She dragged herself across the room, heard the clock chime. She had only a quarter hour. Her voice was gone. Her knife was worthless, corrupted by mortal blood. And yet witch’s blood ran in Ulla’s veins, so why had the blade worked upon her in the first place? Because she had fashioned it? Because she had sung its enchantments? Perhaps, like her, it had been corrupted from the start. That meant the knife might work again. It didn’t matter. She had no voice. She could make the cuts, but without song they would only bleed her.
Ulla hauled herself up by the edge of her dressing table and saw the horror she had become. Her lips were blistered, her hair burned away in places, showing pink scalp. Still, she saw the shadow of the girl who had looked into this mirror and seen beauty looking back at her. I was not made to please princes.
But for what then? Ulla thought she knew. She might as well have taken her knife to that boy’s heart herself. Roffe had made her a murderer. Maybe she would prove to have a talent for the act.
Ulla smiled and her burnt lips split; blood trickled down her chin. She slammed her hand into the mirror, felt the glass cut through her knuckles as it shattered. She took the largest piece, and then, with shaking steps, clinging to the walls, she made her way down the stairs, down, down to the entry hall.
It was empty now. The guests were all in the ballroom. She could hear the stomping of their feet, the distant swell of music. Far below, at the bottom of the steps, two guards leaned against the vast door frame, their backs to Ulla, looking out onto the torch-lined drive.
She went to her knees, half crawling, and made her way to the clever mirror. Here in the gleaming light of the entry, she could see the damage she had done to herself more clearly. Ulla raised her hand to touch the glass, and the girl in the mirror did the same, tears filling her bloodshot eyes.
“Oh,” Ulla said on a soft sob. “Oh no.”
“No, no,” echoed the mirror girl mournfully, her voice faint and fractured.
Ulla gathered her strength. Though it pained her to do it, to force vibration past the raw flesh of her throat, to hear the weak sound that emerged, she made herself part her lips and form a note. It wobbled but held, and the girl in the mirror sang too. Their voices were still weak, but stronger together. Ulla reached into the pocket of her skirts and pulled out the shard of glass from her dressing table.
She held it up to the mirror, finding the right angle, finding herself in the reflection. There. The two mirrors reflected each other, infinite ruined girls in infinite empty hallways—and infinite voices that grew, one on top of the other, the note building and building. First a chorus, then a flood.
As the song grew, Ulla saw the guards turn, saw the horror in their eyes. She didn’t care. She kept the mirror aloft and drew the sykurn knife with her other hand, lifted her fine iris skirts, and slashed across her thighs. The wound was different this time. She could tell. The knife was different and so was she.
The guards rushed toward Ulla, but now all she knew was pain, and without hesitation, she changed the song, drawing her chorus of ruined girls with her, shifting from transformation to the music of the storm, her talent nimble as ever, even if her throat bled around the notes she demanded. Thunder cracked, shaking the palace walls, hard enough to drive the guards down the stairs.
Storm magic. The first she had learned. The first they all learned, the easiest, though impossible to accomplish on your own. But Ulla was not alone; all these broken, betrayed girls were with her, and what a terrible sound they made.
Onward Ulla drove the song, weaving the two melodies together, sea and sky, water and blood. With a crack of lightning, the transformation took hold. Her hair rippled from her scalp, and in the mirror she saw it billowed and curled like dark smoke. Her skin was hard stone and bloomed with lichen, and when she looked down, she saw her thighs binding. But the scales that emerged were not silver, no, they were not scales at all. Her new tail was black and slick and muscular as an eel.
On and on the voices rose, and now Ulla thought she could hear the sea moaning, calling out to her. Home.
A great wave slammed against the side of the cliff with a tremendous boom. Another and another. The sea climbed with Ulla’s song. Water roared over the cliff and rushed into the palace, smashing the windows, pouring over the stairs. Ulla heard people screaming, a thousand mortal cries. The water reached her, embraced her, tore the glass from her hand. But it didn’t matter. This was blood magic, and the song had a life of its own.
The tempest that raged that night broke the land from the northernmost tip of Fjerda and formed the islands that the men of the land now call Kenst Hjerte, the broken heart. The sands turned black and the waters froze and never warmed again, so now all that exist there are whaling villages and the few brave souls who can bear such empty places. S?ndermane, its treasures and its people, the Prophetic’s Tower and all the learning it contained, vanished into the sea.
The storm tore the palace of the sildroher kings from the seabed and wrecked the gardens Ulla and Signy had once built, leaving nothing behind. When at last the waters calmed and the sea folk found one another once again, Signy and Roffe and their silver lantern had survived it all. After an appropriate time had passed, he became king.
As it happens, Roffe did stay loyal to Signy. Perhaps he loved her all along. Perhaps she knew too many of his secrets. They were married and crowned beneath the ivory arches of a new palace, far smaller and humbler than before. Signy sang her vows, binding herself to Roffe forever. But after that, the new queen never sang again, not even a lullaby. The sea folk grew more cautious, more wary of disaster, more frightened of the shore, and in time, much of their music faded too. They lived long lives and kept few memories. They forgot old grievances.
Not so Ulla. She held each sorrow like a chafing grain of sand and grew her grudges like pearls. When Signy gave birth to daughters—six of them, the youngest born with her mother’s bright-ember hair—Ulla rejoiced. She knew they would be cursed as their father to long for what they shouldn’t, and cursed as their mother to give up what they most held dear in the hope for something more. She knew that they would find their way to her in time.
The storm had brought Ulla to the cold shelter of the northern islands, to the darkened caves and flat black pools where she remains to this day, waiting for the lonely, the ambitious, the clever, the frail, for all those willing to strike a bargain.
She never waits for long.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS