The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo (6)

 

YOU WISH TO STRIKE A BARGAIN, and so you come north, until the land ends, and you can go no farther. You stand on the rocky coast and face the water, see the waves break upon two great islands, their coastlines black and jagged. Maybe you pay a local to help you find a boat and a safe place to launch it. You wrap yourself in sealskins to keep the cold and wet away, chew whale fat to keep your mouth moist beneath the hard winter sun. Somehow you cross that long stretch of stone-colored sea and find the strength to scale the angry cliff face, breath tight in your chest, fingers nearly numb in your gloves.

Then, tired and trembling, you traverse the island and find the single crescent of gray sand beach. You make your way to a circle of rocks, to a little tide pool, your wish burning like a sun in your mortal heart. You come as so many have before—lonely, troubled, sick with avarice. A thousand desperate wishes have been spoken on these shores, and in the end they are all the same: Make me someone new.

But before you speak, before you trade some small part of your soul for the hunger writ so clear on your face, there is a story you should know.

Kneeling there, you hear the ice moan. The wind scrapes away at you, a razor on the strop. Even so. Be still and listen. Think of it as part of the bargain.

 

There was a time when the northern seas were neither so black nor so cold, when pines covered these islands and deer grazed in the meadows, when the land could be farmed up to Elling and beyond.

In those days, the sildroher did not cower beneath the waves, afraid of sailors who might spy their smooth limbs and silver tails. They built vast palaces that sprawled along the seabed, sang songs to draw storms and keep their waters safe, and each year, a lucky few carved legs from their tails and went to walk boldly among the men of the shore, to learn their ways and steal their secrets. It was almost a game to them. For three months, they made themselves sick on human food, let their skin freckle and burn beneath the sun. They walked on grass, on cool tile, the slats of boards polished to the slick feel of silk beneath their new toes. They kissed warm human lips.

But look at them now. No better than selkies with their wet, pleading eyes, darting from wave to rock as if waiting to be clubbed. Now their laws are different. They know the land is a place of danger. Yet still they long for a taste of mortal life. This is the problem with making a thing forbidden. It does nothing but build an ache in the heart.

The old city of the sildroher was a rugged outcropping of rock, covered in the dark green sway of seagrass, so no diver or sailor tossed beneath the waves would ever know what wonders lay beneath him. It ran for mile after mile, rising and falling with the ocean floor, and the sea folk darted through its coral caverns and shell-laden hollows in the thousands. The dwelling place of its kings and queens was distinguishable only by its six spires that rose like grasping fingers around a craggy plain. Those bony spires were layered with the scales of trench-dwelling creatures so that, in the daytime hours, they glowed with blue light like a captured moon, and at night their chambers and catacombs gleamed phosphorescent in the heavy dark.

Beneath the rock and cockleshells, hidden below the center of the city, was the nautilus hall, shaped like a great horn curled in on itself and so large you could fit an armada of ships inside its curved walls. It had been enchanted long ago, a gift from a prince to his father before he took the throne himself, and it was the heart of sildroher power. Its base flowed with seawater and the level might be raised or lowered while the rest of the hall remained dry, so that the sea folk could practice their harmonies in both elements—water or air, as the spell required.

Song was not just a frivolity then, something meant to entertain or lure sailors to their doom. The sildroher used it to summon storms and protect their homes, to keep warships and fishing boats from their seas. They used it to make their shelters and tell their histories. They had no word for witch. Magic flowed through all of them, a song no mortal could hear, that only the water folk could reproduce. In some it seemed to rush in and out like the tide, leaving little in its wake. But in others, in girls like Ulla, the current caught on some dark thing in their hearts and eddied there, forming deep pools of power.

Maybe the trouble began with Ulla’s birth and the rumors that surrounded it. Or in her lonely childhood, when she was shunned for her sallow skin and strange eyes. Or maybe it began not with one girl but with two, on the first day Ulla sang with Signy, in the echoing cavern of the concert hall.

They were still just girls, neither yet thirteen, and though they had been educated in the same places, attended the same tidal celebrations and hunts for sturgeon, they were not friends. Ulla knew Signy because of her hair— vibrant red that flashed like a warning and gave her away wherever she went. And of course Signy knew Ulla with her black hair and her gray-tinged skin. Ulla, who had sung a song to scrape barnacles from her nursery when she was just an infant; who, without a single lesson, had hummed a tune to set the reedy skirts of her kelp dolls dancing. Ulla, who wielded more power in a single simple melody than singers twice her age.

But Ulla’s classmates did not care about the surety of her pitch, or the novelty of the songs she composed. These things only made them jealous and caused them to whisper more about her murky parentage, the possibility that her father was not her father at all, that her mother had returned from a summer ashore with some human boy’s child in her belly. It was not supposed to be possible. Humans were lesser beings and could not breed with the sildroher. And yet, the children heard their parents whisper and gossip and so they did the same. They claimed Ulla had been born with legs, that her mother had used blood magic to fashion her a tail, and taken a knife to the skin of Ulla’s throat to give her daughter gills.

Ulla told herself it wasn’t true, that it could not be, that her father’s lineage was clear in the pattern of her silver scales. But she could not deny that she looked like neither of her parents, or that occasionally, when her mother braided Ulla’s hair and set pearl combs above her ears, there was an expression on her face that might have been fear, or worse, disgust.

Ulla sometimes dreamed of a life in distant waters, of finding other sea folk somewhere who would want her, who would not care what she looked like or who had sired her.

But mostly she dreamed of becoming a court singer— venerated, valued. She imagined herself arrayed in gems and cusk bones, a general with a choir as her army, commanding storms and building new cities for the king and queen. Court singers were appointed by the king and nearly always carried noble blood. But that did not stop Ulla from hoping or from clinging to that dream when she was left alone in the nautilus hall as the other students drew into pairings for duets or formed groups for ensembles, when yet again she was forced to sing with the choirmaster, his face soft with pity.

All of that changed the first time she sang with Signy.

On that day, the concert hall had been nearly emptied, the rocks at its base exposed to the dry air as the sea outside flowed on. The students lay upon the smooth stones, faces bored, a sinuous pile of curled tails and pretty cheeks resting on damp forearms. Signy was at the periphery of the group, leaning into their slippery bulk. All morning she had cast Ulla sour glances, her pink conch mouth turned down at the corners, and it was only when the choirmaster began pairing them off for duets that Ulla understood why:

Lis, Signy’s usual partner, had not come to class. Their numbers were even and Signy would be forced to sing with Ulla.

That day the class was practicing simple storm magic with little success. Each pair made their attempt, and some managed to summon a few puffs of cloud or a mist that might generously be called a sprinkle. At one point, a rumble of thunder began, but it was only the growling of young Kettil’s stomach.

When at last it was time for Ulla and Signy to perform, they slid onto the spit of rock that served as a stage, Signy keeping her distance as her classmates tittered at her misfortune.

Ulla thought for a moment of an easy melody, something that would end this humiliation quickly. Then she shoved the thought away. She hated Signy for being so afraid to be paired with her even briefly, hated her classmates for their stifled giggles and sly eyes, but mostly Ulla wished that she could kill the thing inside herself that still longed for their approval. She cast Signy a cold glance and said, “Follow me. If you can.”

Ulla began a spell she’d been practicing on her own, a staccato tune, full of sudden syncopation. She leapt nimbly from note to note, plucking the melody from the secret song she could hear so clearly, happy to leave Signy behind to struggle with her sweet, wobbly voice.

And yet wherever Ulla led the song, the other girl followed with grim determination.

Gray-bellied clouds formed high above them in the ceiling.

Ulla glanced at Signy, and the first rain began to fall.

There are different kinds of magic. Some call for rare herbs or complicated incantations. Some demand blood.

Other magic is more mysterious still, the kind that fits one voice to another, one being to another, when moments before they were as good as strangers.

The song rose louder. Thunder rolled and shook the nautilus hall. The wind howled and tore at the hair of the students on the rocks.

“No lightning!” cried the choirmaster over the din, waving his arms and thumping his massive orange tail.

The song slowed. The other students mewled and thrashed. But Ulla and Signy didn’t care. When the last note had faded, instead of turning to their classmates, hoping for praise, they turned to each other. The song had built a shield around them, the shelter of something shared that belonged to no one else.

The next day Lis returned to class and Ulla steeled herself, prepared to be stuck with the choirmaster once more. But when he told them to pair up for duets, Signy pressed her hand into Ulla’s.

For the briefest moment, Ulla despised Signy, as we can only hate those who rescue us from loneliness. It was unbearable that this girl had such power, and that Ulla hadn’t the will to refuse her kindness. But when Signy looked at Ulla and grinned—shyly, a star emerging at twilight—all of that bitterness dissolved, gone like words drawn on the ocean floor, and Ulla felt nothing but love. That moment tied her to Signy forever.

From then on, that was the way of things—Signy and Ulla together, and poor Lis, forced to sing with the choirmaster, her mouth set in a crimped frown that seemed to pull all her notes a little flat.

 

Trouble roused that day as two girls tangled together like rockweed, but then closed its eyes, pretending to sleep, leaving Ulla and Signy to their games and whispered confidences, letting them murmur their secrets and muddle their dreams as the years passed, waiting for winter and the prince’s birthday party.

Roffe was the youngest of six princes, fathoms away from the throne, and perhaps because he was a threat to no one, his parents and his brothers coddled him. The royal sons had their own tutors, but Roffe’s distaste for scholarship or responsibility of any kind was well known and remarked upon with a kind of fond indulgence among the nobility. On his seventeenth birthday, sildroher from the surrounding waters came to offer gifts, and all who had any sort of talent for song were called to the rocky plain between the palace spires to perform. The royal family sat curled against a milky sea-glass hollow, wedged into the spine of the tallest spire—the king and queen with their crowns of shark teeth, and all the handsome brothers with their pale gold hair, dressed in whalebone armor.

Each singer or ensemble came forward to perform, some old, some young, all famous for the magic they could sing. Hjalmar, the great master who had served as court singer under two kings, brought a cascade of sunlight from the surface to warm the crowd. Sigrid of the Eastern Current sang a huge pile of emeralds that rose all the way to the royal balcony. The twins, Agda and Linnea, called a pod of bowhead whales to block out the sun and then filled the seas around the partygoers with the bright, dreaming bodies of moon jellyfish.

When it was time, at last, for Ulla and Signy to perform, they drifted to the center of the plain, fingers entwined.

