Chapter 261: You Have a Fountain! [2]

She reached the fountain before he had taken three steps.

Meera stopped at the rim of the basin with her skirts still bunched in her fists, looked up at the bearded stone figure and the water falling from his lifted vessel, and let out a breath of pure delight, as though she had crossed the whole county to find exactly this.

Then she let the silk fall.

She tucked her gloves into the sash at her waist, one and then the other, with the care of a woman putting away something she would want again. She pushed the loose sleeves of her gown up past her elbows. And she plunged both bare arms into the basin up to the forearm.

“Oh.”

Her eyes closed.

“Oh, that is cold.”

She did not take her arms out. She leaned forward over the rim, her hair sliding over one shoulder to brush the surface, and moved her hands slowly through the water in wide, lazy circles, the way one might stroke the flank of a horse.

“This is good water, Ulrich. Truly good. Where does it come from?”

“A spring beneath the north wood. It is piped,” he replied sarcastically.

“Of course it is.” She smiled at the water. “You would not have a fountain that merely collected rain. It would offend you.”

Ulrich stood a few paces behind her on the flagstones.

Meera’s hands went still beneath the surface.

And the water began to glow.

It started at her wrists. A faint blue light, paler than the sea and brighter than the sky, welling up from beneath her skin along the lines of her veins, the same light Ulrich had seen twice before in his life and had never been able to name. Once, on a rolling deck, with his own blood in his mouth and her hands pressed to his chest. Once, in his living place, where she had healed the wound he got from Airam.

From her fingertips, the light left her.

Thin tendrils of it unspooled into the basin, cyan and drifting and captivatingly slow, moving through the water the way smoke moves through still air. They did not disperse. They curled and turned back on themselves and reached outward, like living things exploring a new room, and where they passed the water took the light and held it.

Within a few breaths, the whole basin was burning.

Not with heat but with color. A soft, deep, luminous blue that rose from the depths of the pool and lit the pale stone from below, lit Meera’s face and arms and the wet ends of her hair, lit the bearded figure above so that he stood in a column of blue radiance with the water pouring over his hands in threads of light. Every drop that fell from the vessel caught the glow as it came down and fell shining. The spray at the base of the figure hung in the air like a scattering of blue sparks.

The little court, a moment ago silver and black, was drowned in it.

Ulrich stepped closer.

He did not decide to. His feet took him to the rim of the basin two paces from where she leaned, and he stood there with his hands folded behind his back and looked.

He still had no idea what it was.

It was not ordinary magic. There were no runes, no Formula, no shape to it that his eyes could read. It was not witchcraft. The Witch Trees he had seen in the sisters left a signature on the air like a taste of iron, and this had none. It was not the green of Ceres’s spirit arts either.

He did not know.

But it was, he had to admit, beautiful.

So he watched.

Meera lifted her hands.

The water came with them.

A sheet of it rose from the basin between her palms, glowing, and did not fall. It hung in the air and thickened and turned, and as she moved her fingers it began to take shape. A fish, first, long and sleek, that swam a circle around her wrists and dissolved. Then a bird with spread wings that beat twice and was gone. Then a stag, small as her hand, that stood for a moment with its head lifted before it ran off the edge of her palm and burst into drops.

Meera just smiled at the water.

Then the shapes grew.

The water rose higher and spread, and Ulrich saw the long low line of a hull. A ship, glowing blue, rocking on a swell of its own making, with masts of light and rigging fine as hair. On its deck, a figure. A woman, small and bright, her hair streaming.

Beneath the ship, the water darkened.

Something vast uncoiled from below. A body like a serpent’s, thick as a barrel, looping up around the hull in a slow spiral, and where its head rose above the swell a mouth opened, ringed with teeth, wide enough to swallow the deck whole. From the sides of the great mouth, thinner shapes unfurled. Tentacles, lashing, questing, and one of them found the woman on the deck and wrapped her round the waist.

