City of Islands

by Kali Wallace

  It was another cool gray day, with drizzle pattering over the sea. Dark clouds were gathering on the horizon, but the storm-mages on Quarantine Island had sung to the sky, teasing out a response from the restless weather. They were sure it would be only a rain shower, not a true gale.

  Mara heard in Izzy’s voice the same exhaustion she was feeling herself. Mara’s arms were as limp as noodles. All she wanted to do was return to Tidewater Isle and wrap herself in warm, dry clothes.

  One more big one, she thought. One more bone and she would be satisfied.

  “I’m going to look again,” Mara said.

  “All right,” Izzy said, “but don’t take too long. If we get another night off, I’m going to visit Nila, and I want to have a bath first.”

  Mara said nothing at the mention of Izzy’s fiancée. Even though she had spent the last four days daydreaming in every spare moment about her own future after Tidewater Isle, it still stung to be reminded how soon Izzy was planning to leave.

  Along with her hurt feelings was something a little more like guilt. Mara wanted to dive alone so she could try the spell-song again.

  She hadn’t wanted to risk it when Izzy was diving right beside her. Mara didn’t think Izzy would mind, exactly, but she would want to know why Mara hadn’t told her about the spell from the start. Mara didn’t know how to explain that she had wanted to have something that was secret and magical and most of all hers, if only for a few days. She had to share everything else in her life: the dormitory she slept in, the hand-me-down clothes she wore, her finds in the water. She wasn’t going to share the spell-song until she had to.

  She dove again, straight down, her murk-light trailing behind her. When she was about a fathom above the seafloor, she sang a few words of her mother’s song: “Older I grow and farther I roam.”

  She couldn’t sing much more than that underwater, but she didn’t need to. There was an answer.

  It was faint and difficult to pinpoint. With a couple of kicks downward she felt a shiver of cool water over her skin. There: a coil of rope and the edge of a rock-weighted sack sticking out of the sand.

  She dug through the silt and kelp, aware of the tiredness in her arms and the burn in her lungs. She felt a jolt of relief when her fingers closed over something solid; she tugged the bone free of the rope and surged upward.

  Mara didn’t look at her find until she reached the surface.

  “Did you find something?” Izzy said. She leaned over the side of the boat to help Mara climb in. “What is it?”

  Driftwood raised his eyebrows, surprised. “That’s no animal.”

  He was right. It was a human bone. A femur, the longest bone in the leg.

  Mara dropped the bone in alarm. It clattered to the floor of the boat.

  A moment later, Izzy laughed uneasily. “It’s got to be from the shipwreck. Right?” She looked at Driftwood, then Mara. “Right?”

  “Seems likely,” Driftwood said.

  “I’m surprised we haven’t found more from that wreck,” Izzy added.

  “But . . .” Mara swallowed. “But there was a rope and a sack of rocks, like the others.”

  Izzy frowned. “It must have gotten tangled up with them.”

  Mara nodded uncertainly and willed her heart to stop pounding. There was a shipwreck right there. Izzy could be right.

  But as she pulled her shift over her swimming clothes and rubbed her hands dry, Mara could still hear the way the bone had hummed in response to her spell-song. So low, so quiet. There had been something almost lonely about it. A human bone from an ordinary shipwreck wouldn’t be magical. But she didn’t want to tell Izzy and Driftwood about the song, so she said nothing.

  It was well past noon by the time they returned to Tidewater Isle. Servants were waiting at the dock to take the bones to the Lady’s laboratory in the tower. The Lady had not summoned Mara or Izzy since the scolding in the library. She did, however, pass word that they had the night off again, so Izzy went to have her bath while Mara hurried to the kitchens for a late lunch.

  She ate slowly, feeling tired and out of sorts. What she wanted was to spend her time thinking about the hybrid creatures and spell-songs, but her mind kept turning back to the human bone she had found. Was Izzy right? Had it simply been tangled up in the ropes? Or had it been purposefully weighted down like the animal bones? She couldn’t be sure. She caught herself idly wiping her already-clean hands on her clothes, trying to dispel the gritty feel of the silt, still lingering hours later.

