City of Islands

by Kali Wallace

  Maybe somewhere behind those yellow gemstone eyes, Gerrant of Greenwood remembered the green hills and deep valleys he’d left behind. Maybe he remembered looking out over the city from above, marveling at how small the boats looked sailing between the islands, how the vast ocean gleaming with sunrise took his breath away. Maybe he remembered learning magic from hedge witches in remote green meadows. Following the muddy road out of the mountains. Standing on the black-sand beach for the first time.

  Her voice small at first, but gathering courage, Mara began to sing. The first song that came to mind was the silly rhyming song her father had sung that morning they climbed the south-facing slope of Greenwood to look over the city.

  “Ask the shepherd with her staff if her sheep are well.

  Ask the ranger with her ax for a tree to fell.

  Ask the mason with her chisel why stone rings a bell.

  Ask the digger with her spade if the dead feel swell.”

  But as she sang, other Greenwood Island songs came back to her. Woodsmen’s spells and children’s rhymes, farmers’ ballads and pub songs, she sang everything she could remember.

  “The lad and his dog came to Green Inn, oh hey, oh hey!

  The girl and her dog came to Green Inn, oh hey!”

  She wasn’t a Gravetown girl anymore, but she wasn’t singing for herself. She was singing for the memories trapped in the ancient stone, for the man who had become part of the fortress, for the boy he had been and the mage he’d grown to be. She remembered her mother on a rainy morning, singing as rain drummed on the roof, singing and saying, “Who are you to say the difference between music and magic if it’s not your heart a song is meant to stir?”

  “The mage and his bird came down from the hills, oh hey, oh hey!

  The mage and her bird came down from the hills, oh hey!”

  And Mara remembered feeling light, so light she might fly, when her mother twirled her around the little house at the foot of the green hills. Her voice grew stronger as she remembered more and more. Songs flowed more easily from her tongue. Her voice rang through the room, carrying over a sudden hush in the raging magical battle.

  “To the inn on the river in the green, green dell, oh hey!”

  Bindy and the Muck had fallen quiet.

  “To the green, green dell,” Mara said, her voice dropping to a whisper.

  In the doorway, the stone man turned to look at her.

  22

  A Song for a Stone

  A hush fell over the laboratory. The stone man’s yellow eyes glittered. For the first time Mara thought she saw something other than sadness in them.

  Then: “What are you doing?” shouted the Lord of the Muck. All the animals and birds began screeching and squawking again. “By the founders, child, what have you done?”

  Mara felt a burst of pride. The Muck was afraid of her song, her magic. This powerful mage who had caused so much fear and pain for others, and he was looking from Mara to the stone man, back to Mara, with an expression of pure panic on his face.

  “Stop that! You don’t know what you’re doing! You have no idea—” The Muck yelped in surprise as the sunfish skeleton scuttled right up to his feet. He kicked at it frantically and sent it clattering across the floor.

  All the while, Mara kept singing. The Greenwood songs had gotten the stone man’s attention, but they weren’t breaking the founders’ spell. The spell-song needed to be stronger. She needed to be stronger. There was so much noise around her it was hard to concentrate, with the birds squawking and animals chittering and water sloshing, and over it all Bindy’s singing, never stopping, never breaking, keeping the dead things dancing—

  Bindy’s songs. The ones she was singing right now. That’s what Mara needed.

  Bindy had turned a funeral song around to call the dead back to life. Mara had to do the same, only she had to call a living person out of stone.

  She changed her song again. She took the words from the Greenwood Island songs, from Gerrant’s home, but she wove them into the inside-out funeral song Bindy was using to wake the bones. Where Bindy had called the bones with “Sail, sail back to me, back across the darkest sea,” Mara sang, “Wake, wake, from cold dark stone to valleys of green.” Where Bindy made the dead things dance with “Sail, sail to me, my children, and leave the dead seas empty!” Mara urged the stone to “Walk, walk the trails of green, along the rivers and through the trees!”