Neither of their families was rich, but the girls had arrayed themselves as best they could for the occasion. In their hair they wore wreaths of salt lilies and small pearl combs they’d borrowed from their mothers. They had adorned their bodies with slivers of abalone shell, so that their torsos glittered and their tails flashed like treasure. Ulla looked well enough, still gray, still sullen, but Signy looked like a sun rising, her red hair splayed in a blazing corona. Ulla did not yet know how to name that color. She had never seen flame.

Ulla gazed at the crowd above her, around her. She could feel their curiosity like a questing tentacle, hear her name like a warbling, hateful melody.

Is that the girl? She’s positively gray.

Looks nothing like her mother or her father.

Well, she belongs to someone, unlucky soul.

Signy trembled too. She had chosen Ulla that day in the nautilus hall, drunk on the power they’d created together, and they had built a secret world for themselves where it did not matter that Signy was poor, or that she was pretty but not pretty enough to rise above her station. Here, before the sildroher and the royal family, the shelter of that world seemed very far away.

But Ulla and Signy were not the same frightened girls who had once cast each other bitter glances in class. Hands clasped tight, they lifted their chins.

The song began sweetly. Ulla’s tail twitched, keeping the tempo, and she saw the king and queen nodding their heads in time high above. She knew they were already thinking of the feast to come. They were just polite enough not to show their boredom—unlike their handsome sons.

Though Ulla had composed the spell, it had been Signy’s idea, a daydream she had described to Ulla with giddy, fluttering hands, one they had embellished in lazy hours, warming themselves in the shallows.

Ulla let the song rise, and a series of slender, pearly arches began to form on the craggy plain. The floating crowd murmured its approval, thinking this was all the girls had to offer, two promising students who had, for some reason, been allowed to perform with the masters. The melody moved in simple escalating then descending scales, creating symmetry for the sparkling paths that spread below them, and soon the new paths and colonnades formed the shape of a great flower with six perfect petals that radiated from the plain’s center.

A smattering of applause rose.

The song changed. It was not quite pleasant now, and the princes winced at the dissonance. The crowd looked away, embarrassed, a few of them smirking. Signy gripped Ulla’s fingers so hard their knuckles rubbed together, but Ulla had warned her their audience wouldn’t understand, and instead of stopping, they sang louder. The king cringed. The queen turned narrow blue eyes on the choirmaster. His face was serene. He knew what Ulla intended.

She’d written the song to a new scale, one with a different number of intervals, and though the sound was discord to the others’ ignorant ears, Ulla knew better. She could hear the shape of a different harmony. She and Signy held close to the notes—not letting them resolve to something more commonplace—and as they did, their voices vibrated through the water and over the plain. A riot of color exploded between the paths laid beneath them. Pale pink anemones and bright red sea fans, thick purple stalks of kelp, and florid spines of coral.

The crowd cried out in wonder as the gardens grew. Ulla felt her pulse race, her blood crackle as if lightning flowed through her veins, as if the song she’d built had always existed, and had simply been waiting for her to find it. Storm magic was easy. Even raising buildings or crafting gems was simple enough with the right notes. But to create living things? The song could not just call them into being. It had to teach them to understand their own needs, to take sustenance and survive.

That was how the royal gardens came to be. Ulla and Signy were its architects. Two nothing girls who until that moment might as well have been invisible.

When the performance ended, it was young Prince Roffe who clapped the loudest and dispensed with the formal patterns of the dance that would have kept him swimming in circles for hours before he reached Ulla and Signy, lowly as they were. He cut straight through the crowd, and Ulla watched Signy’s face turn to the prince’s as if caught by an undertow.

Roffe’s eyes went to glittering Signy first. “Tell me how it’s done,” he begged her. “Those creatures and plants, will they live on? Or is it all just show?”

But now that the song was gone, it was as if Signy had forgotten her voice.

The prince tried again. “The plants—”

“They’ll live,” replied Ulla.

“The sound was so ugly.”

“Was it?” Ulla asked, a hard carapace glinting from beneath all her gems. “Or was it just something you hadn’t heard before?”

Signy was horrified. Then, as now, one did not contradict a prince, even if he required it.

But Prince Roffe looked only thoughtful. “It was not entirely unpleasant.”

“It wasn’t unpleasant at all,” said Ulla, unsure of why her tongue had turned so sharp. This boy was royalty, his notice might mean a route to becoming a court singer. She should flatter him, indulge him. Instead she continued, “Your ears just didn’t know what to make of it.”

He looked at Ulla then, really looked at her. His family had always possessed extraordinary eyes, blue deeper than any sea. Roffe turned those eyes on Ulla and took in her flat black gaze, the white wreath of lilies sitting at an awkward angle in her black hair. Was it the directness of his stare that made Ulla bold? She was used to everyone but Signy looking away from her, even her mother sometimes.

“Magic doesn’t require beauty,” she said. “Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters. It requires a disruption, something new.”

“Something rare,” added Roffe with a glimmering smile.

“Yes,” she agreed grudgingly.

“And what trouble might you make above the surface?” Roffe asked.

Ulla and Signy went very still, as if bespelled by those simple words, an offer glinting like a lure, and maybe just as perilous. Every summer the royal sons traveled to the shore, to the great city at Söndermane. Only the most favored sons and daughters of the nobility were permitted to accompany them.

Now it was Ulla who could not quite seem to speak, and it was Signy who answered, a new lilt in her voice, as if she had finally found herself again, and something else besides.

“We might make quite a lot of trouble on shore,” she said, the whole of her shimmering like pearl and amber. “But beyond that, who knows?”

The prince’s smile gleamed.

“Well then,” he said. “We must find out.”

 

They became a new constellation: Ulla like a black flame, Signy burning red, and golden Roffe, always laughing, a yellow sun. In some ways, Roffe was not so different from them. Being the sixth son, he was barely a prince, and his chief duty was staying out of the way. He wasn’t expected to study hard or to worry overmuch about statecraft or the ways of war. It made him lazy. When he was hungry, people brought him food. When he grew weary, he slept and was watched over by silent guards with necks so thick their sloping shoulders made them look like stingrays. And yet it was hard not to get swept up in his charm. Let’s go to the hot rock caves, he’d say. Let’s hunt urchin. Let’s swim upriver and find a washing girl to frighten. Ulla and Signy went with him because he was a prince and you did not refuse a prince. They went with him because when he smiled, you wondered why you’d thought to deny him anything.

He claimed he had an interest in song, but Ulla soon discovered what Roffe’s tutors had: Though he had a strong voice and a good enough ear, he had all the focus of a gull, changing course at the glimpse of any shiny object. His mind wandered, he grew bored, and even a small failure was treated as a disaster.

But when Ulla chastised Roffe, he’d simply say, “No one expects me to accomplish anything. They leave that to my brothers.”

“And that’s enough for you?”

“Hungry Ulla,” he had taunted. “Why do you work so hard? I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.”

Ulla didn’t know why those words shamed her. Song was all she had and so she clung to it, honed and perfected it, as though if she could only sharpen her skill to a fine enough point, she might carve a true place for herself in the world.

“What would you know about ambition?” she scoffed.

But the prince had only winked. “I know that you should keep it like a secret, not shout it like a curse.”

Maybe the lesson should have stung, but Ulla liked Roffe best when he let her glimpse the cunning beneath his charming mask.

The sildroher who had once sneered at Ulla and Signy continued to sneer, to wonder what Roffe was playing at, to taunt that the girls were mere diversions. But now they were forced to hide their disdain. Roffe’s favor had transformed Ulla and Signy, granting them protection no song ever could. Their classmates’ envy hung around them in poisoned clouds, and Ulla watched Signy drink that poison like it was wine. It made her movements slow, her skin sleek, her hair silky. She bloomed in the hunger of their regard. And then, at long last, Roffe asked Ulla and Signy to be his guests on shore.

“Can you imagine!” Signy cried, seizing Ulla’s hands, spinning her, the water churning around them as they circled faster and faster.

Yes, thought Ulla, the wonders of the shore unspooling in her mind, the chance to be someone else for a time, the silly hope that if she only behaved as a noble, the king might somehow forget how common she was and grant her heart’s wish. I can imagine it all.

 

Signy’s parents were thrilled. The best of the young nobility would be going to land, and though they might spend their days dallying with humans, they might well take notice of beautiful Signy too. Her mother sold off her few jewels to pay for the making of mortal gowns and velvet slippers for the feet Signy would soon have.

Ulla’s parents refused to let her go. They knew the temptations of the shore. Her mother moaned a song so sad that the kelp withered around their home, and her father raged in great bellows, his tail lashing the water like a whip.

There were strange currents here, Ulla knew, a mystery that made her mother cry when she braided Ulla’s hair and shove her daughter from her lap before the task was finished, a question that made her father brusque and turned his voice hard. She knew it was not possible for her to have a human father, but then who had sired her and made her so strange? Ulla wanted to ask, to drive the past from the murky dark and know at last which whispers were true.

Instead she sat quietly, and when they had done with their wailing and warnings, she said, “You cannot stop me.”

They could not. But they could refuse her gowns and human coin.

“Walk naked amid the men of the shore and see what joy it brings you,” decreed her father.

“Perhaps I will,” Ulla replied with more courage than she felt. Maybe she would find answers onshore, or a human lover, or nothing at all, but she would go.

That night she swam to the wreck of the Djenaller, a ship brought low only months before, a warning to the men of the land to keep from these waters. She pulled scraps of cloth and pearl from the skeletons in its cabins, and over those ragged leavings she sang a song of making. She barely knew what mortal gowns should look like, but she drew seed pearl and lost silk together and made three dresses that pleased her, then sealed them dry in an enchanted trunk.

“You cannot wear such dresses,” said Signy. “They will draw too much notice.” Ulla shrugged and pretended that she didn’t care. She could not tell Signy that her mother and father had refused to let her accompany the party, nor could she bear to tell her why. “Besides, three gowns will hardly get you through three months on land!”

What could Ulla say? She had her voice. She had magic. It would have to be enough. “Signy,” she began carefully, phrasing a question that was also a warning, “you do know why he wants us there?”

It was fine to talk of dresses and parties, but Signy’s eyes followed Roffe like a ship seeking a watch light on shore. Ulla could not bear to see her friend hurt. The truth was that Roffe had been drawn to them by the power they’d wielded the day they’d raised the garden. He was their friend, she knew that, but he was still the youngest son. Only magic might make him more.

