Yes, the soul was coal, ignited by the fiery presence into a great brightness as it sank deeper in my vision, deeper toward the fiery darkness, the abyss.
Ladder smacked me on the arm, and I shuddered.
“Don’t look.” He said, “Not yet. I will tell you when.”
It took a long time before I was ready.
I stop, and inhale. “How about you tell me something now. How you escaped.”
“Give me a minute,” she says, her voice unsteady. “I need to stretch my legs.”
“I will make us more tea.” I eye Ulín with concern as both of us get up. She seems shaky.
She says, “I’ll be all right. I have traveled widely. I am strong.” She sounds unsure, but she stretches with determination, as if it’s a job that needs her focus. “A bit more, and I can begin.”
At last, a choice
Every night, the prince of the serpents returned to his chambers in a foul mood. Ulín pleaded with him not to hit her, and sometimes it worked; sometimes he told her he had never hit her, that she was lying, that he had always been gentle and loving. After all, he had taken Ulín in after her father kept her drugged and bedridden, useless to him as a daughter unless her deepnames came back. But Laufkariar did not need her deepnames. In fact, he preferred her this way.
And he still gave her gifts—not any less lavish than before—strings of pearl and garments of sewn silver scales embroidered with minute flying fish. He gifted Ulín caskets in which to keep her new treasures, and bracelets—even though she tried to refuse—bracelets that jangled and distracted her when she tried to write in her notebook.
When Laufkariar left for the hunt or for council, Ulín would go out and talk to his people, her language skills building for her a bridge. Most of the people who talked to her were other women, of high rank and yet not as powerful as Ulín thought they should be. They showed her the libraries and the gardens in the palace underwater, the vast rows of pearls cultivated in their shells, and the sea vegetables which had to be harvested in the water outside. These women exchanged words with Ulín, and she listened eagerly to their stories, and was careful with what she wrote down.
She made friends—none too close. They all were afraid of Laufkariar.
Through whispered stories, Ulín learned that her brother had fought Laufkariar not once, but twice. That first time, when three of Laufkariar’s companions perished at her brother’s hand, the prince of the serpents came back home wounded. This was just before Ulín’s nameloss, she realized. She thought that her brother had been in a fight.
But she dared not ask Laufkariar what happened. She never did find out.
When Laufkariar made love to Ulín, he was gentle, but she no longer had deepnames, and so could no longer control her fertility; and there were no herbs and potions here that she knew.
So Ulín begged her women friends for such herbs, and gave her treasures away pearl by pearl to pay for these remedies. She was careful, but he found out in the end.
Laufkariar did not hit her that time. It was his words which wounded her more.
His voice was hot and scalding, but his eyes were cold. “Your vermin of a brother might have locked off the dreaming wilds above your land, and we have made a truce, but you are the thing I have bargained for, and you are the thing I will have. I have not forced you—be grateful—but we made an agreement. My child in your womb. You are nothing otherwise. Who will want you? Your father? Your brother? Don’t make me laugh. You are alone—magicless—here, in my power, under the wave—you have nothing except for my favor. Nobody else cares about you. Nobody.”
Ulín wished he’d killed her, right then and there, but he did not. And she was not allowed to leave the room anymore.
Why does she hesitate about this target? I do not understand. “I can swim underwater,” I tell her. “I bet I swim as well as this prince of yours, if not better. He might have his serpentshape, but I have gills and my training, and if the Ra—if your brother could fight him off at barely fourteen, I can kill him.”
Deep in her story and her pain, Ulín does not notice that I have almost misspoken. I cannot keep this up much longer.
Ulín shakes her head. “I am unsure.”
“I, too, am unsure—unsure why you hesitate.”
“Maybe if you hear more,” she says, but she herself does not sound convinced.
