Though she should have been dead, she woke.

Pain shot through her body, hot and relentless, and she longed for oblivion. Nothing had prepared her for this agony. Her eyelids fluttered, and she tried staying still, sniffing through her nostrils. A cool, salty breeze calmed her insides before triggering a heavy cough. Heat rose from her feet and into her stomach.

While her body seethed in an internal fire, a cold figure grazed her shoulder. Moira turned and forced her eyes open.

A woman sat there with silvery, wet hair and skin so pale it was nearly transparent, as though painted in white and gray. Her round eyes wrinkled in concern beneath her white eyebrows. She might have been a few years older than Moira, but it was hard to tell.

“Where—” Moira’s voice felt unfamiliar, as if she was using it after years. She coughed again. “Where am I?”

“On land. You appeared not to tolerate the water.”

Moira stared at the woman.

The storm. She had been over the sea—amidst thunder and lightning—and she had fallen, ending up in the water. Had the woman saved her? But how? Moira craned her neck and stared at the stormy ocean under the black sky. She had failed to notice the rain before, but thick drops splattered against her face and body. She winced at the sight of lightning, dark clouds hiding Aurora.

Moira glanced at the woman and, for the first time, noticed her carefully.

She was half-human, half-fish. From her hips onward, gray-blue scales covered her skin, and the tail ended in fins splayed out across the sand.

The water folk.

Moira backed away, her pain-filled body barely obeying her. “Don’t hurt me. You don’t know who I am. Hurting me would—”

The woman’s hand fell from Moira’s shoulder, landing in the sand, and she looked at Moira with a creased brow.

“Why would I hurt you?”

Moira shivered and looked at her feet. Black burns covered them and blood from her injuries soaked the sand below. The pain made fresh tears pour down her cheeks.

But the woman belonged to the water folk, and Moira knew they were dangerous; she’d heard scary stories about them since childhood. Her dad had also warned against the deadly water folk.

“S-stay away from me.” She pressed the words out between clenched teeth. “I know what creatures like you do with us.”

“Creatures like us?” The woman appeared dismayed at the term ‘creature’—but what else could have Moira called her?

“The water folk! Mermaids,” she spat. “You take us and d-drown us and use our legs in s-spells. Everybody knows that.”

Her teeth clattered, the cold seeping in through the wet dress stuck to her body, while the hot white pain pulsed through her. She needed to go home to Aurora, where she could get medical help for her wounds and sleep under her warm blanket. The Medicals would redress her injuries and prepare a brew to make her pain recede. Then, she would be all right again.

Moira crawled to her feet, and it was like walking on nails. A whining sound like an injured animal escaped her lips, a sound she’d never made before. She needed to rise into the air, needed to fly and get back to Aurora. If she just returned home, everything would be all right.

She flapped her wings and waited for the pain to ease as her feet let go of the sand…

But relief didn’t come. She didn’t leave the dunes. She flapped her wings again and waited. Yet nothing happened.

Something was wrong.

She looked over her shoulder to see her wings—but behind her, there was only sand, and where the dunes ended, a dark forest loomed. Where her wings should have been, now only small black knots remained, protruding from her shoulder blades, as if a reminder of everything she’d lost.

Her wings.

Her ability to leave the ground behind, to rise to the level of others much taller, to soar across the sky with the winds. Her ability to escape the confines of the ground and all burdening expectations.

Her freedom.

It was all gone.

She couldn’t fly home, couldn’t get a blanket or a healing brew. She stood on an unknown beach with a water woman watching her and she was stuck there.

Moira sank back onto the sand. The pain intensified, spread through her body so she could barely breathe; a vacuum inside her lungs. Blood rushed in her ears, drowning out the sound of the waves. Tears ran down her cheeks, mingling with the raindrops.

She was marooned down here.

When she looked up, she saw the water woman sitting in front of her, just shy of the water’s edge, the long fishtail bent in an arc with rivulets dripping from it. The frightening tales Moira had heard about the water folk flooded Moira’s mind. There was a smile; no, a smirk, on the woman’s face, because her victim was collapsing.

Grief, shame, pain, and fear mingled within Moira until only darkness remained.

“What do you want?” Moira stood, and pain shot through the soles of her feet, adding to her rage. “Why are you here? I didn’t ask you to sit here and stare at me. Did you do this to me? Did you take them? Why? Why did you take them?”

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The water woman pulled back. “I—”

Moira couldn’t listen.

“Go away!” she roared, forgetting all her princess manners. “I want them back! Don’t sit there and gloat—go away!”

The woman must have been behind this. She must have burned Moira’s wings and shackled her to the ground like an ordinary land creature.

The woman’s expression turned icy. She said something, but Moira heard none of it. She heard each of her own breaths, harsh and raw, and she shook from the simple act of standing, her legs burning in agony. When she glanced down, she found a dark puddle in the wet sand. Her legs and knees were angry red from open burns. The pain was indescribable.

The woman backed to the water’s edge and dove into the ocean without a word.

Moira sank to the ground.

Loneliness hit her as hard as if she had run face first into a wall. Tears blurred the world.

Her mother’s furious eyes haunted her. The memory blended with the flash of white embracing her, so bright nothing else was visible. She rubbed her palms hard against her temples, as if she could erase the memories if she just applied the right amount of pressure. Her head ached, a constant dull throbbing interspersed with sharp pains that cut through her brain, aggressive like swarming insects.

She lay panting on the ground, sand everywhere and seawater rolling in over her feet, the salt like sharp knives in her wounds. Sitting up after a while, she pulled herself away from the water. Shivering, she wished for heat—a small fire or just a warmer hiding place. Anything.