At the end of each summer on land, the sildroher would return to the sea, and all the princes would present their father, the king, with a gift. The gifts were called a gesture, a nothing, but the king had announced that this would be the last year of his reign, and so they all knew better. These gifts were meant to be an expression of each prince’s ingenuity, a show of feeling for his father and the kingdom. The first song of building had been such a gift, and it had raised the royal palace from the ocean bed. That had been nearly five hundred years ago, but it had made a third son a king. A sixth son would need greater magic than that.

Signy touched her forehead to Ulla’s briefly.

“I know,” she said. “But Roffe may go looking for one thing and find another. After all, I only wanted to survive a duet and instead I found you.”

Ulla hugged her friend close and they sang together as they finished their packing. She knew she should caution Signy further, tell her that Roffe could not choose her, that though he was the youngest and barely a prince, he was still a prince.

You are worth more than that, she wanted to say. You should not have to earn him. Instead she held her tongue and tried to hum away the worry in her heart. What harm can a little hope do? Ulla told herself.

But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.

 

They reached the surface before dawn, when the sky was still dark. Ulla had been above before, when she’d first learned storm magic, bobbing in the waves, the stars sparkling in the black sky above her like another great sea, the hulking shape of the coast lying like a monster’s tail across the horizon. She had stayed to watch the sun turn the water pink and gold, gilding the castle on the high cliffs, and then sought shelter below. But now Ulla and the others let the tide take them inland to a small cove, a grim slash of gray sand and black rock.

They were greeted on the shore by the Hedjüt, the fishermen of the north, with whom the sildroher kept an easy alliance. The sea folk held storms at bay for Hedjüt boats, kept their nets full of mussels and crab, and drove whales into their waters. In return, the fishermen kept sildroher secrets, provided them with horses, and fetched the trunks of human clothes ordered by noble sildroher families. It was from the Hedjüt that the sea folk had learned human language and custom, and it was before these silent fishermen that they now thrashed in the waves.

There is no pain like the pain of transformation. A mermaid does not simply shed her skin and find a mortal body beneath. To walk on land is to have your body cleft in two, split into something other. On that beach, Ulla, Signy, Roffe, and the rest of the party drew the sacred sykurn blades, hewn from narwhal tusk and heavy with enchantments. They raised the song of transformation and plunged the knives into their own bodies.

Many of the royal sons and nobles had been aided by court singers in the making of their knives, but not Ulla, who had crooned the notes that would bind power to her blade with infinite care.

Still, no matter how well-crafted the knife, the song was the greater challenge. It was the deepest magic, music of rending and healing, the only song all royalty were trained in from birth. It was not complicated but required great will, and Ulla worried that Signy would not have the strength for it. But with eyes locked on Roffe, Signy raised her voice and made the cut. Only then did Ulla add her own voice to the song and drive her blade into her tail.

The terror was worse than the pain, the surety that something had gone wrong and that she would be torn apart from head to fin. Blood spilled around her in torrents, staining the sea-foam pink before the tide brought another wave of salt to clean her wounds. And still she sang on, holding the notes steady, knowing that if she did not, she would never heal completely but simply lie there bleeding, a mess of scales and half-formed limbs.

The pain eased. The last notes were sung. Ulla marveled at the strange curve of her hips, the dark thatch of hair between her legs, the odd, awkward knobs of her knees. And feet! Sad little flippers with their crenellated toes. She could hardly believe such things would support her, let alone propel her forward.

The Hedjüt fishermen averted their eyes and hauled the sildroher from the sand, over the rocks, their new legs wriggling limply. The men were gentle enough, but still Ulla felt panic clawing at her heart. It was too strange— the fresh light of dawn all around her, the still solidity of the land, the air coursing raw through her lungs. She struggled to find calm, afraid she would embarrass herself.

In the fishermen’s shacks, Ulla and the other sildroher dressed themselves, and shod their vulnerable and untried feet in shoes made special for the trip, cushioned with lamb’s wool and spells. They spent the better part of the day learning to walk, wobbling and laughing as they stumbled, grasped, felt the earth beneath them. Some had experience from summers past, but even for those who had never come to land, it was not so hard as it might be for a human child. They were a graceful people, strong from years keeping steady against the tides.

Through all of it, the sildroher took great care with their knives. New cuts would be required in three months’ time, more blood magic to bind their legs and form their tails so they might go home again. The blades could touch nothing of the mortal world before then or they would lose the power to return the sea folk to their true forms, so the sildroher wrapped the sykurn knives in the skin and scales they had shed and stored them safely in their trunks.

Ulla saw that Signy and Roffe were looking at her strangely, but there was little time to think on it, for the coaches had arrived, wrought in silver and gold, their doors bright with lacquer and emblazoned with the symbol of the sildroher royal family—though that emblem would mean nothing to the men of the shore. The horses, vast beasts of dappled gray with black eyes like seals, stamped their massive hooves as Signy and Ulla gasped and Roffe doubled over with laughter. None of these wonders were new to him.

Soon they were thundering down the great road that ran along the edge of the coast to the city of Söndermane. They had all seen the city from afar, perched on the tip of the white cliffs they called the Severed Moon, the towers of the church where the great iron bells, enchanted by sildroher magic, were said to compel even the worst sinners to prayer. But Ulla could barely think for all the sensations racing through her—the seat beneath her newly formed thighs, the brush of her skirts against her legs, the jouncing of the carriage. With every jolt the sildroher whooped or clutched their sides, wild with the strangeness of it all.

Through the chaos and commerce of the lower town they rattled, over punishing cobblestones, then past the gates to the great palace. How it glittered, white and silver and surrounded by towering pines, as if hewn from pearl and possessed of its own magic. Its spires were so slender it seemed a breath might topple them, and each balcony, railing, and casement was worked in gauzy stonework so light it looked less like masonry and more like airy tongues of frost. Over all of it loomed the legendary Prophetic’s Tower, where scholars from every country came to study and debate their findings with the king’s chief advisers and seers. Ulla found it hard to believe mortal hands could have made such a place.

“Many human nobles spend the warm days here,” said Roffe, nodding toward another cluster of carriages. “They think we’re from an estate far to the south.”

When the footman opened their door, Kalle, the eldest of Roffe’s brothers, was waiting, mouth full of warnings.

“Take your pleasures as you will,” he reminded them as they slowly ascended the wide sweep of the palace steps—still not entirely sure of just how their bodies should align in the act, testing the cold marble through their shoes. “But remember how fragile these creatures are. Spill not their blood. Draw not their notice.”

His gaze lingered upon Ulla too.

Through two high, narrow doors they passed, into a grand entry flanked by curving staircases that met in a broad landing above. Again they climbed, muscles trembling at the unfamiliar work of it, clutching the banister, surprised at the weight of their bodies, the drag of their clothes. Finally, they reached the top of the stairs and entered a long audience chamber, teeming with people.

There were men and women of every country here, swathed in lace and rich silks, jewels at their cuffs, little gilded heels on their shoes. Ulla marveled at how different they were from the Hedjüt with their broad shoulders and bent backs, their thick knuckled hands and weatherravaged faces. These were the soft, perfumed bodies of people who did not work.

Silence fell as the sildroher passed, and Ulla found it hard not to laugh at the thought of Kalle’s warning. There was no way their party could avoid drawing notice. Despite their tentative steps, the sea folk moved as no human could, their lithe bodies drifting in a liquid sway, their limbs graceful as seagrass.

As they’d been instructed, they made their bows and curtsies to the human king, who greeted the royal brothers warmly. And well he should. For though their clothes might be peculiar and their accents strange, each year the sildroher brought such treasures as the human king had never seen. Kalle gestured to his servants, who carried forward three chests of pearls. The first were white and luminous as snow, the next the silvery gray of storm clouds, and the third chest of pearls glittered blacker than a moonless night. There were chests of coin too, jeweled swords, heavy trenchers made of gold. Ulla watched the mortal king smile and preen and pour wine into a silver cup, little realizing that this treasure had come from wrecked ships, gifts from dead men, their bones rotting at the bottom of the sea. What did mortals care? Treasure was treasure.

But as the eyes of the human court were focused on each new gem and bauble, Ulla saw that one young man did not gawk or marvel. He stood behind the king’s throne, beside a bearded man who wore the sash and smoky-blue sapphire of a seer. The boy’s clothes were black, his hair blacker still, and he was looking directly at Ulla, the weight of his stare heavy ballast. Ulla returned his gaze, expecting him to glance away. He did not, and though she knew it was impossible, she had the strange sensation that she’d met him before.

The king clapped his hands. The doors to the feasting hall were thrown open, and the nobles moved forward in order of rank. But as Ulla drifted through the doors of the audience hall to the strange smells of human food beyond, she looked back and saw the boy in black still watching.

They feasted. They danced. They lifted cups of wine to their lips for the first time. They laughed and stomped their feet as the mortals did, in time with fiddle and drum. The humans clustered around the sildroher, blood suffusing their warm cheeks, chests rising as if they couldn’t quite catch their breath, eyes moist and glittering with desire, and by evening’s end, Roffe had one mortal girl on his knee, another tucked close against him.

Ulla could not see the pain in Signy’s face, but she saw the effort her friend took to hide it.

“You knew why he wanted us here,” Ulla reminded her, as gently as she could.

Not for love but for magic, for what they might help Roffe accomplish onshore.

Signy shrugged one gleaming shoulder. She had drawn her hair back from her face with two sapphire combs and changed into a corseted blue gown that curled like a wave over her breasts and left her white shoulders bare. How many times had Ulla seen Signy’s shoulders? Why, now that they were framed by silk, did they seem like something entirely new?

“He’s meant to have his fun,” Signy said with ease that did not ring true.

“You should have some, too,” said Ulla, and took Signy’s hand, drew her back into the dance, let the heat of human bodies, the brief, wild flutter of mortal life surround them.

Later, when the candles burned low, and Ulla toed her pinching slippers from her feet, when she’d bound her damp hair in a braid, marveling at the moisture that beaded at the nape of her neck, when the wine fizzed happily in her blood, and the shadowed corners were full of ardent gasps and low laughter, she leaned back against the wall, shoved another body away, and wondered why she did not feel the pull the others did.

The sildroher went to shore to taste human language, to sample the decadence of their world, but also to sample them. It was a means of easing their longing, controlling their temptations. Always, the sea folk have been drawn to mortals, to their solid bodies and brief lives, the way they strive and toil and quiver with endeavor. So why did Ulla feel no desire? Why could she not be like Signy swaying slowly, clasped in mortal arms, or Roffe plucking kisses from each eager human mouth? Was she doomed to sit at the edge of the world here as she had below the waves?