  When a scullery maid announced that the fishmonger’s boat had arrived with a delivery, Mara’s mood lifted as though sunlight had broken through the clouds. She jammed the last of her food into her mouth and raced down to the sea cave beneath the palace, where space for the docks had been carved out by founders’ magic long ago. She looked over the jostling, noisy crowd, until she spotted the familiar blue-and-yellow boat.

  She jumped up and down and waved. “Fish Hook!”

  Fish Hook was Mara’s best friend. He was skinny and brown, about thirteen years old, with reddish-brown hair in a crown of loose, springy curls. Sometime in the last year Mara had grown taller than him, although he stood on his toes when she was close and tried to deny it. Nobody remembered Fish Hook’s birth name, not even him. Like Mara, he was an orphan, but he had never known his parents. He was called Fish Hook because of the long scar across his face, a hook-shaped line stretching from temple to jaw.

  Fish Hook jumped the space between the boat and dock. He grinned when he saw Mara waving. “Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen chopping the heads off eels?”

  Mara punched his arm, and he pretended to wince in pain. “How can I chop eels if you haven’t delivered them yet?”

  “There’s more than eels in this delivery. Your mistress must be feeding half the city tonight.”

  “Tomorrow, and only the rich half,” Mara said. “They’re going to dress up in founder costumes and pretend they don’t recognize anybody beneath all the fins and spines. I don’t have to help at all. Night off for me.”

  “Oh, aren’t you the special one,” Fish Hook said. “Did you find Old Greengill’s lost treasure?”

  “All of it,” Mara said. “In a big cave right underneath Spellbreak Isle. I’ve got heaps and piles of jewels and gold, but it’s all cursed so I have to hurry and sell it before boils make my face fall off. I’ll trade it for a magic shop, and you can come with me so you don’t have to work in the fish market anymore.”

  Fish Hook laughed as Mara wanted him to, but there was something indulgent in the way he said “I’d like that. We’ll leave as soon as the eels are unloaded.”

  Not long ago Fish Hook would have playfully argued instead of agreeing. Learning to be a mage was all well and good, he would have said, but that was Mara’s dream. He wanted to be an adventurer exploring distant lands on a ship of his own, never mind that he didn’t know how to sail and barely knew how to swim. At least, that was what he used to want; Mara couldn’t remember when he had last talked about it. Ever since Mara had left the fishmonger’s for Tidewater Isle, she worried that Fish Hook thought she had abandoned him, even though he had encouraged her to go. She hadn’t wanted to leave him behind. She had always meant to help him leave too.

  She tugged on Fish Hook’s arm to draw him away from the boats. “Tell me about Summer Island. How is everybody? What’s going on? I don’t hear any good gossip here.”

  “Well,” Fish Hook began, “have you heard about the masquerading pirates?”

  “Are they different from ordinary pirates?”

  “Depends on who you believe,” Fish Hook said. “One-Eyed Bennie swears they attacked her from a black ship. They were wearing animal masks to hide their faces.”

  “One-Eyed Bennie only has one eye, and that eye is half-blind,” Mara pointed out.

  “She says they were even wearing gloves with fake claws to be extra scary.”

  “But she wasn’t scared, right?” Mara said. “She fought them of
f single-handed with only her fishing pole and chum bucket, and they sailed away crying like babies. She went straight back to the tavern to warn everybody else.”

  “Hey, you just ruined Bennie’s story,” Fish Hook said, and they both laughed. “How did you know how it was going to end?”

  He told her about everything that had happened since they had last spoken, on the day the Roughwater boy told Mara about the bones: which fishermen were already ending the summer season and who was working into the winter, who was injured and who was well, whose son had eloped with a Lunderi silk merchant, never to be seen again. Magic students from the Citadel had been caught casting enchantments on turtles at the Hanging Garden. Nobody knew why the students had wanted to turn the turtle shells blue and make them glow in the dark, especially not when it got them into trouble with the High Mage, but everybody agreed it was a pretty good spell and wanted to know where they’d gotten it.

  “I bet they think it was worth it,” Mara said, giggling.

