“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.