“Don’t be a fool.” Dahra growled, “If you faint I’ll push you off the edge.”
I grit my teeth. The vertigo passed, and I walked with the graceful steps of an islander. People pointed and spoke to each other as we passed above them.
King Shay made a speech which was carried away by the wind. Scores of criers repeated every sentence in a long relay. Dahra stood beside him, and when the man finished she said a few words. The crowd was deathly silent when she spoke. It was the same nonsense about not using magic that Clay had spewed in the throne room, but as she said it the people made an odd sighing sound. Many of them still muttered to each other, but for the first time I could pick out smiles on distant faces.
Dahra’s gloved hands were squeezed so tightly into fists that they trembled. Fear? No, anger. She despised these people. I am sure she would have loved to send them screaming away in terror, but instead she had to crawl for them like a kicked puppy. Still, she reached the end of her speech. I felt a smile of relief on my lips in the very second before everything went wrong.
There was a dull, percussive sound. Dahra lowered a shaking hand to her stomach. It came away wet. A moan came from the crowd. Clay darted forwards but Dahra shoved her away. She raised her hand and we saw eggshells drip from her fingers.
A man started shouting hoarse, piercing accusations, and people in the crowd surged forward and screamed. I thought they might swarm us until the guards tackled the first man to the ground. They pressed the sharp heads of their halberds to his throat, but now they had a problem. They wanted their king to command them, but it was Dahra who had been attacked. Shay was as much at a loss as any of them.
Yes, it was only an egg. It could just have easily been a crossbow bolt.
Miette trembled beside me. I clutched her hand and held it tightly. Dahra lowered her hand again and wiped it onto her cloak. It left a dark stain on the priceless fabric.
“Bring him to me.” She ordered. The words were painfully loud in the silence. The guards immediately hauled the man up the steps. He had stopped struggling, and was limp with fear. Dahra studied him for a moment. “Why did you do it?”
“My brother -!”
“Oh, is that all? Yes, I remember him.” She said indifferently. The man reared up as if she had spat in his face. He must have known that she was lying, that she couldn’t possibly remember every sailor who found his way onto the rocks, but his anger frothed so close to madness that every word rang true.
“Why use an egg? Why insult me when you could have killed me?” She mused, and then held up one finger. “Ah! It gave you a chance to talk to me. That’s it, is it not? You wanted to ask me about your brother. You wanted to know what we did to him. You already know the answer to that, my love. Was there anything else you wished to say? Or did you just want to share his bed?”
The man growled something that was too low for me to hear, and then he lunged forward. For a second he was free, and his steel blade flashed in the cold light. Miette cried out and threw herself forwards. The knife slashed across her arm instead of Dahra’s throat. The servant fell to the ground, but Dahra never moved.
I saw Clay’s fingers twitching, and followed her gaze to the other Siren’s hip. The woman held a thin vial. I had not even noticed her sliding it out of her sleeve. She slipped her hand under her veil as if she was biting back laughter, and then stepped closer to the man. The guards held his arms behind him, and the Altissi’s eyes bulged wildly.
“I have heard that joke before.” Dahra said. She made her voice smooth and rich, but it carried across the silent courtyard. “You told it well. I respect that.” She pushed her veil away and smiled beautifully. The man gasped, but only we islanders could see her. The straining crowd could not see past the edges of her hood. I squinted. Her lips looked swollen and glossy.
“You will die the same way your brother did.” Dahra whispered. She lowered her face to his, and kissed him on the lips. The man tried to pull away, but she sank her sharp nails into his hair. Then she stepped back, lowering her veil. Her hand slipped back beneath it, and I knew she was wiping away whatever she had smeared onto her lips. I did not have to look at the man to know what the choking sound meant. Dahra had spent years dosing herself with these poisons. He had no immunity to them at all.
The assassin fell into the snow. It turned pink where blood poured from his mouth and nose. At the end he released his bowels. King Shay turned away, covering his mouth. The Siren were unmoved. They were used to death.
The people in the crowd clung to each other and fell to their knees. They had just seen a woman kill a man with a single kiss. Every man and woman looked at the Siren and trembled.
“Do they believe in us?” I whispered to Clay. “Can we go home now?”
She shook her head. “Tonight they’ll go home and tell each other that they saw her holding a knife, or that one of the guards did it for her. They’ll make up stories and by morning nobody will know which one is true. They’ll need to see us a hundred times to make up their minds.”
“We cannot do this a hundred times.”
“We may have to.” She sighed and turned away. “Or Dahra can do it. She doesn’t need us here. I’m cold. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 7
The Siren attended a different event every day. Sometimes it was a formal interview, or a negotiation, but more often it was a dance or a supper. There were audiences with the common people which both of the Siren refused to attend. Servants hid behind every corner and stared at us. They filled their pockets with gold by telling their stories to the crowds outside.
