“It doesn’t surprise me at all,” Luce said wearily. It was depressing to be reminded of Anais. “She’s killed larvae before. She probably didn’t care whose sister it was.”

“Oh, she cared!” Sedna’s fury was building. “She cared! She did it to get back at us, and she went out of her way to hurt us as much as she could. When we catch her I’m going to expel her myself, and I’m going to make sure there are orcas all around first. Even if I have to personally draw the orcas there with bait, I’ll make sure of it!” Sedna’s tone was grim, and Luce knew this wasn’t an idle threat. “We knew the bitch was sika, but we just felt so sorry for the mermaids with her. They seemed so scared and miserable, like they were all about to crack up completely, and we made the mistake of taking them in. Those girls are really crazy, though.”

Luce’s head reeled a little. She wanted to think about Dorian and her father, not about whatever awful things Anais had done. But still . . .“What happened?”

“Well, we’re a strict tribe. We don’t take down more than four or five ships a year, max, and I have a rule about only doing it when there’s a big enough storm that it won’t look suspicious.”

Luce was impressed. Keeping the mermaids’ longing to kill under such tight discipline couldn’t be easy, she knew, even if she wished that they wouldn’t sink ships at all. She looked at Sedna with sudden respect, but Sedna was too furious to meet her eyes.

“So I explained all that to them when they showed up, right? And for a while they were mostly okay. But then they started just ignoring me! Like they weren’t in my territory at all!” Sedna was indignant at the memory. “They were attacking ships in this insane, random way, so I told them to get the hell out. And they did, but before they left—”

“They threw Fiona on shore,” Luce finished. She felt nauseous. It was such a hideous, vicious thing to do, even for Anais. “But why do you think they ran back this way? Wouldn’t it be more likely for them to keep traveling south?”

Sedna shook her head. “A few of the littlest girls snuck back to us. Begged us to let them join our tribe. And they said Anais didn’t want to risk meeting any more tribes that already had queens of their own, so she was just dragging them all back to their old territory. Anais kept talking about all the stuff they’d left in their cave, anyway . . . Luce? What’s wrong?”