Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

All those things that silly little girls don’t value until it’s too late. All the things they sacrificed for one stupid reason. They all come for the same thing: for love. For something selfish and venal. Make him love me. Give her to me . Give me, give me, give me. Never once do they think what the other might want. That love, if it were true, if it were right, would find its own way. And, sometimes, they leave debts others must pay.

When the missive arrived, my sister and I talked long into the night, and it was as if the past months of discontent, of selfishness and spite had not been. The bitterness was gone, the competition. She was my other half once more, and I hers. We were one and we would go together to the Sea Witch. We would face her, for we knew from the old tales that if we did not she would come hunting, and her rage would be all the greater.

Alone we departed, leaving advisors and friends behind. We swam for days, into the darkest part of the ocean, but nothing harmed us—why would it? We were daughters of the seas, mer queens in our right. Who would dare? Yet we were afraid: afraid of what we might hear, might find, might have to pay. We swam until at last we came to the rocky overhang that hid the entrance to the cave of the Sea Witch. Clasping hands, we drifted into its maw, deeper and deeper until we found the place she called her own.

She sat on a massive throne of bones, skeletal limbs clasping each other in a tight embrace, cemented in place with coral. A tall woman, pale as the watery moon, she waited, watching as if our appearance was no surprise. Her tail was so long and thick that it curled three times around the base of her seat, and then some. Hair the color of a storm played about a face haughty and scaled, and her eyes were so black they seemed like nothing so much as holes. But they caught us and held us, drew us in. She nodded as if pleased, satisfied. “You came.”

“You called,” we replied.

“So I did.”

And we waited a while for her to speak again. We’d agreed not to ask. Not to show weakness. Not to beg

“Your mother died owing me,” she said, and we trembled. All the tales told of the terrible things that came when a debt was outstanding; by her death Mother had cheated the Sea Witch and left only my sister and I to answer for her. Then the old woman told us how we’d sprung from a broken bargain; how we belonged, now, to her. “But,” she said, one finger raised to forestall any protest, “I am not an unreasonable woman. I only want what’s necessary to balance the books. So, I give you a choice: one of you must be the forfeit.”

We stared at her. We stared at each other.

“We will not—” I began, shaking at the thought that all our mother’s love had meant nothing; that she had left us to this.

“Wait, sister,” my other self interrupted, her fingers tightening around mine, grip solid, stable, assured. “What if…”

“What if…”

“She will never rest until this is settled. She will haunt us, blight our kingdom; our subjects will suffer. But we have ruled together. We have shared our throne. Let us share this punishment, bear this burden together. Let us take it in turns, sister, one shall rule while the other pays this tithe. Then we switch. If this Majesty,” she tilted her head to the Sea Witch, “is willing, I will go first.”

“No,” I said. “I have just completed this cycle of my reign. You return alone. I will pay this first month. If this Majesty will allow?”

And the Sea Witch looked at me as if I were a fool, as if she knew my sister better than I, but she smiled and nodded. My sister held me for so long yet so short a time then swam away, out of the cave and up, up, up. I imagined her as a speck against the watery sky of the kingdom, nothing more than a black dot against the flickering light that drifted down from the above-world. She would return. The old woman knew nothing of the shared blood that ran in our veins, of the invisible cord between our hearts, of the thoughts that began in one mind and finished in the other.

I raised my chin, arrogant, even as I submitted to her will.

My sister did not return.

The Sea Witch was not kind, but she was never unnecessarily cruel. She did not say my sister’s betrayal was only to be expected, did not say her word was as weak as sunlight on the bottom of the ocean, an unfaithful, feeble thing. For the longest time I dreamt my sister had met with some terrible fate on her way back home, without me to guard her. And the Sea Witch tethered me so I could not flee, could not go looking for either my sister or her corpse; she would listen to none of my entreaties. After a while, however, after the first of the little mewling maids came to beg bargains in the name of love, sent by her Queen, I at last understood that my sister bore more of our mother’s blood than I did.

My years of servitude became an apprenticeship of sorts. The Sea Witch taught me true, every spell, every magic, every enchantment under and over the waters, all the knowledge she had gathered in her very long life because she knew, even when she’d called us to her, that her time was coming to an end. She desired a daughter, a successor. In me she found a willing student. Betrayed, lost, I needed a place to belong and the Sea Witch, with her heart of salt and seawater, gave it to me.

When at last she wore out, I did as instructed. I removed her flesh, stored it in jars and bottles and tubs for use in spells, then took the bare bones and wound them into the body of the throne, adding to its height and breadth, as every new Sea Witch’s had done for millennia. And it became mine.

I could have returned home, then, but to what end? I could have revealed my sister’s treachery, claimed what she’d stolen from me, but I had been long gone from the kingdom and had begun to change in both appearance and temperament well before my mistress died. I would not have returned to any good purpose, and I’d have had to witness so many faces frozen in terror at the sight of what I’d become. Besides, I’d found a love for the power, the knowledge, the darkness to which I was heir, and the patience to play a long game.

I have never seen my sister again, but she sends me tribute. I know she still lives, for the girls keep coming even after all these centuries, and I ask them who rules. She sends me all those little girls and young women who want too much, who long for things they cannot have, whose yearning makes everything else in their lives appear insignificant. She has sent daughters and granddaughters, nieces and great-nieces. Fools all. Perhaps it’s a test for those silly little things: if they’re willing to trade with me, they get what they deserve.

But perhaps she simply fears if she didn’t send them, I’d return home.

I think about the latest child, with her lovely hair and lovelier voice. I wonder how long before disappointment strikes, before realization hits, before she or someone who truly loves her comes to me, begging a solution. I’ll give them the knife, the same one I always do, I’ll tell them their choices and we shall see what we shall see. Whose blood she’ll choose to spill, her own or his—I suspect her own. Not out of love, no, but shame; it’s easier to die than live on under the weight of humiliation. Again, I can count on five fingers the girls who’ve come limping home, who are strong enough to bear the burden of consequences.

In the deepest darkest part of the cave, in a tiny alcove, on a bed of coral lies my own child, my own successor, the work of my own hands, the sum of those silly little girls. Over the years I’ve cobbled their pieces together to make one being, a daughter of stitched-together sorrow, made with all the things those girls discarded as unimportant: their very best gifts, the cores of their secret and best selves. An amalgam of sacrifice and loss and pain.