when my eyes had recovered, the serpents were nowhere to be seen. I was in a gigantic and dimly lit cave, Nat lying flat out beside me, horribly gray-green and still. The iron ring was gone from his hand. My own wrists were bare.
As I bent over him, I became aware that I was moving through something murkier and more dense than air. Water? Maybe. Yet it didn’t have water’s buoyancy; I couldn’t swim in it. Some kind of ether?
Whatever it was, I was breathing it. And Nat, I was relieved to see, was breathing again too—though very shallowly.
“Nat?”
He didn’t respond. But maybe that was because the otherworldly singing had drowned me out. Though it no longer boomed in my ears, it had an insidious low thrum that seemed to make the ether itself vibrate. Even my stone, trapped under my sodden cape and bodice, was shaking in time with it.
I tried again, my lips almost touching his ear. “Nat?”
Still nothing. Trying not to weep, I kissed his temple, then touched my hand to his neck. His pulse was weak but steady. Surely that had to be grounds for hope. And now that I was becoming used to the ether, I could see that his color was not so terrible after all. Everything here, even my own hand, had a greenish cast; it must be a trick of the light.
But where was here? And why was no one coming? From the effort they’d made to bring us here, I’d expected to be fighting off enemies long before this.
Not that I had any idea how I would fight them, beyond using my bare hands. Listen as I might, I could hear nothing here that resembled the Wild Magic I was used to. Instead there was only the singing: low and cruel, and so controlling that my heart couldn’t help but beat to its rhythm.
I rocked back on my heels and stood up. Where there was a song, there must be a singer. And perhaps it was better to go out searching than to wait to be found.
There were several mouths to this cave, but the largest was in front of me. With a quick backward glance at Nat, I crept toward it, and heard the song grow still louder. It was like a physical force, this song—like the tide of the ocean, or the pounding of a storm.
When I peered past the edge of the cave, I saw the eye of the storm—a dark-haired woman, as still as a statue, standing on a high rock at the center of a vast cavern, chanting out the furious song that was drowning the world. Her expression was remote and terrible to behold.
And the very worst shock was this: In every detail, her face was the twin of my own.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MONSTROUS LIES
My heart hammered in double time. It was like seeing my own reflection in a mirror-still sea. The singer and I had exactly the same broad forehead, the same small chin, the same wide-spaced eyes.
I blinked. No, not exactly. The singer’s face was a little narrower. A little older. Framed by hair that was quite a bit straighter than mine.
I gasped. This otherworldly singer—this singer who was destroying everything I held dear—wasn’t my twin. But could she be . . . my mother?
My mind whirled.
Mama is dead.
So I’d been told. So we’d all believed. But maybe we’d been wrong. Maybe she had survived. Maybe she’d been on the other side of the wall all this time.
A mad hope seized me. Without stopping to think, I ran out to her, shouting to be heard over her song.
“Mama! Mama, stop!”
I hurled myself toward her—to embrace her, to reason with her? Truly I didn’t know which, but it didn’t matter. When I reached for the rock she stood on, my hands flew up, burning like fire, and I was thrown back onto the sand.
“Mama, it’s me. Lucy.”
She didn’t even look down. She kept singing her terrible song, her face as distant and serene as the sky.
I stared up at her in utter dismay. Perhaps this wasn’t my mother, after all. Perhaps it was some dreadful illusion. The appearance was right, but the voice itself was all wrong—vicious and overpowering, utterly unlike my gentle mother. But—
A change in the vibration of the song warned me of another presence. I spun around and blanched.
Behind me was an enormous glowing mass, half eel, half jellyfish. Dozens more like it, only smaller, crowded behind it. In the middle of their