The Winter Duke

by Claire Eliza Bartlett

  I tried to bury my frustration on that, too. It wasn’t Farhod’s fault that the search for the remedy was going poorly. “Anything else?”

  “There’s a message on your desk.” She frowned at my shoe.

  I went over. My heart skipped a beat as I spotted the pale green paper.

  Your request for an audience has been granted.

  Yours in friendship, etc.

  “Get me a change of clothes,” I told Aino. “We’re going Below.”

  Olloi met me at the entrance to Below. His unblinking eyes examined my hands, then my belt. “Your Grace risks great offense by going Below without a gift.” Olloi unlocked the rusted padlock that secured the iron bar across the door.

  “I’ll have one sent. Below knows we’re living in unusual circumstances.” Besides, could they afford to offend me? I was the head of a sovereign nation, one that Below relied on for any contact with the world above. “How fast does that lock rust?”

  “One or two years, Your Grace. We’re due a replacement.”

  “Hmm.” Had Viljo been lying to me about the break-in, or was Olloi lying to me now?

  I caught a flash of silver beneath the dark water. My problems Above would have to wait. Aino helped me out of my dress and finished pinning my hair to my head. “Are you sure about this?” she murmured.

  “I’m sure.” I wondered whether to say something to Olloi, but Meire’s crest lifted above the surface of the lake, and I was out of time. Better for me to act once I had more information.

  I slid into the water, gasping as my muscles seized. A hand found mine and tugged me down until I was face-to-face with Meire. Meire’s fingers brushed over my eyes and lips. The pressure on my lungs lifted, and I let the excess air go in a stream of bubbles.

  Meire coiled her lithe green body in a bow. “Hail, Your Grace.” We began to swim down together. “We were delighted by your request to meet again so soon,” she said.

  “I wish it were under better circumstances,” I admitted. “But an urgent matter has come up.” Or two.

  The ice creaked above us, pale, dotted with seaweed and thick as any of the city walls. A long line ran where something’s dorsal fin had scratched against it. Soon it disappeared as we swam into the gloom and the darkness enveloped us.

  Meire flipped her feet, pulling up short. “Hold out your hand,” she said.

  I hesitated. “Can… can I try?”

  “Magic is notoriously fickle around your kind,” she warned me, but a moment later, I felt the soft press of her hand on mine. The pearl was slick and a little bit slimy. I focused, pushing my mind toward light and vision, and squeezed my fist until I felt the pearl burst between my fingers.

  I felt that tug, as though the magic drew on some part of me I couldn’t name. Then I cried out as a stabbing pain shot up my arm. Light flared from Meire’s hand. Long, thick spines, red at the base and fading to white, ran up my arm, ending in wicked points. The skin around them swelled. I touched one gingerly; it was rubbery beneath my finger and I winced as it bent, pulling the skin beneath.

  Meire hissed something, and her long fingers pressed against the base of the spines. “Perhaps we should fix this before we visit my duke.”

  “Sorry.” I should’ve let Meire do her job, instead of wasting time and fixating on a magic I couldn’t master. “I just…” Again, I hesitated. But whom else could I tell this to? Meire had been kind to me before she’d had to be. “The grand duke is the only one Above who can do magic.”

  “Yes,” Meire said. She did not look at me but tugged a spine free, leaving a white welt behind. I clenched my fist. It felt like pulling needles.

  “I sort of thought”—hoped—“that when I became grand duke, I’d inherit the secret.” It sounded foolish when I put it that way. The knowledge wouldn’t simply appear in my head.

  “It is a symbol of trust between us,” Meire said. “The greatest secret. I know my duke is eager to give it to you once the coronation trials are over.”

  “Do you know it?”

  Meire went still, one hand holding mine, the other pinching a spine near my wrist. I shouldn’t have asked. All the same, if she truly was debating telling me…

  She spoke carefully, quietly, focusing on my arm. “When I was learning, my tutors always said that the secret to magic was inside us.” Her wide eyes darted to mine, and she blinked.

