The Girl Who Chose

by Violet Grace

  I don’t know if I should believe her. If my mother severed ties with House Grigio, why would she send me back to them? I think of the sweet, sickly woman I met at the banquet. Eleonora certainly likes her bling but I’m struggling to believe Melusina’s story.

  ‘Your mother was our friend, halfling. And now I must ask you to continue her legacy and help us.’

  I shuffle backwards along the altar. ‘I … I have no influence with House Grigio.’

  I don’t mention that I barely have any influence over my own house either.

  ‘You misunderstand,’ Melusina says.

  ‘We want our song back, legs,’ Rena says bluntly.

  ‘If we can rediscover our song, we can reclaim our power,’ Melusina explains. ‘Venus etched the song of Sirena onto a scroll, which she hid in the fabric of life for safekeeping, in case her gift should ever be lost from our collective memories.’

  I recall seeing a reference to a scroll in the Agency files.

  ‘Is it the same scroll the humans are interested in?’

  ‘The humans have been in Venice for more tides than I can count, searching for our scroll,’ Melusina says.

  ‘Why? Why do humans want it?’

  ‘Because anyone who possesses both the scroll and a tongue to sing our song will wield the power of Venus. Maybe the humans wish to wield the power of the Goddess; maybe they just wish to prevent us from regaining it and once again ruling the seas. Whatever the reason, words are weapons, halfling. This is why I am asking you to find our scroll. It is not something I would ever ask of another – not the Guild of Gondoliers, not even your mother.’

  I came to Serenissima for my mother. And while I am sympathetic to Melusina’s story, this is not my fight.

  ‘Why don’t you find the scroll yourselves?’

  ‘Retrieving the scroll is a delicate task that requires many skills, not least of which is the capacity to navigate terrain,’ Melusina says. ‘But, more importantly, you are the only one who has proven herself worthy.’

  ‘Worthy?’

  ‘Did you not hold unbridled power in the palm of your hands once before?’

  I shrug, unsure of what she’s getting at.

  ‘You could have used the power in the Chalice for anything. Anything. Any desire you wished to fulfil.’

  It’s not the first time I’ve thought about how, instead of eradicating the pyct virus and maintaining the Treaty with humans, I could have used the power in the Luck of Edenhall to release my mother and make things right. She would be alive and well – and maybe I could even be with Tom.

  ‘You acted against your own self-interest to save your people,’ Melusina explains. ‘I have not known another, in all my years, who could withstand the temptation of such power.’

  ‘If I’d had time to think about it I might have acted differently.’

  ‘You and I both know that is false. Your capacity to do good is unheralded. Why do you retreat when you could aid us?’

  ‘Because I listened once before when someone told me I was special – that I was The One. And ever since, so many things have gone wrong. But mostly because I made a promise to someone, and I need to honour it.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  I nod.

  ‘Then our desires are as one, halfling. Our song can help you.’

  I raise an eyebrow. ‘How?’

  ‘Have you heard nothing I have been telling you? Our song is power. Anyone who is held captive can be set free by the Song of Sirena. Even the tightest of binds, be they physical, emotional or spiritual, can be loosened by it.’

  I stare at her, wondering if this really could be a way to find my mother. I also wonder if I can believe anything they’ve told me. But if the Agency is also looking for the scroll, then it must be powerful. And I can’t discount the possibility that the scroll is the reason my mother asked me to come here.

  ‘I wouldn’t have a clue where to start looking,’ I say.

  ‘The humans. Find out what they know. As I said, they have gone to extraordinary efforts to recover the scroll,’ says Melusina.

  She dips her hand in the pool of water. Closing her eyes, she gently turns her wrist, drawing a small circle in the water. Tiny bubbles surface, clinging to her wrist, followed by small ripples that, impossibly, crisscross the pool, before rising as a wall of mist. The mist swirls around the top of the sunken temple, shifting and moving like an apparition and then composing into lines.