Dahra remained veiled and aloof, but every time real political clout was required she spoke strongly and decisively. Clay was a butterfly of silks and jewels who flitted from man to man. Every insipid word she said made me cringe. After a few days I understood what she was doing. The men she fluttered her eyelashes at did not guard their tongues when she was nearby. Dahra made them as silent as the grave, but Clay was so vapid that they said whatever was on their minds.
Coluber fell into the same trap. Whenever Clay made a mistake he was always on hand to advise her, whether that meant helping her to learn a dance step or to recall a diplomat’s name. He carved meat for her at dinner, and kept her glass full of wine. He was as ready to seduce the Siren as he was to be seduced. I had never seen anyone work so hard to impress such an easy conquest. The man bragged that he had seen his share of courtesans and he could see through her act, and so they sniped at each other as much as they cooed sweet poetry.
The sad thing was that Mistress Clay probably wasn’t pretending. She had never spent more than a few days with a man, and she was used to controlling every minute of it. The woman was dumbstruck by the way Coluber treated her. She had a talent for transforming her entire being into something alluring and gracious, and when she was with him she knew no other way to behave. She fell entirely into the illusion. When she was alone, it was as if a light had been turned off behind her eyes.
I remembered the flatness I had seen in her when we were on the boat. I would have called it unhappiness, but it seemed to be far more than that. Beyond all of her unconscious wantonness she must have had her own desires, but she had no way to express them. Every gesture, every blink, was carefully chosen to make her be someone else’s ideal. She even did it to me. She became the perfect, tender Mistress any servant might turn to. I wondered if I had ever seen her true self.
One morning, very early, she crept out of bed and left the rooms. I followed her through the dark hallways. The guards let her pass without a sound, and I pressed my finger to my lips when they saw me in the shadows. I expected Clay to meet a man for a tryst, but she moved through the kitchens and slipped out into the garden.
A slow river moved through the palace grounds. Pipes directed the water into the filtered pools and fountains, but at the source it was crawled with frogspawn and newts. Mistress Clay sat at the edge of it for a while, running her fingertips through the snow on the bank. The
n she stood up, peeled her clothes off, and jumped into the river. Her breath came out in one sharp gasp, but apart from that she was silent.
‘She’s trying to drown herself!’ I thought, and then shook my head. Of course she wasn’t! She was more likely to freeze.
There was a childish gracelessness in the way she moved. She did not swim, exactly, but she moved through the water as the current did, and pushed her feet against the riverbed whenever the water became too shallow. She unpinned her hair. The dark water swallowed the heavy silver clasps. The red strands looked black in the blue light. Then the moon came out from behind the clouds, and the Siren floated on her back and watched it with such perfect, unblinking stillness that I was afraid she really had frozen.
Her skin looked blue. I couldn’t watch any longer; I ran from my hiding place and slipped in the snow. When I fell the cloak tangled around my hand, and I yelped. The woman barely flinched. Her eyes looked around, but her body was completely lifeless.
“Harriet.” she said, and looked back up at the sky, “Go back to bed.”
“No.” my teeth chattered as I waded into the water. I held her clothes out in front of me like a shield. “Are you insane? Clay, you have to get warm.”
She raised her hand in front of her eyes, smiling a little when the trembling fingers refused to obey her, “I’ve been colder. You can feel this kind of cold right at the back of your heart.”
“That’s hypothermia!”
“It’s something. I like it.” The water around the woman’s shoulders moved, and I realized that it was a shrug. She met my eyes and smiled, “All Siren turn to ice in the end.”
“Not literally.” I gritted my teeth and plunged my hand into the water. The shocking cold made my fingers seize, but I found her scrawny wrist and pulled. The idiot woman smiled as I dragged her under the surface, and far too many bubbles appeared before she decided to put her feet down and follow me ashore.
“What the hell was that all about?” I snapped, throwing her damp cloak around her shoulders. Now that she was out of the water, Mistress Clay was shivering.
“I had a bad dream.” she said, “I saw the river.”
“That’s not difficult. You’re standing in it.” I was so angry that my voice had lowered to a growl. She looked down, biting her lip, and I saw a trail of blood where her tooth had sunk into the numb skin. I wiped it away with my thumb and led her back into the kitchen, where I sat her down beside the banked stove. The idiot obediently held her hands out to the warmth. I threw a log onto the fire and it flared. Clay flinched away from the sparks, and water trickled down from her hair onto her face.
“I like the river.” her voice was quiet, as if she was trying to grasp something that made no sense, “I used to run to the caves when I needed to be alone. There’s nowhere to be silent, here, except in the river. When you’re under the water it’s as if you stop existing. Nobody can hear you, or smell you, and nobody wants to follow you.”
“You’re right, I didn’t want to wade through that freezing filth.” I said, and held my own feet out to the blaze. She looked guilty, and I sighed, “Did you say you had a nightmare?”
