But Prince Roffe looked only thoughtful. “It was not entirely unpleasant.”
“It wasn’t unpleasant at all,” said Ulla, unsure of why her tongue had turned so sharp. This boy was royalty, his notice might mean a route to becoming a court singer. She should flatter him, indulge him. Instead she continued, “Your ears just didn’t know what to make of it.”
He looked at Ulla then, really looked at her. His family had always possessed extraordinary eyes, blue deeper than any sea. Roffe turned those eyes on Ulla and took in her flat black gaze, the white wreath of lilies sitting at an awkward angle in her black hair. Was it the directness of his stare that made Ulla bold? She was used to everyone but Signy looking away from her, even her mother sometimes.
“Magic doesn’t require beauty,” she said. “Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters. It requires a disruption, something new.”
“Something rare,” added Roffe with a glimmering smile.
“Yes,” she agreed grudgingly.
“And what trouble might you make above the surface?” Roffe asked.
Ulla and Signy went very still, as if bespelled by those simple words, an offer glinting like a lure, and maybe just as perilous. Every summer the royal sons traveled to the shore, to the great city at S?ndermane. Only the most favored sons and daughters of the nobility were permitted to accompany them.
Now it was Ulla who could not quite seem to speak, and it was Signy who answered, a new lilt in her voice, as if she had finally found herself again, and something else besides.
“We might make quite a lot of trouble on shore,” she said, the whole of her shimmering like pearl and amber. “But beyond that, who knows?”
The prince’s smile gleamed.
“Well then,” he said. “We must find out.”
They became a new constellation: Ulla like a black flame, Signy burning red, and golden Roffe, always laughing, a yellow sun. In some ways, Roffe was not so different from them. Being the sixth son, he was barely a prince, and his chief duty was staying out of the way. He wasn’t expected to study hard or to worry overmuch about statecraft or the ways of war. It made him lazy. When he was hungry, people brought him food. When he grew weary, he slept and was watched over by silent guards with necks so thick their sloping shoulders made them look like stingrays. And yet it was hard not to get swept up in his charm. Let’s go to the hot rock caves, he’d say. Let’s hunt urchin. Let’s swim upriver and find a washing girl to frighten. Ulla and Signy went with him because he was a prince and you did not refuse a prince. They went with him because when he smiled, you wondered why you’d thought to deny him anything.
He claimed he had an interest in song, but Ulla soon discovered what Roffe’s tutors had: Though he had a strong voice and a good enough ear, he had all the focus of a gull, changing course at the glimpse of any shiny object. His mind wandered, he grew bored, and even a small failure was treated as a disaster.
But when Ulla chastised Roffe, he’d simply say, “No one expects me to accomplish anything. They leave that to my brothers.”
“And that’s enough for you?”
“Hungry Ulla,” he had taunted. “Why do you work so hard? I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.”
Ulla didn’t know why those words shamed her. Song was all she had and so she clung to it, honed and perfected it, as though if she could only sharpen her skill to a fine enough point, she might carve a true place for herself in the world.
“What would you know about ambition?” she scoffed.
But the prince had only winked. “I know that you should keep it like a secret, not shout it like a curse.”
Maybe the lesson should have stung, but Ulla liked Roffe best when he let her glimpse the cunning beneath his charming mask.
The sildroher who had once sneered at Ulla and Signy continued to sneer, to wonder what Roffe was playing at, to taunt that the girls were mere diversions. But now they were forced to hide their disdain. Roffe’s favor had transformed Ulla and Signy, granting them protection no song ever could. Their classmates’ envy hung around them in poisoned clouds, and Ulla watched Signy drink that poison like it was wine. It made her movements slow, her skin sleek, her hair silky. She bloomed in the hunger of their regard. And then, at long last, Roffe asked Ulla and Signy to be his guests on shore.
“Can you imagine!” Signy cried, seizing Ulla’s hands, spinning her, the water churning around them as they circled faster and faster.
Yes, thought Ulla, the wonders of the shore unspooling in her mind, the chance to be someone else for a time, the silly hope that if she only behaved as a noble, the king might somehow forget how common she was and grant her heart’s wish. I can imagine it all.
Signy’s parents were thrilled. The best of the young nobility would be going to land, and though they might spend their days dallying with humans, they might well take notice of beautiful Signy too. Her mother sold off her few jewels to pay for the making of mortal gowns and velvet slippers for the feet Signy would soon have.
Ulla’s parents refused to let her go. They knew the temptations of the shore. Her mother moaned a song so sad that the kelp withered around their home, and her father raged in great bellows, his tail lashing the water like a whip.
There were strange currents here, Ulla knew, a mystery that made her mother cry when she braided Ulla’s hair and shove her daughter from her lap before the task was finished, a question that made her father brusque and turned his voice hard. She knew it was not possible for her to have a human father, but then who had sired her and made her so strange? Ulla wanted to ask, to drive the past from the murky dark and know at last which whispers were true.
Instead she sat quietly, and when they had done with their wailing and warnings, she said, “You cannot stop me.”
They could not. But they could refuse her gowns and human coin.
“Walk naked amid the men of the shore and see what joy it brings you,” decreed her father.
“Perhaps I will,” Ulla replied with more courage than she felt. Maybe she would find answers onshore, or a human lover, or nothing at all, but she would go.
That night she swam to the wreck of the Djenaller, a ship brought low only months before, a warning to the men of the land to keep from these waters. She pulled scraps of cloth and pearl from the skeletons in its cabins, and over those ragged leavings she sang a song of making. She barely knew what mortal gowns should look like, but she drew seed pearl and lost silk together and made three dresses that pleased her, then sealed them dry in an enchanted trunk.