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Annabelle Cane is disorientated when she wakes from her hibernation. That isn’t particularly noteworthy—two years of sleep is hardly easy to wake from—but the room she’s in is cold and bare, nothing like the warm cave and piles of blankets she’d gone to sleep beneath.
She keeps her breathing slow and even as she opens her eyes to darkness. She can hear one other person in the room, breathing soft and steady, a light kind of sleep. She allows herself to roll over and slowly sits up. She’s on a cot, bare of anything resembling a sheet or blanket, and she’s shivering so badly it threatens to shake her apart. How long has she been away from her cave?
As her eyes adjust to the darkness, she makes out the sleeping form near the door. He’s seated in a chair, head tucked against his chest. A sentry, she guesses.
She slides her legs to the floor, standing up as silently as possible, but when she tries to take a step, her legs buckle beneath her. She manages to catch herself before she falls, but the noise startles the sentry awake. His eyes focus on her and widen in near-panic.
She so badly wants to turn him into a rat. But she can’t do anything right now. Not so newly awoken, not shivering as badly as she is, cold permeating to her very core. The sentry runs out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him. Annabelle sits back down on the cot, listening to raised voices outside. She notices, all at once, that the room is rocking. A boat?
The voices get louder, and the door slams open again, letting in the sunlight. A man wearing a captain’s hat walks in, still yelling at the sentry. A small boy trails behind him, maybe ten years old. Annabelle watches the kid with interest. The captain’s son, maybe? But they don’t look anything alike.
The captain follows her gaze and steps determinedly between her and the boy. “I know what you are, witch.”
Anabelle smiles. “P-playing our cards awfully b—boldy, aren’t we?” She’s so cold. It rattles her pride, but she hugs herself, trying to keep warm. It doesn’t help much—her fingertips are icy to touch, and tucking them beneath her armpits only makes her shiver more violently. “A blanket would be n-nice,” she says.
The captain only laughs. “I’ve no interest in letting you kill us all. Rest assured, I know what it will take to control you, and I’ve taken the necessary precautions.”
“I can’t do any magic like this. Whatever you want from me—”
“Why do you think I want anything from you?” the captain says.
“You kidnapped me, a decision that I’m sure your studies warned you about, and that I guarantee you will live to regret. I’m assuming you had a reason.”
“Fair enough,” the captain says. “But I won’t need magic for it. I want to catch a mermaid, and I know you know where I can find one.”
Anabelle laughs, then. Loudly, throwing her head back. When she finally calms, the captain looks angrier than ever, and the little boy looks nervous. “You want to die?”
“I’m not the sort to be frightened by idle folk tales.”
“They aren’t folk tales,” Annabelle says. “If you sail your little ship into Mer territory, you’re dooming every member of your crew.”
“You let me worry about that. You just worry about pointing me in the right direction.”
“No,” Annabelle says, crossing her arms across her chest. “I’m not interested in going down with this ship. Sorry.”
The captain gives her a thin smile. “You’ll cooperate.”
“Was that a threat?” Annabelle says. It would be nice if her teeth would stop chattering, if her voice wasn’t shaking like that. “I’m impressed. That was a very good attempt. Unfortunately, I long ago gave up being intimidated by men with no real power.”
He looks back at the sentry, who is standing dumbly by the door. “Cut off all of her fingers. Left hand, then right. And then do her tongue.”
Annabelle’s heart freezes, and before she can stop herself, she’s pulling her hands tightly against her chest. She swallows, forces herself to stay calm. The sentry isn’t moving, is just looking at the captain, like he can’t believe what he just heard.
“You’re bluffing,” Annabelle says.
“I’m really not,” the captain says. He looks over his shoulder again. “Get on with it!” he says. The sentry pulls a knife from his belt and starts walking towards her.
“You see, witch, it’s honestly of no accord to me whether you ever cast magic again.”
Annabelle tries not to let her panic show on her face. There must be a way out of this, an escape route she hasn’t yet seen. But there’s only one door, and with her every muscle trembling as it is, she knows she wouldn’t make it very far.
“Honestly, neutering you would make my life easier in every way. Wouldn’t have to keep such a close eye, won’t have to worry about you getting your revenge later on. Actually, to be completely honest, your chances of getting off this ship with your faculties intact is rather low. If I were you, I’d be working on mitigating that. Convincing me that it’s not worth cleaning up the bloodstains.”