  Out of the mist emerges a double-storey building, sculpted gardens and a pond that goes right up to the door. It looks solid, as though I’m peering into a model of the building, rendered in water and mist. And sound. I can hear traffic and birdsong, as if I’m actually there.

  Melusina opens her eyes, still circling her wrists, and looks at me.

  ‘The humans in Volgaris know it as Villa Ducale. Above ground, the villa is a hotel for tourists,’ she says as the image turns and magnifies as if we’re walking closer to the building. ‘Below is a research facility for what you know as the Agency.’

  ‘The Agency? Here in Venice?’

  ‘Of course. They have been here for centuries. Peddling their propaganda, thwarting us as best they can. This is where you will start.’

  The building rotates 360 degrees in Melusina’s mist. I watch in amazement. And then, in amongst the birds and background noise, I hear a tune.

  Whistling. A beautiful, resonant melody.

  I know it. I know that tune from somewhere. Not as in a hit that I’ve heard on the radio, or one of those classic songs that old men whistled in the laundromat. My mouth goes dry as a distant memory sparks to life. I listen to each individual note rising and falling just as I know it will. It’s as if it belongs to me.

  ‘That song …’ Before I can say more, I feel a rush of wind and hear the familiar sounds of a portal opening. I jump to my feet on the altar, my wings flaring. Melusina’s eyes widen and the image of the building breaks apart and dissolves into fine spray.

  The mermaids disappear into the water, flicking their tails behind them.

  ‘Wait!’ I yell, peering into the pool. But all that remains are ripples.

  Jules appears through the golden dust of the portal, sleek as a leopard. She alights beside me on the altar, her knuckledusters up as she scans the room for threats. Satisfied we are alone, she turns, inspecting me from the top of my wet scraggly hair, along my griffin-shredded and bloodied dress to my water-soaked boots.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say.

  She looks relieved, but then I see the hurt beneath her trained composure.

  ‘I assumed that I had earned your trust, Your Majesty. That I had proved I was worthy of it.’

  ‘You have,’ I say. ‘You are.’

  Jules doesn’t reply. She doesn’t have to. I know I’m the Queen, I can do whatever the hell I want. But Jules isn’t just talking about her job. Taking off without her is also a betrayal of our friendship. I didn’t think about that.

  ‘You’re right. I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I won’t do that again. How did you find me?’

  ‘Gondoliers are surprisingly talkative when they have a unicorn horn pointed at their groin.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say again, feeling even worse as I understand the risk Jules has taken by transing into her unicorn form to find me.

  ‘It is not safe here, Your Majesty. We must return to the castle,’ she says, recovering her professional veneer. ‘I sense we are not alone.’

  ‘We are now,’ I say. ‘They’ve gone.’

  ‘They?’ says Jules.

  ‘Mermaids.’

  ‘You have met with nereids?’ she asks, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘The nereids are fabled for their powers of trickery. I counsel we return to the castle immediately. For your safety.’

  ‘They’re no threat to me,’ I assure Jules, but this clearly does not allay her concerns.

  ‘My scouts have informed me that your Uncle Damius has created an unnatural army
of foot soldiers in Serenissima.’

  ‘I’ve met them. They’re called sporgente. Dirtbags with wings, but they’re rubbish at flying. They don’t bounce too well, either.’

  ‘You have confronted this threat?’

  ‘It didn’t go well. For them.’

  A hint of a smirk breaks Jules’s impassive features.

  ‘How can Damius bring those things to life?’ I wonder aloud. ‘I’ve never seen magic like that before.’

  ‘We do not understand your uncle’s dark power, Your Majesty. We do know that he excels at manipulating life force.’

  I tell Jules about the griffins that Damius presumably animated with life as well, and the scroll, and the watery apparition of a place where I can find information about the scroll.

  ‘And you trust these nereids?’ Jules asks, making it clear that she does not.

  ‘Probably not.’