She was pulled.

She was pulled from the deck into the air, arms thrown out, and drawn down toward the opening mouth, and the mouth closed over her, and she was gone inside the glowing bulk of the thing.

Ulrich shifted his gaze.

Another figure. A man, appearing on the ruined deck where the woman had stood. He did not hesitate. He ran to the rail and leapt, and the creature’s mouth was opening again and he went into it, head-first, sword in hand, and the water swallowed him too.

For a moment there was only the serpent, coiling in blue light.

Then it split.

From the center of the great body, the man came bursting out in a spray of glowing drops, and in his other arm, held hard against his chest, was the woman. His sword was raised. The worm came apart around them into a thousand falling threads of light, and the man and the woman hung there above the basin, alone, the woman’s arms around his neck and her face against his shoulder, and he did not put her down.

Ulrich lifted his gaze.

He looked at the two small figures of water, the man and the woman he held, turning slowly in the blue air.

He knew the scene.

He had lived it. The Scar-beast, the deck of the Blue Wind, the sea worm’s mouth closing over her, and the moment when he had not thought at all and had simply gone in after her, because she had waited seven days for him on the edge of the Maelstrom and he had not been willing to let the sea have her after that.

Two years ago.

She had made it out of his fountain water, and she had made it perfectly.

The figures held a moment longer.

Then they dispersed, softly, into a slow rain of cyan drops that fell glittering around him and pattered on the flagstones and on the shoulders of his shirt, and the light in the basin dimmed to a low glow, and the little court was quiet again except for the fountain’s voice.

Ulrich stood very still.

He was, he realised, still reeling from it. He did not reel easily. He did not care for the sensation. He was arranging his face into something more suitable and opening his mouth to say something dry when a fistful of cold water hit him square in it.

He blinked.

Water ran down his nose and off his chin.

His gaze, when it cleared, had gone dark, and he turned it slowly to the right.

Meera was sitting on the rim of the basin.

At some point during the last minute, while he stood there gaping at her water like a farmer at a fair, she had slipped off her silk slippers and set them neatly on the flagstones, gathered her gown to her knees, and swung both bare legs over the edge into the glowing pool. Her feet moved lazily beneath the surface. Her wet hand was still raised.

She was smirking.

“I was under the impression,” Ulrich said, “that you were in a great hurry to leave.”

“I can spare five more minutes.”

“You may spare as many as you like.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “Spend them preparing to go. I will inform your pirates that—”

“Ulrich.”

Her voice had changed suddenly as Meera called him.

“What was that?”

He stopped.

“What.”

“There.” She was leaning forward over the water, staring down into the blue depths of the basin with her brows drawn together. “In the water. Something moved. It looked like some kind of fish, but it was too…no, there, did you see it?”

Ulrich frowned.

He stepped to the rim beside her anyway, because she was staring so intently, and because the light was strange and the water was glowing and he had just watched a sea serpent made of that same water swallow a woman whole. He leaned forward to look down where she was pointing.

Something seemed to wriggle into the water.

And…

The water hit him in the face.

Both hands’ worth, this time, scooped and flung from a distance of less than an arm’s length, straight into his eyes and his open mouth and the whole front of his hair. It ran down his neck into his collar. It dripped from the ends of his crimson hair onto the pale stone.

Ulrich did not move.

He stood there, bent over the rim of his own fountain with water streaming from his face, and for a long moment he simply dripped.

Beside him, Meera had fallen sideways along the rim and was laughing so hard she had to hold onto the stone.

His gaze, behind the water, was very dark.

He had led men into battle. He had fought with demons. He had, that very afternoon, dictated terms to ten of the most dangerous pirates on the coast. And he had leaned into a fountain because a woman said there was a fish in it.

Nobody would ever learn of this. He would make certain of it.

Meera wiped her eyes with the back of her wet hand, still hiccupping with laughter, and pushed herself up to stand on the rim.