  I squeezed her hand in return. I knew it was more than she should have told me, and warmth filled me that she’d answered at all.

  But it wasn’t enough. I needed to search until I held the secret of magic in my hands. If I did that, my council would forget Sigis even existed.

  No one had prepared for my arrival Below. Figures crowded the processional way, haggling with vendors who wore suspended cages of corroding iron and nets of seaweed. Scales shone in the bioluminescent light, red and green and blue, and black eyes gleamed. Fishwives hung fish, still breathing, from chains at their shoulders. Seaweed reached green-black fingers out, brushing at the finned feet of the crowd. Tiny sharks stole from their wares.

  “Is it a market day?” I couldn’t help asking.

  Meire moved her head, and a cloud of silver fish around her mane shivered and dissipated. “Every day is a market day. But come. The grand duke knows that you are here.”

  Together we swam on. As the fishwives saw us, their bodies moved in surprise, curling in deference and undulating as they swam out of the way. Spikes glistened on elbows and arms. I wondered if they were there by magic, as mine had been.

  The sea shifted and pulled us toward the palace. I held tightly to Meire’s arm, keeping my feet up so I could avoid the reaching fronds and the tiny figures that darted between them.

  The guards at the palace gates bowed and moved to the side, and we swam into darkened halls. The shadows seemed to have grown since I’d swum here last—was it only two days ago? Something roiled in a corner, flicking a tentacle out to test the water as we passed.

  We stopped at the entrance to the duke’s throne room. Meire released my hand. Her black eyes seemed pensive. “What is it?” I said.

  “My master…” she began, but she didn’t seem to know how to finish. Her shoulders hunched, and she turned toward the guards, bowing. The guards at the inner doors opened up, and I swam into the throne room once again.

  It was much darker than it had been the other day. The glow of the bioluminescence illuminated silhouettes more than faces, and I saw only thin slices of body and fin as they swam in from the edges of the room. The half-cages that held the grand duke and the grand consort Below were barely visible in the gloom, and my skin was the pale grayish-blue of bodies shortly before we burned them. I bowed.

  “We must apologize for the lack of light,” came the grand duke’s voice from a shadow in front of me. “We don’t have as much need of it as your kind do. But we will bring a lamp, and we will talk of treaties and good friendships together.”

  I swallowed, rallying my courage. “How can you be so certain that I am the one you should treat with?”

  “Whom else would I treat with?” the duke Below replied, and the amusement in his voice was diminished.

  I wished I could take a deep breath, or tighten my grip around something heavy and protective, like a sword. “You declared my foster brother eligible to defeat me in your trial.”

  There was movement, an eddying of water. The winter roses above us refracted the dim light, glinting like razors. “He is of the line,” the duke Below said, and, suddenly, the shape of him loomed before me, a shadow in front of shadows. The spines at his elbows were tipped in yellow. A warning to predators? Was it significant that he was the grand duke and that his spurs were a different color? Focus.

  Father was a large man, but the duke Below had to be nine feet from crown to toes. His shoulders were broad, and his arms powerful with muscle. I could see no sympathy in his eyes. I knew if I tried to flee, I wouldn’t stand a chance. I had to use my words—the words I was so terrible with Above.
“We do not meddle in the affairs of Above.” His teeth flashed in the gloom. “Unless…” He extended a hand, and a servant set a roll of seaweed paper into it.

  The agreement. I should just sign it. But even I wasn’t foolish enough to sign a contract I hadn’t read. “Send it to my prime minister,” I said.

  The duke Below’s voice was low in my mind, and did I imagine the cold current that wrapped around my limbs? “You do not have much time.”

  “Nevertheless.” There was no reason to feel anxious. No reason to panic. “I came here to investigate magic, not negotiate.” Not until I had a stronger grasp of the situation.

  His fins swished. “You are bold. I respected your father, for all we disagreed. I hope it is not a mistake to extend the same courtesy to you.”

  “No,” I said, feeling the rising panic. “I want to work with you. I only…” I told him of my suspicion that someone had been Below without me.