  “You should learn that song,” Fish Hook said. “That could be the first magic you learn.”

  It was right there on the tip of Mara’s tongue: It’s too late for that. I’ve already found my first magic. But the Lady had sworn her to secrecy about the bones.

  Fish Hook was already going on. “If you think One-Eyed Bennie’s story is great, I’ve got an even better one.”

  “Stop playing,” Mara said, shoving his arm. “What is it?”

  “You know Svana, from the fish market?” Fish Hook waited for Mara to nod; she remembered the woman with the long braids and braying laugh. “One of her sons brought something back the other night.” Fish Hook glanced around and lowered his voice. “He said he caught it way out east, past the Winter Blade. He killed it, but it was so big he could only get part of it on their boat. He’d never seen anything like it before.”

  Mara had been thinking about strange sea creatures a lot for the past few days, but all the ones chasing through her thoughts were already dead. Something alive, something fishermen could catch and bring back, that was different from a muddy pile of bones.

  “What was it?” she asked.

  Fish Hook leaned closer to her ear. “A sea serpent.”

  Mara pulled back and glared at him.

  A second later, Fish Hook started laughing. “You believed me for a second, didn’t you?”

  Mara scowled. “That’s not funny.”

  “Svana’s son doesn’t think it’s funny either. He keeps going around to all the dockside pubs with this sloppy rotten hunk of fish and making everybody look at it. Yesterday Big Jes had to kick him out because the smell was driving her customers away.”

  “Svana’s son is an idiot,” Mara said, even though she wasn’t sure which of the seven sons Fish Hook was talking about. She smiled and hoped Fish Hook didn’t notice how forced it was. If he’d told her this story five days ago, she would have been laughing right along with him. But it was different now.

  A thousand years ago, city sea serpents had been to the founders what horses or dogs were for humans. In the legends they were beloved companions, accompanying founders on quests or pulling sea chariots into battle. But the founders were gone, and the serpents too, and the city beneath the water was empty.

  Mara had asked her mother once where they had gone and why they had left. Her mother’s eyes had gone soft and sad as she explained that there were as many stories about the leaving of the founders as there were storytellers in the islands, but she believed they had left because humans had claimed the islands for their own, mages had stolen their songs, and the founders could not abide staying in a city they had built as a gift for people who repaid their kindness with greed.

  Every once in a while sailors would claim they had seen a serpent way out in the open ocean, but nobody really believed them. Nobody had ever claimed to see one right here in the city.

  The stories didn’t feel as much like myths anymore, now that Mara had held the strange magical bones in her own hands.

  “I wish it was real,” Mara said.

  Fish Hook’s expression grew serious. “Yeah. That would be really great, wouldn’t it?”

  Mara hadn’t meant to ruin his good mood. “Maybe One-Eyed Bennie can fight a sea serpent on her next night out and we’ll know for sure.”

  Fish Hook snickered. “Knowing her she’ll tell everyone the serpent tried to follow her home because it thought she was a founder.”

  Mara giggled. “Everybody knows wherever the sea serpents go, the founders are right behind them!”

  “The serpents never swim alone, even if it’s to a dockside tavern!”

  They cracked up laughing and stopped only when a voice rang over the docks: “Mara! There she is.”

  Fish Hook’s chin jerked up and Mara spun around. It was Izzy, striding across the dock. She was dressed for visiting Nila, with her braids wrapped in a brilliant blue scarf, her green skirt flowing around her ankles and her long earrings sparkling over a gold-threaded shawl. She looked pretty and relaxed and happy, and Mara felt renewed guilt for wishing she would change her mind about leaving Tidewater Isle.

  But she wasn’t leaving for good yet. She only wanted a ride on the fishmonger’s boat back to Summer Island. Fish Hook shrugged and agreed, then he frowned and said, “What does he want?”

  He was looking over Mara’s shoulder. A houseboy was watching from several paces away, shifting nervously from foot to foot.

  “Oh, him,” Izzy said, distracted. Her mind was already on Summer Island. “He’s looking for Mara.”

  “Me? Why?”