“Oh, your face,” she managed. “Ulrich, you should have seen your—”

She seemed caught up in her own fun when her foot slipped.

The wet stone went out from under her without warning. Her arms flew up, her weight pitched backward toward the glowing pool, and her mouth opened in a startled little sound that had nothing of the actress in it.

Ulrich moved faster; his left hand shot out to catch her arm.

Her fingers closed on it, and her weight came onto it all at once, and the arm that Ceres had sewn back onto his body with a curse and a prayer one week ago did what he had known, in some careful corner of his mind, it would do.

It gave especially when Meera did not so much grasp his arm as pull it, and him with it. He felt the joint of his shoulder go, felt the stiff and half-strange muscle of the forearm fold like wet paper, and then he was falling forward over the rim after her, and the two of them went into the fountain together in an enormous glowing splash that threw blue water over every flagstone in the court.

Silence fell right after.

Meera sat in the middle of the basin, in water to her waist, with her white gown floating around her like a spilled cloud and her hair plastered flat to her skull and neck and streaming down her back. Water ran off her nose. Water ran off her chin. The foam-blue edge of her bodice had gone dark and heavy with it.

Ulrich was on one knee in front of her.

His right hand was braced against the bottom of the basin. His left hung at his side. Water sheeted from his hair and shirt, the white linen gone transparent and clinging, and he loomed over her in the glowing pool with his crimson eyes fixed on her face and an expression that would have sent Grover reaching for his knife.

Meera looked up at him.

Then she burst out laughing.

It was not the laugh he knew.

He knew her laughs. He had catalogued them over two years the way he catalogued the tells of men across a bargaining table. The sly giggle. The low, pleased chuckle. The theatrical peal she gave when she wished a whole room to know she was amused. The bright, cruel little laugh she had given Shana through the bars.

This was none of them.

This was loud and quite genuine.

It came up out of her chest in great helpless gusts, and she threw her head back with it and clutched at her own stomach and rocked in the water, and her face did things he had never seen it do. Her eyes squeezed shut. Her nose wrinkled. She snorted once, and that made her laugh harder, and she slapped the surface of the pool with one hand and sent up another glowing spray and did not care.

Ulrich watched her.

He had thought her beautiful even before.

But this, however…

This was simply her. And she was, he found, with a kind of distant and unwilling clarity, more beautiful like this than she had ever been.

He looked at it for perhaps two seconds.

Then he recovered himself.

He stood.

Water poured off him. He did not look at her again. He turned, climbed over the rim of the basin in a single stiff, furious motion, and stepped down onto the flagstones with his boots full of water and his shirt clinging to his back and his hair dripping down into his collar, and he began to walk.

Behind him, the laughter cut off.

“Ulrich—”

He kept walking.

He heard the splash of her climbing out. He heard the wet slap of bare feet on grass as she came after him, quick, not bothering with her slippers, and the sodden whisper of her gown.

“Ulrich, wait. That was fun. Admit it was fun.”

He most certainly wouldn’t admit that being thrown in the fountain was fun.

“You will not need a bath tonight, at least. Think of the savings in water,” she added lightly, and clearly it didn’t land lightly on Ulrich.

He just walked, and she followed, and the two of them left a trail of glowing blue drops across the moonlit gravel, past the dark hedges, along the north face of the house toward the small plain door set into the wall there. It was the servants’ door. They used it to carry out the slops. He had not been through it since he was nine years old.

He reached it, putting his hand on the latch.

But at that time, Meera’s fingers closed on his arm.

His right arm, this time. She pulled, hard, and turned him.

His hand was already coming up to knock hers away. He had had enough, and he opened his mouth to tell her so.

But Meera just pushed him.

His back hit the door. It swung inward under him a hand’s width, and she reached past his shoulder and pulled it shut again, and then both her wet hands were on his chest, and she rose on her bare toes and kissed him.