Laufkariar did not care about language. He was eager to show her his treasure—a vast coral palace underwater, its rooms inlaid with white pearl and nacre, with emerald and sapphire and bone. It was in that place that Ulín discovered that not all dreamway people could take the serpentshape; most could not, in fact. They only had one shape, like Ulín herself. For the sake of those people, the whole palace domain was sealed with great rooms of air, where one could live a lifetime without taking the serpentshape, and where Ulín did not need to worry about maintaining her magical bubble of breath.
He gifted her with heavy garments sewn with stars made of seed-pearl, and he held Ulín’s wrists, binding them with white silver. He said that he would be chosen First Dreamer after his father and she’d be his bride, there on the cushions and under canopies, speechless in his tongue and entirely at his will, while he made agreements and treaties with Ulín’s people. Promises of peace. Even though their two peoples had not been at war for centuries.
“It is good that your women inherit,” he said.
“I do not want to inherit,” she said.
Laufkariar frowned. “Would you let your brother inherit?”
Ulín brushed it off. “My brother is still a child.” And why wouldn’t he inherit if he wanted? What mattered on the Coast was aptitude and desire and consent, before family name and birth order.
“I want to travel,” she told him. “To learn the languages of people not my own, to breathe the air of faraway places, to see and to hear, to study and to be awed, to write down what I learned.” When Ulín saw him frown, she quickly added, “But I will always return to you.”
Laufkariar’s face did not ease—if anything, his frown deepened, but back then, in the dimness, Ulín convinced herself it was a trick of the light. As he held her wrists down, he was tender.
I say to Ulín, “I wish Old Song had found a sea palace when she ventured south.” It would have been easier, perhaps, if she befriended people of water.
“What did she find?” Ulín’s eyes shine.
Instead of a palace, Old Song found a shore stretching endlessly from side to side, and above it, on a cliff, was a forest. Two peoples lived there—nameway and dreamway—and they came out to greet her, all clothed in garments decorated with twigs and branches. The dreamway shape there was the stag. Old Song described the animal to me, with words she learned later. It was a stag of miracle, its antlers red with dawn and twinkling with jewels like stars underwater. When the stag took a personshape, it was a woman, tall and regal in her nakedness. Three powerful nameway hunters accompanied her, with their bows and their spears of forged steel.
“We will continue to fish the sea,” the stag woman said, but her voice was generous. “Our peoples can share its bounty.”
She and her husbands welcomed Old Song and her Boater bonded. From the shore they climbed back to the wood, deeper into its dappled green shade. Like deep water, but growing. Old Song described it to me—leaves that rustled like waves, multicolored flowers in glades of foam-soft grass—I have never seen such sights, nor do I understand them still, but I heard Old Song’s story and felt her yearning.
The stag woman taught her the words for he, she, and they. And the language of bodies, and their pleasures.
This I learned later: that all boats were forbidden now, except for the purpose of labor. Not a single person from the Boater storyline would talk to me, and I was steered away from boats on dock.
“Old Song,” I said when I flickered to her. “I must know. You traveled and returned without a companion, and now my whole body is buzzing with this yearning. What happened with your Boater bonded? Why do the Boaters turn away from me? When I fall asleep now, I hear a song of red, as if coming from underwater. It beckons and disturbs me.”
“Hold me,” she asked. “Hold me with your bond. Do not let me go, and do not seek this light which you hear when you drift into sleep. This is not why I bonded with you. You are the anchor, the stone. We must not be traitors to our people.”
But I wanted—I knew now, and I wanted. Desire had settled in me, not simply to flicker from one person to another, but—on a surface. On land and on wave. Toward the horizon. To see more than Old Song saw. To see.
Ulín is jotting some words in a notebook spread on her knees. She looks up, and her eyes are shining in a way I do not understand. “There are no words for he, she, and they in siltway?”
“No,” I explain, patiently. “The body is not that important.”
“It’s not just about the body. It’s about who the person is, how they feel . . .”
I shrug. “Everybody is equal in the isles. We use the word en for all people. I have translated it for you as they, but it is not one word out of many. Everyone is en.” Again, I think, of all my words, this is what she latched on to. But then, didn’t Old Song latch onto the word she just as fiercely, after that traitorous time she spent with the queen of the stag people? She told me, “A woman. This I can be—for myself—”
Ulín smiles at me. “Languages are wonderful, aren’t they?”
No, I think. Languages are prisons. People are prisons for each other, too.
“Go on,” I say, roughly. “Tell me more of your story.”
A woman came to Ulín in secret, at night, when her lover Laufkariar was out hunting. It was his sister. Or perhaps his cousin, or his aunt. A woman just slightly older than him, in her early thirties. She could not take the serpentshape. Like many among his people, she was magicless, and so she would live forever in the underwater palace of nacre and pearl. Her body was lavishly clothed, her dress decorated in shimmering green waves embroidered with slivers of shell, but she did not look happy. She looked afraid.