There’s no way out. The sentry reaches out for her hand, and Annabelle has never been backed into this kind of corner, but she can’t—
“I’ll do it,” Annabelle breathes. “I’ll tell you where to go. I’ll help you.”
The sentry stops.
“Good,” the captain says. “So if I bring you a map, you’ll tell me where to sail?”
She doesn’t need a map. She closes her eyes, sees everything in her mind, all of the connections between this ship and the rest of the world. “The territory is due South,” she says. “But there’s a storm forming over the sea that we’ll hit tomorrow if we sail directly for it. It would be better to go around. There are good winds to the east.”
She opens her eyes. The captain is grinning. “Wonderful,” he says. He turns, looks at the boy and the sentry. “I think this trip is going to be a massive success.”
Annabelle sits on her cot, staring at the floor.
They’re all going to die.
***
She spends the evening pacing the room, trying to think of a plan. It’s hard to think with her teeth chattering constantly. Her ears are rumbling from the cold, and even if she could have thoughts, she’s not sure she’d be able to hear them.
She doesn’t know why it’s so cold. If she’s awake, it must be May or June. It should be warm, not freezing. The captain must have found a magical charm, somewhere, cast it over the room. No warmth for her.
She isn’t used to feeling helpless, and she hates it. She should be able to do something, to get herself out of this situation. She doesn’t mind the boat going down—she’d sink it herself, if she weren’t so cold—but she doesn’t want to die alongside these fools. She needs a way to escape.
She doesn’t have a way to escape.
They’re all going to die.
Eventually, Annabelle lays down on the cot. She doesn’t expect to get much sleep with how much she’s shivering, but exhaustion takes her in the end. The quiet is nice.
She wakes up to small, warm hands clasped over hers. She’s still trembling, but the small bit of relief is wonderful. She opens her eyes and finds herself staring into wide brown eyes, a chubby, youthful face that still seems jarringly out of place on a ship like this. The little boy she’d seen earlier.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be here,” Annabelle says, struggling to keep her voice from trembling. She doesn’t pull her hands away. She wants to pull the little boy closer, to wear him like a coat. She doesn’t. But she doesn’t pull her hands away.
“Can you make sick people better?” the boy asks, sounding so serious it makes Annabelle’s heart twist. She looks at the strings that move him, a vast construct of guilt and martyrdom. And fear. And sadness.
“Do you know someone who’s sick?” Annabelle asks, and the boy nods.
“My mum,” he says, and his voice trembles.
Annabelle is still shivering too hard to allow herself to be fully shocked by this, although she had expected the answer to be a sibling or a friend, the closest connections an orphan would have. Why was this little boy on a boat in the middle of the ocean, if he had a mother to care for him?
Annabelle swallows. “I’m sorry.” She’s surprised to find that it was true, that in this endlessly horrible situation, she has the energy to feel anything but apathy. She had just emerged from hibernation. “But I’m too cold to do any magic right now.” And they were all going to die, besides.
The little boy was silent for a long moment. “I can bring you some blankets.”
Anabelle’s eyes widen.
“And I could hug you,” the little boy says. “I’m warm.”
Anabelle can’t help it. She laughs. “You know that if you help me warm up, I’m going to leave.”
The little boy nods. “But then, after you leave, you can go help my mum. Right?”
He looks so hopeful. Annabelle sighs. “Okay. You’ve got a deal.”
“Okay,” the little boy pulls his hands away, and Annabelle immediately tucks them beneath her armpits. They’re still cold, having absorbed precious little of the boy’s heat. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and then he’s gone, pulling the door silently closed behind him.
He returns a few minutes later, holding a heavy quilt in his arms. “Where did you find this?” she asks. “I didn’t know this kind of thing was allowed on ships.”
“I took it from Mr. Lukas’s room,” the boy says. “He’s a heavy sleeper.”
“I see,” Annabelle says. What was going to happen to this boy when she left? She couldn’t imagine Peter would treat him very kindly, not after releasing his special captive.
He climbs onto her cot, burrowing against her side like he doesn’t even feel the cold emanating from her in waves. “You’re shivering,” he informs her in a soft voice.