It was only then that she saw the black-clad boy crossing the room toward her. The shadows seemed to shift as he passed, pulled along by him like a tide. Ulla took in the familiar angles of his face, the slash of his dark brows, and felt fear coil in her stomach. She touched her tongue to her teeth, already imagining the song she would raise to defend herself. Such music would doom her—sildroher magic was not for mortal eyes. But the thought reassured her nonetheless.

“I remember you,” he said when at last he reached her. His eyes were gray agate.

That isn’t possible, she thought to say, but instead asked, “Who are you?”

“The seer’s apprentice.”

“And can he really tell the future?” she asked, her curiosity getting the best of her.

“He can tell the king what he wants to hear, and that’s more important than knowing the future.”

Ulla knew she should say her good nights, put distance between herself and this odd creature, but she’d had too much wine to heed caution. “Why do you say you remember me? And why do you watch me like a blackbacked gull seeking prey?”

He leaned forward slightly, and Ulla could not help drawing back.

“Come to the Prophetic’s Tower tomorrow,” he said, voice cool as glass. “Come, and I’ll tell you all you wish to know.”

“To the library?” She could not read. Only the sildroher royal family could, trained in the ways of diplomacy and treaties.

“I do not expect you to read,” he said as he slipped past her without a sound. “Any more than you expect me to breathe underwater.”

 

Ulla slept badly that night. When the sun had set, the cold had crept into her bones, and she shivered beneath the covers. She could not get warm or purge the scent of sweat and tallow and roasting meat from her nose. She couldn’t get used to the feeling of the bed beneath her, the sense that her heavy body might sink right through the sheets. Then there was the painful pressure that had pushed at her abdomen until at last she remembered the chamber pot and what she was meant to do with it. When at last she dozed, she dreamed of her parents, of her father’s cold eyes and her mother’s sorrowful hands tugging at her hair as if, were she only able to pull hard enough, she might change its color.

Ulla woke early, filled the basin nearly to the brim, and plunged her face into the cold water, letting the silence fill her ears, trying to remember herself. Her few belongings had already been placed in her dressing room, and she quickly checked the contents of her locked trunk, making sure the sykurn blade was safely bundled in the folds of her scales.

She could not quite settle. Her skin smelled sour, wrapped tight and stiff around her frame. Her stomach growled. She ran her hand over the bed’s embroidered coverlet, drew off her slippers, and felt the cool stone floors through the soles of her feet. She plunged her toes into the soft furs that had been laid before a vast hearth. Though the summer air was warm, the palace was all cold rock and high ceilings, and the remnants of a fire smoldered in the grate. She had been too tired to realize it was there the previous night. But now Ulla knelt before it, felt the heat radiating from it against her palms, and had to keep herself from reaching for those glowing embers. She had studied the songs and artifacts. She knew the idea of fire. She’d been taught about it, sung the word. But seeing it—so close and so alive … It was like having a little sun to keep all for herself.

The chamber had tall, pointed windows that looked out over the royal gardens and the forest beyond, and on the table set before them was a gray glass ewer full of what Ulla thought might be roses, heavy-headed things, their smell sweet and strange, their pale, dawn-pink petals slightly darker at the center. She touched her fingers to the place on her neck where her gills had been before the song of transformation, then inhaled deeply, the scent of the flowers filling her nose and lungs and making her dizzy. She plucked a petal and laid it thoughtfully on her tongue. When she chewed, the taste was disappointingly bitter.

She was grateful when a maid arrived bearing a tray of tea and salt fish, followed by servants carrying pails of steaming water. Though Ulla had been told about bathing, she’d never been properly dirty before, and she was shocked at the dust that washed from her body in a gritty cloud, the slip of sweet oils that coated her. But nothing was more startling than the sight of her funny little toes curled over the tub’s edge, the tender bones of her ankles, the smooth incrustations of her claws—nails. The water felt too slick on her skin, flat and saltless as the rivers she had explored with Signy and Roffe on cloudy afternoons.

Once Ulla was clean and dry and patted with powder, the maid helped her into a gown and laced her tight, then vanished out the door with a nervous glance over her shoulder. Only then, in the silence of her room, did Ulla finally see herself in the mirror that hung above her dressing table. Only then did she realize why she’d drawn so many stares from the sildroher—and from the humans as well. Away from the blue depths of the sea, the sallow gray-green tinge of her skin was gone and she glowed burnished bronze as if she had tucked sunlight beneath her tongue. Her hair was black as it had always been, but here in the bright light of the human world, it shone like polished glass. Her eyes were still dark and strange, but dark like a midnight path that might lead somewhere wonderful, strange like the sound of a new language.

She left her room, the palace silent around her, as servants went quietly about their business, careful not to wake the revelers who had stumbled to their beds only hours before. Ulla realized there were mirrors everywhere— as if humans were afraid they might forget what they looked like—and in them she saw her new self reflected, tall and lithe, floating in gray lace like sea foam, the pearls of her bodice gleaming softly, stars through fog.

The apprentice was waiting at the base of the tower stairs.

Without a word, they began to climb, Ulla clinging to the banister as they rose higher, the air thick with dust that glittered in beams of early morning sun.

Books had a scent, she realized, as they passed level after level of libraries and laboratories, shelves lining their round walls, packed with brightly bound volumes in tight rows. The books meant nothing to her. The sildroher had no pen and paper; no parchment survived beneath the waves, and they had no need of it. Their histories and knowledge were held in song.

At each level the apprentice named another subject: history, augury, geography, mathematics, alchemy. Ulla hoped they’d wind all the way to the top of the tower, where she knew they’d find the famous observatory. But instead, when there were still many floors above to discover, the apprentice led her from the spiral stairs to a dimly lit room set with long tables and tall glass cabinets. They were full of odd objects—a golden hoop spinning continuously on its axis, stuffed birds with scarlet feathers and glossy beaks, a harpoon made of what looked like volcanic glass. One entire shelf was taken up by hourglasses of different sizes and filled with varied colors of sand, another contained flats of insects pinned to boards, and still another was crowded with many-legged specimens floating in sealed jars of amber fluid.

Ulla drew in a breath when she glimpsed a sykurn knife, wondering who it had belonged to and what possible reason its owner could have for relinquishing it. But she forced herself to move on, conscious of the apprentice’s observant gaze.

They passed a vast mirror, and Ulla saw their shapes reflected in the gloom. The girl in the glass waved.

Ulla leapt back and the apprentice laughed. His reflection joined him, though the pitch was not quite the same.

“I can hear him,” Ulla said, clutching the edge of the table. It was as if the boy in the glass was simply another boy in another part of the room, as if the frame were an open doorway.

“It’s an illusion, nothing more,” the apprentice said, and his reflection gave a dismissive wave of his hand.

“A powerful one.”

“A useless one. It’s a frivolous object. My master’s predecessor made it while attempting to find a way to place a soul in the mirror so that the old king might live forever once his body was gone. All he managed was this.”

Ulla peered at her reflection, and the girl in the glass smiled. No wonder others shied away from her. There was something sly in the mirror girl’s expression, as if her lips might part and show an extra row of teeth.

“It’s impressive nonetheless,” she managed.

“It’s a waste. The reflection has no soul, no animating spirit. All it can do is echo. The new king brings it down for parties to charm the guests. You’ll see at the ball. They put it in the main hall as a diversion. You can even have a little conversation with yourself.”

Ulla could not resist such a temptation.

“Hello,” she said tentatively.

“Hello,” the mirror girl answered.

“Who are you?”

“Who are you?” There was that smile again. Did Ulla imagine it or had the girl’s inflection changed?

Ulla sang a soft note, not a spell, just a sound, and the girl opened her mouth, joining Ulla in harmony.

Ulla couldn’t help the delighted laugh that sprang from her, but the mirror girl flushed when she saw the apprentice’s bemusement.

“It seems I am as easily entertained as the king’s party guests,” said Ulla.

His lips quirked. “We all love novelty.”

The apprentice’s gaze slid to their reflection, and he squared his shoulders so that he and Ulla stood side by side, much the same height, their hair as black and gleaming as deepwater pearls.

“Look at that,” he said, and his reflection lifted a brow. “We might almost be blood relations.”

He was right, Ulla realized. It was not just the hair, or the slender-reed build that they shared. There was something in the shape of their faces, the sharp cut of their bones. She touched her fingers to her scalp as if she could still feel her mother’s hands tugging, tugging at her braids, hear her doleful song withering their garden and filling Ulla with regret. The apprentice was offering her an answer, an oyster pried open, a jewel upon a plate. She need only reach for it.

She said nothing.

“Why are you here in Söndermane?” he asked, and his reflection remained quiet as if waiting to hear the answer too.

Ulla ran her thumb over the table. Her reflection blinked rapidly, looking far more flustered than she would have liked. “I came for the cool weather,” she said lightly. “You came here to study?”

“No,” said the apprentice. The gray eyes of his reflection narrowed. His voice was like the cold pull of a glacier. “I came here to hunt.”

Beneath the waves, small creatures survived by hiding when a predator was near, and everything in Ulla longed to cower, to tuck herself into some scrap of shadow and escape his gaze. But there was nowhere to hide here on land, and the sildroher did not shrink from humans. She had song and he was only a mortal.

Ulla turned to the apprentice, made herself meet his gaze without flinching. “Then I wish you good fortune,” she said. “And easy prey.”

He smiled, the same sly, dangerous smile she’d seen on her own face in the glass. Ulla had come for answers, but why should she believe this boy knew anything about her? For all she knew, his mysterious words had been nothing but an empty lure. Best to get away quickly. Besides, even in that long ago time, Ulla knew a bad bargain. Maybe this boy held secrets, but whatever knowledge he might possess would not be worth the price. She turned her back on him and forced herself not to run as she began the long, winding journey down the stairs.

 

Despite the apprentice and his threat, for a time Ulla was happy. They all were in their own ways. Roffe took his pleasures; Signy suffered but drowned her longing in a tide of human lovers; and Ulla let herself be carried away too, far from the clutter of ardent hearts, into the wilds of the wood, where the pines made a green cathedral and the air was thick with the smell of sunwarmed sap. She watched for deer and beaver, stained her lips with berries, marked the sun on its path as it set beneath the horizon, then rose again to color the whole world.