  The longer she sang, the more certain she became. She could feel when the song was going wrong with a flatness that sounded like cloth in her ears—“free” when she ought to have said “green,” a high note where a low one should fall. But when she got it right there was a giddy flutter high in her chest, and she kept singing.

  The stone man turned his head. He clenched his fingers into fists and released them. First one arm bent at the elbow, then the other. The magic was working. He was breaking free of the curse!

  She was so caught up in her song she didn’t notice the dead things thrashing toward her until Fish Hook rasped, “Mara, look out!”

  A tangle of spiny lobsters and slumping jellyfish had already surrounded her. She yelped in pain as they stung and nipped at her feet, hard enough to draw blood. She slipped on a jellyfish, lost her balance, and toppled into a wooden table, knocking over a jar of fish eyes with the jolt. Bindy was barking commands at them—harsh, snappish bits of song, stirring them to a greater and greater frenzy. Somewhere above the cacophony stone ground against stone, and with it came a sharp cracking sound.

  Fish Hook lunged at the largest of the lobsters. “Keep singing!”

  Mara sang even louder, doing her best to drown out Bindy’s voice.

  The sunfish skeleton clattered toward her, with the great toothy jaw of a shark snapping right behind it. Bindy was good, to be sure, but Fish Hook had worked in the fish market for most of his life. He plucked and kicked the dead things away from Mara as quickly as he could, flinging them across the room and laughing out loud when one of them struck Bindy in the face.

  Bindy’s expression turned thunderous. She stopped singing abruptly.

  When she uttered another spell, it was completely different. Lower, slower, darker. Mara didn’t understand any of the words; it was a language she didn’t know at all. She tried to ignore it, tried to focus on her own spell-song, but she felt a steady drumming of fear in her heart and a breathless tightening in her chest. Bindy was singing louder and louder—

  No, that wasn’t it at all. The laboratory was going quiet.

  One by one the reanimated dead things fell still. They slumped where they’d scrambled, collapsed into piles of wired-together bones, dropped out of the air in tufts of feathers. The living animals began to fall silent too. Fish Hook turned to Mara, his mouth open in question, but when his lips moved no sound came out.

  Mara tried to ask, “What’s wrong?”

  Tried, but failed, because she couldn’t speak. She felt herself forming the words, taking in the air and moving her lips and her tongue, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t make a sound.

  “There,” said Bindy. “That’s better.”

  Mara tried to shout at her, tried to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound. It felt as though there was a hand on her throat, lightly squeezing out all sound. Bindy had taken away her voice, taken away her spell-song, taken away every sound in the laboratory except her own words.

  “Oh, Mara,” Bindy said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Magic is not a toy for children to play with.”

  “I quite agree.”

  Mara blinked in confusion and spun around.

  The reply came not from the Muck, who was struck as silent as Mara, but from Gerrant of Greenwood.

  He flexed his fingers slowly, rolled his head from side to side, and worked his jaw. His motions were at first jerky and cautious, like a man waking from a dream. But as he moved, his skin softened, became pliable and brown again as the grayness faded. It started with the crown of his head, washed ove
r his face, over his collar, and down his sleeves. The buttons on his shirt turned from gray to a shimmering pearl, the buckle of his belt from gray to silver, his trousers from gray to deep green. All of the gray drained from him like rainwater running over a statue.

  His boots were last. As he lifted first one foot, then the other, they became battered brown leather again, and the laces an unexpected crimson.

  “I would suggest,” he said, his Greenwooder brogue like rocks rolling down a hillside, “that you direct your attention to the ceiling.”

  Bindy blinked twice, stunned. “What—”

  “Look.” The Muck had broken free of her silencing spell. He was pointing upward.

  Bindy looked up. Mara looked up. Fish Hook too.

  Long, spidery cracks were spreading across the glass windows, and there were fractures in the stone buttresses. A trickle of seawater seeped through one crack and began to drip steadily. Chips of black stone snapped free and fell to the floor.

  “What have you done, you stupid girl?” Bindy said.

  “I—did I—” Mara stared in openmouthed shock. Had she done that? With her song?

