The Language of Thorns

by Leigh Bardugo

  They were still just girls, neither yet thirteen, and though they had been educated in the same places, attended the same tidal celebrations and hunts for sturgeon, they were not friends. Ulla knew Signy because of her hair—vibrant red that flashed like a warning and gave her away wherever she went. And of course Signy knew Ulla with her black hair and her gray-tinged skin. Ulla, who had sung a song to scrape barnacles from her nursery when she was just an infant; who, without a single lesson, had hummed a tune to set the reedy skirts of her kelp dolls dancing. Ulla, who wielded more power in a single simple melody than singers twice her age.

  But Ulla’s classmates did not care about the surety of her pitch, or the novelty of the songs she composed. 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, that her mother had returned from a summer ashore with some human boy’s child in her belly. It was not supposed to be possible. 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. They claimed Ulla had been born with legs, that her mother had used blood magic to fashion her a tail, and taken a knife to the skin of Ulla’s throat to give her daughter gills.

  Ulla told herself it wasn’t true, that it could not be, that her father’s lineage was clear in the pattern of her silver scales. But she could not deny that she looked like neither of her parents, or that occasionally, when her mother braided Ulla’s hair and set pearl combs above her ears, there was an expression on her face that might have been fear, or worse, disgust.

  Ulla sometimes dreamed of a life in distant waters, of finding other sea folk somewhere who would want her, who would not care what she looked like or who had sired her. But mostly she dreamed of becoming a court singer—venerated, valued. She imagined herself arrayed in gems and cusk bones, a general with a choir as her army, commanding storms and building new cities for the king and queen. Court singers were appointed by the king and nearly always carried noble blood. But that did not stop Ulla from hoping or from clinging to that dream when she was left alone in the nautilus hall as the other students drew into pairings for duets or formed groups for ensembles, when yet again she was forced to sing with the choirmaster, his face soft with pity.

  All of that changed the first time she sang with Signy.

  On that day, the concert hall had been nearly emptied, the rocks at its base exposed to the dry air as the sea outside flowed on. The students lay upon the smooth stones, faces bored, a sinuous pile of curled tails and pretty cheeks resting on damp forearms. Signy was at the periphery of the group, leaning into their slippery bulk. All morning she had cast Ulla sour glances, her pink conch mouth turned down at the corners, and it was only when the choirmaster began pairing them off for duets that Ulla understood why: Lis, Signy’s usual partner, had not come to class. Their numbers were even and Signy would be forced to sing with Ulla.

  That day the class was practicing simple storm magic with little success. Each pair made their attempt, and some managed to summon a few puffs of cloud or a mist that might generously be called a sprinkle. At one point, a rumble of thunder began, but it was only the growling of young Kettil’s stomach.

  When at last it was time for Ulla and Signy to perform, they slid onto the spit of rock that served as a stage, Signy keeping her distance as her classmates tittered at her misfortune.

  Ulla thought for a moment of an easy melody, something that would end this humiliation quickly. Then she shoved the thought away. 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. She cast Signy a cold glance and said, “Follow me. If you can.”

  Ulla began a spell she’d been practicing on her own, a staccato tune, full of sudden syncopation. She leapt nimbly from note to note, plucking the melody from the secret song she could hear so clearly, happy to leave Signy behind to struggle with her sweet, wobbly voice.

  And yet wherever Ulla led the song, the other girl followed with grim determination.

  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.

  The song rose louder. Thunder rolled and shook the nautilus hall. The wind howled and tore at the hair of the students on the rocks.

  “No lightning!” cried the choirmaster over the din, waving his arms and thumping his massive orange tail.

  The song slowed. The other students mewled and thrashed. But Ulla and Signy didn’t care. 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.

  The next day Lis returned to class and Ulla steeled herself, prepared to be stuck with the choirmaster once more. But when he told them to pair up for duets, Signy pressed her hand into Ulla’s.

  For the briefest moment, Ulla despised Signy, as we can only hate those who rescue us from loneliness. It was unbearable that this girl had such power, and that Ulla hadn’t the will to refuse her kindness. But when Signy looked at Ulla and grinned—shyly, a star emerging at twilight—all of that bitterness dissolved, gone like words drawn on the ocean floor, and Ulla felt nothing but love. That moment tied her to Signy forever.

  From then on, that was the way of things—Signy and Ulla together, and poor Lis, forced to sing with the choirmaster, her mouth set in a crimped frown that seemed to pull all her notes a little flat.

  Trouble roused that day as two girls tangled together like rockweed, but then closed its eyes, pretending to sleep, leaving Ulla and Signy to their games and whispered confidences, letting them murmur their secrets and muddle their dreams as the years passed, waiting for winter and the prince’s birthday party.