At night, she feasted with the others, watched Signy hope, and Roffe charm, and all his golden brothers hold court. The beauty that had revealed itself in Ulla when she came to land earned her gifts of jewels and poetry, posies left outside her door, even a proposal. Nothing could tempt her, and this only strengthened her allure. The steady beat of mortal fascination made her weary.

She would sit for hours as the great hall emptied, listening to the human musicians, studying their fingers on the frets of an oud, giving herself over to the thump of the drum, the pull of the bow, until the last note was played. There were legends of instruments enchanted by sildroher and gifted to human favorites. Finger cymbals that made the dancer more graceful, harps that would play themselves when their strings were wetted with blood. But for Ulla there was only music.

Some nights, when Signy had taken no lover, she would come to Ulla’s room and they would wriggle beneath the covers, feet tangled together, chafing each other’s hands, and laughing themselves warm. Those were the nights when Ulla did not dream of her mother or father, of the apprentice’s teeth, or the cold blue silence of the deep.

But as the days passed, Roffe’s temper changed, and Ulla saw his brothers become watchful and secretive too. They dallied less with mortal girls and spent long hours in the Prophetic’s Tower. Ulla knew they were all searching the pages of human books for mortal magic, for a gift they might bring back to their father—the thing that might change their fortunes forever.

As Roffe’s mood grew darker, Signy became restless and skittish too, endlessly twining her bright hair around her nervous fingers, her teeth worrying her lower lip until it bled in tiny garnet beads.

“You must stop,” Ulla told her beneath the blankets, dabbing the blood away with the sleeve of her nightgown. “Your misery won’t fix this for him. He’ll find his way. There’s still time.”

“When he does, he’ll seek you out.”

“Both of us,” said Ulla.

“But you are the composer,” Signy said, pressing her feverish forehead to Ulla’s. “You are the one he needs.”

“He needs us both for any song of worth.”

The tears came then and Signy’s voice broke. “When he truly understands your power, he will want you for his bride. You will leave me behind.”

Ulla held her close, wishing she could shake Signy from these thoughts. Neither of them were fit to be a princess, no matter how powerful their song. “I will never leave you. I have no wish to be his bride.”

Signy’s laugh was bitter in the dark. “He’s a prince, Ulla. He will have what he wants.”

 

As if Signy’s own small hands had set a secret clock ticking, Roffe approached Ulla the next day. It was late afternoon, and a long, languorous meal of cold fowl and chestnuts with citron had been served on the terrace overlooking the gardens. Chilled bottles of yellow cherry wine had been emptied and now, as the servants cleared the table, humans and sildroher drowsed in leafy alcoves or chased one another through the turns of the hedge maze.

Ulla stood at the terrace’s edge, looking down at the gardens, listening to the bees hum. Her mind had already begun to build a song that might transform a corner of the undersea garden she and Signy had raised for the royal family into a maze like this with a whirling pool at its center. It would be a trick of the eye, of course, a gesture toward human fountains, but she thought fish could be made to swim in a circle if she could simply build a strong enough pattern into the melody.

“I need a gift like Rundstrom’s tiger,” said Roffe, coming up beside her and leaning on his elbows. “A horse. A great lizard if I could find one.”

The tiger was a legendary gift, but it was no simple spell. The creature had to be enchanted to breathe underwater, to endure the cold, and then to obey its master. Rundstrom’s tiger had survived barely a year beneath the sea. Long enough to make a second son a king.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” she murmured, the sun warm on her shoulders. “Or you’ll look no better than a cheap imitation.”

“Kalle and Edvin have already found their gifts. Or so they say. But still I falter. An elixir of strength from the alchemist? A bird that sings beneath the waves?”

Ulla huffed out a breath, a human gesture she’d learned to enjoy. “Why does it matter? Why do you even want to be king?”

“I thought you of all people would understand.”

Hungry Ulla. Maybe she did. A song had made two lonely girls friends. A prince’s favor had made them worthy of notice. What might a crown do for that prince?

“You want to spend your days negotiating with the other sea folk?” she asked. “Your nights in endless ritual?” She bumped her shoulder against his. “Roffe, you can barely be counted upon to rise before noon.”

“That’s what advisers are for.”

“A king cannot simply rely on advisers.”

“A king bows to no one,” Roffe said, his blue eyes trained on something Ulla could not see. “A king chooses his own path. His own wife.”

Ulla shifted uneasily, wishing she could be weightless for just a moment, caught in the saltwater arms of the sea. Was Roffe making the very offer Signy had feared?

“Roffe—” she began.

But as if sensing her discomfort, Roffe continued, “A king chooses his own court. His own singers.”

How easily princes played. How easily they spoke of dreams they had no business offering. But Ulla could not help the yearning she felt as Roffe bent his head as if to whisper endearments.

“I would raise you so high, Ulla. No one would gossip about your birth or your wayward mother ever again.”

Ulla flinched. It was one thing to know what others thought, another to hear it spoken. “They will always gossip.”

Roffe smiled slightly. “Then they will do it far more quietly.”

What might a crown do for a prince? What might a king do for a girl like her?

Signy’s laughter floated up to them from the maze below. She was easy to spot, her hair burning like banked embers, a red banner of war streaming behind her as a mortal boy pursued her down the row. Ulla watched her let the boy catch her, spin her around.

“You want to win the throne and impress your father?” she asked Roffe.

“You know I do.”

Signy tossed back her head and threw her arms wide, her face framed by curls like living flame.

Ulla nodded. “Then bring him fire.”

 

As soon as she said it, Ulla realized her foolishness, but from then on, the prince could think of nothing else. He left off chasing human girls entirely, cloistered himself in the Prophetic’s Tower, barely ate or drank.

“He will drive himself mad,” said Signy as they shivered beneath the covers one night.

“I doubt he has the focus for it.”

“Don’t be unkind.”

“I don’t mean to be,” said Ulla, and she thought that it was true.

“Could the mirror be a gift for the king instead?” Signy asked. Ulla had told her of the strange mirror and the room full of odd objects in the tower.

“He might be amused by it.” For a time.

“Roffe thinks only of fire, day and night. Why did you put such a thought in his head?”

Because he made me dream of things I cannot have, she thought, but said, “He asked and I answered. He should know better than to think it’s possible.” It was one thing to bring a creature of the land beneath the sea and make it live and breathe for a time. That was powerful magic, yes, but not so radically different from the enchantments that allowed the sildroher to walk on land. But to toy with the elements, to make a flame burn when it had no fuel to do so … It would require greater magic than the song that had created the nautilus hall. It could not be done. “He must turn his mind to something else.”

“So I’ve told him,” Signy fretted. “But he will not listen.” She tugged gently at Ulla’s cuff. “Perhaps the king’s seer might help. Or the seer’s apprentice. He’s been friendly to you. I’ve seen it.”

Ulla shivered. The apprentice had left her in peace since that day in the tower. He seemed to have his own work to attend to, but she was aware of him always, sitting silent at table beside his master, walking the grounds, the spilled ink of his black clothes moving from shadow to shadow.

“Talk to him,” insisted Signy. “Please, Ulla.” She took Ulla’s hands in hers. “For me. Won’t you at least speak to him? What harm could it do?”

Quite a lot, Ulla suspected. “Perhaps.”

“Ulla—”

“Perhaps,” she said, and rolled over. She did not want to look at Signy anymore.

But when her friend took up a dreaming song, low and sweet, Ulla could not help but join her. It wove a warm glow around them as it rose and fell.

Ulla did not know which of them fell asleep first, only that she dreamed she stood at the center of the hedge maze wearing a mantle of fire, paralyzed, unable to do anything but burn. When she opened her mouth to cry out, no sound emerged, and in the distance she saw Signy, poised on the edge of the terrace as if to take flight, the flame of her hair hidden by a white bridal veil.

 

The days crept by. Roffe grew more frantic. Signy’s gaze grew more accusatory. Ulla knew only fear was keeping her from the apprentice. She had not mistaken Roffe’s message. If the flame could be mastered and Roffe made king, he would choose Ulla as his court singer. She had to at least try to speak to the apprentice. He might be dangerous, but abandoning even a small chance to make her dream real seemed more dangerous still.

Ulla found him in a reading room at the bottom of the Prophetic’s Tower, packing books into a simple satchel. One was bound in leather, its pages loose and covered in frenzied scrawl that differed from the orderly patterns she’d seen in other books, though it was equally meaningless to her. In one corner she spied what looked like the antlers of a stag. The apprentice snapped the satchel closed.

“You’re leaving?” She could not keep the surprise or relief from her voice as she hovered in the doorway. There was only so much courage she would demand of herself. “I can never stay in any one place too long.”

She wondered why. Had he committed some crime?

“You will miss the ball,” she noted.

A bare smile touched his lips. “I do not care for dancing.”

But Ulla had not risked this visit for the sake of idle conversation. She flexed her toes in her slippers. There was nothing for it but to ask. “I seek … I seek a flame that might burn beneath the sea.”

The apprentice’s gray eyes skewered her like a pin through a moth’s body. “And what possible use could such a thing have?”

“A frivolity,” Ulla said. “Like the mirror. A trifle for a king.”

“Ah,” mused the apprentice, “but which king?”

Ulla said nothing.

The apprentice tightened the clasps on his satchel. “Come,” he said. “I will give you two answers.”

“Two?” she said as she followed him up the spiral stairs.

“One to the question you asked, and one to the question you should have asked.”

“What question is that?” She realized he was leading her back to the room of strange objects.

“Why you are not like the others.”

Ulla felt the cold settle in her bones, the night rushing in, vaster than the sea. Still she followed.

When the apprentice opened the door of the glass cabinet beside the trick mirror, she thought he would reach for the sykurn knife. Instead he held up a bell that she hadn’t even noticed, the size of an apple and tarnished from neglect.

As he lifted it, the clapper struck—a high silvery sound— and Ulla released a cry, clutching at her chest. Her muscles seized. It felt as if a fist had squeezed itself tight around her heart.

“I remember you,” he said, watching her, the same words he’d spoken when he’d approached her at the first night’s feast.

“That can’t be,” she gasped, breathless from the pain, the ache receding only as the sound of the bell faded.

“Do you know why your voice is so strong?” the apprentice asked. “Because you were born on land. Because you took your first breath above the surface and bawled your first infant cry here. Then my mother, our mother, took up the bell your father had given her, the bell he’d placed in her hand when he realized she carried a child. She went down to the shore and knelt at the waters and held the bell beneath the waves. She rang it once, twice, and a few moments later your father emerged in the shallows, his silver tail like a sickle moon behind him, and took you away.”

