A Dark and Drowning Tide

by Allison Saft

She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised. Good sense tended to flee wherever Sylvia von Wolff went.

From this angle, Lorelei couldn’t see her face, but she could see her hair. Even after five years of knowing her, it always shocked her—the stark, deathlike white of it. She’d knotted the unruly waves at the nape of her neck with a ribbon of blood-red silk, but a few stubborn strands had managed to escape. In Lorelei’s weaker moments, she imagined that grabbing hold of it would feel like plunging her hands into cold water.

Lorelei was not beautiful enough to whisper her heart’s desires into the king’s ear and believe he would listen. There was no charm she had, no power she possessed to make her persecutors throw themselves at her feet. All she had was her mind.

It was a song like the sea—the sweetest song Lorelei had ever heard. It swelled and crested, inexorable and irresistible as it wove around Sylvia’s in perfect harmony. One moment, Lorelei had her feet planted solidly on the earth. The next, she felt weightless, soaring. Never before had she felt so…complete, as though she breathed in tandem with every being on earth. For one glorious, incandescent moment, she saw it: the vibrant, wild beauty of the world. Aether was within all of them—within everything. It glimmered in the mist, and the Vereist sparkled with a thousand different colors, so bright it nearly brought tears to her eyes. How had she ever thought it so dark?

The river—once again black and dull as iron—churned winkingly below her.

Sylvia, meanwhile…Even half-drowned in a mud-stained gown, she managed to look fairy-tale beautiful, as perfect as a princess in a glass coffin. When Lorelei looked at her, she felt sick with an emotion she preferred not to name.

Up close, it was an ostentatious sprawl of white stone crowned with a dome of copper. The moon seemed to balance on its tallest peak, silvering the gardens with a soft hand. The air was thick and sweet with the scent of roses. Thanks to the king’s veritable army of royal botanists, they blossomed in every imaginable color, from dusky gold to purest white. But it was their thorns that Lorelei most admired, each one a bolt of silver in the dark.

There was good, and there was evil. Those who were rewarded and those who were punished. But she would never be the pitiable girl in the blood-red cape or the golden-haired orphan who charms a prince with her fragile beauty. She would always be the goblin forcing maidens to spin straw into gold. She would always be the Yeva in thorns. The moment she let down her guard, everything she’d fought for would be taken from her. This place had made Lorelei into a viper, and if she should go down, she would go down hissing like one. Until that day when they inevitably turned on her, she would guard what was hers, no matter who she had to bring down with her.

She wanted to throw herself from the roof and tear the protective scroll from the doorpost. She wanted to set her father’s starveling herb garden aflame.

The starlight found Sylvia, even in a place like this. She had an infuriating knack for looking utterly at home or at peace anywhere she went.

She had lain awake deep into the night, devouring every word until the candle went out, puddled on her windowsill. It painted a picture so exquisite, she’d wept from longing. Now, having read Ziegler’s later works, Lorelei knew it was a piece of juvenilia. But that book had cracked her world open like an egg. It was a place full of wonder, of adventure. And for the first time, her yearning had a name: naturalism. That far-off dream contented her at first. But as she grew older, she realized that girls from the Yevanverte didn’t get to leave it.

Perhaps she was not bold enough to challenge him, but Sylvia would never understand what it meant to make yourself less than you were. If she had nothing else, she would always have her name—and all her stupid pride. There was nothing else to do. Lorelei laughed. By now, she knew it was not a pleasant sound, low and what Heike had once described as sinister. A shiver, barely perceptible, passed through Sylvia.

The kingdom seemed to her nothing but a vast, bleak expanse of mud. Nothing was going as she dreamed it would.

The delicate splinters in the woodwork, the uneven seams in the damask wallpaper, the way the tiles of marble on the floor fit together like crooked teeth. It was a splendor she could slide her fingers beneath, like a loose tile or a strip of rain-swollen bark. Some superstitious part of her feared what rot she’d find if she peeled it back.