“Hush,” she says, wrapping her arms around him, basking in the warmth. She’s never had any desire for children, but for the first time, she understands at least some of the appeal. She feels suddenly possessive of him, and she wishes she could bring him with her.
She kicks herself. She’ll forget about him as soon as she leaves the ship. She might not even bother tracking down his mother and healing her. (A lie. She’s already thinking of remedies she could try.)
“Doesn’t your mother worry about you, working on a ship like this?” Annabelle asks.
“I didn’t tell her I’d signed on,” he says. “Mum wasn’t well enough to work anymore, and we—we needed the money.”
“You couldn’t have taken an apprenticeship or something?”
“None that would pay. I’m—I’m not really old enough to be a useful hand.”
“How old are you?” Annabelle asks.
The boy’s eyes track towards her, then quickly dart away. “Twelve.”
Anabelle laughs. “Unfortunately, I have magical powers of not being completely stupid. What’s the real answer?”
A pause. “I’m eight,” he says quietly.
Eight!?
Annabelle presses a hand over her mouth. “You’re eight years old?”
He nods.
Love of god. “And Mr. Lukas is just… fine with that?”
“He thinks I’m twelve.” A pause. “He isn’t around kids very much.”
Clearly.
Annabelle doesn’t know what to say, after that. She really wants to bring this kid with her, but that would be stupid. She’s hardly at the height of her power, and being associated with a witch would be nothing but a stain on his life.
… He could be a familiar. He seems far too stressed for a kid his age anyway; he’d probably enjoy the simplicity of being a cat. Or maybe he’d want a different form. A toad wouldn’t be her first choice, but children are weird. Maybe that’s the form that would call to him. Or an owl, with all of its powers of flight. Or—
No. She can’t do any of that. If he was an orphan with nothing to live for and no one to care for him, maybe. But he has a mother. Annabelle can’t take him from her. She’ll leave the ship, heal his mother, and the boy will be able to spend the rest of his childhood safe with her.
She can’t turn him into a cat just because she’s grown attached in the five minutes she’s known him. It would be wrong, especially for someone who has done her a genuinely good turn.
She hears a soft snoring beside her. While she’s been lost in her thoughts, he’s managed to fall asleep, leaning against her shoulder. In sleep, his face looks much more relaxed. He almost looks like a real eight-year-old, not an old man in an eight-year-old’s body. Cute.
In spite of herself, Annabelle smiles.
Maybe, when her power is restored, she’ll also give him a blessing.
***
One night isn’t nearly enough time to replenish her magic entirely, but she doesn’t need to be at her full power to escape the ship. By the end of the night, she’s collected more than enough warmth.
She rouses the little boy. “It’s time for me to go,” she whispers.
He takes a deep breath and nods. “You’ll heal my mother? You promise?”
Annabelle nods. “You have my word.”
“Her name is Diane Blackwood. Our house is—”
Annabelle stops him. “You don’t need to give me directions. I’m magic, remember?”
He smiles at that, a little bit. “Okay.”
She squeezes his hands. “What’s your name?”
“Martin.”
“Martin Blackwood?”
He nods.
“Well, Martin Blackwood. You’ve done a very good thing tonight. You’ve saved everyone on this ship.”
Another nod, not meeting her eyes.
“You’ve saved my life, too, and that’s worth far more than you can imagine. When you make it back to your mother—”
“I’m not going to make it back,” Martin interrupts, staring down at his lap.
Annabelle tilts her head. “What do you mean?”
Martin swallows. When he speaks, his voice is shaky. “When Mr. Lukas finds out that you’re gone, it—he’s going to be really, really mad. And—and—he’ll know that someone had to have helped you, and no one else on the crew would have done that. He’ll know it was me. And—and—and that’s mutiny.”
“You think he’s going to kill you?” Anabelle says, heart sinking. Does she think the captain is capable of murdering a child? Yes, actually. Shit.
“It’s alright,” Martin is saying. There are tears on his cheeks. “If—if Mum won’t be sick anymore, then she’ll be okay. She won’t need me. So it’s alright.”
Annabelle closes her eyes. She really doesn’t have enough energy stored up to be wasting spells, but she can’t just leave this little boy to die. She can’t.