She shook her head. It cannot be.

“Look into the mirror,” he commanded, “and try to deny it.”

Ulla thought of her mother’s long fingers combing through her hair tentatively, then grudgingly, as if she could not quite bear to touch her. She thought of her father who had raged and warned of the temptations of the shore. It must not be.

“I remember you,” he repeated. “You were born with a tail. Every summer I’ve come here to study and watch the sea folk, wondering if you might return.”

“No,” said Ulla. “No. The sildroher cannot breed with humans. I cannot have a mortal mother.”

He gave a slight shrug. “Not entirely mortal. The people of this country would call her drüsje, witch. They would call me one, too. They play at magic, read the stars, throw bones. But it’s best not to show them real power. Your people know this well.”

Impossible, insisted a shrill, frightened voice inside her. Impossible. But another voice, a voice sly with knowing, whispered, You have never been like the others and you never will be. Her black hair. Her black eyes. The strength of her song.

It cannot be true. But if it was … If it was true, then she and this boy shared a mother. Had Ulla’s father known the girl he’d laid down with was a witch? That there might be a price for his dalliance, one he would be forced to look upon every day? And what of Ulla’s sildroher mother? Had she been able to bear no child of her own? Was that why she had made a cradle for some unnatural thing, fed her, tried to love her? She does love me. That voice again, wheedling now, feeble. She does.

Ulla felt the hurt inside her winnow to a hard point. “And did your witch mother care at all for the child she abandoned to the sea?”

But the apprentice did not look troubled by her harsh words. “She isn’t one for sentiment.”

“Where is she?” Ulla asked. A mother should be here to greet her daughter, to explain herself, to make amends.

“Far to the south, traveling with the Suli. I’ll meet with her before the weather turns. Come with me. Ask her your questions, if you think the answers will bring you comfort.”

Ulla shook her head again, as if such a gesture might erase this knowledge. Her limbs had gone weak. She grasped the lip of the table, tried to stay standing, but it was as if with the ringing of that bell, her legs had forgotten what they were meant to do. Ulla slid to the floor and watched the girl in the glass do the same.

“You claimed you were hunting,” she said, a flimsy kind of protest.

“They say the sea whip roams these waters. I want to see the ice dragon for myself. Knowledge. Magic. A chance to forge the world anew. I came seeking all those things. I came seeking you.” The apprentice knelt beside her. “Come with me,” he said. “You needn’t return with them. You needn’t belong to them.”

Ulla could taste the salt of her tears on her lips. It reminded her of the sea. Was she crying then? What a human thing to do. She could feel herself splitting, dissolving, as if the apprentice’s words had been a spell. It was like the cut of the sykurn knife, being torn apart all over again, knowing that she would never be wholly one thing or another, that the sea would always be strange upon her, that she would always carry the taint of land. Nothing could transform her. Nothing could make her right. If the sildroher ever learned what she was, that the rumors were not just rumors but true, she would be banished, maybe killed.

Unless she was too powerful to abandon. If Roffe became king, if Ulla found a way to give him what he wanted, he could protect her. She could make herself unassailable, indispensable. There was still time.

“The flame,” she said. “Tell me how it’s done.”

He sighed and shook his head, then rose. “You know very well what it requires. You are creating a contradiction. A flame must be made and remade from moment to moment if it is to burn beneath the water.”

Transformation. Creation. This would be no mere illusion. Blood magic,” she whispered.

He nodded. “But the blood of the sea folk will not be enough.”

At this, Ulla’s heart gave a frightened hitch. There were few rules the sildroher were bound by on land. They might trifle with the humans, break their hearts, steal their secrets or their treasures, but they could not take a mortal life. Remember how fragile these creatures are. Spill not their blood. The sea folk had too much power over the people of the shore as it was.

“Human blood?” Even speaking the words felt like a transgression.

“Not just blood.” Her brother bent and whispered the requirements of the spell into the shell of Ulla’s ear.

Ulla shoved him away and scrambled to her feet, stomach roiling, wishing she could unhear the words he’d just uttered.

“Then it cannot be done,” she said. She was lost. Roffe was lost. It was that simple. That final. She brushed the tears from her eyes and smoothed her skirts, wishing they were scales. “The prince will not be happy.”

Her brother laughed. He touched his finger to the silver bell that still sat on the table. “We were not made to please princes.”

You were born on land… . You took your first breath above the surface and bawled your first infant cry here.

And she’d been crying out since. She did not want the apprentice’s knowledge, not of her birth, not of the ways of blood magic. She did not want this tower with its rotting books and pillaged treasures. She turned and fled toward the stairs.

Then the bell tolled, sweet and silver, the sound a hook that lodged in her heart. Her muscles contracted and she felt herself turning as the bell drew her back, just as it had once compelled her father.

Ulla seized the doorjamb, forced her muscles to still, refusing to let her traitorous legs carry her back. She looked over her shoulder. The apprentice wore the faintest smile as he placed the bell back in the cabinet, silencing its terrible ring. Ulla felt her muscles ease, her pain abate. The apprentice closed the glass door.

“I must go,” he said. “I have my own war ahead, a long one. I am not quite mortal either, and I have many lives to live. Consider my offer,” he said quietly. “There is no magic that can make them love you.”

There was, but she could not accomplish it.

Ulla launched herself out of the room and down the stairs. She lost her footing, stumbled forward, grasped the banister, righted herself, and plunged downward once more. She needed the sea. She needed Signy. But Signy was not in her room nor in the gardens.

At last, she found her in the music gallery, head resting on a mortal girl’s shoulder as they listened to a boy play a silver harp. When she saw Ulla, she leapt to her feet.

“What is wrong?” she asked, taking Ulla’s hands and pulling her onto the stone balcony. “What has happened?”

Far below, the waves crashed. The salt breeze lifted Ulla’s hair and she breathed deep.

“Ulla, please,” Signy said, distraught. She tugged Ulla down beside her onto a marble bench. Its base was carved to look like leaping dolphins. “Why these tears?”

But now that she was here, now that Signy’s arm was around her, what could Ulla say? If Signy shrank from her, showed even the slightest sign of revulsion, Ulla knew she couldn’t bear it. She would be undone.

“Signy,” she attempted, eyes on the far blue plain of the ocean. “If the stories … what if the stories about me were true? What if I was not sildroher, but mortal too?” Drüsje. Witch.

Signy expelled a disbelieving laugh. “Don’t be silly, Ulla. No one ever really believed that. They were just children being cruel.”

“Will you not answer?”

“Oh, Ulla,” Signy chided, drawing Ulla’s head onto her lap. “Where is this nonsense coming from? Why this misery?”

“A dream,” she murmured. “A bad dream.”

“Is that all?” Signy began to hum a calming song, one that wove between the stray notes that drifted out to them from the harp.

“Will you not answer?” Ulla whispered again.

Signy ran a gentle hand over the silk of Ulla’s hair. “I wouldn’t care if you were part human or part frog. You would still be my fierce Ulla. You always will be.”

They sat that way a long while, as the harpist played, and Ulla wept, and the wind blew in cold over the unchanging sea.

 

Ulla did not join Signy at the afternoon meal. Instead she walked down to the cliffs, then on into the woods, where the pines caught the breeze off the water and seemed to whisper, hush hush. Her dress was rumpled, her slippers grass-stained, and she was sure of nothing anymore. She could travel with the apprentice—her brother. She could meet her true mother. But it would mean never returning to the sea. Three months they were allowed on shore and no more. The longer the sildroher stayed on land, the greater chance they had of revealing their power or forming attachments that could not be easily broken, so the enchantments binding their tails and gills would last only that long. Perhaps the rules did not apply to Ulla, since she was not quite sildroher, but there was no way to be sure.

And would she ever be truly safe on land? Below the waves, she might be odd or even unwanted, but her gifts at least were understood. The apprentice himself had said that mortals did not like to see real power, and he had little idea of what her song could do. She sensed that, perhaps, it was best that he didn’t know.

Ulla thought of the spell’s requirements and shuddered. She could not give Roffe and Signy what they wanted. No one could.

And yet, when she found Roffe in the gardens and explained what the apprentice had told her, he did not put his face in his hands and admit defeat. Instead he leapt to his feet and paced, back and forth, crushing green leaves beneath his boot soles.

“It could be done.”

Ulla lowered herself to the grass in the shade of the alder tree. “No, it could not.”

“There are prisoners in the palace dungeons, murderers who will face the gallows anyway. We’d be doing no one any harm.”

That was a lie she would not indulge in. “No.”

“You needn’t sully your hands,” Roffe pleaded, going to his knees like a supplicant. “All you need accomplish is the spell.”

As if that was some small thing. “It cannot be, Roffe.”

He placed his hands on her shoulders. “I have been a friend to you, haven’t I, Ulla? Don’t you care for me at all?”

“Enough to keep you from this wickedness.”

“Think of what our lives could be. Think of what you might accomplish. We could build a new palace, a new concert hall. I would make you court singer. You could have your own choir.”

The dream she’d held close to her heart for so long. There was no place for her on land or on sea, but Roffe was offering her the chance to make one. A chance to forge the world anew. With a choir at her command, she would have her own army, and who would dare challenge her then?

The want in her was an animal, scratching at her resolve, fretting its claws and saying, Why not? Why not? Safety, respect, companionship, a chance at greatness. What feats might she accomplish, what new music might she make, what future might she lay claim to—if she would only take the risk, pay the bloody price?

“No,” she said, finding the anchor’s chain within her. She had to keep steady. “I will not make this bargain.”

Roffe’s brow lowered. Weeks in the sun had turned his skin gold, his hair white. He looked like a petulant dandelion, gathering breath to throw a tantrum. “Tell me what you want, Ulla. Tell me and I will give it to you.”

She closed her eyes. She had never felt so weary. “I want to go home, Roffe. I want the quiet and the weight of the water. I want you to give this up and stop worrying Signy sick.”

There was a long silence. When at last Ulla looked at Roffe, he had rocked back on his heels and was watching her, his head cocked slightly to the side.

“I could make Signy my queen,” he said.

In that moment, Ulla wished that she and Signy had chosen a humbler song when they had first performed for Roffe, that they’d never raised the royal gardens, or drawn his notice, or come to this place. Cunning Roffe. She should have known he would not be so easy to refuse. Had he always known the truth of Signy’s heart? Had he enjoyed the steady light of her longing? Cultivated it?

