The words echoed in Hæra’s memory. Where had she heard them before? Oh…she recalled…she had spoken them herself. When she’d first met the witch and pleaded for her life. Had the witch remembered Hæra’s words so clearly for years? Of course she had. Who better than the witch to understand—to empathize—with being bound to the human she loved?

“Then let her hold me.” Hæra yearned to stand but couldn’t rise up without her hind legs, only flop uselessly on the sand. “Ancient One, I surrender…please…”

“You would do this?” the witch repeated.

“I would do anything! It can’t be worse than losing her!”

At this, the witch flung up the two corpses. As she began to spin once more, the currents resurrected, and the whirlpool resumed its shape. Her robes, rotted from the sea, spun with her. Her knobby bare feet kicked up eddies of sand. She was silent, silent, and Hæra wanted to scream⁠—

“Then do anything,” the witch said.

The surface opened. The stars reappeared. Around Hæra, the water roared, creating a tunnel between sea and sky.

“Don’t come back,” the witch said. “You are not ours.”

The current wrapped around Hæra’s fins again. This time, it acted like a lasso, flinging her through the wall of the vortex with such force that she cried out. Then it released her, but it had thrown her so fast that she kept going, spinning until she couldn’t tell up from down. Her tail flailed as she sought to slow down and right herself. But her tail wasn’t working properly. It was growing weaker⁠—

It was shrinking⁠—

So were her front legs. So was her face, along with everything else. Without her willing it, Hæra’s body was enacting a transformation it had done so many times before.

Wildly, Hæra pumped her tail toward the surface, even as she felt it begin to split in two. But not into her horse legs. Into her human legs. She’d never gone straight from this shape into that one, without being a four-legged creature in between.

She broke the surface of the water, gasping for air. She’d never had to do that before. Whether in water or on land, her body knew how to breathe. She’d never worn her human form underwater, though—maybe that was why?

The water was cold. Nearly freezing.

Hæra strove for air. Her teeth began to chatter, her muscles to lock up. She squinted ahead—was it darker than it had been when she’d first gone under? Everything was blurrier.

Nevertheless, she could make out the shore in the near distance, the one where she had kissed Madeleine and where Jonathan now lay. The witch had thrown her back the whole way, and she could easily make it to land.