So she starts to weave a spell. Martin’s eyes widen as he sees the thin filaments beginning to spread between her fingers, growing into strands that stretch up her arms. She reaches for his hands, and he gives them, and the glowing white strands cross over to him. He watches them, utterly enraptured.
“Peter Lukas won’t find out what happened here tonight,” Annabelle says. “It’ll stay a secret, the two of us its only holders. No one else will ever know.” The strands lose their light, and then disappear from ordinary sight entirely.
Martin swallows, still looking at his hands with wonder in his eyes. It’s a wonderful expression, another one that makes him look more like an eight-year-old. Annabelle wants to see it again, and once again feels the urge to just kidnap him.
She can only fight off the urge so many times before she gives in, and she’s reaching her breaking point, but then there’s noise outside the door. Footsteps.
Martin looks at her with wide eyes. “You have to go!” he says.
She doesn’t argue. She turns herself into mist, and then she’s gone.
***
Six years later, Annabelle sits at the edge of the harbor, waiting to catch sight of Peter Lukas.
She’d woven spells around Lukas as soon as she was able, after the disaster of her last hibernation. Vengeful things, curses, always leading him to annoyance and failure, always keeping him out of anything truly dangerous. His fate won’t be anything as swift as a shipwreck or a lost battle. His fate belongs to her alone.
Today, Lukas’ ship has landed in the harbor, back from yet another extended voyage, and Annabelle is here to check on her spells. Making sure nothing has torn free in the intervening years.
Lukas is the first one off the ship, and with no small amount of satisfaction, she sees her spells are still firmly in place. Unsurprising, considering how tightly she’d woven them, how much of her fury had gone into the work.
She watches Lukas for a few moments more, thinking about how sweet it will taste when her jaws finally close around him, but she can’t dwell on her revenge all day. She does have things to do.
As she gets up to leave, though, her eyes catch on something else. The familiar glimmer of her threads. She blinks, and then she’s looking at another sailor, helping with the unloading. Snaking around his fingers and up his arms, are the unmistakable filaments of one of Annabelle’s spells.
They’re tattered—unlike Lukas’ curses, the spell she’d made for Martin was a weak thing, only meant to last a few months, until the ship returned to harbor and he could return to his mother.
She can’t tear her eyes off him. She isn’t nearly close enough to see his face, to see his expression. He seems healthy enough, at least. Taller, stronger. It’s been six years, so he’s, what? Fourteen?
When Martin finishes working and gets off the ship, Annabelle follows him. He doesn’t accompany his fellow crewmates to the bars and brothels where they’re doubtless planning to spend their weekend ashore. Instead, he heads off on his own.
When they’re out of sight of anyone on the crew, Annabelle says, “Martin!”
Martin turns, and for a moment his face is blank, bewildered confusion. Then he tilts his head, recognition lighting in his eyes. “What—what are you doing here?”
“Living my life, the best I’m able,” she says, closing the distance between them. “The real question is, what the hell are you doing here? Why are you still with Lukas?”
Martin smiles humorlessly. “There’s no other work, anywhere.”
“You’re not old enough to be working! What about your mother? Why didn’t she pull you off this boat as soon as you returned from your first voyage? I healed her as solidly as anyone could possibly be healed, probably added twenty years to her life on top of it! You shouldn’t be the one working.”
Something pained crosses Martin’s face. “It’s—Things are just hard. We can really use the money.”
Anabelle stares at Martin for a long moment, studying him. There’s a bruise on his face, right next to his left eye. She taps it. “Where did that come from?”
Martin looks away. “It was an accident.”
It was an accident, meaning: Mr. Lukas lost his temper, and there aren’t any consequences to him taking it out on me. “Unbelievable,” Annabelle says.
“It’s fine,” Martin says, an edge in his voice. “I’m not—it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters!” Annabelle said. She should have kidnapped him. She absolutely should have kidnapped him, when he was still young enough to think that life as a cat was a fun adventure, not a horrible curse.
Too late now.
She lets out a breath, trying to to think. She can’t kidnap Martin and keep him as a familiar. What else can she do for him? Get him away from Peter Lukas, for one. She casts her mind out, quickly. There are seven ships looking to sign on new hands while they’re docked. Three of them are leaving today. One of them is captained by a man who sails with his two young daughters on board.
