Page 41 of A Magic Deep & Drowning

So his mother was still alive, somewhere. That was a small comfort at least. “Thade, I—”

“Enough! I’ve heard enough from you, forever. All your wasted breaths and words and time on land. You have apeopledown here, and you ignored it all. Mother never saw you for the liability that you were, and as creative as she was with her little games and punishments, she never took away what really mattered.”

Thade was staring at him, piercing him with his icy gaze. The guards’ grips on Maurits’s arms was tight, but he hardly felt it. There was something unnerving about the way Thade seemed to be looking straight into the dark recesses of his heart. A cold weight settled in Maurits’s stomach, but it wasn’t just a sense of foreboding. Soon the sensation was climbing up his body, a trail of ice that blazed an excruciating path up past his lungs and lodged in his throat.

If it weren’t for the guards holding him up, Maurits would have fallen from the pain of it. He opened his mouth to cry out, but no sound emerged. Thade gave him a sad smile. “No, there will be no more words now.” Another snap of his fingers, and he was holding a little glass bubble in his palm, a bluish green light dancing within. “Your voice,” he explained. “You won’t be needing it where you’re going. Though you never made good use of your powers, I will be taking those too.”

Maurits watched helplessly as Thade played with the bubble, letting it float between his hands. “Goodbye, brother. Ihope that you will not think me unduly cruel. What I do, I do for our people, our kingdom. The current situation with the humans is untenable, and the Water Kingdom needs a ruler who will take matters firmly in hand and see them through.”

Maurits thrashed at his idiot brother’s words. “I wouldn’t waste my energy, if I were you,” Thade said with a smugness that only made Maurits struggle harder. “You can take him now,” he told the guards, and turned his back.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The narrow buildings of Amsterdam glowed golden in the late autumn evening. Clara hurried from the pigment shop, taking the long way so that she would not have to cross one more canal than was absolutely necessary. Avoiding canals in Amsterdam was as fruitless an endeavor as trying to avoid eels in eel soup. If Wierenslot had been a testament to her father’s planning and tight-fisted control of nature, then Amsterdam was a rambling, untamable testament to the nebulous interests of man’s mind. Crooked alleys and twisting footpaths wound about in an endless tangle, circling art guilds and luthiers, banks and exchanges. Clara could walk to the same shop every day for a week, and find herself on a different path back each time. The novelty of the city should have amused her, given her something to preoccupy her mind with, but as she hurried across uneven cobbles—baby’s heads, the citizens of Amsterdam called them—her shawl tight against the October chill, all she felt was a heavy sense of loneliness, of homesickness. All the roses and tulips in her father’s garden, regardless of how tame and meek they had been, were mere smudges of memory here in this gray and unfamiliar city.

Clara cut through a narrow alley, then zigzagged behind a bakery, nearly upsetting a cart loaded with flour. If she was careful, she could at least time her errands so that she was back at the studio before it grew dark. But today there had been acustomer in the shop who had monopolized the shopkeeper’s time, and by the time she was helped she had found herself leaving late enough that the sun was sinking fast, the lengthening shadows bidding her to make haste.

Her breath came in cold puffs, her arms hugging the precious pigments to her chest. It felt good to have a purpose, even if it was a small thing. Her new life was not without brightness. Clara ground cobalt pigment, as blue as the water that flowed through the city. She fetched parchment and canvas from the little shop with the rickety sign on the Singel canal. She dreamed and remembered and tried not to dwell on all that had come before. Her life working for a painter of some small renown was not unpleasant, but neither was it the satisfying work that she had done at the farm, where her mind and body were so busy that she never had time to ruminate on anything other than her next meal. She felt as if she was a docked ship, simply waiting for its anchor to be pulled up before she could set sail again. And Clara van Wieren had never been one who was content with waiting.