  Roffe was the youngest of six princes, fathoms away from the throne, and perhaps because he was a threat to no one, his parents and his brothers coddled him. The royal sons had their own tutors, but Roffe’s distaste for scholarship or responsibility of any kind was well known and remarked upon with a kind of fond indulgence among the nobility. On his seventeenth birthday, sildroher from the surrounding waters came to offer gifts, and all who had any sort of talent for song were called to the rocky plain between the palace spires to perform. The royal family sat curled against a milky sea-glass hollow, wedged into the spine of the tallest spire—the king and queen with their crowns of shark teeth, and all the handsome brothers with their pale gold hair, dressed in whalebone armor.

  Each singer or ensemble came forward to perform, some old, some young, all famous for the magic they could sing. Hjalmar, the great master who had served as court singer under two kings, brought a cascade of sunlight from the surface to warm the crowd. Sigrid of the Eastern Current sang a huge pile of emeralds that rose all the way to the royal balcony. The twins, Agda and Linnea, called a pod of bowhead whales to block out the sun and then filled the seas around the partygoers with the bright, dreaming bodies of moon jellyfish.

  When it was time, at last, for Ulla and Signy to perform, they drifted to the center of the plain, fingers entwined.

  Neither of their families was rich, but the girls had arrayed themselves as best they could for the occasion. In their hair they wore wreaths of salt lilies and small pearl combs they’d borrowed from their mothers. They had adorned their bodies with slivers of abalone shell, so that their torsos glittered and their tails flashed like treasure. Ulla looked well enough, still gray, still sullen, but Signy looked like a sun rising, her red hair splayed in a blazing corona. Ulla did not yet k
now how to name that color. She had never seen flame.

  Ulla gazed at the crowd above her, around her. She could feel their curiosity like a questing tentacle, hear her name like a warbling, hateful melody.

  Is that the girl? She’s positively gray.

  Looks nothing like her mother or her father.

  Well, she belongs to someone, unlucky soul.

  Signy trembled too. She had chosen Ulla that day in the nautilus hall, drunk on the power they’d created together, and they had built a secret world for themselves where it did not matter that Signy was poor, or that she was pretty but not pretty enough to rise above her station. Here, before the sildroher and the royal family, the shelter of that world seemed very far away.

  But Ulla and Signy were not the same frightened girls who had once cast each other bitter glances in class. Hands clasped tight, they lifted their chins.

  The song began sweetly. Ulla’s tail twitched, keeping the tempo, and she saw the king and queen nodding their heads in time high above. She knew they were already thinking of the feast to come. They were just polite enough not to show their boredom—unlike their handsome sons.

  Though Ulla had composed the spell, it had been Signy’s idea, a daydream she had described to Ulla with giddy, fluttering hands, one they had embellished in lazy hours, warming themselves in the shallows.

  Ulla let the song rise, and a series of slender, pearly arches began to form on the craggy plain. The floating crowd murmured its approval, thinking this was all the girls had to offer, two promising students who had, for some reason, been allowed to perform with the masters. The melody moved in simple escalating then descending scales, creating symmetry for the sparkling paths that spread below them, and soon the new paths and colonnades formed the shape of a great flower with six perfect petals that radiated from the plain’s center.

  A smattering of applause rose.

  The song changed. It was not quite pleasant now, and the princes winced at the dissonance. The crowd looked away, embarrassed, a few of them smirking. Signy gripped Ulla’s fingers so hard their knuckles rubbed together, but Ulla had warned her their audience wouldn’t understand, and instead of stopping, they sang louder. The king cringed. The queen turned narrow blue eyes on the choirmaster. His face was serene. He knew what Ulla intended.

  She’d written the song to a new scale, one with a different number of intervals, and though the sound was discord to the others’ ignorant ears, Ulla knew better. She could hear the shape of a different harmony. She and Signy held close to the notes—not letting them resolve to something more commonplace—and as they did, their voices vibrated through the water and over the plain. A riot of color exploded between the paths laid beneath them. Pale pink anemones and bright red sea fans, thick purple stalks of kelp, and florid spines of coral.

  The crowd cried out in wonder as the gardens grew. Ulla felt her pulse race, her blood crackle as if lightning flowed through her veins, as if the song she’d built had always existed, and had simply been waiting for her to find it. Storm magic was easy. Even raising buildings or crafting gems was simple enough with the right notes. But to create living things? 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. Two nothing girls who until that moment might as well have been invisible.

  When the performance ended, it was young Prince Roffe who clapped the loudest and dispensed with the formal patterns of the dance that would have kept him swimming in circles for hours before he reached Ulla and Signy, lowly as they were. He cut straight through the crowd, and Ulla watched Signy’s face turn to the prince’s as if caught by an undertow.

  Roffe’s eyes went to glittering Signy first. “Tell me how it’s done,” he begged her. “Those creatures and plants, will they live on? Or is it all just show?”

  But now that the song was gone, it was as if Signy had forgotten her voice.

  The prince tried again. “The plants—”

  “They’ll live,” replied Ulla.

  “The sound was so ugly.”