He’s a good father, and he vets his crew carefully for the sake of his children. Annabelle tugs at the string in his mind that takes pity on poor, desperate souls. A precaution. She doesn’t think he’d hesitate to sign Martin on, but just in case.
She grabs Martin’s wrist. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Martin says, resisting, just a bit. There’s a wariness in his voice that was never there before. He’s heard a thing or two about witches, she guesses, stories much darker than an eight-year-old would have ever been privy to.
Honestly. As if she would ever hurt him.
“We’re signing you on with a different ship,” Annabelle says.
“What? No, I—I can’t. I’m supposed to stay with Peter until—”
“How is he going to stop you?”
Martin opens his mouth. “I—He—”
“Exactly,” Annabelle says. “He can’t. Especially since the ship we’re putting you on is leaving in just a few hours. You’ll be long gone before he even thinks to look for you.”
“Why—?”
“Because you deserve better,” Annabelle says, tugging at the part of Martin’s mind that hates Peter Lukas, that hates working with him, that desperately wants to abandon ship and sign on with a different crew.
“... Alright,” Martin says, and then he’s following her without complaint.
Part of Annabelle wants to walk right up to the captain, tell him that he’s going to take Martin on board his ship, and if anything happens to him, there will be hell to pay. Wind a spell around him to make Martin’s safety and well-being the man’s top priority.
But Martin probably wouldn’t appreciate that. Instead Annabelle just points the way toward the ship. “Come back here once you’re signed on,” she says. “I have something else to give you.”
She half-expects, as she watches Martin talking with the captain, that Martin will ignore her. He shakes the captain’s hand, and for a moment she really thinks he’s going to walk right up onto the ship, starting the process of meeting his new crew.
She doesn’t pull on any of his threads. She wants it to be his choice.
To her surprise, he does come back to her. “He seems nice,” Martin says, something guarded in his voice.
“He is. Did he tell you about his daughters?”
Martin nods. “Ten and thirteen. I told him I was eighteen, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. Didn’t say anything about it, though.”
Annabelle smiles.
Martin looks at her suddenly, eyebrow furrowed. “You didn’t have to do this.”
Yes, she did. What was the alternative? Leave Martin in Peter Lukas’ hands, always at risk that Lukas would discover Martin’s secret and execute him, six years after the crime?
“You already healed my mother, it—We were even.”
Suddenly, his nervousness makes sense. She sighs. “It isn’t a quid pro quo,” she says. “I don’t expect another favor from you, in exchange.”
“Then why—?”
She sighs, and doesn’t answer. “Give me your hands,” she says.
Martin looks hesitant, but complies. She weaves another spell between their four hands, thin white filaments jumping back and forth as she weaves them tightly together. She glances at Martin’s face, and he’s watching, just as enraptured as he’d been all those years ago. She smiles.
The threads wind their way up Martin’s arms, and he stiffens a bit as they go over his shoulders, around his neck. “It’s alright,” Annabelle murmurs as the spell keeps growing. It’s everything she wants for Martin. Happiness and health. A dash of childhood, because Martin has hardly gotten any of that. Caring, to combat the deep loneliness in him. Above all else, protection.
When it’s done, when the filaments fade, Martin steps back, away from her, but it isn’t fear in his eyes. “Why do you care?” he asks, and he sounds—overwhelmed. Overwhelmed, but in a good way.
She shrugs, stepping back. Maybe it’s good that she didn’t kidnap him. Maybe this is better.
“Enjoy your voyage,” she says, and before he can ask anything else, she’s gone.
***
She takes to meeting him in every harbor where his ship touches down on shore. She gets dinner with him, tightens and strengthens her spells, asks how he’s doing. Good, is always the answer. He likes the ship. He fits in well with the crew, and for all his inexperience with children his own age, he becomes good friends with the captain’s daughters.
When Martin is fifteen, the captain sits him down and tells him that he doesn’t expect Martin to be a responsible adult. Martin’s initial reaction is anger—what has he done to make the captain think he can’t handle it?—but the captain explains that it isn’t a matter of trust. It’s a matter of morality, of Martin being allowed to be a teenager. Martin still bristles at the implication that his age makes him less capable than the rest of the crew, but as the weeks pass, he comes to appreciate having a bit of space to be a child.