Rain continued to fall. She brushed her messy hair from her face, looking down at the formerly gorgeous dress she’d put on for dinner with the royal family of Chim. It was in ruins. She could easily be mistaken for one of the shipwrecked from the storybooks of her youth, stranded on an unknown island. She turned her gaze to the clouds and, giving in to the lifelong habit, flapped the stumps that should have been her wings. Getting nowhere, she realized that was what she was: stranded.

Dark clouds hid the floating rocks of Aurora, and despite her country being no more than a half-hour flight away, it was an entire world away. An eternity, an impossibility. She had lost everything: her wings, her family, her world.

Sinking back into the sand again, memories from her last night in Aurora replayed before her eyes: Milton as he threw mashed potatoes in the Queen’s hair. Dad’s red eyes. The Duchess and her moronic infatuation with the Chim Prince.

Her mother’s voice echoed through her head, bouncing around inside her skull. Memories flickered past so fast she scarcely registered them.

She heard screaming.

Dimly, she realized it was her own screams.

When everything finally slowed, she lay on her back in the sand again and stared blankly up at the sky. She imagined glimpsing the floating rocks beyond the clouds.

The Queen’s words about being rich and spoiled echoed in her head. She would learn to be something other than that now—if she survived long enough, she thought, bitterness slicing through her like a dull knife.

She had looked down at the ground sometimes, sitting at the edge of the cliff and staring out across the world below. On cloudless days, she had watched the creatures living their lives so far from hers. Sometimes, she would spot a dragon, so big they didn’t go unnoticed. In the cities, people milled about—humans, centaurs, and all the other land-bound folk. Moira used to watch those creatures with fascination and wonder.

Then she had returned to her own world.

Her world of birds and shape-shifting clouds, of waterfalls, and long bridges connecting the floating rocks. Lessons to listen to, books to read—without pleasure, but with homework. The nature lessons were the only ones she truly enjoyed, the ones about the creatures of the world, focusing on the ones in Aurora. And in her free time, siblings who wanted hugs and needed looking-after when their mother was too busy being queen and Dad was unreachable in the alcoholic fog.

The thought of her siblings made her stomach churn. The Queen had been furious—would her wrath strike her siblings instead? With Moira gone, Mari was next in line—would her mother turn on her now, or would Mari stay the favorite?

Her thoughts slowed to a halt.

Mari was next in line.

Moira’s Day of Age.

If Moira failed to show up in Aurora when she turned seventeen in three weeks, she would lose everything. She would have renounced her inheritance and her family. They wouldn’t welcome her back, believing she had turned her back on them. After what she had told the Queen, after the newspapers’ articles about the unwilling princess, why would anyone think she was being kept away against her will?

Nausea swept over her at the thought. Yes, she wanted to escape the responsibility, the boring dinners, and being nice to everyone—but to be excluded from her family, no longer allowed to live with them… it was unthinkable. The Queen would lay all of Moira’s burdens on Mari’s shoulders. Of course, Mari would do a better job as queen, but Moira didn’t want to force her into it. Mari would take the news of being the next monarch with a stoic nod and never protest.

Was her mother right? Was Moira selfish?

She recalled her mirror, and her heartbeat quickened—had she lost it? Moira dug into the pocket of the remains of her party dress. Had she lost it to the bottom of the ocean?

Her fingers closed on the rounded metal, and Moira breathed again. When she pulled out her hand, it lay there, small, round, and flat in her palm, framed by silver metal.

“Show me Mari.”

The mirror shimmered upon Moira’s words, and Mari’s face replaced Moira’s reflection. Moira’s little sister was still at dinner, a smile that reached her eyes with no hint of worry.

The Queen must not even have told Mari that Moira was gone. The guards may have escorted Mari to bed right after dinner, leaving her in the dark.

“Show me my mother.”

The Queen was also back at dinner. Moira wondered how much time had passed since she fell. How long she had been unconscious on the beach with the water woman for company? And why had the woman not killed her when she had the chance?

The Queen spoke to someone—likely the Chim king—but Moira couldn’t see who it was. Unless the Queen mentioned Moira’s name, Moira couldn’t hear what she was saying. There was a crinkle between her eyebrows and something heated in her eyes—she looked upset, as far as the Queen ever showed her feelings—but she was still back at dinner. Was she worried about Moira at all? Did she grieve her daughter who was lost in the storm? It did not look like it.

“Show me Caol.” She needed to think of something else, and her chevolant could always lighten her mood.

The mirror shimmered, and there appeared a magnificent golden-brown horse with beautiful copper wings and fur. She was out flying, far above the storm clouds. Moira wished she could be there, riding on Caol, dashing across the sky. She wished Caol would come down and get her, that she had some way of contacting her.

But no.

Swallowing hard, she closed the clasp of the mirror.

She needed to return, and for that, she must get her wings back. How, she had yet to figure out, but she must. They wouldn’t look for her—the Queen saw her disappear into the storm clouds; she may have even seen her get hit by lightning. Had they searched, they would have found her already. But they hadn’t, so they must have assumed she was dead.

She should be dead.

She wished she were dead.

The water woman had had every chance to kill her but she hadn’t. Now that she was gone and Moira’s fear had receded, she wondered why.

She pulled her hands through the sand, grains falling through her fingers. Millions of small grains, not a single one of them different from the rest. Could she stay on the beach until she became a part of it?

When she came across something hard in the sand, she stopped. At first, Moira thought it was a stone, but as she let her fingers run over it, she realized it was metal. She picked it up, a thin golden chain with a worn charm. It wasn’t hers, far too simple, ugly, and worn—but it reminded her of the jewelry she frequently wore, reminiscent of life in Aurora.

She took the necklace and clasped it around her neck.

A quick look at the sea. The storm had abated.

A new day dawned.