Then, when all the life has been bled away, when all is still and silent, and there are only coils of drifting entrails, the ships lower men into the water to retrieve the bodies. The youngest are processed quickly; deveined, deboned, skins removed and crusted with salt and spice before they’re left to dry under the sun; the meat carefully separated and stored in chests dripping with ice. The oldest they preserve with formaldehyde and meticulous stitching, with pins and steel rods and hooks no wider than a strand of hair, anything that can allow them to pretend that this was a crusade, not a slaughter.

Their trickery succeeds. The kingdom celebrates and my prince, he devours my littlest sister at his soothsayer’s behest, marinating her first in cumin and cilantro. She was barely more than a fry, too young to emulate his idea of human. In a few months, that would have changed. Her skull would have flattened and grown sleek with long, silvery hair. She would have been beautiful, perhaps even beautiful enough to have taken my place.

“I saved you,” my prince says as he picks the soft meat from her spine.

I say nothing, look down, pick through the kelp heaped on my plate, try not to think about the first time I saw my sister, peering from between my father’s teeth, freshly hatched and clumsy, still viscous from the egg.

The ocean is not like the territories of man.

My father sends no armies in retaliation. My mother does not poison the seas with her grief. The fish do not mourn. Even the wind is silent, indifferent. Ten sisters are nothing, less than nothing.

He gives me no salt, only sugar.

Acres of caramel, drizzled on pastries and baked into sinuous eclairs, layered between crumbling shortcake and bittersweet chocolate. Endless cakes, all intricately made, some infused with strange fruit, others with crushed wildflowers and ginger. Scones dripping with cream. Glittering jellies. Macarons and marshmallows and meringues fragile as hummingbird eggs.

Only once did he make the error of feeding me meat, a tender cut from the leg of his latest kill. Seven men died mangled for this mistake, that gift of power, and I almost, almost reached the shore before he snared me in barbed wire and dragged me away.

From then on, he kept me sequestered in a windowless room in the highest tower of the castle, buried in organza and lace, in books devoted to domesticity, in the green smell of the hills, and flowers that drown me in pollen every spring. My prince allowed me nothing sharp, nothing dangerous, nothing that could be used to cut or maim.

Not even my teeth, which he wears on his crown like a warning.

Occasionally, my sisters visit me.

They are not unhappy, for all of their new ephemeralness, their inability to taste or touch. Death has given them color, imbued their deepwater pallor with indigo and orange and filaments of gold.