When Martin is sixteen, he starts a disastrous romantic relationship with the captain’s elder daughter. Neither of them are inclined towards the opposite sex, but they somehow manage to hurt each other’s feelings in every way possible before they figure it out. The first mate, endlessly amused by the situation, mediates, and manages to help them salvage their friendship.
When Martin is seventeen, the ship goes down. An unexpected storm came upon them, far out in open waters. No survivors.
But that can’t be right. Martin was protected. Annabelle had made sure of it.
She passes a week in anxious silence, her normal activities falling to the wayside in favor of imagining the worst fates that might have befallen him. Nothing could have happened to him. Her spells were airtight. She knows her spells were airtight.
… But the report says no survivors, and with each passing day that she finds no sign of him, desperate fear constricts a little tighter around her heart. She should have just kidnapped him. Even if he hated it, she should have realized that the sea was too dangerous, that he would never be truly safe unless–
Finally in a moment of relief that feels more like a collapse, she senses him. She forces herself to breathe again. He’s nearby. He’s alive.
She’s far too exhausted to go looking for him, so she winds him towards her. He’s looking for a place to stay anyway, so he might as well come to the inn where she’s been spending endless nights staring at the fire, casting her magic out, trying to find him.
When he walks through the door, Annabelle has to pause for a moment. Her own spells are woven around him, tight as ever, but now they are joined by more colorful ornamentation. The spell covers Martin like a thick blanket, making up in enthusiasm what it lacks in grace. A mermaid song.
Annabelle can’t help smiling. What kind of adventures has Martin gotten up to?
She doesn’t say anything to draw attention to herself, just watches him as he goes to the innkeeper and barters for a room and a hot meal. For a moment as he turns around, now holding a bowl of warm soup, she thinks his eyes will drift right past her. But then she sees his eyes flash in recognition.
“I wondered when I’d see you,” Martin says, coming to sit beside her. His voice is oddly flat, nothing like him at all.
She doesn’t dwell on it. This close, Annabelle can see the details of the mermaid song. It’s an intricate thing. Boons for protection, mostly. And boons for cloaking, which is interesting. Why would Martin need to be hidden?
“You heard about the ship?” Martin says.
Annabelle nods, still examining the song. Is that—love? Yes, unmistakably. Now that she’s noticed it, she sees how love is threaded through every piece of it. “It’s been an interesting few weeks, I assume?”
Martin just glares at her.
Not a very enthusiastic answer from someone who had apparently fallen in love. With a mermaid.
“How’d you get back here?”
A shrug. “The way people usually make it back to civilization after a shipwreck. I washed up on an abandoned island, and then managed to get a signal to a passing ship.”
Annabelle tilts her head. What about the mermaid? She squints, looking closer at the song, and—there! It’s a thin filament, nowhere near as flashy as the rest of the thing, but it’s there. It’s enough. A boon for forgetting, woven into the spell meant to protect and disguise and love him.
Evidence of a tragedy.
Oh, Martin.
He’s still talking, his voice losing its hard neutrality, edging into genuine upset. “I’ve been trying not to think about them, but I—” his voice breaks, and he closes his eyes for a long moment. “Annabelle, what am I going to do? They’re all gone.”
Oh. Right. In all her worrying about Martin’s safety, she’d forgotten that Martin has, essentially, lost his entire family. Everyone he knows and cares about, all at once.
Once again, Annabelle wishes she’d just turned him into a cat, all those years ago. She might go ahead and do it right now, spare him from at least some of this grief, if she wasn’t certain the mermaid song would block any attempt she made.
Instead, she puts her hand on his back. She’s never been very comfortable with physical touch, so she isn’t quite sure what to do. She leans against his side, trying to think of what to do with him. She can’t send him back out onto the sea. Even if she weren’t petrified at the idea of him getting into another shipwreck, the mermaid must have had a reason for making him forget.
She can’t risk Martin remembering, not until she’s figured out what happened. Not until she figures out the danger and knows how to protect him.
And then she has an idea, an idea so wonderful she’s surprised she didn’t think of it years ago. She tilts her head, looking at Martin, who is staring blankly down into his soup. “Martin,” she says.
“Mm?”
She’s silent for a moment, looking him over, up and down. Yes. This is a good idea. This will work. “How would you feel about being king?”