Laufkariar’s sister visited Ulín one day, when he was out. When she rattled the door with her key and stepped in, Ulín thought the other woman was alone, but others came at her heels. Laufkariar’s sister looked older than her age and weighed down with sorrow, but Ulín knew the language well now, and they could talk freely.
“This is not right,” she said to Ulín, and the others echoed her. “He is my brother, and the First Dreamer of my people, but this is not right. The war has ended. You should not be a prisoner.”
Ulín turned to her, beyond tears, beyond hope. “In my room in my father’s house I was barely awake for the drugs. Here I’m awake and aware, but alone with myself, not allowed to go out or to choose my future. Neither is what I want.”
“What do you want?” another woman asked, a librarian Ulín had come to regard as a friend.
The words fell from Ulín’s mouth like hot coals. “I want to be free.”
“And you do not want to remain here among us?” the librarian said.
A different woman said, “We may not be able to protect you from Laufkariar’s anger, but you should have freedom of movement.”
Laufkariar’s sister said, “He does love you, you know.”
Ulín looked between them all. Six women were here with her, younger and middle-aged, thin and stout, beautiful and plain. Their seaweed hair was elaborately braided and bejeweled, and their garments shone with ornaments made of nacre. They were all noblewomen. Ulín wondered how many were magicless, and how many could take serpentshape.
One said, “He will be calmer once you give birth.”
“I am not planning to give birth,” Ulín said, but an older woman, a gardener, looked her up and down.
“As you say.”
The gardener’s daughter, a young woman close to Ulín in age, looked at her mother in surprise, then gave a small nod.
The others did not notice, but Ulín’s hand stole to her stomach.
“You will have to give birth if you stay here,” said the gardener quietly.
A child. Ulín never wanted a child. She especially did not want to have a child when she was held prisoner, not allowed to even leave her room. And if she were to leave the room and roam, a child in tow, what future would that be? Ulín had wanted to travel. To learn new words and discover how languages grew among people for generations. She always wanted to go to university. Ulín did not want a child at all, and she certainly did not want a child who would be born against her will, tying her to a place she could not leave.
“I want to leave,” she said.
The women talked between themselves and argued, their tones rising and falling, but nothing was decided that night. It was another week, and another day with Laufkariar once he returned, and another evening of pain, before the other women came to a decision.
Three of them came to Ulín’s room when Laufkariar was out. He was with another woman, Ulín was told, a woman of the serpent people, but this mattered little to her. On the Coast, her people had their freedom of lovers and lives; such customs were deemed scandalous among the people of the serpents, as was Ulín’s indifference to his straying. But now Laufkariar’s affair was in her favor—he was not in the dreaming wilds, and he was occupied. The three friendly women—the librarian, the gardener, and the gardener’s daughter—took Ulín by the hand. “It is now or never,” they said, and she said, “Please, now.”
“Where shall we take you?” they asked.
“To my parent, if you can . . . I do not know where Sibeli is now . . .”
They whispered between themselves. All three had serpentshapes, not nearly as powerful as Laufkariar’s, but between them they carried Ulín through the dreaming sea while she dangled between them, breathless and terrified and nauseous, all the way until their dreaming powers were spent. Then they emerged in the regular, waking lands, and they swam, carrying Ulín through the cold waves of autumn toward the far shore, underneath the shade of a mountain.
This was North Coast. The mountain was Priadét—this Ulín recognized from her childhood trips with her parent.
The serpent women led her out of the water and to a secluded, small beach, where shells crunched underfoot. “Please take all my treasures,” she begged. She had very little with her—a string of pearls, her bag with the useless soaked notebook. “Take what I have left in the rooms.” But they shook their heads no.
“Travel far from here, for a while,” the librarian said. “The agreements are signed, and nobody wants any more violence between your people and ours, but it would not be wise for you to defy him with your presence.”
“We will deal with Laufkariar,” said the gardener’s daughter. She was putting a brave face on it, but Ulín was grateful.
They embraced her before they left, and Ulín wondered what would have happened if she’d fallen in love with one of those women instead. The gardener’s daughter was fierce and proud, and her serpentshape was handsome and strong, and perhaps in a different time she would be the First Dreamer, if women could formally learn dreamcraft and inherit among the people of the serpents, if Ulín’s mind hadn’t been so set on the stranger she met on the shore. If Ulín had been smarter, faster, older.
“Will I see you again?” Ulín asked the gardener’s daughter.
“Maybe one day, when the dreaming sea dreams a storm to my aid, wave by wave she will dream me true.”
Ulín did not quite understand, but she remembered, and later, she wrote these words down in a new notebook.
But first she bid farewell to her friends. Then she went east toward the mountain, hoping to find Sibeli.
Sibeli was building a house at the foot of Mount Priadét. It was not yet finished, though the magical structure had been planted and the stonework laid, and Sibeli’s people were working now on the house’s chiseled wooden trim. It was evening when Ulín found the place, and she could barely distinguish the shape of the house. She was cold and wet and bone-tired, but the wide-open sky and the wind had revived Ulín.
Sibeli ran forward to greet her. They were a tall person, with a stern and somewhat cold demeanor, and they were a welcome sight. They gathered Ulín in their arms, pressed her tight to their chest for a while. This touch was out of character for them, but Ulín clung, reassured by their coolness and their closeness.
Sibeli led her into the house. Even unfinished and undecorated, the sizeable greeting room was warm. Light spilled from magical candlebulbs that floated under the grand wooden beams of the ceiling. Live fire burned in a stone hearth, and for the first time in months, Ulín felt warmer. Her parent’s people clustered around them with clothing and drinks, but Ulín begged them to give her and Sibeli privacy.
“Mother,” Ulín began.
“Mother?” I echoed. “I thought you used parent for in-betweeners?”
