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 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 and 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 in 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.
Edited 2023-04-24 00:33 (UTC)
"Magic doesn't require beauty. Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters."
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.”
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 you 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 her against 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.
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, nor walk up to 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 movement, 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.
"After all her sacrifice, she begged for mercy and Signy sought a prince's permission to grant it."
Ulla fell backward, fighting the urge to cry out as the blaze in her gut tore through her, up through her 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 burn 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.
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. 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 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 rush 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.
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.
“Why do you work so hard? I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.”
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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"That was how the royal gardens came to be. Ulla and Signy were its architects."
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 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 and 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 in 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.
"Magic doesn't require beauty. Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters."
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.”
"It cannot be true."
"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 you 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 her against 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."
"The fire demanded air just as humans did."
"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, nor walk up to 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 movement, 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.
"After all her sacrifice, she begged for mercy and Signy sought a prince's permission to grant it."
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.
"First a chorus, then a flood."
"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. 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 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 rush 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.
"That moment tied her to Signy forever."
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.
“Why do you work so hard? I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.”
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.