  Fish Hook slapped at her arm frantically, then did so again when Mara didn’t respond. She tore her gaze away from the ceiling to see what he wanted. He pointed at Gerrant, who was staring at the floor in front of his feet.

  Just a few inches away from the toe of one boot was a small stone figurine in the shape of a frog. It was poised on hunched legs, as though preparing to leap. Right behind it was another figurine, a fish flopped onto its side with its tail fin curved up toward the ceiling. Beside the fish, a hermit crab had been caught mid-scuttle with half its legs raised. Other animals were leaping over them, bounding through puddles of water, fleeing the laboratory through the door as though the room were on fire.

  Mara stared at the little statues in confusion, but then Fish Hook was slapping her arm again, and tearing a strained word from his injured throat: “Look! Look!”

  Mara looked again, and she understood.

  They weren’t figurines. They were animals turned to stone.

  The curse that had fallen from Gerrant of Greenwood had not vanished. It had only slipped away from him, freed by Mara’s song to slide across the floor, creeping like a gray shadow, changing everything it touched into stone. Animals both dead and alive, bones stirred by Bindy’s song, the legs of a stool and a table, they were all transforming before Mara’s eyes. The curse swept up the pedestal of one round table, bleaching the rich red wood to a dirty bland gray, then crawled across the books on the top, changing vellum and leather to stone. It caught a seagull by its clawed feet and froze the entire bird even as it tried to launch itself in a panic; the stone bird overbalanced and crashed to the floor, where it shattered over the newly stone skeleton of a snake. A stampede of beetles tumbled into one another and rolled over and over like marbles as the ones leading the charge turned to stone.

  The only creatures that remained safe were those splashing through water, for the stone magic and the water magic seemed to repel each other.

  Gerrant of Greenwood was backing away from the laboratory, his alarmed expression perfectly framed by the round doorway. Bindy was saying something—a song or a shout, Mara couldn’t tell. There was a deafening noise like thunder; the cracks in the ceiling were spreading and water spurted through fissures in the glass windows.

  There was a bellow from across the room. The Muck was singing again. There was no finesse in this song; it was all force, and all directed at the breaking ceiling.

  Mara grabbed Fish Hook’s hand. “Run!”

  They sprinted for the door. The gray curse had overtaken too much of the floor, and the puddles and rivulets repelling its touch were too small for human feet, so they scrambled onto a long table and raced to the other end. There Mara jumped to a chair that was just beginning to turn to stone in its legs. But she hesitated. She didn’t know if she could make it to the doorway. It was too far.

  “Come on, child!” Gerrant shouted, holding out his arms. “I’ll catch you!”

  Mara glanced back at Fish Hook, waiting on the end of the long table.

  “Go!” Fish Hook urged her. The pained rasp of his voice cut through the cracking, crashing chaos of the laboratory. “You can!”

  Mara took a breath, bent her legs, and flung herself toward the door.

  Gerrant caught her and pulled her through the doorway. He set her on her feet, and Mara scurried out of the way. Fish Hook leapt a second later. When he landed, with Gerrant’s help, he tumbled to the floor and let out a yelp of pain. He curled over onto his side, clutching his knee to his chest.

  “What is it?” Mara asked, dropping to her knees beside him. “Did you sprain your ankle?”

  “The chair,” Fish Hook said through gritted teeth.

  “What? What happened?”

  Fish Hook extended his left leg.

  His foot had turned to stone.

  For a second Mara could only stare.

  “No,” she said. She felt numb and cold all over. “No, no, no—”

  “We can’t delay. The dome is collapsing.” Gerrant took Mara by the elbow to lift her to her feet, then offered a hand to Fish Hook. “Look, child, it’s not spreading, now that contact is broken.”

  He was right. The stone curse had encompassed Fish Hook’s ankle, but it didn’t seem to be reaching higher on his leg.

  “Can you walk?” Gerrant asked.

  “I think so,” Fish Hook said, but on his first step he stumbled.

  Gerrant picked him up easily—he was a big man, and Fish Hook was so skinny—and he said, “We must hurry.”

