City of Islands
Page 23
Later that night, Mara slipped from her bed and pulled a blanket around her shoulders. She had her own room now, one of the fine guest chambers high in Tidewater Isle. The bed was huge and soft, the blankets plentiful, the view across the city stunning, but it wasn’t as warm as the dormitory above the kitchen.
She knew it was a stupid thing to complain about. She had a place to live, and Fish Hook was right down the hall, safer and warmer and better fed than he had ever been. Neither of them would be huddling in a damp, drafty attic through the winter, dodging the lash of a cruel fishmonger.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want her fine chamber with a view of the city. It was only that she missed the quiet noises of the other girls sleeping.
The rain stopped and the clouds broke apart to let silver moonlight shine across the city. The founders’ golden lights looked like tiny candles scattered throughout the sea. Mara wondered what the city had looked like when the founders’ underwater city was full and bustling. It must have been even brighter, like sunrise at every hour, brilliant with motion and color.
As she watched, Mara saw a shadow moving below: the long, elegant silhouette of a sea serpent winding around the islands, slow and so very graceful.
Mara watched it until the sea serpent glided out of sight, then turned away from the window. She picked up the stone frog on her way to the door. The household was quiet as she made her way downstairs, but in a restful way, nothing like the terrible silence of the Winter Blade. As she passed the kitchen Mara heard the rumbling snore of the cook, dozing in her rocking chair by the fire. She turned a corner and descended the steps into the sea cave.
The boats tied up at the dock bumped quietly against one another, nudged by the waves. Moonlight slanting through the cave mouth glistened on the water. The glass and stone mosaics on the walls sparkled.
Mara sat at the end of the dock and dangled her feet in the chilly water. The cave was empty; she was alone. Holding the frog in her hands, she took a breath, and she began to hum.
Softly at first, the same way her mother used to when she was lulling Mara to sleep or working at her drafting table late into the night. How soothing it had been, how gentle. She had always felt safe when her mother was singing. That was something a song could do that a spell could not: make a child feel safe, give a daughter sweet dreams, let a mother linger in memory long after she was gone.
She heard the gentle sound of scales moving through water, so she wasn’t surprised when the sea serpent bumped up against her foot. She laughed softly.
“Hello there,” she said. “Is it a nice night for a swim?”
The serpent doubled back and lifted its great head above the water. Mara reached out, tentatively, and the serpent nudged her palm before diving away. The ripples rolled toward the entrance to the sea cave, right to where the founder was waiting.
Only her head was above water. All the brilliant colors of her scales and spines were washed to shades of gray in the silver moonlight, but Mara recognized her at once. She was the one who had first surfaced to speak to the people of the city. Mara and Professor Kosta had tried to figure out if she had some sort of position among the founders that granted her special standing, but they still weren’t sure. Founders didn’t seem to think about leaders and hierarchies the same way as people.
The founder didn’t look quite as intimidating when she was low in the water rather than looming from her glass half shell, but still Mara felt a shiver of nerves.
“Hello,” Mara said. She knew the founder couldn’t understand her, but she had to say something.
The founder tilted her head to the side. She looked younger when she did that, her expression quizzical as she followed Mara’s words without understanding. She said something—it sounded to Mara like “lalala,” a rapid trill of syllables.
“I don’t understand,” Mara said, shaking her head. “I know I have a lot to learn. I was just trying to . . .”
When she had been singing to Gerrant of Greenwood, Mara had known who she was trying to reach, and she’d had songs and memories from her own childhood to draw on. She had nothing like that now. How did you call to a frog, a tiny frightened creature that had only wanted to escape? How could she free Fish Hook’s foot from the curse without endangering the rest of him?
But even more, she could not stop thinking about the stone figures in the drowned laboratory. How could she sing to the Muck, whose ambition had been so twisted Mara scarcely dared to think about the implications? How could she sing to release Bindy, who existed as one person in Mara’s memories and somebody else in reality, a constant clash between the warm and caring person Mara had believed her to be and the conniving manipulator who had so desperately wanted to control the Winter Blade?
She hated that it was her fault the stone curse had trapped them, that she had all but killed them out of carelessness and ignorance. But she hated too that she didn’t even know if she wanted to fix it, or that she wouldn’t have done the same even if she’d known the outcome. Maybe the city was safer with the two of them no longer scheming and battling. Maybe it was better they remained stone forever.
