Chapter 9

The transformation was not fire. It was salt.

My skin crusted. My bones dissolved. My blood turned to brine. I felt my mother's vow enter me, cold and old, a weight that had been waiting six years for someone foolish enough to take it. The Grief roared, not in anger, but in release. Her great body shuddered. Her scales fell away like shattered glass. The water churned. The cage opened.

Elin Callis surfaced as a woman.

She was thin, gasping, her hair dark with salt. She looked exactly like the portrait in my locket, only older, only tired. She reached for me, but her hand passed through my chest. I was already changing. My legs fused. My arms lengthened. My mouth filled with the taste of the deep.

"Wren!" Lottie screamed.

I tried to answer. My voice came from the water, from the walls, from the Bell. "I'm here."

Maud stumbled back. "The binding-the binding is mine!"

"The binding is done," my mother said. She stood naked and human on the altar steps, water streaming from her. "You wanted a Warden. You have one. But she is not yours."

The Black Tide hit the cathedral.

It should have crushed us. The wave rose above the collapsed roof, a mountain of dark water. But I was the Grief now. I was the cage and the lock and the thing beneath the waves. I rose to meet it.

I do not remember the fight. I remember the cold. I remember the weight of the sea pressing against me. I remember the Black Tide breaking against my new body like a fist against stone. I remember the scream of the city, then the silence.

When it was over, the water retreated. The cathedral stood. The lower district was flooded, but not drowned. The palace was still on the bluff. The people of Bellwether came out of their roofs and their stilt houses and stared at the thing in the water.

I was vast. I was shadow and salt. I was the Grief.

Maud's soldiers turned on her. They had seen the truth. They had seen her use a child as a sacrifice. They had seen her lie. The captain who had hit me pulled Maud's bell hammer from her hand and threw it into the sea.

Elin knelt by the water. Lottie ran to her, then stopped, staring at me. I lowered my head until my eye was level with her. She was so small. She was holding my locket. It had fallen from my neck during the change, and she had caught it.

"Wren?" she whispered.

"Keep the Bell dry, little sister," I said. "I'll keep the tide out."

She nodded. Tears ran down her face. She put the locket around her neck. The gold crack gleamed.

I sank beneath the water.