  “Was it?” Ulla asked, a hard carapace glinting from beneath all her gems. “Or was it just something you hadn’t heard before?”

  Signy was horrified. Then, as now, one did not contradict a prince, even if he required it.

  But Prince Roffe looked only thoughtful. “It was not entirely unpleasant.”

  “It wasn’t unpleasant at all,” said Ulla, unsure of why her tongue had turned so sharp. This boy was royalty, his notice might mean a route to becoming a court singer. She should flatter him, indulge him. Instead she continued, “Your ears just didn’t know what to make of it.”

  He looked at Ulla then, really looked at her. His family had always possessed extraordinary eyes, blue deeper than any sea. Roffe turned those eyes on Ulla and took in her flat black gaze, the white wreath of lilies sitting at an awkward angle in her black hair. Was it the directness of his stare that made Ulla bold? She was used to everyone but Signy looking away from her, even her mother sometimes.

  “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.”

  “Something rare,” added Roffe with a glimmering smile.

  “Yes,” she agreed grudgingly.

  “And what trouble might you make above the surface?” Roffe asked.

  Ulla and Signy went very still, as if bespelled by those simple words, an offer glinting like a lure, and maybe just as perilous. Every summer the royal sons traveled to the shore, to the great city at Söndermane. Only the most favored sons and daughters of the nobility were permitted to accompany them.

  Now it was Ulla who could not quite seem to speak, and it was Signy who answered, a new lilt in her voice, as if she had finally found herself again, and something else besides.

  “We might make quite a lot of trouble on shore,” she said, the whole of her shimmering like pearl and amber. “But beyond that, who knows?”

  The prince’s smile gleamed.

  “Well then,” he said. “We must find out.”

  They became a new constellation: Ulla like a black flame, Signy burning red, and golden Roffe, always laughing, a yellow sun. In some ways, Roffe was not so different from them. Being the sixth son, he was barely a prince, and his chief duty was staying out of the way. He wasn’t expected to study hard or to worry overmuch about statecraft or the ways of war. It made him lazy. When he was hungry, people brought him food. When he grew weary, he slept and was watched over by silent guards with necks so thick their sloping shoulders made them look like stingrays. And yet it was hard not to get swept up in his charm. Let’s go to the hot rock caves, he’d say. Let’s hunt urchin. Let’s swim upriver and find a washing girl to frighten. Ulla and Signy went with him because he was a prince and you did not refuse a prince. They went with him because when he smiled, you wondered why you’d thought to deny him anything.

  He claimed he had an interest in song, but Ulla soon discovered what Roffe’s tutors had: Though he had a strong voice and a good enough ear, he had all the focus of a gull, changing course at the glimpse of any shiny object. His mind wandered, he grew bored, and even a small failure was treated as a disaster.

  But when Ulla chastised Roffe, he’d simply say, “No one expects me to accomplish anything. They leave that to my brothers.”

  “And that’s enough for you?”

  “Hungry Ulla,” he had taunted. “Why do you work so hard? I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.”

  Ulla didn’t know why those words shamed her. Song was all she had and so she clung to it, honed and perfected it, as though if she could only sharpen her skill to a fine enough point, she might carve a true place for herself in the world.

  “What would you know about ambition?” she scoffed.

  But the prince had only winked. “I know that y
ou should keep it like a secret, not shout it like a curse.”

  Maybe the lesson should have stung, but Ulla liked Roffe best when he let her glimpse the cunning beneath his charming mask.

  The sildroher who had once sneered at Ulla and Signy continued to sneer, to wonder what Roffe was playing at, to taunt that the girls were mere diversions. But now they were forced to hide their disdain. Roffe’s favor had transformed Ulla and Signy, granting them protection no song ever could. Their classmates’ envy hung around them in poisoned clouds, and Ulla watched Signy drink that poison like it was wine. It made her movements slow, her skin sleek, her hair silky. She bloomed in the hunger of their regard. And then, at long last, Roffe asked Ulla and Signy to be his guests on shore.

  “Can you imagine!” Signy cried, seizing Ulla’s hands, spinning her, the water churning around them as they circled faster and faster.

  Yes, thought Ulla, the wonders of the shore unspooling in her mind, the chance to be someone else for a time, the silly hope that if she only behaved as a noble, the king might somehow forget how common she was and grant her heart’s wish. I can imagine it all.

  Signy’s parents were thrilled. The best of the young nobility would be going to land, and though they might spend their days dallying with humans, they might well take notice of beautiful Signy too. Her mother sold off her few jewels to pay for the making of mortal gowns and velvet slippers for the feet Signy would soon have.

  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.

  There were strange currents here, Ulla knew, a mystery that made her mother cry when she braided Ulla’s hair and shove her daughter from her lap before the task was finished, a question that made her father brusque and turned his voice hard. She knew it was not possible for her to have a human father, but then who had sired her and made her so strange? Ulla wanted to ask, to drive the past from the murky dark and know at last which whispers were true.