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My life began with wanting something for myself.
She had taken him outside one night.
“Beware of Droessen. You were meant to be a gift to Clara, a means of enchanting her and nothing more.”
Now Clara scowled and stamped her foot as if she were the child she’d been when Droessen had first placed the nutcracker in her arms instead of a girl of seventeen.
Droessen reaching into the cabinet. Tell me, the clocksmith whispered. Tell me her secrets.
He had not been made to be a soldier but a spy.
He kissed her beneath the stairs. He kissed Frederik in the darkened hall.
My life began with wanting something for myself.
“Who are you?” asked the nutcracker, wishing he could back away, but there was nothing behind him except the glass cabinet. “What are you?”
I made you in my workshop,” he said. “Between your jaws, I placed a child’s finger bone, and then crack.”
I took from a foundling home. I fed you on sawdust until you were more wood than boy.”
The nutcracker had been cursed from the start. If only he’d been made by a generous hand. If only he’d had a true father.
“That’s how much you loved me, Father.” He opened the door to the cabinet and placed the charming little doll with its pale blue eyes inside. “Enough to give your life for mine.”
She rose, bathed, and came down to breakfast to find that her reputation was in ruins. Clara didn’t care.
She could not imagine marrying some ordinary merchant’s son or choosing to live in one gray world for the rest of her life. She considered her options and decided there was nothing for it but to become a writer.
she wrote fantastical tales that charmed children, and under another name, she penned rather more lurid works
“A soldier he was,” she said. “Dressed all in uniform. And when he came out, he wasn’t alone. He led a whole parade down the street. Lords and ladies in velvet finery, a boy with wings. I even heard a lion roar.”
But when it was time to return home, he hopped another ship, and then another, stopping in ports only long enough to mail a postcard or, occasionally, a parcel.
So the Zelverhaus family was disgraced and their empire was left without an heir. The house on the lake grew quiet.
They know the land is a place of danger. Yet still they long for a taste of mortal life.
This is the problem with making a thing forbidden. It does nothing but build an ache in the heart.
Song was not just a frivolity then, something meant to entertain or lure sailors to their doom. The sildroher used it to summon storms and protect their homes, to keep warships and fishing boats from their seas.
They had no word for witch. Magic flowed through all of them,
But in others, in girls like Ulla, the current caught on some dark thing in their hearts and eddied there,
Ulla, who wielded more power in a single simple melody than singers twice her age.
These things only made them jealous and caused them to whisper more about her murky parentage, the possibility that her father was not her father at all,
Humans were lesser beings and could not breed with the sildroher. And yet, the children heard their parents whisper and gossip and so they did the same.
Ulla sometimes dreamed of a life in distant waters, of finding other sea folk somewhere who would want her,
mostly she dreamed of becoming a court singer—venerated, valued.
Their numbers were even and Signy would be forced to sing with Ulla.
She hated Signy for being so afraid to be paired with her even briefly, hated her classmates for their stifled giggles and sly eyes, but mostly Ulla wished that she could kill the thing inside herself that still longed for their approval.
Gray-bellied clouds formed high above them in the ceiling. Ulla glanced at Signy, and the first rain began to fall.
There are different kinds of magic. Some call for rare herbs or complicated incantations. Some demand blood. Other magic is more mysterious still, the kind that fits one voice to another, one being to another, when moments before they were as good as strangers.
When the last note had faded, instead of turning to their classmates, hoping for praise, they turned to each other. The song had built a shield around them, the shelter of something shared that belonged to no one else.
Ulla felt nothing but love. That moment tied her to Signy forever.
Trouble roused that day as two girls tangled together like rockweed, but then closed its eyes, pretending to sleep,
When it was time, at last, for Ulla and Signy to perform, they drifted to the center of the plain, fingers entwined.
Is that the girl? She’s positively gray. Looks nothing like her mother or her father. Well, she belongs to someone, unlucky soul.
Though Ulla had composed the spell, it had been Signy’s idea,
He knew what Ulla intended.
The song could not just call them into being. It had to teach them to understand their own needs, to take sustenance and survive.
That was how the royal gardens came to be. Ulla and Signy were its architects.
“Magic doesn’t require beauty,” she said. “Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters. It requires a disruption, something new.”
They became a new constellation: Ulla like a black flame, Signy burning red, and golden Roffe, always laughing, a yellow sun.
His mind wandered, he grew bored, and even a small failure was treated as a disaster.
Ulla’s parents refused to let her go. They knew the temptations of the shore. Her mother moaned a song so sad that the kelp withered around their home, and her father raged in great bellows, his tail lashing the water like a whip.
“Walk naked amid the men of the shore and see what joy it brings you,” decreed her father. “Perhaps I will,” Ulla replied with more courage than she felt.
You are worth more than that, she wanted to say. You should not have to earn him. Instead she held her tongue and tried to hum away the worry in her heart. What harm can a little hope do? Ulla told herself.
But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.
They were greeted on the shore by the Hedjüt, the fisher-men of the north, with whom the sildroher kept an easy alliance.
