Don’t leave, breathed the sea-song over my shivering skin. You could peel off your skin and wring the blood from your veins, but you would still hear this call. Don’t run away from yourself.
I didn’t even know who myself was. Not truly—not alone, untrammeled by other needs. The princess who tried so hard to be good, who was good enough to love but not to leave alone. A sea-morgen’s daughter, wearing her mother’s face to console her abandoned father. Frightened, and hiding it badly; needing, and knowing better than to ask. I lay awake in the dark and tried to see whose heart beat so fretfully in my chest.
Far below me, the sea pounded against the granite wall. Let me in. I can help.
Only my eyes moved, rolling until I could see him sleeping next to me. The key to the causeway gate gleamed around his neck in the faint scar of moonlight.
My city, the only thing I’d ever asked for. All the artists and craftsmen and workers who’d come, trusting me enough to put their lives in the ocean’s hands, who’d closed their eyes and ears every time he came to visit. The home I’d tried to build. So much to weigh in the balance, against nearly thirty years of what he’d taught me to call love.
They knew. Those raised eyebrows and knowing glances when I asked them to teach me their skills; of course they knew. He had never made it a secret, either here or in his capital. And no one here had spoken a word to make it real and terrible. Not even the ones I’d taken such secret joy in protecting. No one in all my life had ever looked me in the eyes and said, I know, and I’m sorry.
The tide was low; that might give some of them a chance. It was as much as they had ever given me. It would even the tally. It took effort to remember that I existed; I had nothing left to spare for them.
The sea-song rippled through my bones, with the cool fullness of magic in its wake. I hummed a sleep charm under my breath, one I’d used on myself when I had a little extra magic left on my skin, and breathed out in silent relief when I felt the sharp sting of a spell working. It might not hold for long, but I wouldn’t need much time.
I rubbed my hands together to warm them before I reached for the key. The clasp had worked its way onto his shoulder in his sleep; I unhooked it and slid the key off the chain. It dropped silent and solid into my palm. I slid naked off the bed and padded out of the room. (My room, you father, you monster. Mine again now; mine forever.)
The guards knew I walked the seawall at night. They turned their eyes away from my nakedness. I clenched my fist on the key until my knuckles creaked. Cold seeped up from the stones into my feet, my legs, my spine. I was cold as the ocean, cold as the spray that stung my flesh, cold as a heart that had never been taught how to love. I traced my hand along the wall, sipping away the strength in the warding spells. The heat of the gathering magic hurt as it burned into my shivering body. I walked all around the wall, undoing the spells I had maintained, hearing the faint creak as the granite protested and shifted. Goodbye, I said as I drew off the spells’ strength. I’m sorry. Thank you. When my skin stretched tight with magic, I stopped at the watchtower and rang the bell, once to draw the guards’ attention and once more when I had it.
Then I went down through the city, toward the locked gate. I’d thought it was late, but the lanterns in the cleaner of my two rival taverns still threw golden light onto the cobblestones. Magic glimmered silver under my skin; in the torchlight it could almost pass for harmless moonlight on pale flesh. Blood slicked my hand, cut open by my fingernails as I gripped the key. I needed only a few steps to reach the causeway gate. I could hear the waves growling beyond it, straining to get in. The sea-song shrilled high and fierce in my head as I knelt to the lock that held the gate shut. Come home, Dahut. Come home.
I didn’t know what coming home would be like, but I wanted to find out. The key scraped in the lock, and the sea came pouring in.
The sea is not gentle. I should have remembered that. It knocked me onto my back as it ripped aside the gate. I hit my back on cobblestones and choked on a lungful of harsh salt water as the rush of the incoming waves dragged me backward, deeper into my city. A wall of water forced my hand open, scouring salt into the bleeding crescents on my palm and tearing away the key.
By the time I fought my way to the churning surface, people were already screaming. Loose cobbles streamed past me underwater, borne on the current; one slammed into my leg, and I felt the bone crack. You know me, I said. You’re hurting me. Stop. The ocean’s roar drowned me out.
Someone surfaced near me, water-darkened hair streaming: a woman, one of my favorite painters. I snatched for her hand, caught a handful of hair, pulled her toward me. I kicked out, knocking my numb feet against deep-carved stone. I hauled us up a set of stairs only half-underwater. She hung heavy, dragging down my arm. When I looked back, I saw she was already dead, bleeding sluggishly from a gash in her head. I let her go; the inrushing waves snatched her away.
The palace loomed at the top of the stairs. I stumbled up toward it on my bad leg, spitting out salt water. Had I guessed wrong? Had the sea sung to me only to drown me? But no: I felt magic surge inside me. I saw it ripple underneath my skin like the sea itself, spreading my toes to grip the stairs better, reshaping the broken bone of my leg. Fine webs already stretched between my fingers. It had not forgotten me. Absurdly, delightedly, I leaned against the crumbling stairs and laughed.
Waves kept rising behind me. This high up, I couldn’t hear my city dying. All the screams faded behind the howling waves and the steady rising hum of the sea-song calling my name. I staggered as the stairs groaned under my feet. Mortar scraped away at a touch; the beautiful blocks of granite shifted as the ocean battered against them. The sharp savage sweetness of the waters rushing in made me feel weightless, as if they already surrounded me.
“Dahut!” My father’s voice rang from a palace balcony above me, cutting through my wild laughter. I had never heard him sound afraid before. Salt stung my eyes as he pounded down the last few stairs to me and seized my arm. “Where’s my horse? We have to get out of here!”
“Drowned,” I said, and laughed again. Was that fear I saw flicker in his eyes? His hand tightened on my arm, but for once he stared in silence and let me speak. “They’re all drowned, or drowning. There’s no way back. The gates are flooded, the causeway’s underwater, and the spells that held the wall up...” I lifted my free hand, the one that had held the key, and showed him the places where my nail-scarred palm glowed silver with the magic I had eaten.
“Dahut, I told you no more magic.” But his voice shook, and fear licked like waves at the corners of his eyes, and oh—
I had never seen anything so sweet.
“And now,” I said, “I’m telling you. No.”
He had never before heard that word from my lips. Not once. It stopped him cold, his red tunic hanging unbelted from his shoulders and his mouth gaping like a beached fish. The sea-song was shaking me apart; I could feel my teeth rattling, my bones shifting, all of myself swelling into something beyond his worst fears.
“No,” I said again, for the sheer joy of saying it to him at last. And seized him by the loose flapping cloth of his devil-red tunic, and dragged us both over the wall into the devouring embrace of the sea.
Let me tell you a story, the only one that matters anymore. Once there was a city ruled by a princess and a princess ruled by her fears. They’re both dead now. I killed my city and myself, in the same night.
You allowed me that city, but I’ve chosen a different home. I built it myself, out of will and magic and anger. I left behind the shape and the place I had been told to love. Now, I swim over empty roofs, my gills fluttering in the currents. A crust of barnacles silences the bell that rang when you approached. I drink magic like lungs drink air, to keep my palms scarred with silver; my flukes shimmer in the clear blue darkness underwater. You would have found me hideous like this. It’s one reason I love this shape.
I keep you down here to see it. I take your polished skull between my webbed fin
gers and tip it to and fro, so that you miss nothing. Then I let you go. Your empty bone face clatters on the cobbles of my dead city, and I swim up and up, away, following the current wherever I please as the song of my home wraps warm and safe around me, close enough to feel and loose enough to shake free.
© Copyright 2020 Elizabeth Zuckerman
Elizabeth Zuckerman - [BCS318 S02] Page 2