Chapter One

The sun never reached the bottom.

Two hundred summers, and Fen still checked. Every morning when the light hit the surface and broke into shafts, gold near the top, thinning to green, thinning to gray, thinning to the cold colorless murk that was hers, she looked up from the stone bed and measured the distance between the warmth and her face. It was always the same. But she did it anyway, the only little ritual she had left that still felt like something a person would do, and she wasn’t entirely sure she was still a person, but she wasn’t ready to stop pretending to be one.

The river was loud today, which was unusual.

A vibration in the stone bed, reaching her through her spine where she lay. The water was running at its usual summer pace, warm on top, cold beneath, boringly predictable, but there was a sound underneath the sound. Sustained and sourceless, humming through the granite.

She pressed her palm flat against the rock, and the vibration traveled up through her wrist, into her forearm, and settled somewhere behind her chest. Familiar like a face when you see it after years and can’t place the name. She knew this feeling. Something that had been locked in place for a very long time was testing whether it was still locked.

The binding. Her binding. The pull at the center of her chest that kept her oriented toward the deepest point of the river, the water constantly reshaping everything below her waist, legs becoming current becoming legs becoming whatever the river felt that she was at any given moment. The binding that pressed back when she reached too far toward the bank, her edges going translucent, her fingers losing their tangibility until she pulled them back and the water filled her in again.

The stone bed was smooth beneath her. Granite, worn by centuries of current into a surface she knew by feel. Every ridge, every depression, the place near the eastern bank where the rock dipped and collected silt in a pocket she had been rearranging with her fingers for longer than most human families lasted. She had named the formations. The flat shelf where she slept—the Ledge. The overhang where the current ran fastest—the Throat. The shallow basin on the western side where sunlight penetrated longest—the Bowl, where she went when she wanted to pretend the warmth reached her, because in midsummer, for an hour around noon, it almost did. She had organized her territory thoroughly, as she had nothing to organize except water and stone, and she made jokes about all of it because the alternative was screaming and doing so in a river was acoustically unsatisfying.

The water moved through her. Between her ribs, around her fingers, through the spaces where her lungs had been before the river replaced them with current. She didn’t have gills—the river simply let her breathe because she was the river. She also breathed at the surface for visitors because they expected her to, a chest that rose and fell, lips that parted, a being that required air. She didn’t. She required the river, and the river required her—and the bargain had been involuntary on both sides, and neither of them had lodged an objection because there was no clerk to hear it, no court to receive it, and the laws of magic were as unhelpful as every other law she had encountered, which, admittedly, wasn’t many, because she lived in a river.

The current tasted different. The mineral signature of snowmelt was still there—iron and granite and the old cold of mountain rock, but underneath it something organic had appeared—a sweetness that made her think of sap and living wood and things with roots still in the ground.

And something carried from far upstream where tributaries she had never tasted fed into the lattice. Warm-blooded and metallic, wrong like the water had never been in all her years living in it. She tasted it and let the current take it south. She had enough to worry about in her own water.

She had felt a tremor, weeks ago, so faint she’d dismissed it as the river adjusting to the spring melt. But the melt was over, and the tremor had deepened instead of fading. The pull at her center hadn’t changed its grip, but the thing it gripped had changed by the width of a hair, the weight of a breath. She had been held in the same position for a very long time, and a hair’s width of movement after that much stillness was an earthquake.

The Deathless King had been given his death back. A healer had carried a bone needle through a forest that forgot things and placed it against his chest and the needle had gone home, and his death had returned to his body, and the king who couldn’t die became a man who could. She had felt it when it happened. The whole river had felt it. The current had surged, the ice on the upper banks had cracked and spun downstream, and the binding had shuddered like a bridge losing a support column. She had surfaced gasping that night and gripped the bank and watched the ice spin south in the dark and understood that the ceiling above her was no longer attached to the walls.

Without him at the center, it felt as though the binding in the arch sat unsupported, and arches without keystones didn’t stand forever. Like something had loosened.

The central problem of being a rusalka was that all her best material was wasted on fish.

The fish, for the record, were unresponsive. She had been workshopping observations about the trout’s territorial politics for decades and had received exactly zero laughs, which was a poor return on investment for comedy that she considered, at minimum, competent.

She rose from the bottom. The deep water was dark and cold, the binding’s country, where her edges blurred and the current moved through her as much as around her. The middle water was warmer and lighter, with the pressure easing as the surface approached, and her form sharpening with proximity to the air. The surface water was foreign territory. Bright, with sounds of the world above pressing flat against the underside of the membrane between their air and her water. And it was thin. The same it had always been, and she checked that too, like she checked the distance of the sun, because it was the only thing she could do about either of them.

She broke through and the world arrived all at once. Noise and light. The rush of current over the rocks downstream, the lap of water against the muddy bank. A warbler hidden in the willows, singing something territorial and repetitive that it clearly believed was magnificent.

The willows along the bank were fully leafed, their branches trailing in the current, and she chose to interpret this as flirtatious, and she was old enough to interpret whatever she wanted however she wanted, and if the willows objected, they could take it up with the river—which was also her.

She pulled herself onto the bank, forearms on the mud, chin on her hands. She had claimed this spot centuries ago and maintained it through sheer territorial stubbornness against every flood and freeze and the slow erosion of the bank itself, which retreated an inch every few decades, and she retreated with it.

The mud was warm. Late May, the sun had been working on it all day. Stored sunlight, pressed against her skin through the thin layer of water that clung to her. Earth-warmth, different from river-warmth. Her forearms sank into it and the heat entered her and she remembered standing on warm ground with the sun on her shoulders and gravity pulling at her hips. Just the ordinary ache of standing. She would have given anything for that ache. Anything for the weight of her own body on her own two feet on ground that expected her to stand on it and didn’t care whether she was a person or a river or something in between.

She pulled her hands back. The mud kept the impression of her forearms for a moment before the river lapped at it and softened it away.

The current brought something else while she lay there. From somewhere south of the ward line, a taste she had caught three days ago and dismissed. It was back, and it was stronger. Something in the ground that should have been still. The taste reached her through the water like all the other tastes, through the spaces where her body met the current, and it sat on her tongue and wouldn’t dissolve. Cold—but in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. Old cold. Like a body buried in summer soil, except the cold was moving, through the dirt, and the earth was letting it through.

She tasted it again. Something heavy crawling through packed earth, soil being pushed aside from below. She had tasted every kind of death the river carried. Drowning tasted like copper and panic. Rot tasted like sweetness turning to gas. This tasted like nothing she had a name for, and it kept moving, and the current kept carrying it north to her, and the earth kept letting it through.

The binding hummed beneath her and the sky above the willows darkened by degrees, and she lay at the surface with mud cooling under her arms and tasted the strange cold three miles downstream and didn’t know what to do about it.