“You cannot wear such dresses,” said Signy. “They will draw too much notice.” Ulla shrugged and pretended that she didn’t care. She could not tell Signy that her mother and father had refused to let her accompany the party, nor could she bear to tell her why. “Besides, three gowns will hardly get you through three months on land!”
What could Ulla say? She had her voice. She had magic. It would have to be enough. “Signy,” she began carefully, phrasing a question that was also a warning, “you do know why he wants us there?”
It was fine to talk of dresses and parties, but Signy’s eyes followed Roffe like a ship seeking a watch light on shore. Ulla could not bear to see her friend hurt. The truth was that Roffe had been drawn to them by the power they’d wielded the day they’d raised the garden. He was their friend, she knew that, but he was still the youngest son. Only magic might make him more.
At the end of each summer on land, the sildroher would return to the sea, and all the princes would present their father, the king, with a gift. The gifts were called a gesture, a nothing, but the king had announced that this would be the last year of his reign, and so they all knew better. These gifts were meant to be an expression of each prince’s ingenuity, a show of feeling for his father and the kingdom. The first song of building had been such a gift, and it had raised the royal palace from the ocean bed. That had been nearly five hundred years ago, but it had made a third son a king. A sixth son would need greater magic than that.
Signy touched her forehead to Ulla’s briefly. “I know,” she said. “But Roffe may go looking for one thing and find another. After all, I only wanted to survive a duet and instead I found you.”
Ulla hugged her friend close and they sang together as they finished their packing. She knew she should caution Signy further, tell her that Roffe could not choose her, that though he was the youngest and barely a prince, he was still a prince.
You are worth more than that, she wanted to say. You should not have to earn him. Instead she held her tongue and tried to hum away the worry in her heart. What harm can a little hope do? Ulla told herself.
But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.
They reached the surface before dawn, when the sky was still dark. Ulla had been above before, when she’d first learned storm magic, bobbing in the waves, the stars sparkling in the black sky above her like another great sea, the hulking shape of the coast lying like a monster’s tail across the horizon. She had stayed to watch the sun turn the water pink and gold, gilding the castle on the high cliffs, and then sought shelter below. But now Ulla and the others let the tide take them inland to a small cove, a grim slash of gray sand and black rock.
They were greeted on the shore by the Hedjüt, the fishermen of the north, with whom the sildroher kept an easy alliance. The sea folk held storms at bay for Hedjüt boats, kept their nets full of mussels and crab, and drove whales into their waters. In return, the fishermen kept sildroher secrets, provided them with horses, and fetched the trunks of human clothes ordered by noble sildroher families. It was from the Hedjüt that the sea folk had learned human language and custom, and it was before these silent fishermen that they now thrashed in the waves.
There is no pain like the pain of transformation. A mermaid does not simply shed her skin and find a mortal body beneath. To walk on land is to have your body cleft in two, split into something other. On that beach, Ulla, Signy, Roffe, and the rest of the party drew the sacred sykurn blades, hewn from narwhal tusk and heavy with enchantments. They raised the song of transformation and plunged the knives into their own bodies.
Many of the royal sons and nobles had been aided by court singers in the making of their knives, but not Ulla, who had crooned the notes that would bind power to her blade with infinite care. Still, no matter how well-crafted the knife, the song was the greater challenge. It was the deepest magic, music of rending and healing, the only song all royalty were trained in from birth. It was not complicated but required great will, and Ulla worried that Signy would not have the strength for it. But with eyes locked on Roffe, Signy raised her voice and made the cut. Only then did Ulla add her own voice to the song and drive her blade into her tail.
The terror was worse than the pain, the surety that something had gone wrong and that she would be torn apart from head to fin. Blood spilled around her in torrents, staining the sea-foam pink before the tide brought another wave of salt to clean her wounds. And still she sang on, holding the notes steady, knowing that if she did not, she would never heal completely but simply lie there bleeding, a mess of scales and half-formed limbs.
The pain eased. The last notes were sung. Ulla marveled at the strange curve of her hips, the dark thatch of hair between her legs, the odd, awkward knobs of her knees. And feet! Sad little flippers with their crenellated toes. She could hardly believe such things would support her, let alone propel her forward.
The Hedjüt fishermen averted their eyes and hauled the sildroher from the sand, over the rocks, their new legs wriggling limply. The men were gentle enough, but still Ulla felt panic clawing at her heart. It was too strange—the fresh light of dawn all around her, the still solidity of the land, the air coursing raw through her lungs. She struggled to find calm, afraid she would embarrass herself.
In the fishermen’s shacks, Ulla and the other sildroher dressed themselves, and shod their vulnerable and untried feet in shoes made special for the trip, cushioned with lamb’s wool and spells. They spent the better part of the day learning to walk, wobbling and laughing as they stumbled, grasped, felt the earth beneath them. Some had experience from summers past, but even for those who had never come to land, it was not so hard as it might be for a human child. They were a graceful people, strong from years keeping steady against the tides.
Through all of it, the sildroher took great care with their knives. New cuts would be required in three months’ time, more blood magic to bind their legs and form their tails so they might go home again. The blades could touch nothing of the mortal world before then or they would lose the power to return the sea folk to their true forms, so the sildroher wrapped the sykurn knives in the skin and scales they had shed and stored them safely in their trunks.