“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.