But Mara didn’t think it was okay for anybody to turn anybody else into stone. Not even if they were dangerous people who had harmed others.
Mara had spent so much of her life dreaming about learning magic. Now that she was actually trying to do it, it was proving to be so much more complicated than she had ever imagined. It made her think about Mum and Dad, and the careful way they would chisel and scrape at a block of stone, each individual tap producing a barely perceptible change, all the while working toward an intricate shape they held in their minds.
“Everybody keeps telling me it wasn’t my fault,” Mara said. “It was the spells in the Winter Blade that had gotten all tangled up with each other, but . . . I don’t think that means I shouldn’t try to fix it. There has to be a way.”
Mara set the frog on the dock. The founder gripped the edge of the dock with her long, long fingers and pulled herself up for a closer look. Her green eyes were thoughtful.
Then, after a moment, she began to sing.
Her voice was eerily, hauntingly beautiful, pitched perfectly to echo through the sea cave and roll over the water. She wasn’t singing very loudly, but there was a strength behind it that made the hair on Mara’s neck stand up. The song was short, and it faded softly when the founder was finished.
The little stone frog sat unchanged on the dock. The song had no effect.
The founder made what Mara could only guess was a frustrated face. She sang a few more notes, trying different pitches and tones. It reminded Mara, suddenly, sharply, of the way Bindy use to feel her way into a song when she was singing to bones in the Ossuary to glean their secrets; her voice would echo from the walls of stone inset with bones as she sang the same ancient words over and over to different notes and different rhythms. The memory put a tight, hot ache in Mara’s throat. She forced herself to breathe through it. She wondered if it would ever stop hurting, to remember how good things had been, to never know how much of it had been a lie.
The founder stopped again, and looked at Mara expectantly.
“What?” Mara said. “I’ve already tried. I don’t know how to reverse it.”
The founder gestured at herself with her long fin-tipped fingers, then gestured at Mara, then she repeated the motions.
Mara’s pulse quickened. “You want me to sing with you? But nobody does that!”
Even as she spoke, she was thinking: Why not try? Just because mages had been singing their spells one way for generations didn’t mean it had to be that way forever. The city was changing more and more every day. It was only right that magic change with it, and there was no better place to begin than with righting her own mistakes.
The founder began to sing again, and after a moment Mara joined her. She didn’t recognize any of the words, nor the melody, but she let herself ease into the comfort of the founder’s beautiful voice, following her lea
d. It wasn’t at all the same as it had been singing in the Muck’s laboratory, when fear and hurt had been driving her every choice. They harmonized gently and easily as the sea serpent swam lazily back and forth in the sea cave. The founder’s voice softened, softened, and Mara followed, until together they trailed off in a pair of clear, ringing notes.
A flash of bright green shimmered over the little frog.
Mara gasped. The color was gone as quickly as it had appeared. Mara might have thought she imagined it, but the founder was staring too. Mara laughed, and the founder let out a sound that must have been the same.
When the founder began singing again, Mara joined in right away. Together they sang, the girl and the founder, on a cold moonlit night, in a city alive both above and below, their song old and new at the same time, their voices twining together while the islands slept.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, as ever, to my editor, Alex Arnold, who gently helped me shape this book into the adventure it was always meant to be.
Thank you to my fantastic agent, Adriann Ranta Zurhellen, who somehow keeps me around even when I do things like begin children’s novels with piles of bodies and throw fishy eyeballs all over a scene just to gross her out.
Thank you to Adriana Mather and Kathy MacMillan, who offered invaluable input on an early draft of this story.
Most of all: thank you to all the readers who have given my stories a chance, the teachers and librarians who share their love of books with their students, and book lovers of every age who continue to crave, cherish, and value stories of all kinds during these difficult times.
About the Author
Photo credit Jessica Hilt
KALI WALLACE is the author of two novels for teens and many short stories. She studied geology for years but now devotes her time to writing. She lives in Southern California. You can find her at www.kaliwallace.com.
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Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
CITY OF ISLANDS. Copyright © 2018 by Kali Wallace. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art by Jensine Eckwall
Cover design by Amy Ryan
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933267
Digital Edition JULY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-249983-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-249981-3
1819202122CG/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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