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.
He put her into his bed.
“I am so sorry.” My hands are clasped in my lap. I brace myself not to reach out. Touch is not what Ulín needs right now, I am sure of it as I am sure of anything.
I wonder how can someone so eloquent be silent so much. I want to take one of these notebooks and write a dictionary of her silences.
I say, “You do not need to tell me. I will not pry. I assume it is him you want killed. I will do it gladly.”
I have the skills for this. Surviving underwater is easy. The dreaming wilds are not a danger to me. When my dirk sinks into his neck, I will smile.
She pries her mouth open to speak. “He never forced me.”
“All right.” Not much of a defense of him, but I am relieved to hear this.
