He stopped talking to her. Stopped listening to the stories Ulín found in books, stopped looking at her comparisons of vocabularies, stopped laughing, stopped taking her on moonlit walks in the quince orchards, stopped gifting her bottles of ink, stopped talking to her about the history of ancient wars, stopped being anything but the procurer of healers. Ulín was no longer a daughter, but a problem that demanded to be solved, before she could be allowed to be a daughter again.

“First you will be cured,” Kannar said. “Then we’ll party. We’ll talk. We will travel to the capital together and go see the splendid singing performances, and the shows of spun glass, and we will drink bad Katran wine and you’ll go to the governance sessions with me. You will see! You are not broken, not irreparably.” But the corners of his mouth turned down, and his eyes were shrouded. Ulín begged him for a reprieve from these healers, but he only said, “Don’t give up so easily. We must keep looking for hope.”

I interrupt. “Are you sure you do not want him killed?”

She laughs, bitter. “Between people who see me as powerless and needing protection, and people who see me as broken and needing repair, I have lived these years unseen. But I am a language scholar, and I do not need deepnames in my work. My work stands on its own merit. This is what I want people to see when they look at me.”

I regard her levelly. I say, “I see you.” I think, I do not fully understand this language work, but it compels you and always has. You travel widely, and you make friends because you listen. You are brave and learned, and you need neither protection nor fixing.

“It has been a long time,” she says. “A long ten years.”

After a moment I lean forward, brush my hand against hers. It is not the clasp of before, no longer desperate or even new. This touch I’m giving because I choose to. “Tell me how you escaped the healing room.”

Ulín had tried, surreptitiously at first, to slip out when nobody was watching, but somebody was always watching. She was guided to bed, and her father would appear to scold her. His eyes grew more and more sunken, his wrinkles became deeper, and his anger faster to flare. Ulín thought that his condition was caused by her insubordination, expressed in small ways. It was a few weeks before she found out that the whole of the Coast was experiencing nightmares.

They finally told her what it was. Serpents. Dreamway shapechangers who hunted the Coastal people in dreams, chasing them through watery depths of horrors unknown. Some of her kinspeople dreamt of being torn apart, being devoured. Some never woke up from such dreams. Others sickened.

It had been hundreds of years since her people had quarreled with the sea-serpent people, even though peace was often uneasy—but now the Coast was preparing for war. Across the garden-grown land of the Coast, those magically strong were gathering in groups and in councils. The Coast had been a part of the Katran Oligarchy for centuries now, and paid tribute to the Governance, but their Katran overlords would offer them no support. Still, the Coastal houses were rich in named strong. And Kannar was home. In the Katran capital he served as a minister of war, and his Coastal fighters were powerful and hardened. From the capital, too, he summoned even more healers, more callous and ruder by far than the ones at home. Ulín spent most of her days floating in dreamless sleep. It was something they put in her drinks, and no matter how much she would spit them out, these people with power over her were everywhere now, and she had no deepnames anymore with which to resist them.

She never saw the dreamway nightmares. In her hours and minutes of waking, Ulín thought it must have been the drugs they gave her.

But then, one night, Laufkariar came. In serpentshape.

He leapt from the dreaming wilds, slithered down from the ceiling, deadly and glinting with scales. Around them, the great house was quiet.

Ulín’s head was pounding. There was magic happening somewhere, and she needed to think, but then Laufkariar shed his serpent skin and stood before her in a man’s likeness. And oh, he was beautiful like this, his bare skin gleaming iridescent green in the light of the stars that pinpricked his arms and bare shoulders, and his bluish-green hair was studded with pearls.

He smiled, that smile that Ulín had thought she had forgotten. She forgot everything else then, her hands reaching up to his shining.

His kiss cleared the drugs from her blood. Even the headache receded. But she still could not think. Only feel.

When he broke the kiss, he spoke. “I have asked for your hand in marriage, and I still want that. A condition of peace between your people and mine. I will call my fighters back from the vast dreaming sea, and your people’s nightmares will end. Your brother’s crime even will be forgotten. A bride, a wife, you will live with me underwave. Our child—and we will have a child—will inherit both kingdoms. It is a good deal.”

He did not say, I love you. He did not say, Do you want a child? She thought about it only later, how he asked her nothing at all about what she wanted.

“Did you want a child, Ulín?” I am curious, but there is a sadness to it. I add, “Perhaps, like me, you did not want production.”

“This is not how my people think of it.” But she thinks of it now, her face hesitant, suddenly unsure. “See, a thousand years ago when my people were new to the Coast, our foremother Ranra asked everyone who was able and willing, to give birth . . .” She chews her lips. “Is that production? We were so few, and newly escaped from disaster that befell our archipelago.”

“So everybody gave birth.”

Ulín says, “Not everybody. People still had a choice, of course. But—everybody understood the need.”

“In the Shoal as well. Our siltway people, too, were so few, newly escaped from disaster. There’s still not enough people. It is a duty to the collective.”

“Ranra called it a rekindling. But it is seen as a duty, yes.” Ulín shrugs. “Nobody can force anybody to give birth. Some people want children, others don’t. But this was a different thing. Laufkariar wanted—it was a political plan he had. Perhaps that, too, was a duty to his people. I am not sure.”

“I think that what hurt you was different,” I observe wryly. “Your lover—he came there to save you from your father, who wanted to save you from your brother, who wanted to save you from your lover.”

Ulín’s eyes glisten with water. “I just wanted to be free. To be myself.”

“But you had been drugged and physicked against your will, and your thoughts were not clear. And nobody asked you what you wanted.”

She says, “I did not want to live underwave forever, bearing children and going nowhere, but I did not want to stay in the healing room. And, to be honest . . . I still wanted his touch. Not in bed but . . . his closeness. Was I consenting? I don’t know, Stone Orphan. I thought I was.”

It seems clear to me. “You were drugged. He did not ask anything.”

"All my people now hated his people. I refused to hate his people, or him, or—it was all wrong, and I could not figure it out. So I went with him.”

I do not offer my hand this time. Ulín is curled upon herself, almost crushing the notebook on her knees. I say gently, “The people who should have loved you had hurt you. There seemed no other place for you to go. To be. To be safe.”

“Is that consent?” she asks me hoarsely.

“I would call it survival.”

Laufkariar took the serpentshape and wrapped Ulín in his golden-green coils, and he carried her up into the dreaming wilds, into the vast violet sea full of movement and terror.

It was the worst thing yet. Suffocating and purple-gray and full of menacing slivers of bone, and nothing to breathe. She screamed in terror, and he bit her at the base of her neck, and she could not move or scream anymore.

He brought Ulín back to his home. To his rooms.

He took the personshape.