“Hello. Good girl?” No, she wanted to reply. Demonic beast.

she’d clung to two lines so fervently, they were all but branded on her heart. It seems to me you’ve far too much potential to waste it making shoes and moping. How would you like to be extraordinary?

It had been a long while since she’d extended any gesture of maternal fondness. It made Lorelei’s stomach twist violently with—what, exactly, longing? She felt vaguely disgusted with herself. Somehow, all she could think of was the barely leashed fire in Sylvia’s voice. You slink and scrape for him like a beaten hound, just as you do for Ziegler.

Through her delirium, Lorelei at last recognized that it was Sylvia holding her shoulders steady. Shame, hot and relentless, seared through her. Of all people to see her like this, to witness how humiliatingly fragile she truly was, of course it was her. Her own death would be a blessing now. She wanted to drive her fist through the wall, to dip her power into the river and overturn the entire boat with the force of her rage.

She knew Sylvia. Her tells and her fears. The way she wrote and how it exactly mirrored the overexuberant way she spoke. The way she took her tea—with a teeth-rotting amount of sugar—and her favorite color—amethyst, not purple—and the tenderest spots to dig the knife of her words. She was irritatingly forthright. When she was happy, she laughed. When she was sad, she wept. She wouldn’t know subtlety if it threw a dueling gauntlet at her feet.

In the pale moonlight, with the fog pressing its fingers longingly against the glass, Sylvia still looked like a specter. Like something that might slip through Lorelei’s fingers if she held too tight.

Wilhelm might look like a charming fop, but his heart was colder than hers. His was a desolate, far-reaching cold, like a long winter’s night. She could almost admire it, if it weren’t for the terror simmering just beneath the surface.

“I am begging you.” Something about those words sent a rush through her. Entirely against her will, Lorelei’s gaze flickered down and landed on Sylvia’s lips. What depths would you sink to? Lorelei wanted to ask. How will you convince me?

Over the months they’d known each other, she’d come to associate him with the folktale “The Wolf and the Fox.” It was short but brutal, with a simple message: if you couldn’t be the strongest creature in the woods, you could be the slyest. If you were agreeable enough, you could call in favors like debts. You could persuade people into revealing their weaknesses and make them feel like they’d given you a gift. That was what made Ludwig dangerous. He had a face that begged to be trusted and a smile as sharp as a knife in the back.

Surely, everyone had noticed the lingering looks and the way they invented excuses to touch each other. It was exhausting to watch.

But sometimes she believed she had been doomed to misery, like the victim of some fairy-tale curse. It was a devouring sort of sadness, the kind that did not grow lighter when you shared it. She had scrubbed through her life, searching for the root of it. If she spelled it out in black-and-white like one of her stories, perhaps it would all make sense.

But games like that were as pointless as they were punishing. Lorelei would never know that version of herself. She would never know how much of this bitterness within her was innate and how much had been shaped by the inevitable cruelty of living. Her story had been written long ago, in indelible ink and blood.

She sank below the surface of deep, black waters, so cold it snatched the last gasp of air from her lungs. Bubbles burst from her lips. Her hair drifted wildly around her, reaching toward the faint thread of light filtering in from above. But when she looked up, it was nothing but darkness overhead and darkness all around her.

A horrible, self-satisfied smile spread across her face. “Lorelei, have you…read my books?”

“It’s unwise to take your eyes off a dying thing, you know,” Johann said. “Everything becomes more vicious and more beautiful in its final moments.”

“In Herzin,” he said after a long moment, “from the moment you can walk, they take you by the shoulders and point you toward an enemy. They place a sword in your hand and call it purpose. She is the only one who has asked me to set it down. I don’t know what you call that.”

I trust one of you will watch that one…” Feeling vengeful, Lorelei said, “Surely, it would make everyone the most comfortable if Her Highness were to do it.” Sylvia shot her a downright murderous look. “It would be my pleasure.”

Even as a child, Lorelei had not been easy to love. Early on, she’d found it preferable to embrace her unpleasant nature rather than undergo the agony of trying and failing to please.