  Waltzing right into the den of the Agency on the recommendation of some slimy fish who wanted to eat me is probably not one of my better plans. But that whistling …

  Jules is not swayed, so I give her the option of coming with me to the villa or returning to the Grigio castle without me. She chooses as I knew she would.

  I chant the transfer spell, and the chipped and falling walls of the sunken temple blur around us as Jules and I step through the portal and emerge into leafy grounds. The grand Villa Ducale looks exactly like it did in Melusina’s misty model: a double-storey stone building with a red carpet spilling out the front of the arched entrance. Behind us flows a winding river. Immediately I see that I’ve transferred us into the wrong realm. Tourists – human tourists – swarm around us, sweltering in the afternoon heat, licking melting gelatos off sticky fingers and fanning themselves with roughly folded maps.

  I glance up at the stone statues on the roof of the villa, checking to see if they’re giving me a bit of sporgente side eye. I can’t be sure, but I think they’re not.

  A tour bus pulls up in front of us, and bickering families clutching guidebooks stream off and wander across to the villa. Some of them stare at us. I don’t blame them; I look like I’ve just been dredged up from the bottom of the canal and Jules looks like, well, Jules. She waves her knuckledusters in a wide sweep, uttering:

  Where you look, you have not seen

  Where you go, you have not been

  Your tongue in knots, will not encumber

  Your memory shall forever slumber.

  The tourists instantly lose interest in us, some of them shaking their heads as though waking from deep sleep. I use the moment to summon a dry gown directly onto my body from my wardrobe in the Grigio castle.

  ‘I will transfer us to Iridesca, Your Majesty,’ Jules says. There’s a light shimmering of dust and she disappears through her portal.

  As I follow, I see that the grounds have emptied of tourists, replaced by Fae who look a lot like teenagers hanging out in front of a school. Some are chatting and laughing, others have their noses buried in books. The red flag hanging out the front of the villa in Volgaris has gone, replaced by a sign that reads ‘Guilda Neoteric’ in swirling script.

  My heart squeezes at the sight of it. If I was an ordinary Fae girl this would be my guild. Who knows? I might have even travelled here to study for a semester on exchange from the Neoteric Guild in Trinovantum. Under different circumstances these people would be my tribe. I take a closer look at the students and feel a tug of envy that they get to spend their days learning and lazing about with friends.

  More students are inside, some of them walking to classes wearing grey lab coats, protective glasses that look like old aviator goggles hanging around their necks. Others are wearing grease-smeared aprons over their beautiful Fae fashion.

  The foyer is an odd mix of mechanics and magic, old and new. On one side of the foyer is a machine that looks like a mechanical computer, a riot of levers and gears; on the other side is a hovering light source that could only be powered by the Art.

  Students steal glances at the House Raven symbol pinned to Jules’s leather bodysuit and they look me up and down. There are no gargoyles in here but we’re definitely being watched.

  The air is noticeably cooler as we go downstairs. The roof is low and the light dim. The walls feel like they’re closing in on me. I wrap my arms around my body. Foreboding slithers up my arms.

  ‘Should everything that’s lost be found?’ I mumble to myself.

  ‘Your Majesty?’ Jules asks with a slight tilt of her head.

  ‘Never mind.’

  The windowless walls aren’t helping my headspace. I try not to think about my time in juvenile detention, curled up on that thin mattress with the scratchy sheet and stiff blanket. Still, it was worth it to save Gladys’s life. If I had known that less than six months later I would take her life, would I have made different choices?

  ‘Your Majesty? Chess?’

  Jules is pointing to a sign. The big bold letters at the top are in Italian. Underneath is English. ‘Closed for renovation. No access beyond this point.’

  Beyond the sign lies a dingy corridor lined with heavy oak doors spaced at irregular intervals. What I don’t see is any sign of renovations. Not a chisel, hard hat or safety vest in sight.

  ‘Look into Volgaris as well,’ I tell Jules.

