bright horde I saw Nat, eyes closed, limbs flung out wide, completely at their mercy.
“Nat!” I charged toward him.
The largest creature lashed an undulating tentacle in my direction and hummed a soft, strange melody—a melody that had some of the same tonalities as my mother’s song. My heart jolted, and I fell to the ground. For an instant I burned all over, just as I had when I’d approached my mother.
Gulping for breath, I pulled myself to my feet. Running to Nat’s rescue wouldn’t work. I needed a song to help me, a song to help Nat. But the only music I could hear was my mother’s.
No, wait. There was something else, a dim undertow beneath my mother’s melody, more cacophony than music. But I couldn’t hear a note of the Wild Magic I was used to on Earth, and without it I couldn’t work my own enchantments.
A few of the horde shimmered toward me, humming all the while. Wary of more jolts, I backed away. They pursued me, edging me toward a cleft in the wall. There was no way to avoid them, except by stepping into it, so I did. As they pulled away, I felt relief. The cleft was actually a small cave, and they weren’t going to follow me into it. Then a bony lattice went down in front of me, and I realized I’d been trapped.
I scrabbled at the lattice, but it was thick and as hard as shell. Wherever I touched it, it burned.
Hands stinging, I screamed, “Let me out!”
“Not until you have paid,” said a liquid and malevolent voice.
I looked up. It was the largest creature who had spoken, the one who had lashed out at me. And it was turning human.
Or almost human.
It hovered on the other side of the lattice, body still round and transparent but now with a woman’s head in its center. Heart-stopping in its beauty, the face was fringed not with hair but with slithery tentacles. Like eels in search of a meal, they snaked through the ether, shining like blue fire in the dreary light.
Impossible to have a conversation with a being like this, and yet I had to ask. “The singer out there. Is that my mother?”
“Yes and no.” The Medusa’s mouth did not move, and yet the creature spoke. “She was once your mother. Now she is my voice.”
“Your voice?” I repeated, dumbfounded. “And who are you?”
This time the creature did not speak, yet words cascaded into my brain: Queen. Mother. Empress. Other.
Pressina.
Pressina? The name was oddly familiar, but I wasn’t sure why. And then I had it. “You are Melusine’s mother?”
“Yes.” There was a wealth of grief in the syllable—and then anger, sharp as a knife. “You took her from me. You took her, and you punished me. And so I will punish you.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“You did!” Fury was uppermost now—the same sort of fury I could hear in my mother’s song. “She was only trying to avenge me against my husband. And you Chantresses punished her for it.”
I shook my head. That wasn’t the story I’d heard.
“No,” I said. “You can’t fool me. You punished her. You gave her a serpent nature because she rebelled against her father.”
I ducked as Pressina howled. “A monstrous lie!” Blue-green sparks shot out from her head. “Only a human would tell it, and only a human would believe it. Here we do not punish our daughters for defending us. And looking like a serpent is no hardship for us.”
This last was true enough, I supposed. And I was worried about what she might do to me or to Nat if I angered her again. Shifting farther back into the cave, I said placatingly, “Well, then, what is the truth of it?”
Pressina answered eagerly, as if savoring the chance to tell her side of the story. “The truth? Melusine always had the power to turn into a serpent. It was in her blood, as it is with all my daughters. And her father deserved punishment.” Her angry voice soared higher. “He said he would love me always, but the moment he saw the scales on our girls—so light, just on their forearms—he threw us all out.”
In the story I knew, it was Pressina who had left her husband. But as Pressina had just pointed out, it was a human who had written that story. Who knew what the truth was?
“So when Melusine made her father pay, I rejoiced.” Pressina’s jellyfish center pulsated. “Indeed, I helped her.