The Language of Thorns Page 16

  “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 to
wer 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.