And yet, Sylvia did not budge. She looked as though she was making her last stand before some horrid fairy-tale creature. Lorelei hated it. She stepped closer, until Sylvia’s head had to tip back to hold her gaze. Until she could feel the heat of Sylvia’s breath against her lips. Until her vision was filled with nothing but Sylvia’s defiant, blazing glory. She had half a mind to grab her chin and… Sylvia made a strange noise, but her silver eyes were molten, almost expectant.

It was a perfect mirror of the sky, serene and glittering with the cold light of a thousand stars. They were so bright, it seemed to Lorelei that there truly were stars submerged here. It would be a simple thing to scoop one out and swallow it whole.

Sylvia’s enchanted lantern—enspelled to never extinguish, Lorelei assumed—illuminated the small space, but most of it clung to Sylvia. It gilded her hair and filled her pale eyes with fire. It might have been beautiful, had Lorelei not caught a glimpse of blood seeping through Sylvia’s coat. For one horrible moment, Lorelei’s vision pulsed black with fear.

It was impossible not to notice her. She tore through the world like a streak of white lightning.

“Because you despise me! You think me beneath you. I could see it in your eyes, and I…God, I would have done anything to earn your respect, your attention. I just wanted you to look at me.” Sylvia floundered for a moment. “When you do, I…It’s terrifying. It’s exhilarating. You’re like something out of a nightmare.”

Lorelei stared at her as her entire life rearranged around this revelation. So much clicked into horrifying, sickening clarity. Every flush of Sylvia’s face she’d misinterpreted as indignation. Every tremor of her voice she’d read as barely leashed anger. The ways their eyes always found one another in a room. The way she always stood too close when they argued.

She could not possibly want her as she truly was: the tender, nerve-stricken parts of herself she did not let anyone see. But if she wanted her monstrous—a fantasy—then Lorelei could give her that.

She was a weed, drawn helplessly to light she did not deserve. And now she had knowledge she was never meant to have. The sound of her sighed-out name on Sylvia’s lips, the taste of her kiss. Now, she would never be able to stop wanting her. Like another fairy-tale curse inflicted upon her, she was struck with a hunger she could never satisfy.

He touched the wound and stared at his fingers, slicked red with blood. Then, his eyes locked on hers. A terrible, ravening hunger lit them from within: pure bloodlust.

Sylvia’s breath shuddered out of her. Her eyes were livid, burning as bright and wild as an open flame. Sparking within them was something Lorelei realized then that she had never seen before, not even when they first met five years ago. It felt as though she’d been struck across the face with the shock of it. She had been a fool if she thought for even one moment she knew what hatred looked like on Sylvia von Wolff’s face before now.

“One day,” Sylvia said, “you will grow tired of this thing you’ve made yourself into. One day, all there will be to content you is ghosts.”

A horrible feeling curdled within Lorelei, and her fingers twitched around some impotent, murderous impulse. God, she despised him. More than anything, she wished she had the power to hurt him in a way that mattered.

You are honestly one of the least self-aware people I have ever met!” “I am perfectly self-aware! You are brighter than the sun itself. And me…”

They were horrible, but they were beautiful, too. If there was a way to speak with God, to lay eyes upon something sublime, this surely came close.

Sylvia was practically sparkling, her hair pooled like molten silver around her. Lorelei wanted forever to bask in the light of her smile. She wanted to be carried on the current of her whims. She wanted to argue with her until she was breathless. She wanted to hurt her exquisitely, again and again, for as much time as they had. The depth of her hunger frightened her.

Sylvia’s lips parted. Her eyes were hooded and darkly inviting, as though her thoughts had been following those same delirious loops of I want, I want, I want.

“I want you however I can have you. I want you brutal, and I want you tender, and I want you at your best and your worst. Saints. I want you, Lorelei, and I—”

Heike looked different than Lorelei had ever seen her, like something had cracked within her and been clumsily papered over.