  Mara spared one last look through the round doorway. The animals were fleeing the laboratory, following a maze of puddles and spills to freedom. The winged lizard beat its wings powerfully to hop through the doorway, tumbling head over tail when it landed.

  Bindy and the Muck were still flinging spell-songs at each other as stone and glass and water fell all around. They were oblivious to the gray curse spreading through the laboratory.

  “Bindy!” Mara shouted. “The stone!”

  She didn’t wait to see if Bindy heard her. She ran.

  The fortress shuddered as they fled. Stones blocks worked themselves loose from straining walls, and a rain of mortar sand pelted Mara’s face. She ducked her head and sprinted. The winged lizard followed her, fluttering a few inches in the air with every bound. Soon they were overtaken by a stampede of frightened animals. The tiny goats bleated as they bounded along, snakes slithered with astonishing speed, long-legged rabbits raced ahead, and birds and bats beat their wings through the air.

  Mara had just reached the vertebrate-stone archway when the singing in the laboratory cut off sharply.

  She skidded to a stop.

  There was a shout—a yelp of pain—quickly silenced.

  For one long, uneasy moment, all Mara could hear was her own panting breath and the soft patter of falling sand. Gerrant had run ahead with Fish Hook to the sea cave. In the fading glow of the murk-light Mara saw a couple of rats scurrying toward freedom. They seemed to be the last of the animals.

  Then, down the long corridor, Bindy began to sing.

  Her voice was strong and clear and alone. The Muck had fallen silent. The restless stones were silent. There was only Bindy’s song. It was powerful and eerie, echoing through the cavern and rising to beautiful, clear high notes before falling again. Mara didn’t recognize any part of it. There were no familiar funeral songs to be found in that spell, no mourning dirges, no rowing chants. Everything about it was alien and strange and lovely.

  Then the song stopped abruptly. There was no yelp of surprise, no shout for help. A single clear note rang in the air—then it was swallowed by the low, distant grind of stone against stone, and the fortress was silent.

  23

  The Waking Island

  As she sprinted toward the sea cave, Mara worried that she had been wrong about the shimmer of spell she’d
seen before. She could swim, but could Gerrant? Could Fish Hook, with his stone foot? And what about all the animals?

  But finally one thing was going right. When she burst through the doorway, there was a rowboat waiting at the dock. At the oars was a broad-shouldered, red-haired Roughwater boy with pale skin and a smattering of freckles. Beside him was the white-haired woman from the dungeon. The other boat and the rest of the escaped prisoners were gone.

  “Hey,” Fish Hook rasped as Gerrant set him down.

  “Yes, he’s the one who told me about the bones, I know,” Mara said. “Bindy put him up to it. She promised to help his grandmother.”

  “Gran made me wait for you,” said the boy. The old woman gestured for Mara and the others to hurry into the boat. “She said you helped them, so we had to help you. She wouldn’t let us leave with the others.”

  “Thank you,” Mara said to the old woman.

  She helped Fish Hook into the boat and jumped in after him, scooted over to make room for Gerrant. The little lizard hopped in with them, followed more clumsily by the tiny goats and a few terrified rabbits. The birds and bats were already swooping out of the cave as fast as their wings could carry them—and right on their tails came a terrible thunder rumbling through the entire fortress.

  “How fast can you row?” Mara asked.

  “Fast enough,” the Roughwater boy said grimly.

  The roar chased them through the sea cave and out of the fortress. It was a deafening crash of cracking stone and rushing water, like a storm, a river, a waterfall scouring away a mountain, so loud it hurt Mara’s ears and filled her entire body with fear. That sound could only mean one thing.

  The dome had collapsed. Water was rushing to fill the passages and dungeons below. There was no stopping the force of the sea.

  The Roughwater boy rowed faster and faster, even as the waves grew choppier and threatened to capsize the crowded boat. Mara clung tightly to the side with one hand and to Fish Hook with the other. The little goats bleated incessantly, and the winged lizard was nipping frantically at Fish Hook’s arms.