splaying her hands out wide. “And then I need to learn how to make it so that Guilford Wentworth is the end of men who play with the gods’ children.”

“Right,” Nathalie said, but she was clearly too confused to have quite grasped what Kira was saying. 

“Human magic can’t make a curse,” Kira explained, voice low, without taking her eyes off of the siren.

Areyto’s smile widened. For the first time, those black eyes sparkled, and it was a look just for her.

“Right, it’s not even that it’s forbidden, it just doesn’t happen for us, it isn’t in our blood. Magicians can't-"

"Human magicians cannot," Areyto said. Nathalie glanced over at him, eyebrows furrowed, then back to Kira.

Kira leaned forward, as far as she could. “Listen to me, Nathalie. Here what I am telling you. Human magic cannot draw curses.”

“Yes…”

“But I've read every book ever written on magic, and I know something that you don't know about it. Something that Lord Wentworth certainly doesn't know. What human magic cannot do... wild magic can.”

-