“Do you love her at all?” Ulla asked.

Roffe shrugged and stood, brushing grass from his breeches. The sun behind him set his bright hair aglow.

“I love you both,” he said easily. “But I would break her heart and yours to take my brother’s crown.”

I will not do it, Ulla vowed, watching Roffe stride across the gardens. He cannot make me.

But he was a prince and Ulla was wrong.

 

The beginnings of the spell crept into Ulla’s dreams that night. She could not help it. Even as she’d denied Roffe, she’d started to hear the shape of the music in her head, and though she tried to quell the melody, it found its way to her. She woke up humming, a dull warmth in her chest. The flame would have to be built in her body and be born on her breath. But then what? Could it be transferred into an object?

No.

As she came fully awake, she sat up in her bed and tried to shake the echo of the song and the delicious pull of those questions from her head.

She could not do what Roffe asked. The risk was too great and the price too high.

But at breakfast, Roffe filled Signy’s water glass himself instead of leaving it to a servant. At lunch he peeled the orange on his plate and fed her one of the slices. And when they went down to dinner, he turned away from the human girl on his left and spent the night making Signy howl with laughter.

 

It was a careful campaign he waged. He found ways to make sure he was seated next to Signy at meals. He rode beside her on every hunt. He lavished his golden smiles on her—tentatively at first, as if he was unsure of their reception, though Ulla knew that shyness was a ruse. Roffe watched Signy now as she had once watched him. He let her catch him looking. Each time, her cheeks flushed pink. Each time, Ulla saw new hope flare within her. Bit by bit, moment by moment, in a thousand small gestures, he made Signy believe he was falling in love with her, and Ulla could do nothing but observe.

The night before the great ball, the last of the parties before they would return to the sea, Signy slipped under the covers of Ulla’s bed, glowing with the hope Roffe had kindled inside her.

“When we said good night, he pressed his lips to my wrist,” Signy said, placing her own lips to the blue veins where her pulse beat. “He took my hand and placed it against his heart.”

“Are you sure he can be trusted?” Ulla asked, so gently, so carefully, as if she were trying to hold broken glass.

But Signy recoiled, clutched her kissed hand to her chest like a talisman. “How can you ask that?”

“You are not noble—”

“But that’s the magic of it. He doesn’t care. He’s grown weary of noble girls. Oh, Ulla, it is more than I could have hoped. To think he could want me above all others.”

“Of course he could,” Ulla murmured. Of course.

Signy sighed and flopped back against the pillows, slender hands pressed to her brow, as if she suffered from headache. “It cannot all be real. He cannot possibly mean to make me his wife.” She bounced her dainty heels against the sheets, kicking the way humans did when they were trying not to drown. She had never been more beautiful. Ulla tasted poison in her mouth. “Do you think I might make a passable princess?” Signy asked.

Charming Roffe. More clever than Ulla had ever imagined. If Ulla did as the prince asked, he would give Signy all she wanted, or at least the illusion of it. If Ulla did not, he would break Signy’s heart, and Ulla knew it would destroy her friend. It was one thing for Signy to have loved Roffe from afar, but how deeply had she let herself fall now that he’d given her permission to love him? The dam had broken. There was no calling back the water.

So it was decided.

“You would make a passable princess,” Ulla said. “But a far better queen.”

Signy seized Ulla’s wrists. “You spoke to the apprentice? You’ve found a spell for the flame?”

“A song,” Ulla said. “But it will be dangerous.”

Signy pressed a kiss to her friend’s cheek. “There is nothing you cannot do.”

And nothing I will not do to protect you, Ulla vowed. The bargain is made.

 

Signy was all joy the next day, asking Ulla to sing her a dress for the ball, laughing that she cared for mortal clothes no longer.

Ulla prayed Roffe would make Signy happy. Though he might not make a great king, he would at least be a cunning one. Besides, she would be there at his right hand to make sure he kept to their bargain. Now she knew she was not just sildroher but something else too. She had witch’s blood in her veins. Roffe would make Signy a queen and treat her as such, or Ulla would bring the roof of his palace down on his kingly head.

Signy brought one of her mortal dresses to Ulla’s room. They threw open their trunks and chose the best pearls and beading from their wardrobes and sang them together into a gown of copper fire that made Signy look like a living conflagration. A good reminder for Roffe. When they were done, there was little left for Ulla, so she plucked a clutch of irises from the garden, and from them and a slender scrap of silk she sang a purple gown hemmed in gold.

They ascended the great stairs and passed the landing where the clever mirror had been set to entertain the guests, who were already clowning before it. Their reflections waved to them, then preened in their fine clothes.

Up to the grand ballroom Ulla and Signy climbed, and there they joined the celebration.

Ulla danced with anyone who asked that night. She had not bothered with slippers, and her nimble feet peeked from beneath her skirts as she whirled and leapt on the marble floor. But she took no pleasure from the perspiration on her skin, the rapid keening of the fiddles. For all its wonders, she’d grown weary of the human world and the constant press of mortal desire. She longed for the sea, for the mother she knew, for the barely broken quiet.

She would have been happy to return now, before midnight struck, but there was still work to be done on land—work that would secure all their fortunes.

Ulla saw Roffe disappear from the crowd. She saw his brothers drinking and dancing on this the last night. And then the clock was striking the eleventh hour.

She found Signy in the crowd and pressed her palm to the damp small of her back. “It’s time,” she said.

Hand in hand they left the ball and went to meet Roffe outside Ulla’s chamber.

When Ulla pushed open the door, she could already feel the wrongness that had settled there. The chamber had become familiar to her, dear to her in its own way despite her homesickness. She was used to its smells, stone and wax and the pines far below. But now there was something—someone in her bed.

In the moonlight, she saw the body laid out upon the covers.

“I do not wish to do this here.”

“We’re out of time,” said Roffe.

Ulla drew closer to the bed.

“He’s young,” she said, a sickness growing in her gut. His hands and feet were bound. His chest rose and fell evenly, his mouth hanging open slightly.

“He’s a murderer. Sentenced to hang. In a way, this is a kindness.”

This death would be painless, private. No wait in a prison cell, no walk up the gallows steps or crowd to jeer him. Could that be called a kindness?

“You drugged him?” Signy asked.

“Yes, but he’ll wake eventually, and the hour of return comes on. Hurry.”

Ulla had told him they would need a vessel of pure silver to capture the flame. From a case by the window, Roffe drew a square silver lantern. Into its side, the symbol of his family had been cut—a three-pronged triton. There was little other preparation to be made.

Ulla had worked the spell again and again in her mind, practiced snippets of it separately before she would try to piece together the whole. And if she was honest, she’d had the sound of it with her since she’d first made the suggestion to Roffe in the garden. He had pushed her to this moment, but now that they were here, some shameful part of her thrilled to the challenge.

She knelt to face the hearth and set down the silver lantern. Signy settled beside her, and Ulla lit the white birch branches that she’d lain in the grate. The night was far too hot for a fire, but the flame was required.

“When do I—” said Roffe.

Without turning, Ulla silenced him with a raised hand.

“Watch me,” she said. “Await my signal.” He might be a prince, but tonight he would follow her orders.

She kept her hand in the air, her eyes on the flames, and slowly, she began the melody.

The song built in easy phrases, as if Ulla was stacking a different kind of kindling. The melody was something new, not quite a healing song, not quite a making song. She gestured to Signy to join. The sound of their twined voices was low and uneasy, the striking of flint, the hop and crackle of sparks.

Then the song jumped like fire catching. Ulla could feel it now, a warm glow inside her, a flame she would breathe into the lantern and, in one bright moment, make a future for them all. The price was the boy on the bed. A stranger. Little more than a child. But weren’t they all children really? Ulla kept to the melody, pushed the thoughts from her head. The boy is a murderer, she reminded herself.

Murderer. She kept that word in her head as the song rose higher, as the blaze in the hearth leapt wild and orange, as the discord sharpened and the heat in her belly grew. Murderer, she told herself again, but she did not know if she meant the boy or herself. Sweat broke over her brow. The song filled the room, so loud she worried they might draw someone’s attention, but all were below, dancing and feasting.

The moment came, a high crescendo. Ulla dropped her hand like a flag of surrender. Even above the sound of their voices, she heard a horrible wet thunk, and the boy cried out, woken from his sleep by the blade piercing his chest. She heard muffled moaning and knew Roffe must have a hand on the boy’s mouth as he cut.

Signy’s frightened gaze flicked to the bed. Ulla told herself not to look, but she couldn’t help it. She turned and saw Roffe’s back, hunched over his victim as he did his work—his shoulders too broad, his gray cloak like the pelt of a beast.

Ulla turned her eyes back to the fire and sang, feeling tears slide down her cheeks, knowing they had crossed a border into lands from which they might never return. But there was nowhere else to look when Roffe knelt beside her and slipped two fresh, pink human lungs into the pyre.

This was what the spell required. Breath. The fire demanded air just as humans did. It would need to breathe for itself beneath the sea.

The flames closed over the wet tissue, fizzing and spitting. Ulla felt the magical heat within her bank, and for a moment she thought both fires would simply go out. Then, with a loud snap, the flames roared up in the grate as if they had a voice themselves.

Ulla fell backward, fighting the urge to cry out as the blaze in her gut tore through her, up through her own lungs, her throat. Something was horribly wrong. Or was this the pain that creation required? Her eyes rolled back in her head and Signy reached for her, then cringed backward, as flames seemed to flicker beneath Ulla’s skin, traveling her arms, lighting her up like a paper lantern. Ulla smelled burning and knew her hair had caught fire.

She released a wail and it became a part of the song as flames poured from her throat and into the silver vessel. Signy was weeping. Roffe had his bloody hands clenched before him.

Ulla could not stop screaming. She could not stop the song. She seized Signy’s arm, pleading, and Signy reached forward to slam the silver lantern shut.

Silence. Ulla crumpled to the floor.

She heard Signy cry her name and tried to answer, but the pain was too great. Her lips were blistered; her throat still felt as if it was burning. Her whole body shook and convulsed.

Roffe held the silver lantern in his hands, the shape of his family’s triton glowing with golden light.

“Roffe,” said Signy. “Go to the ballroom. Get the others. We need to sing healing. My voice won’t be enough.”

But the prince wasn’t listening. He walked to the dressing table and upended the basin, dousing the lantern. The flame did not even sputter.

Ulla moaned.