  The duke’s eyes gleamed. “I have given your liaison dispensation to escort you wherever you need to go.” His smile grew, and I imagined those teeth fastening around me, dragging me down to the seaweed of the royal road, to lie among the picked bones. “Come and go as you need, if you think you can discover defiance of my law, Your Grace.”

  His words were the height of generosity. His tone was a warning. I bowed and allowed the guard to see me out.

  Meire waited for me outside. “I will take you to the treasury,” she said. “But would you like to see the fields where we grow it first?”

  “Grow what?” I asked.

  “The magic.”

  My heart quickened against my ribs. “Lead the way.”

  Magic came from a particular type of seaweed, Meire explained as we swam. It produced little white flowers, which, in turn, produced bloodred stamen, which, in turn, produced sap that beaded and congealed into the pearls that Meire kept in a little pouch on her belt.

  “And you use it every day?” I said, still astonished.

  “We do have it in excess,” Meire pointed out.

  “Isn’t it dangerous to use it so much?” I said.

  Meire’s head tilted. “Why would it be?”

  Because magic was unstable. Because magic was expensive. Because magic was uncontrollable. But only Above.

  We swam away from the palace complex and its swooping walls. Eels darted from coral gardens. Citizens swam among them, seemingly unbothered by sharks and seven-foot fish. Rocks jutted from the lake floor, and in the small, cavernous spaces fish nibbled at algae.

  Meire stopped at the edge of the city and unhooked a lantern from its post, showing me the space where pearls of magic were inserted so that light would be emitted. “We will be going into the dark. Can you hold the lamp?” I pressed my hand against the fungal sentinels, reveling in the spongy feel of them, then took the lamp by its glass handle, another item they must have traded for with Above. Meire’s hand grasped mine again, and she drew a six-foot spear from the sheath at her back. The tip thinned to a barbed point. The wood was soft and rotted in places, the iron point browned and flaked. “What is that for?” I asked.

  “It is only a precaution,” Meire said. Precaution against what? It looked like I could snap that spear in half. She pushed aside the lights of the city, and we swam out into the dark.

  I held the lamp before me, but it illuminated only a small swath of water in front of us. Meire swung her spear slowly through the water, and ink-black shapes moved out of our way. More sentinels, I hoped. “Does anything ever attack you out here?”

  “You hunt Above, do you not?” Meire said. “We hunt, too. The fish you catch Above are the slow, stupid ones. For us, it is a rite of passage to go into the deep, to pursue the angriest and largest of creatures.”

  “What did you fight?” I asked.

  Meire hesitated. It occurred to me that perhaps it was too personal a question, that I’d put her on the spot by asking something she didn’t want to answer but couldn’t refuse a grand duke. “Never mind. I’m sorry.”

  “Do not be sorry.” Meire moved her right arm closer to the lamp, and I saw a spiral of perfect rings winding from her elbow to her wrist. “It was a… squid, you might call it.”

  “A kraken?” I guessed.

  A stream of bubbles hissed out of Meire’s teeth. Had I made her laugh? “Nothing so large,” she said. “I am alive, after all.”

  “What’s the largest thing anyone’s ever killed down here?” I asked.

  “Ah. That was many hundreds of years ago. It was a shark as large as the city itself. It is said that one tooth was the size of a whole man. He swallowed entire villages, until a hero resolved to be the one to end his terrifying control over us. That was our first grand duke.”

  “Did he defeat it?” I asked.

  “He beseeched his brother from Above for iron and fashioned a spear and an enormous bow to launch it. Our merwives stood as bait. When the shark attacked, our grand duke killed it with one shot. It is said the shark’s blood flowed over the lake floor, creating the carnivorous processional road. The meat served for a feast that united all the people Below.”

  “And the skeleton?”

  “Became the walls of the grand duke’s palace.” Now it was my turn to laugh. “Consider it,” she suggested.

  I thought of the gleaming walls, their polished stone. They looked more like volcanic rock than cartilage, as romantic as the legend sounded. Maybe the grand duke would grant me leave to take a small sample of the building material, and Farhod could help me analyze it.