  The boy jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “The Lady wants you in her tower. She’s up there with the flotsam. She wants to see you right away.” Flotsam was an unkind word for travelers from faraway lands. The Lady’s only foreign guest right now was a scholar from Sumant, a woman Mara hadn’t met or even seen.

  “But why?” Mara asked, her heart thumping. The Lady had never summoned her to the laboratory tower. “Are you sure?”

  Izzy made a face. “Does she want both of us?”

  The boy was impatient. “No, just her. That’s what she said. You better hurry.”

  “I have to go,” Mara said to Fish Hook. “I’ll see you around?”

  “Tomorrow!” he agreed.

  “Watch out for pirates!” Mara called out after them, and Fish Hook turned to flash her a grin as he hurried toward the blue-and-yellow boat.

  5

  The Laboratory in the Tower

  Renata Palisado’s tower laboratory was located in the oldest part of Tidewater Isle. The only entrance was at the end of a long corridor with water dripping down the walls and moss growing in cracks between the stones. Low arrow slits provided glimpses outside, a reminder of when the island had been a battle-ready fortress rather than a comfortable palace.

  Two armed women stood guard at the base of the tower stairs. They didn’t say a word, didn’t ask Mara her business, only unlocked the door and stepped aside.

  “Thank you,” Mara said as she hurried through.

  The guards shut the door. Mara heard the rattle of metal on metal as they locked it again. A narrow staircase spiraled before her, and a single candle flickered in a sconce on the wall. Mara straightened her shoulders and took a steadying breath. She had always wanted to see the Lady’s tower laboratory. She was excited, not scared. She had no reason to be scared. She began to climb.

  The stairs had been worn slick by centuries of use, each one sloping into a polished bowl where hundreds of feet had trod before. The candles were just far enough apart that a gulp of darkness fell between each pair. Mara looked at the walls with interest. Some of the blocks were carved with intricate designs, now worn away by dropping water and creeping moss. There were patterns of shells and starfish, the silhouettes of whales and sharks and giant squid, and a scene of two founders, their long tails whipping and spines splayed, battling each other with deadly harpoons.

  Mara touched one stone block, thinking.


  The palace carved into Tidewater Isle had been shaped by the founders with their powerful magic centuries ago—just like the bones she had found. Maybe it would respond to spell-song in the same way?

  Feeling a bit foolish, a bit hopeful, she sang out a few lines of her mother’s old song: “Over the sea and under the sky, my island home it waits for me . . .”

  She trailed off. Nothing happened.

  Mara tried again, louder: “Over the waves and under the storms, my heart is bound but my dreams are free.”

  You have to be bossy, Bindy used to say, when you want a song to stop belonging to the one who sang it and start belonging to you.

  Mara didn’t know how to do that. She didn’t even know what she wanted the spell to do. There was no answer, no echoing song, no eerie voice ringing from the stone.

  Disappointed, Mara kept climbing. There was no real reason to think it would work. Bindy had always said that a spell that spoke to one kind of object wouldn’t work on another. There was no reason for an old sailors’ song from Gravetown to affect the building blocks of Tidewater Isle. But then there was no reason for that song to have worked on the bones of hybrid creatures either. Mara didn’t know why it had worked before, and she didn’t know why it wasn’t working now. Not knowing felt like clothes that didn’t fit right, a discomfort she wanted to pick at until it could be fixed.

  As Mara neared the top of the tower, an acrid smoke filled the air, and she felt an odd sensation, not unlike being in the attic of a tall wooden house on a windy day. It felt as though the tower itself was swaying and groaning—but she wasn’t moving at all, and the smoke was humming with spell-song. It wasn’t particularly melodic, that dull droning song in a language she couldn’t understand, but she was fairly sure she recognized the Lady’s voice.

  The smoke grew stronger and thicker the higher she climbed, scratching at her throat and stinging her eyes. She was coughing and rubbing tears away by the time she reached the open door at the top of the stairs. She hurried inside without waiting to be invited. She was so desperate for clean air she momentarily forgot she was barging headfirst into the Lady’s laboratory.