by Kali Wallace
She liked the way the song changed underwater, dropping into lower tones, vibrating in her bones rather than dancing in her ears. She shifted the words from her mother’s song into the melody of one of Bindy’s spell-songs, just to see how it sounded. She was expecting it to feel weird, burbling out a song underwater, and it was.
She was not expecting the sea to answer—but it did.
2
The Singing Bones
A rolling low song filled the sea around Mara. It was as deep and sonorous as a gong on a foggy night. She felt it in her teeth, in her bones, over every inch of her skin.
She was so surprised she gasped, gulping a mouthful of seawater. Coughing and spitting, she bobbed to the surface.
As soon as she hit the air, the sound vanished.
Mara could hear the lap of water, the distant buoy bells, Izzy and Driftwood chatting on the boat. The air felt colder than it had before. Goose bumps rose all over Mara’s skin.
Cautiously, frowning in thought, she tilted her head to submerge one ear.
The song was still there. Lower now, eerie and wavering, but still there.
All magic in the City of Islands came from songs. Anybody could sing a bit of magic, if they knew the right combination of words and melody. Fishermen had songs for luring fish into their nets, crafters for gently shaping wood and metal and glass, sailors for asking the clouds and waves about the weather. That didn’t make them mages. Becoming a mage meant apprenticing when you were young, or studying at the Citadel on Obsidian Isle under the High Mage, both of which required money. True mages spent a lifetime learning spell-songs in any number of living or dead languages, including the founders’ language, which nobody knew how to speak anymore. It had never been meant for using above water anyway.
Mara wasn’t a mage. She didn’t know why the sea reverberated in response to her song. Sound traveled fast and far underwater—a diver in the city might hear whale song from miles and miles away—and spell-songs carried even when they weren’t very loud at the source. All she knew was this magic.
Like calls to like, Bindy had always said, explaining why you couldn’t sing a woodworking spell to a stormy sky any more than you could sing a weather-wishing song to a pile of kindling.
Mara had been singing the words of her mother’s song, but Mara’s parents hadn’t been mages. They had been stonemasons, and there was no stone magic anymore. The founders had once been able to lift towers from the seafloor, carve maze-like fortresses into solid rock, and hurl great boulders at their enemies from afar. The massive valley that nearly rent Greenwood Island in two was said to have come from two cruel founder sorceresses battling each other for the same suitor, hundreds and hundreds of years before any people came to the islands. Of all the great elemental forms of magic, stone magic was the one that had died utterly with the founders. Most people agreed it was probably for the better.
No sailing song from a Gravetown stonemason could be magical. That didn’t make any sense. She had to be mistaken. It had to have been Bindy’s song.
“Mara?” Izzy called out. “We’re coming over to you.”
There was the slice of oars through water. Mara took a deep breath. She ducked her head underwater, and she began to sing Bindy’s song.
Nothing happened.
She tried again, enunciating as much as she could.
It was no use. The only words she managed sounded like nonsense to her own ears, and she didn’t even know if the la and ooh and ah she remembered corresponded to words in the founders’ language. She returned to the surface and treaded water again, thinking of all the times Bindy had taught her that you had to be bossy to do magic, you had to know what you were singing, even if you didn’t know what the words meant. Mara had never really understood that—how could you know a song without knowing what the words were saying?—but she figured it was unlikely a random collection of sounds would get her anywhere.
Well, she thought. It can’t hurt to try.
Mara sang her mother’s song again: “Over the sea and under the sky, my island home it waits for me.”
The answer was immediate and overwhelming. The water trembled with a deep, slow melody, a sound so strong she felt it in every bone. It was just about impossible to pinpoint the source of a sound underwater, but spell-song was different from ordinary sound. It had a feel to it: teasing, feather-light brushes on the skin, prickles of hot or cold, even phantom pressure if the spell was powerful.
Mara swam in a careful, ever-widening circle, coming up for air before ducking down again to sing a few lines from the second stanza: “The rich green slopes that haunt my dreams, they are beloved as treasure to me.”
When she felt the first shiver of tiny hot-cold bubbles on her skin, she knew she was right. There was something here, something more magical than a shipwreck, something emanating its own spell-song.
With her murk-light in her hand, Mara dove straight down.
There, among the mounds of green seaweed and brown sand of the seafloor, a bright spot caught her eye.
Mara’s lungs began to burn, but she kicked down, down. The eerie music was fading, but she didn’t have breath to spare for another bit of song.
Jutting from the sand was a clean white object both curved and angular. There was an empty eye socket; and there was the slope of a brow; and there, reaching up from the side like a spire, was a twisted horn. It was a skull.
Mara dropped her murk-light to mark the spot and surged upward. She surfaced a few feet from Driftwood’s boat.
“I found something!”
Izzy was already perched on the side of the boat in her swimming clothes. Her murk-light bobbed on the surface on the end of its chain. “What is it?”
Mara gulped salty water, spat it out again. “A skull,” she said, grinning.
“There’s a shipwreck. It could be a sailor.”
“Do you know any sailors with horns?”