“Roffe!” Signy snapped, and some part of Ulla’s heart returned at the anger in her friend’s voice. “We need help.”

The clock began to chime the half hour. Roffe seemed to return to himself.

“It’s time to go home,” he said.

“She’s too weak,” said Signy. “She won’t be able to sing the transformation.”

“That’s true,” Roffe said slowly, and the regret in his words set Ulla alive with fear.

“Roffe.” Ulla gasped his name. Her voice was a shattered thing, barely a rasp. What have I done? she thought wildly. What have I done?

“I’m sorry,” he said. Are there any words so cursed? “The lantern must be my gift only.”

Despite the pain, Ulla wanted to laugh. “No one … will believe … you worked … that song.”

“Signy will be my witness.”

“I will not,” Signy spat.

“We will tell them you and I forged the song together. That the lantern is a sign of our love. That I am a worthy king and you are a worthy queen.”

“You took a human life …” Ulla gasped. “You spilled human blood.”

“Did I?” Roffe said, and from his cloak he drew Ulla’s sykurn knife. He’d wiped it mostly clean, but the wet remnants of blood still gleamed on its blade. “You took a boy’s life, an innocent page who caught you working blood magic.”

Innocent. Ulla shook her head, and fresh pain flared in her throat. “No,” she moaned. “No.”

“You said he was a criminal,” cried Signy. “A murderer!”

“You knew,” said Roffe. “Both of you knew. You were as eager as I, as hungry. You just wouldn’t look your ambition in the eye.”

Signy shook her head. But Ulla wondered. Had either of them bothered to look closely at the boy’s soft hands? At his clean face? Or had they simply wanted this enough that they’d been willing to leave the ugly work to Roffe?

Roffe dropped the blade at Ulla’s feet. “She cannot return now. The blade is sacred. It can touch nothing human or be corrupted. It’s useless.”

Signy was sobbing. “You cannot do this. You cannot do this, Roffe.”

He knelt, and the flame of the lantern caught the gold of his hair, the deep ocean of his eyes. “Signy, it is done.”

That was when Ulla understood. It was Signy who had asked her to unlock her chest to make her a gown.

“Why?” she rasped. “Why?”

“He said he needed the knife to secure your loyalty.” Signy wept. “In case you changed your mind about the spell.”

Oh, Signy, Ulla thought as her eyes filled with fresh tears. My loyalty never wavered, and it was never his.

“It is done,” Roffe repeated. “Stay with Ulla and live in exile, pay the price with her when the humans discover her crime. Or…”—he shrugged—“return to the sea as my bride. It is cruel. I know it is. But kings must sometimes be cruel. And to be my queen you must be cruel now too.”

“Signy,” Ulla managed. Her name hurt more to speak than any other word. “Please.”

Signy’s tears fell harder, splashed over the knife. She touched her fingers to its ruined blade.

“Ulla,” she sobbed. “I cannot lose everything.”

“Not everything. Not everything.”

Signy shook her head. “I am not strong enough for this fight.”

“You are,” Ulla rasped past the tortured flesh of her throat. “We are. Together. As we have always been.”

Signy brushed her cool knuckles over Ulla’s cheek. “Ulla. My fierce Ulla. You know I was never strong.”

My fierce Ulla. She saw then what she had been to Signy all along—a shelter, a defense. Ulla had been the only rock to cling to, so Signy had held on, but now the seas had calmed and she was slipping away to seek other shelter. She was letting go.

Ulla found that she was tired. The pain had devoured her strength. Rest, said a voice inside her. Her mother? Or the witch mother she’d never known? The mother who had left her to the mercy of the waves. If Signy could leave her behind so easily too, maybe it was best not to try to hold on.

Ulla had made a vow to protect Signy, and she’d done it. That had to mean something. She released her friend’s hand, a final kindness. After all, she was the strong one.

“Leave the knife,” Ulla croaked in her broken speech, and prayed that death would close over her like water.

But Signy did not pick up the knife. Instead she turned her eyes to Roffe—and in the end, this was the thing that doomed all of Söndermane. Ulla could forgive betrayal, another abandonment, even her own death. But not this moment, when after all her sacrifice, she begged for mercy and Signy sought a prince’s permission to grant it.

Roffe nodded. “Let it be our gift to her.”

Only then did Signy place the blade in Ulla’s hand.

Roffe took up the lantern, and without another word, they were gone.

Ulla lay in the dark, the sykurn knife clutched in her fingers. She felt the stillness of the room, the cold grate, the chill presence of the hollowed corpse on the bed. She could end her life now. Simply, cleanly. No one would ever know what had happened. She would be buried in the ground or burned. Whatever they did to criminals here. But bright behind her eyelids she saw Signy’s face as she turned to Roffe, seeking the approval of her prince. She could not stop seeing it. Ulla felt hate bloom in her heart.

What gave her strength then? We cannot know for sure. That contrary thing inside her? The hard stone of rage that all lonely girls possess?

She dragged herself across the room, heard the clock chime. She had only a quarter hour. Her voice was gone. Her knife was worthless, corrupted by mortal blood. And yet witch’s blood ran in Ulla’s veins, so why had the blade worked upon her in the first place? Because she had fashioned it? Because she had sung its enchantments? Perhaps, like her, it had been corrupted from the start. That meant the knife might work again. It didn’t matter. She had no voice. She could make the cuts, but without song they would only bleed her.

Ulla hauled herself up by the edge of her dressing table and saw the horror she had become. Her lips were blistered, her hair burned away in places, showing pink scalp. Still, she saw the shadow of the girl who had looked into this mirror and seen beauty looking back at her. I was not made to please princes.

But for what then? Ulla thought she knew. She might as well have taken her knife to that boy’s heart herself. Roffe had made her a murderer. Maybe she would prove to have a talent for the act.

Ulla smiled and her burnt lips split; blood trickled down her chin. She slammed her hand into the mirror, felt the glass cut through her knuckles as it shattered. She took the largest piece, and then, with shaking steps, clinging to the walls, she made her way down the stairs, down, down to the entry hall.

It was empty now. The guests were all in the ballroom. She could hear the stomping of their feet, the distant swell of music. Far below, at the bottom of the steps, two guards leaned against the vast door frame, their backs to Ulla, looking out onto the torch-lined drive.

She went to her knees, half crawling, and made her way to the clever mirror. Here in the gleaming light of the entry, she could see the damage she had done to herself more clearly. Ulla raised her hand to touch the glass, and the girl in the mirror did the same, tears filling her bloodshot eyes.

“Oh,” Ulla said on a soft sob. “Oh no.”

“No, no,” echoed the mirror girl mournfully, her voice faint and fractured.

Ulla gathered her strength. Though it pained her to do it, to force vibration past the raw flesh of her throat, to hear the weak sound that emerged, she made herself part her lips and form a note. It wobbled but held, and the girl in the mirror sang too. Their voices were still weak, but stronger together. Ulla reached into the pocket of her skirts and pulled out the shard of glass from her dressing table.

She held it up to the mirror, finding the right angle, finding herself in the reflection. There. The two mirrors reflected each other, infinite ruined girls in infinite empty hallways—and infinite voices that grew, one on top of the other, the note building and building. First a chorus, then a flood.

As the song grew, Ulla saw the guards turn, saw the horror in their eyes. She didn’t care. She kept the mirror aloft and drew the sykurn knife with her other hand, lifted her fine iris skirts, and slashed across her thighs. The wound was different this time. She could tell. The knife was different and so was she.

The guards rushed toward Ulla, but now all she knew was pain, and without hesitation, she changed the song, drawing her chorus of ruined girls with her, shifting from transformation to the music of the storm, her talent nimble as ever, even if her throat bled around the notes she demanded. Thunder cracked, shaking the palace walls, hard enough to drive the guards down the stairs.

Storm magic. The first she had learned. The first they all learned, the easiest, though impossible to accomplish on your own. But Ulla was not alone; all these broken, betrayed girls were with her, and what a terrible sound they made.

Onward Ulla drove the song, weaving the two melodies together, sea and sky, water and blood. With a crack of lightning, the transformation took hold. Her hair rippled from her scalp, and in the mirror she saw it billowed and curled like dark smoke. Her skin was hard stone and bloomed with lichen, and when she looked down, she saw her thighs binding. But the scales that emerged were not silver, no, they were not scales at all. Her new tail was black and slick and muscular as an eel.

On and on the voices rose, and now Ulla thought she could hear the sea moaning, calling out to her. Home.

A great wave slammed against the side of the cliff with a tremendous boom. Another and another. The sea climbed with Ulla’s song. Water roared over the cliff and rushed into the palace, smashing the windows, pouring over the stairs. Ulla heard people screaming, a thousand mortal cries. The water reached her, embraced her, tore the glass from her hand. But it didn’t matter. This was blood magic, and the song had a life of its own.

 

The tempest that raged that night broke the land from the northernmost tip of Fjerda and formed the islands that the men of the land now call Kenst Hjerte, the broken heart. The sands turned black and the waters froze and never warmed again, so now all that exist there are whaling villages and the few brave souls who can bear such empty places. Söndermane, its treasures and its people, the Prophetic’s Tower and all the learning it contained, vanished into the sea.

The storm tore the palace of the sildroher kings from the seabed and wrecked the gardens Ulla and Signy had once built, leaving nothing behind. When at last the waters calmed and the sea folk found one another once again, Signy and Roffe and their silver lantern had survived it all. After an appropriate time had passed, he became king.

As it happens, Roffe did stay loyal to Signy. Perhaps he loved her all along. Perhaps she knew too many of his secrets. They were married and crowned beneath the ivory arches of a new palace, far smaller and humbler than before. Signy sang her vows, binding herself to Roffe forever. But after that, the new queen never sang again, not even a lullaby. The sea folk grew more cautious, more wary of disaster, more frightened of the shore, and in time, much of their music faded too. They lived long lives and kept few memories. They forgot old grievances.

Not so Ulla. She held each sorrow like a chafing grain of sand and grew her grudges like pearls. When Signy gave birth to daughters—six of them, the youngest born with her mother’s bright-ember hair—Ulla rejoiced. She knew they would be cursed as their father to long for what they shouldn’t, and cursed as their mother to give up what they most held dear in the hope for something more. She knew that they would find their way to her in time.

The storm had brought Ulla to the cold shelter of the northern islands, to the darkened caves and flat black pools where she remains to this day, waiting for the lonely, the ambitious, the clever, the frail, for all those willing to strike a bargain.

She never waits for long.