Read Chapter 29: The Coffin of the Sea

The sea had a voice beneath the church, and it was calling her name.

Maëlle stood ankle-deep in the rising water that had flooded the stone floor, the cracked reliquary stone cold against her palm. The pulse that had answered her touch now beat in the water itself, a slow, deliberate thrum that synchronized with the ache in her chest. Her stone heart—the one that beat only when she thought of Tanguy—pounded now without her summoning him.

*Yann.*

The thought came not as her own but as a pressure against her ribs, a tidal push toward the altar. The water had begun to recede in a strange, unnatural pattern, carving a channel through the flooded floor that led not to the door but *down*—a spiral of stone steps revealed where none had been before, slick with seaweed and barnacles.

Maëlle descended.

The steps twisted deeper than any church basement should reach, past walls that changed from cut stone to living rock to something that looked disturbingly like bone. The water level rose to her hips, then her chest. The music box lullaby played in her skull, over and over, the return-song lyrics rearranging themselves into a navigational map. She understood it now. Every line was a landmark. Every verse, a turn.

She emerged into an underwater cathedral.

The wreck lay in a shaft of pale green light that filtered from somewhere far above, its hull encrusted with centuries of salt and shell. It was a ship she recognized from Pierre's ledgers, from her mother's scratched testimony, from the vision the stone had shown her. The vessel Tanguy had sailed to the land of the dead. The ship that had carried his bride back.

Yann floated just inside the broken hull, suspended in the still water like a saint in amber. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. Something moved in his throat.

Maëlle swam to him, her breath burning. She grabbed his collar and pulled.

The water resisted. It pressed back against her like a living thing, and the ship's timber groaned. She heard it then—a sound that came not from Yann's mouth but from deep inside the wreck, rising up through the ribs of the ship like the complaint of a dying whale. A cry. Half-drowned. Half-human.

It was her mother's voice.

*Maëlle.*

She lost her grip. Yann's body drifted away from her, and the water flooded into her lungs, and she was sinking, sinking, the light above her shrinking to a coin. The cry grew louder, and she understood it was not her mother calling her to save her.

Her mother was calling her to *leave*.

And the understanding shattered something inside Maëlle's chest. Her stone heart cracked—she felt it, a fissure running from its center to its edge—and the pain was so sharp and so bright that she screamed into the water.

The cry propelled her upward.

She broke the surface gasping, her hand clenched around Yann's wrist. She had him. She had him somehow, her grip locked like rigor mortis, and she dragged his weight through the rising water toward the spiral stairs that had begun to dissolve behind her. The walls were weeping. The reliquary stone was calling, its pulse frantic now, desperate.

She climbed.

She fell through the church door with Yann's body on top of her, both of them drenched and shaking, salt coating her lips. The villagers who had gathered in the square stared. Someone screamed. Someone crossed themselves.

Maëlle rolled Yann onto his back and pressed her hands to his chest.

*Breathe.*

Water poured from his mouth. His skin was cold, his lips blue. She pumped and pumped, and the crack in her stone heart widened with every compression, and she thought of Tanguy—his face, his name, the weight of him against her on the isle—and her heart beat faster, harder, as if it might burst.

Yann jerked.

He coughed. Water fountained from his throat. She rolled him onto his side and he vomited seawater and something darker, something that moved—no. She would not look at it. She would not.

His eyes opened.

But they were not his eyes.

They were the stranger's eyes. Tanguy's eyes. Grey as the winter sea, and she knew—she knew before he spoke—that the ritual had worked, at least in one terrible direction.

"Maëlle." His voice was Yann's voice, roughened by brine. "I remember. Everything."

She should have been relieved. She should have wept. But her hands were still on Yann's chest, and beneath them she could feel two heartbeats fighting each other in the same cage of bone.

"Where is Yann?" she asked.

Tanguy's borrowed lips twisted. "He is here. He is *here*, Maëlle, and I cannot get out." He clawed at his own chest, digging his fingers into Yann's skin. "The ritual. He meant to bind me to his body forever. He only succeeded in splitting us both."

The reliquary stone pulsed behind her, a frantic, drowning rhythm.

"Help him," Tanguy said, and his voice broke. "Help him, Maëlle. He is drowning inside my memory. He is living my death. The voyage to the land of the dead—he is reliving it, over and over, and I cannot stop it."

Maëlle looked down at Yann's face, at Tanguy's terror moving behind it. The man she had resented. The man she had thought she loved. The man who had tried to steal another soul to keep her.

And she saw her mother, walking into the sea.

The cry rose in her own chest then, torn from the crack in her stone heart. It was not her mother's voice. It was her own.