Izzy’s doubt turned to excitement. She dropped into the water and came up a second later with her rows of braids slicked back, her eyes shining. “Where is it?”
They dove together. The song had faded completely. Izzy followed Mara to the seafloor and dropped her own murk-light beside the skull. They began to dig in the sucking, sticky mud. Every motion stirred up gritty clouds of silt. When it got too bad, Mara closed her eyes to work by feel, prying her fingers around the skull’s eye sockets and the smooth twin arches of the brow. She felt the sharp ridges of teeth, a twisted length of its horns, a long snout.
It took them two lung-burning dives to tug the skull free from the silt, along with the length of rope and woven sack of lumpy, angular rocks that had been used to weight it down. Mara left Izzy to retrieve the jaw and kicked to the surface. When she burst into the open air, she grabbed the side of the boat to set the skull inside, dragging the rope and sack in after it. She broke away clumps of mud and strands of clinging seaweed.
She looked up at Driftwood. “What do you think it is?”
Driftwood leaned over the crossed oars and frowned thoughtfully. “Hold it up,” he said.
Mara obliged. Out of the water, the skull was heavier than she expected, the bone denser. “It’s not a sea creature, is it?”
Izzy surfaced a moment later and passed the jawbone to Mara. “Well?”
All three of them studied the skull in silence.
It was about the size of a horse’s head, but it had horns like a Greenwood Island mountain goat, long and twisted, protruding from behind the eye sockets. Its teeth were neither a horse’s nor a goat’s; they were too sharp for munching grass. The lower jaw, when Mara fitted it to the rest, jutted from beneath the upper with long, curved fangs. Mara wanted to hold it up to her ear like a conch shell to listen for the spell-song, but if she did, Izzy and Driftwood would ask what she was doing.
The Lady of the Tides had all manner of strange creatures in her collection. The massive sea serpent skull was the prize, but there were also animals of every size and shape gathered
from all across the world, birds from the far east and snakes from the far west, horned deer from the north and leviathan ribs from the southern seas. She even had a handful of fine, frail bones she claimed had come from the founders themselves, locked in a glass case in her library.
But in the whole of the Lady’s collection there was nothing like this.
Izzy clung to the side of the boat. “What is that?”
Mara opened her mouth to say she had no idea, but something stopped her. A memory flashed into her mind like a darting fish.
She had seen something like this creature before. But where? Not in the Lady’s collection. Not in a cage in the dockside markets. Not among the jumbled bones in Bindy’s shop. She had been hurrying somewhere—running, even—racing back to the fish market because she had been listening to the storm-mages atop Summer Island and the fishmonger would be angry she was late—she could already feel the stinging slap on her cheek—she had to find a shortcut, and there at the corner of her eye—
Mara’s heart began to beat faster. Her throat was dry.
It wasn’t a living animal she had seen, nor was it a skeleton.
What she remembered was a stone carving.
The crooked streets and rambling stairways of all the city’s islands were filled with ancient mosaics and statues, fountains and friezes. Many depicted the strange animals that had not lived in the city since the time of the founders: fish with wings to fly above the water, great cats with webbed feet and fins for tails, birds with talons as long as swords. In addition to calling up fierce storms and carving islands into fortresses, the founders had also been able to create wondrous creatures with their magic, filling the sea and land and sky with strange, magical hybrids. Some were created for battle, some for beauty, some for no reason anybody could fathom. The animals, like their creators, had been gone from the city for centuries.
On a weather-worn carving in an alley not far from the great fountain in Seafarers’ Square, Mara had seen an animal with a horse’s head, a goat’s horns, and the curving fangs of a predator. She couldn’t remember what its body had looked like. Horse-like, she thought, but perhaps it had wings? Or catlike claws rather than hooves?
She didn’t even want to say it out loud, for fear of making the skull vanish in a puff of smoke.
The Lady’s sea serpent skull was impressive for its size and great age, but sea serpents were natural creatures. They had been tamed by the founders, not created by them. This skull was different. Mara was holding in her own trembling hands a creature made by forgotten, ancient magic.
And magic, Bindy had always said, was a duet. If a mage sang the right song to an ancient spelled object—or skull—that object might be persuaded to echo the spell that had shaped it right back to her. Dedicated collectors like the Lady, with piles of ancient artifacts to study, spent their lives coaxing small bits of melodies out of the oldest treasures.
The skull had responded to Mara’s song. It had answered her with a spell, and that spell might not have been heard by anybody for hundreds of years.
She took a steadying breath.
“Doesn’t it look a bit like one of the old creatures?” she asked. She tried to keep her voice light, as though she wasn’t asking the most important question she had ever asked. She had never believed she would find anything so special. Nobody had ever found anything like this. “Like in the stories?”
Izzy tilted her head to one side. “A little. But you don’t think—” She looked at Mara sharply. “Is that even possible? Could this really be an animal from the time of the founders? An animal they made?”
“I think it could.” Mara’s voice fell into a ragged whisper on the last word.
Izzy looked at Driftwood. “What do you think?”
Driftwood was quiet for a long, long moment. Finally he said, “I think you should find the rest of the body.”
With a scramble and a splash, Mara and Izzy were diving again.