  But my first priority was to find out how someone Above had gotten magic and learned how to use it. My second was to figure out a cure for my family. And when I managed that, I’d probably have to leave Kylma before I could learn more about Below—before my father decided I was too much of a threat.

  Meire put her hand over mine and lifted the lamp. Something dark fluttered away from the lantern light. “We are here.”

  The magic fields stretched dark over the lake floor, dotted with pale, round blooms like the moon at its peak. As light fell on them, a few flowers swiveled toward the lantern. I caught the glint of red stamens, and the shining, pearlescent sap at their center.

  Farhod had one tiny jar of pearls, allotted by the treasury once a year. Here were thousands of them, nestled in paper-thin petals—the wealth of Kylma and more.

  I ran my hand over a velvet-soft bloom. The pearl’s skin broke, leaving a trail of glittering white across the dark water. The trail grew fins, a tail, a gaping jaw—and my finger, smeared with sap, became long and pointed, as pale as bone and as ridged as a tooth. I reached for the little fish, and at the touch of magic upon magic, it splintered into shards of ice, to be snatched up by even smaller fish that flashed beneath the flowers. They swarmed my finger, nipping at the remains of the magic, softening the look of my hand until only the shadow of scales remained. Then they darted back to the protection of the seaweed.

  “Amazing,” I said, bringing my finger close to my face. “The pearls aren’t so fragile Above.” My fingers glowed a moment with the final traces of magic, then faded to their dull, pale human forms.

  “These are not entirely ready to be harvested. We allow the pearls to mature before sending shipments Above. It hardens their skin and makes them less potent.”

  “But it means that anything you shipped Above would have been sent within a certain time frame,” I guessed. That was a start. “Meire, how does a curse work?”

  Her hand tightened fractionally against mine. “It is entirely a matter of will. Of the actor.”

  “I don’t suppose you know how to cure one?”

  Was it wishful thinking, or did she hesitate for a moment? “No, Your Grace.”

  “Hmm.” I sighed, releasing a stream of bubbles even though I wasn’t technically breathing. The nearest flowers danced in the little current I’d created. The ground beneath them swarmed with life. Everything over the fields seemed to shimmer. “Why grow the magic all the way out here? Why not
within the city?”

  “The flowers require the dark,” Meire replied.

  “And what lies beyond this?”

  “The deep places.” Meire’s forearm turned so that I could see the puckered scars again. “Do you really wish to see…?”

  I laughed. “It’s not necessary. This time.”

  “You are a curious one,” Meire said. “It is a trait we like Below.”

  “Lucky me.”

  We turned away from the fields and made our way back toward the archives. “Do you wish me to take the lantern?” Meire asked as we swam.

  “Does that mean I can try the spear?” I said.

  A trail of laughter escaped from her mouth. “My master would be most displeased if you stabbed something by accident. I regret that I must keep the spear.”

  “It was worth a try.” I felt Meire’s hand squeeze briefly around mine.

  We swam back into the city. I tried to imagine it as it once was, according to Meire’s tale—a barren rock bottom swarming with frightened citizens Below. One fishman, with a seaweed mane and shoulders like an aurochs, winding a winch that would launch a spear the length of my Great Hall. A shark with a great, gaping mouth, with teeth the size of my father, eyes like twin eternities. What had happened to the skin of such a creature? Was the wide arch of the palace truly part of its nose?

  Meire took me to a low building on a street with more of the strange orange and green gardens that surrounded the palace walls. We swam through the wide door and into the bare foyer of the treasury. The small room had a vaulted ceiling dotted with blue fungal lamps. Long shadows moved over my arms. When I looked up, I saw only dark rock.

  A fishwoman hovered before us, pressing webbed fingers together. Her scales were a deep orange-red, tinged with blue around the outside edges. Delicate fins rippled down her back, over the top of her head, down her chest. Her nose was of the flat, gill type, and her eyes had a thin orange iris. She paused before us, and Meire swam in front of me. She inclined her head, and the fishwife returned the gesture. Then Meire gestured to me.