“I always do. I dream that I’m back in my box, and that it’s filling up with water, and I can’t get out. Usually it’s not so bad but tonight I… I needed to prove that the water couldn’t hurt me.”
“You’re afraid of drowning, so you fix it by swimming alone, in the dark, in the cold?” I shook my head, and she laughed in embarrassment.
“I know that it doesn’t make sense. If Dahra had followed me I don’t know how I would have explained it. I couldn’t even tell Jonas about it… but you?” she caught my hand and stroked it. Her fingers moved as if she had been drugged, and my frozen skin burned at the slight pressure, “Thank you for pulling me out.”
“Sleepwalking.” I pulled my hand away and invented a story quickly, “If anyone asks, that’s what you were doing. None of that ‘turning to ice’ nonsense.”
“Oh, I just said that to make you be quiet. I’m sure being out so late was a huge adventure for you.”
Just like that, she was back to her normal, impossible self. The vulnerability was gone. Ten minutes later she was scolding me for leaving her shoes out in the snow.
CHAPTER 8
The Siren received gifts from strangers who wrote petitions on expensive paper instead of signing their names. We sold all but the finest gifts, and used the unread letters for kindling. One day, we received a bulky lump wrapped in thick cloth. An old man delivered it, and he stepped nervously from foot to foot as I stared at it. I put the box down on the table, waiting for him to leave.
“My name is Guinn.” he said awkwardly, “I have to stay until you open it.”
“I’m not a Siren.” I said with a smile, “You’ll have to wait.”
“It’s not for them!” The man nodded at the parcel encouragingly, and I saw my own name written onto the label. I held my breath, and pushed the fabric away.
It was a hand made of thin wire, which had been woven into a fine filigree. It was utterly useless as a real limb, as the fragile warp would bend and twist, but as an ornament it was breathtaking. The nails were made of mother-of-pearl, and every fingerprint and whorl on the palms were excruciatingly designed.
“Who is this from?”
“His royal highness, the prince.” The man waved his hands enigmatically, “He wants to impress your Mistress. We must make sure it fits before she returns.”
‘If it’s for Clay, then shouldn’t we cut off her hand and make her wear it?’ I thought. I did not say anything, though. The man’s face was such a mixture of awkwardness and pity that I felt sorry for him.
The man clearly knew that the gift was a humiliating farce. It gave people another excuse to talk about my deformity. I would be openly exposed, and all for a bit of cumbersome metal. He drew the hand out of the parcel and showed me how it would fit onto my arm. Long leather straps had to be crisscrossed up my forearm and tied above the elbow, otherwise the weight of the wire dragged the velvet socket off my stump. The clumsy thing was a dead weight but – as I stood in front of the looking glass – I had tears in my eyes.
The soft, unfocused glass made both hands look real. I saw myself as I should have been. With my soft eyes; my chestnut brown hair and bronze skin; my figure and my bearing; my fine clothes and my glittering jewellery, I could have been as grand a Siren as any of them. I raised the shining hand to touch the reflection. The socket popped free. I caught the bauble as it sagged on its straps.
“My Mistress has a servant who cannot work. Tell that to your prince.” I said, feeling a bubble of frustration lurching through my stomach. The man smiled ruefully, and my heart softened, “It really is very… very nice.”
Other words were too close to the sycophantic nonsense Clay used whenever Coluber gave her a gift. ‘Nice’ suited me, but it made the man’s face fall. I drew the laces back around my arm. I started tightening them with my teeth before he gently did it for me. I told him what I had seen when I looked into the mirror.
“Most of that would be true even if you had no hands at all!” he looked irked, “Why let a few strands of copper tell you who you are?”
“After my accident the girl in the mirror just… stopped existing. I forgot about her.”
“What a stupid thing to do.” he huffed, and pulled the last strap tight. He eyed it for a moment, and said. “Well, I agree with you. It is a useless little trinket, but if it makes his highness happy you’d better wear it. I’ll make you a better one, and then you can look in the mirror whenever you want.”
I blinked and ran my fingers over the smooth wires, “You made this?”
A cheeky smile showed me some of his teeth. “Yes. It’s not perfect. I worked quickly. I wasn’t going to let the Siren go home before I had a chance to see them!”
I laughed, “I’m sorry that they’re not here.”
“I cannot imagine they’re lovelier than you, little copper pri
ncess.” he raised the metal hand to his lips and kissed the fingertips. I drew my arm back and shyly hid it behind my back. He grinned approvingly at me, chastised me for taking so long to be ashamed of his masterpiece, and left.
Another odd thing happened on that day, although at the time I thought little of it. Master Gaskell came to tell us that he was going to leave Crozier. He had visited us so many times that the guards didn’t even tell us he had arrived. He lazed around on the cushioned benches until we noticed he was there. Clay could usually sniff out her friend like a hound, but she was sleeping, and it was me who stumbled over him. The man opened one eye and squinted against the bright light from the glass roof.
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