“If not for your insistence on her free will, she’d never prepare to marry and never go down to that shore, she’d still be uninjured—”
“It is her will that matters here,” Sibeli said. “Ulín is not a child.”
“She is—she is nineteen—unformed—” Kannar’s hoarse whisper was lost now in angrier, louder tones.
“You are confused.” Sibeli, too, was losing their customary calm. “In your anger and grief you call your fourteen-year-old child a snake, and your nineteen-year-old adult daughter a child, and neither—”
“Shut up,” Ulín’s father roared. She felt a wave of scorching heat, as his deepnames activated—Ulín could no longer see them, but the room became suffocating, as if the air was burning, just like that morning on the shore. “Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut up!”
“No, I will not,” Sibeli retorted. “I will not allow you to torture her without her consent—Ulín must decide what she wants—”
Ulín’s father’s face contorted, and she screamed—stop it, stop it, stop it—because she knew what was coming. His power of three single-syllable deepnames—the Warlord’s Triangle, the most militant, potent, unyielding configuration in the land—would destroy her parent’s deepnames just as her brother had destroyed hers. Ulín screamed and screamed, and the world faded into the tearing blind wail of the headache.
It took Ulín many days to fully regain her mind.
Physickers and healers and nursing people came to the room, talking between themselves. In time, she learned that her parent Sibeli had left—just up and left. She heard whispers that Kannar had struck Sibeli, and whispers that he only threatened to strike them; that he was grieving. She heard it said that Sibeli abandoned their duty to their spouse, to their children, to the Coast. She heard that by leaving, Sibeli did the right thing, and who wouldn’t do the same in their place?
Ulín woke up to more physickers, and drifted to sleep again. Her parent never came back. And she could not leave.
“Wait,” I ask. “Is it your father you want killed?”
She is silent. I am becoming adept at her silences now.
Three deepnames—not just any three, but a Warlord’s Triangle; and he was some kind of leader, a politician, he would be well protected even without his own magic. Still, I would take this on.
“I’m willing,” I say. “If you name him as target.”
Ulín chews her lips. “Sometimes I do want to kill him. More often than I would like. Rage rises like bile, this memory of unfreedom, but also . . .” She sighs. “More than his death, I want—my father back, the way he was before. Before he stopped seeing me, and began seeing nameloss.”
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.
