His fins swished. “You are bold. I respected your father, for all we disagreed. I hope it is not a mistake to extend the same courtesy to you.”
“No,” I said, feeling the rising panic. “I want to work with you. I only…” I told him of my suspicion that someone had been Below without me.
The duke’s eyes gleamed. “I have given your liaison dispensation to escort you wherever you need to go.” His smile grew, and I imagined those teeth fastening around me, dragging me down to the seaweed of the royal road, to lie among the picked bones. “Come and go as you need, if you think you can discover defiance of my law, Your Grace.”
His words were the height of generosity. His tone was a warning. I bowed and allowed the guard to see me out.
Meire waited for me outside. “I will take you to the treasury,” she said. “But would you like to see the fields where we grow it first?”
“Grow what?” I asked.
“The magic.”
My heart quickened against my ribs. “Lead the way.”
Magic came from a particular type of seaweed, Meire explained as we swam. It produced little white flowers, which, in turn, produced bloodred stamen, which, in turn, produced sap that beaded and congealed into the pearls that Meire kept in a little pouch on her belt.
“And you use it every day?” I said, still astonished.
“We do have it in excess,” Meire pointed out.
“Isn’t it dangerous to use it so much?” I said.
Meire’s head tilted. “Why would it be?”
Because magic was unstable. Because magic was expensive. Because magic was uncontrollable. But only Above.
We swam away from the palace complex and its swooping walls. Eels darted from coral gardens. Citizens swam among them, seemingly unbothered by sharks and seven-foot fish. Rocks jutted from the lake floor, and in the small, cavernous spaces fish nibbled at algae.
Meire stopped at the edge of the city and unhooked a lantern from its post, showing me the space where pearls of magic were inserted so that light would be emitted. “We will be going into the dark. Can you hold the lamp?” I pressed my hand against the fungal sentinels, reveling in the spongy feel of them, then took the lamp by its glass handle, another item they must have traded for with Above. Meire’s hand grasped mine again, and she drew a six-foot spear from the sheath at her back. The tip thinned to a barbed point. The wood was soft and rotted in places, the iron point browned and flaked. “What is that for?” I asked.
“It is only a precaution,” Meire said. Precaution against what? It looked like I could snap that spear in half. She pushed aside the lights of the city, and we swam out into the dark.
I held the lamp before me, but it illuminated only a small swath of water in front of us. Meire swung her spear slowly through the water, and ink-black shapes moved out of our way. More sentinels, I hoped. “Does anything ever attack you out here?”
“You hunt Above, do you not?” Meire said. “We hunt, too. The fish you catch Above are the slow, stupid ones. For us, it is a rite of passage to go into the deep, to pursue the angriest and largest of creatures.”
“What did you fight?” I asked.
Meire hesitated. It occurred to me that perhaps it was too personal a question, that I’d put her on the spot by asking something she didn’t want to answer but couldn’t refuse a grand duke. “Never mind. I’m sorry.”
“Do not be sorry.” Meire moved her right arm closer to the lamp, and I saw a spiral of perfect rings winding from her elbow to her wrist. “It was a… squid, you might call it.”
“A kraken?” I guessed.
A stream of bubbles hissed out of Meire’s teeth. Had I made her laugh? “Nothing so large,” she said. “I am alive, after all.”
“What’s the largest thing anyone’s ever killed down here?” I asked.
“Ah. That was many hundreds of years ago. It was a shark as large as the city itself. It is said that one tooth was the size of a whole man. He swallowed entire villages, until a hero resolved to be the one to end his terrifying control over us. That was our first grand duke.”
“Did he defeat it?” I asked.
“He beseeched his brother from Above for iron and fashioned a spear and an enormous bow to launch it. Our merwives stood as bait. When the shark attacked, our grand duke killed it with one shot. It is said the shark’s blood flowed over the lake floor, creating the carnivorous processional road. The meat served for a feast that united all the people Below.”
“And the skeleton?”
“Became the walls of the grand duke’s palace.” Now it was my turn to laugh. “Consider it,” she suggested.
I thought of the gleaming walls, their polished stone. They looked more like volcanic rock than cartilage, as romantic as the legend sounded. Maybe the grand duke would grant me leave to take a small sample of the building material, and Farhod could help me analyze it.
But my first priority was to find out how someone Above had gotten magic and learned how to use it. My second was to figure out a cure for my family. And when I managed that, I’d probably have to leave Kylma before I could learn more about Below—before my father decided I was too much of a threat.
Meire put her hand over mine and lifted the lamp. Something dark fluttered away from the lantern light. “We are here.”
The magic fields stretched dark over the lake floor, dotted with pale, round blooms like the moon at its peak. As light fell on them, a few flowers swiveled toward the lantern. I caught the glint of red stamens, and the shining, pearlescent sap at their center.
Farhod had one tiny jar of pearls, allotted by the treasury once a year. Here were thousands of them, nestled in paper-thin petals—the wealth of Kylma and more.
I ran my hand over a velvet-soft bloom. The pearl’s skin broke, leaving a trail of glittering white across the dark water. The trail grew fins, a tail, a gaping jaw—and my finger, smeared with sap, became long and pointed, as pale as bone and as ridged as a tooth. I reached for the little fish, and at the touch of magic upon magic, it splintered into shards of ice, to be snatched up by even smaller fish that flashed beneath the flowers. They swarmed my finger, nipping at the remains of the magic, softening the look of my hand until only the shadow of scales remained. Then they darted back to the protection of the seaweed.
“Amazing,” I said, bringing my finger close to my face. “The pearls aren’t so fragile Above.” My fingers glowed a moment with the final traces of magic, then faded to their dull, pale human forms.
“These are not entirely ready to be harvested. We allow the pearls to mature before sending shipments Above. It hardens their skin and makes them less potent.”
“But it means that anything you shipped Above would have been sent within a certain time frame,” I guessed. That was a start. “Meire, how does a curse work?”
Her hand tightened fractionally against mine. “It is entirely a matter of will. Of the actor.”
“I don’t suppose you know how to cure one?”
Was it wishful thinking, or did she hesitate for a moment? “No, Your Grace.”
“Hmm.” I sighed, releasing a stream of bubbles even though I wasn’t technically breathing. The nearest flowers danced in the little current I’d created. The ground beneath them swarmed with life. Everything over the fields seemed to shimmer. “Why grow the magic all the way out here? Why not within the city?”