The princess walked back home with the bald soldier. Benna had tried to enchant him, but he already had a vocation. There was no place for a new school of thought in his limited world view. He was a soldier, and his job was to protect the empire and its royals. No matter how much she whispered tunes across the room and aimed her spells at him, nothing landed. The best way to succeed would be to plan, to attack when the princess was most vulnerable.

  She wasn’t vulnerable at the moment. Instead, she was the strongest she had been in weeks. There was something in the way she walked that had changed. It was more than human, and Benna regretted not succeeding in her first attempt. It would have made things so much easier, caused so much more chaos than just the death of the Nouminese queen.

  In the land of setting suns,

  In the land of pearly-heavy waters,

  Where sirens and sailors shared the sea,

  In the land of magic and men,

  That’s where we’re meant to be.

  When there’s a storm,

  The sailors and sirens fight,

  And when there’s clear skies,

  They come to reunite.

  Her song extended further than she thought, and one of the soldiers guarding the failed assassin picked up on the tune. He started to hum it as he walked into the occupied cell. The young woman quieted on hearing the song.

  Benna saw the princess stop. For a second, Benna hoped. Perhaps the princess was susceptible to the song. It would make things so much easier if she was. But the princess had stopped because she heard silence instead of the prisoner’s ravings from the cell. She sent the soldier back towards the guardhouse, and Benna sang faster.

  It was an easy thing to kill when there was no resistance. The soldier’s hands were around the woman’s throat, and with her last high note, he squeezed. Within seconds, he was done. The young woman was finally free of the madness. Benna leaned back against her chair and watched as the princess ran back to the guardhouse. She shouldn’t have been able to run. Even those who survived poisoning from deep sea fish venom spent the rest of their lives weakened and ill.

  Brenna frowned. Something had gone wrong. She had kept eyes on the princess for months before the poisoning, and more eyes in the weeks afterward. A weakened princess was almost as good as a dead one. A princess confined to her sick bed could not be a bastion of hope, could not travel back to Noumin to take over the throne.

  If everything in her plan had worked as intended, the princess would have died in Daivia. It was not such a big loss for the empire, and the crown prince would find some prettier, wealthier girl without issue. They would search for the criminal and then realize it was only a waste of resources. The child king would die last, leaving behind a power vacuum and letting Noumin collapse into a mess of warring factions, with no one having a clear claim to the throne.

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  Now, all her work looked like she was clearing the way for the princess. The child king was still alive, and even the old man had not died. They had prepared for this for years, and somehow the humans had escaped death. Benna had spent years watching the shores. She saw as the humans gained knowledge and power. She saw their huts become houses and then fortresses. Even in the absence of magic, they had grown formidable.

  She had been so confident that she could topple their empires. After all, she was an enemy they could never have predicted. She had powers they only talked about in their stories. But she had underestimated them. All the time she spent, she thought only humans had lost knowledge over the years, but she hadn’t realized that those who were born of magic had lost it too.

  The first man she sang to willingly dived into the sea for her. The fourth did not. Powers did not affect very person in the same way, and some people were not affected at all. Those who were suggestible did anything for her song. Those who had stronger wills did not even pay heed to it. Some, like the princess and the bald soldier, could not even hear it.

  Benna was watching everything through the eyes of a robin perched on the castle walls. The bird had fallen for her song without the slightest bit of hesitation, handing over its tiny soul as a gift. Now, she flew through the castle, free to watch and listen to all of the goings on. The young crown prince was taken with the girl, although Benna couldn’t see why. There was nothing special in her features or her coloring. There was nothing about her that was alluring or seductive. She was like a girl that had grown but not gone through puberty.

  It was not her business. The princess came out of the guardhouse, the bald soldier holding the other soldier tightly. She should’ve ordered that one to attack the princess as well. It would have been two birds with one stone, but she had been preoccupied with her task of tying up loose threads. The bald soldier held on tight, but Benna had let go of the spell long before. The soldier would recover in time, although she doubted he would ever work in the castle again.

  At least she had the pleasure of knowing the humans were running around confused and clueless, as they should. Her focus was Noumin, not Daivia, but she wasn’t against some incidental mischief among other humans. The Daivian emperor thought himself to be so above the other humans around himself. He was just a man, a tad bit more intelligent than the idiots he surrounded himself with.

  Lovelorn and lost,

  The maid stands at the edge,

  She’s paid the cost.

  The princess turned sharply and looked directly at her, at the little bird Benna was occupying and using. It was impossible. The little bird was a speck of red against the dark sky, and it wasn’t even moving. Benna had started singing, just to keep the soldier asleep, but the princess had heard her song.

  Love is lost and tears fall,

  Drops of fire along her face,

  The maid’s only truth now,

  Is her solitude.

  The princess was listening, but she did not move. Benna paused, seeing if the princess would also succumb to her song, if she would feel the same urge to faint. Seconds passed while Benna sang, and the princess was not affected by the magic of the song. Instead, she turned to the bald soldier. Benna knew what she was saying.

  “Do you hear that?” the princess was asking. She pointed at the bird, and the bald soldier squinted in the darkness. Benna pulled back, removing herself from the bird’s body. The bird, she knew, would soar off into the darkness immediately.

  The princess had heard her, and instead of being apathetic or susceptible to the song, had been able to identify its source. Benna had to change her plans.