The Sea Witch Gives Meira the Enchanted Dagger to Kill the Queen

The Sea Witch Gives Meira the Enchanted Dagger to Kill the Queen is a turning point in Myrkur’s attempt to gain control of the seal: an enchanted blade is delivered to Meira with the new queen as its intended target. The gift joins Meira’s desperate hope of regaining her mermaid form to a threat against the royal succession, and exposes how Myrkur has shaped the terms of her bargain around the seal’s guardianship.

Background and Stakes

Galahad had come from the Fortress of Maith to explain the Seven Seals (Edel’s Seven Seals), protections established by the first Curse-Breakers against Curse-Makers from other shores. Each seal has a guardian whose life is bound to it and whose duty is to keep it strong. The prince had not known that the sea seal visible from his window required a guardian, making the seal’s protection an obligation that reached into the royal household as well as the magical world.

Meira’s own bargain had also placed her future in jeopardy. Galahad recognized that she believed she must marry Prince James to regain her speech and live out her life as a human. When King Leonardo died, Mhuirlan’s succession laws made James king; Galahad explained that James was twenty-five and that the law’s transfer of the throne had come four years after the proper age. His new responsibilities, Galahad said, would place the kingdom before his personal feelings. In that altered situation, the queen’s position and Meira’s hope of marrying James became bound up with the fate of her bargain.

Delivery and Disclosure

Myrkur disclosed the delivery while confronting Galahad. She said that she had sought out Meira’s sisters and that they had brought the enchanted blade to Meira as she stood on the lower balcony of Perlkastel. The weapon was intended to kill the new queen. The account establishes the sisters as the immediate messengers, while Myrkur claims responsibility for arranging the gift.

The blade’s purpose was not simply to threaten the queen. Myrkur described it as a means for Meira to recover her body’s original form and return to the sea, where she could live for the remainder of her life. She put Meira’s age at fifty years, exceptionally young beside the roughly three hundred years a mermaid might live. The gift thus presented a route back to Meira’s own realm and a greatly extended life, but attached that possibility to an act that would endanger another person and alter the seal’s protection.

The Sea Witch’s Strategy

Myrkur connected the proposed killing to Galahad’s transfer of the seal. She said that she had anticipated he would entrust it to a woman of elfin blood, who could hold it lawfully once she married a king. After Galahad performed the rite, Myrkur’s plan required Meira to strike the queen through the heart; she claimed that this would restore Meira to the sea and leave the seal available for her to take. The blade therefore functioned as both a promised remedy for Meira and an instrument in Myrkur’s attempt to capture the seal.

Galahad rejected Myrkur’s account of Meira’s choice as predictable or inevitable. He insisted that Meira would not kill the queen. Myrkur answered by claiming intimate knowledge of Meira’s desires and arguing that her longing to live, together with her resentment at losing the man she loved, would drive her to act. These claims are Myrkur’s attempt to define Meira for Galahad; the weapon’s delivery makes the danger concrete, but does not establish that Meira accepted the plan or used the blade.

Competing Accounts of the Bargain

The disclosure also sharpens the disagreement over what Myrkur had done to Meira. Galahad accused her of giving Meira a curse that eliminated any real chance of fulfilling her side of the bargain, so that Meira would die through a choice of her own and Myrkur could take her place as guardian. Myrkur denied imposing a curse, describing her act instead as granting a spell at Meira’s request. The distinction matters: Myrkur presents the dagger as a gift that restores Meira’s life, while Galahad sees it as part of a rigged arrangement designed to turn Meira’s agency against the seal.

The episode leaves the intended killing unresolved in the evidence of the scene. Its decisive revelation is the double purpose of the blade: it offers Meira the return to mermaid life that she longs for, while making the new queen’s death the means by which Myrkur hopes to gain the seal.