  She squints her eyes and I do the same. The world shimmers, divides and then comes back together with a dual focus. I reach out to the stone wall to steady myself while I adjust. There isn’t anything more to see in the human realm. Just the same stone walls and doors.

  Jules’s knuckledusters flicker with the Art as we step around the renovation sign and then come to a stairwell. I turn to Jules, pointing downwards. She nods and we go down another level. There’s nothing much to see except a row of doors. The first door is open.

  In Iridesca the room is practically empty, just a few boxes filled with old lab equipment stacked in the corner. But in Volgaris it looks like someone is living in there.

  Books and papers are piled in neat stacks on every surface. I note the telltale mark of a coffee drinker, light brown halo stains crowning the tops of the piles. A threadbare reading chair is pushed into one corner and set at an angle, a reading light craning over it. A single bed made without much care lines the other wall.

  Jules creeps across the room and leans down to inspect a tweed coat that’s been discarded over one of the stacks of papers. She peers at the ID card clipped to the coat pocket.

  ‘Agent Twelve,’ she says.

  Melusina was right about the Agency at least.

  Beyond is another, smaller room. Through the open door, I see a makeshift kitchen with a kettle and a sink littered with empty take-away containers. Though another door is an office that looks a lot like a graveyard for computers. Stacked around the walls are motherboards, disk drives, speakers and tangles of cables.

  Walking into the office, I see a scarred wooden desk with a folded piece of cardboard under one leg, keeping it level. My eyes are drawn to the hardware sitting on top of the desk. A little sigh of envy slips out of me as I take in the three flat screens, graphics tablet and CPU box with more grunt than a weightlifter.

  It’s my dream set-up, exactly what I would have chosen for myself if I could have afforded it. I consider transferring into Volgaris so I can use it to snoop around a little. But I’m distracted by an old leather-bound book sitting open on the desk.

  ‘The Voynich manuscript?’ I say in disbelief, staring at the unreadable words that could almost be English or some other Latin alphabet, but isn’t. ‘It looks like the original. But it can’t be. The original is locked away in the rare books library at Yale University.’

  ‘Your Majesty?’

  ‘It’s a human book, but not written in any language that we can understand. And so far nobody’s been able to decode it,’ I say. ‘I was obsessed with it a couple of years back after I found out that not even the Enigma code-breakers could crack it. Of course, I took it as a personal challenge.’
>
  ‘Naturally,’ Jules says.

  ‘I hooked up with some cypher hackers and tried to crack the Voynich code. We were working off scanned copies because nobody was going to let the likes of us anywhere near the original. But then I got done stealing Gladys’s meds and forgot all about it.’

  Jules raises her hand, signalling me to be quiet. ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘It’s coming from Volgaris.’

  Whistling. It’s the same tune I heard coming from Melusina’s apparition, melodic, haunting and achingly familiar. Tears fill my eyes, and I don’t know why.

  ‘That whistling. I need to see where it’s coming from.’ I start walking back out to the corridor.

  ‘As you wish,’ says Jules.

  The tune is spilling out from the room at the far end of the corridor. We walk to the door, which stands wide open. Maintaining my vision in Volgaris, I see a man standing with his back to us, staring at a wall plastered with papers. They look like ancient maps of what I’d guess is Venice. He’s tall, with salt and pepper hair, and wears a cream shirt, rolled up at the sleeves.

  The whistling stops and the man turns around suddenly. I flinch, expecting him to see us, just like the gondolier did. But his shoulders relax and he looks straight through me and Jules. He can sense us, I’m sure of it, even if he can’t see us. I study him, taking in his features.

  My knees go weak.

  I know those eyes. I know him.

  ‘But you’re dead,’ I hear myself whisper.

  Memories flood back. That space between his jaw and his shoulder. It’s where I used to rest my head.

  Tears sting my eyes as one more certainty of my life collapses in on itself. Nothing has ever been, or ever will be, real.

  Jules stares at me, her brow furrowed in confusion. She looks back at the man, who takes a step towards us. And then another.