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Water slipped through her hands too easily. The webbing between her fingers was gone, making it impossible to paddle to the surface. She kicked her tail, which felt agonizingly splintered.
Nothing happened. She kicked again, and now she felt no tail at all.
In the starlit water, she looked down, confusion and terror engulfing her. What she saw made no sense. Where her tail had been just moments ago, there were two slender, flailing appendages.
Riella had human legs. And judging by the rate she swallowed water, human lungs, too.
CHAPTER 3
“Nah. She can’t be.”
“I’m telling you, that’s a siren.”
“Are you daft? She’s got legs. Same as me or you.”
“Her legs are a good deal nicer than your gnarly gams, Berolt.”
Riella became aware of a steady rocking sensation. A hard surface beneath her body. Voices above her, male and rough. It was still nighttime, firelight tinging her vision.
She tried to speak, but coughed instead. Saltwater spewed from her mouth. She pushed herself up, hands clawing at the wooden surface.
The rocking almost toppled her sideways. More water came up from her stomach in a heave—a seemingly impossible amount for her to have swallowed.
Metal dug into her wrists. She narrowed her eyes, trying to focus her vision. Manacles.
Everything came back to her. The mage named Polinth captured Riella. Seraphine the elf traded her freedom to save the siren. And Riella had legs.
“I reckon we throw her back in the water. Last thing we need are the sirens thinking we kidnapped one of their own. It’d start another war.”
“She’d drown, numbskull. You want them to think we killed one of their own, instead?”
“What do we do with her then, if you’re so smart?”
Riella chanced a look at her legs. They were definitely real—pale and strange and useless. They were not some horrible nightmare.
Her body was tangled in a net, seaweed clinging to her naked body. Without her tail, she felt exposed in a way she never had before. And without the ability to use Sirensong, she was trapped.
Her hands grappling with the slippery deck of the ship, she sat up. Dawn was coming, a mauve tint beginning to supersede the darkness of night.
Riella’s legs flopped around awkwardly. She tried to move them, like she would her tail, and they splayed at the knee, causing her to gasp in pain. Human legs were so terribly angular and hinged. How did they manage to walk around on these things?
The manacles felt several times heavier than when she’d been in Polinth’s cave. She tried not to think about what that meant—about how much he’d weakened her. Poor Seraphine was still at the sorcerer’s mercy. Riella had abandoned her, only to end up in a possibly worse situation. What a waste of the elf’s sacrifice.
“Oi, she’s awake.”
Not wanting to look up at their faces, she stared at the legs surrounding her. Male human legs, dressed in grubby trousers. One of the men squatted in front of her, attempting to put his face to hers. On instinct, she lashed out at him with her hand, swiping with her diamond-sharp talons. At least she still had those.
“Jeez!” The man skittered backward in panic. “Yeah, that’s a siren alright.”
She bared her teeth at him. His face was weathered and he was missing a chunk of his ear. Tattoos covered his arms. Her blood turned to ice when she recognized one in particular. The mark of the sirens’ most sworn enemies.
Heart thumping, she forced herself to look up at the masts, confirming her grim suspicion.
Atop the highest mast, above the flapping white sails, was a black flag bearing a pair of crossed cutlasses. She’d been fished out of the ocean by Dark Tide Clan pirates. Perhaps she fought some of these very men during the war.
The pirates stared at her, but she avoided meeting anyone’s eye. What in the seven seas was she going to do? If she jumped overboard, she’d likely drown. But she didn’t know anyone in the human world, unless she counted Polinth, which she absolutely did not. Where was she supposed to go?
“Say what you want about sirens,” one of them murmured. “But no one could ever accuse ‘em of being ugly.”