They didn’t find the rest of the body, but they found more than enough to make up for it.
There was the skeleton of a lizard as long as Mara’s arm with spindly, bat-like wing bones. Another looked at first like half of an ordinary bayfish, only instead of a tall caudal fin, it had a long tail, like a sea snake but twice as big around. In a sticky hollow of mud, Izzy found a bird skull and a scattering of hollow bones, but the skull alone was bigger than the largest birds that migrated through the islands. Tangled in a mat of kelp, Mara found the bones of a creature that she would have guessed was a seal if only it didn’t have long talons on the ends of its flippers. They both spent several long dives bringing up what could have been a shark, but its head was too long, its teeth too blunt, and strangest of all it had a tail split into two sinuous ends.
It was difficult work, far more tiring than their usual searches for small objects in rocky caves. The bones weren’t buried very deep, but many were covered with silt and seaweed. All had been weighted down by knotted ropes tied to sacks full of stones.
The more bones they pulled from the water, the more puzzled Mara grew. The ropes and woven bags weren’t old; they hadn’t been sitting on the seafloor for hundreds of years. Somebody had dumped these animals not very long ago. But because the skeletons were so strange, it was hard to know when they’d dug up the whole skeleton. She couldn’t even be certain she and Izzy were putting the right skulls with the right bodies and limbs. What were they doing half buried in the seafloor mud? Why would somebody have discarded them at all? How long had they rested there, humming with magic, before the Roughwater boy spotted them? Had whoever dumped them here known what they had?
And most of all: Had her mother’s old Greenwood sailing song really called to them? Mara had so many questions and not a single answer.
Mara and Izzy dove all morning. Driftwood helped them lift the larger remains into the boat, along with the bags of stones and knotted ropes. He said little about what they found except that he had never seen such animals in his travels. His reticence gave Mara a nervous feeling, but she ignored it. She didn’t have time for doubt, not when there was so much more to find.
Near noon she and Izzy came up from a dive empty-handed. The sun had burned away the fog, and the day was bright and warm.
“We should probably stop for today,” Izzy said reluctantly. “We’ve got plenty already.”
Mara wanted to keep diving, but the burn in her lungs and hunger in her stomach told her Izzy was right. They couldn’t afford to grow careless; they might miss something. The rest of the bones would have to wait for another day.
She dove one more time to retrieve the murk-lights. Just for a test, just to see what would happen, she sang a few words of her mother’s song: “Over the waves and under the sky, my island home . . .”
She stopped as the sea hummed in response. A little bit quieter, maybe, but no less eerie. Mara returned to the surface, giddy to have that lovely old song echoing on her ears.
“I wonder what the Lady will think,” Izzy said as she helped her into the boat. They had to shift some of the larger bones around to find a spot to sit. “She’s got nothing like this in her collection.”
“I bet nobody does,” Mara said. “Not even at the Citadel.”
“You know the High Mage would be bragging to everybody if he had anything like this.” Izzy smiled at Mara, who grinned right back at her.
“They’re even better than a sea serpent, because they were made with magic,” Mara said.
“Don’t get ahead of yourselves,” Driftwood said. “You don’t know that yet.”
Mara opened her mouth to argue, then changed her mind. Part of her wanted to blurt out that she did know. She knew they were magical bones because she’d used magic to find them. It was the first time in her life she had actually sung magic that worked. Real magic, not silly household spells any child could do, and she had done it without help! She was almost bursting with the need to brag, to impress Izzy and Driftwood, to prove to them and everybody else that she was mea
nt to be doing magic.
But another part of her, the bigger part, wanted to wait. Wait to see what the Lady said. Wait to see how pleased she was. If she was as delighted as Mara expected her to be, she would ask how Mara had found these bones, and then Mara could reveal what she had done. The Lady was a mage herself. She would understand.
She might even give Mara a special reward. Mara had never earned a reward from the Lady of the Tides before, but others in the household still spoke of a previous diver, a woman who had found a trove of ancient mariner’s instruments in a sea cave beneath the Hanging Garden. The Lady had been so pleased with the find she had given the woman enough money to retire from diving altogether and buy her own spice shop on Quarantine Island.
Mara settled back against the pile of bones to enjoy the sun on her face and the warm breeze drying her skin. She had spent so long daydreaming about what she could do if she found a sea serpent skull or a long-lost underwater palace or a trove of magical artifacts, and now she was lying right on top of such a treasure.
All her life she had wanted to study magic. She had thought she would become Bindy’s apprentice someday, but then Bindy had died and Mara had feared her chance was gone for good.
For the first time in two years, Mara was hopeful again. If she could recall enough of Bindy’s magic, she might even be able to help the Lady study these bones, delving into magic that had been forgotten centuries ago. That would surely earn the Lady’s gratitude and more. She could earn the Lady’s patronage and go to the Citadel, or persuade a mage to take her on as an apprentice. When she was a fully trained mage she could have a shop of her own, spelling herbs to cure fevers and amulets to protect fishermen, or hire herself out to the city’s rich merchants and ruling families, who paid mages to shield their ships from storms and guide their traders along dangerous routes.