News of the floods in Friesland had reached the city not long before she had, but most people here didn’t seem terribly concerned. Friesland was a long way from Amsterdam, and the city was like a world unto itself. Maurits and Pim, Helma and all the rest of the faces that had peopled her world in Wierenslot... They all seemed so far away, like a dream that had long since faded. And Fenna—where was she? Did her restless spirit still haunt the ground where Wierenslot had stood? There was so little anchoring Clara to her old life, and even less from her years before the flood.

A few other people nodded their greeting to her as she wove down the street, but for the most part, she was invisible to the grinding cogs of the city. She passed by taverns, the interiors boisterous like the paintings on her father’s walls come to life.

The sun was sinking fast in the inhospitable slate sky, and Clara hurried her step. There was no real reason she couldn’t be out past dark, but she would be a fool if she believed that the water held no danger for her anymore. Who knew what Maurits was doing right now? Who knew what his mother, the water queen, was capable of? It still seemed too fantastic to believe. She was in a city, and so long as it was bright and she was surrounded by people, she doubted that any creature of the water would try to abduct her. In the cover of night, however...

She was nearly running by the time she saw the small sign with the red tulip. Panting, she fell inside and bolted the door behind her, her legs going weak.

“I thought you had gotten lost,” came a woman’s familiar voice.

Straightening, Clara set the pigments on the old wooden table that dominated the small room. “Mr. van Horne was trying to charge double for the cobalt,” she told her mistress, her breath slowly beginning to even again.

“Old miser,” the woman commiserated, stepping into the light of the rushes. She was dark-haired and petite with freckled skin the color of fresh milk, and carried herself with the poise of a queen. “He only charges so much because he knows that no one else can get their hands on that blue. Never mind him, did you put it on credit, or do you have any change left for me?”

Clara dutifully deposited the extra coins into her mistress’s hand.

Sometimes it prickled her that she was expected to defer to a mistress now, that no one here knew that she had once lived in a castle and eaten off plates from China. But she could not complain when she had a roof over her head, food in her belly, and a degree of freedom she had only ever dreamed about. Securing a position with one of the city’s finest painterswas no small feat, and she knew that she had been lucky to be accepted for the post. It wasn’t the life she would have hoped for in a city as grand as Amsterdam, but neither was it a life of poverty and insecurity.

“Perhaps I should pay you back the coins in exchange for your thoughts?”

Clara flushed at being caught drifting at sea by Alida. “Nothing of import,” she said with a strained smile.

Her mistress gave her the smallest raise of her brow. Alida was sharp-witted and canny, with an eye for detail and an ear for gossip. “You needn’t look so nervous,” Alida told her with a smile that touched her knowing green eyes. “You’ve been here nearly a month, and I have yet to see you breathe freely, let your shoulders down. If it’s me you’re afraid of, you’ve no need to be. I don’t care what my maid gets up to outside these walls, so long as your work is good and you do not give me trouble in the studio.”

Clara nodded as her mistress went off, humming, to attend to her evening toilet. Alida was nothing if not kind, but she didn’t know that Clara was a fugitive from a deep and drowning magic. Perhaps if she had, she would not have opened her home and her life to her so quickly.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Sun was pouring in from the third-floor window, casting mellow gold across the gabled studio. After finishing her morning tasks, Clara liked to climb the steep stairs up to the studio and sit in the corner on a crate to watch Alida work. It wasn’t a large room—just the footprint of the narrow house—but entire worlds were created in it. She had never given much thought before to the skill that was needed to bring a painting to life. All the pictures that had hung on her father’s walls might as well have been furniture. But watching Alida blend her pigments, dance her brush across the canvas in small, precise strokes, ignited a strange hunger within her. What power it must be to wield a brush and see one’s innermost visions become real.

Clara knew better than to ask what Alida was working on this morning, as this piece had consumed a great deal of her time already, and required several very expensive pigments for which Clara was continually being dispatched to fetch from the shop.

“The Hooft family,” Alida said from behind her brush as if sensing Clara’s curiosity. “Mr. Hooft wanted the whole brood in an open-air setting, with all of the family’s pets, from the monkey to the hounds. His good wife was able to convince him of a studio setting with a backdrop of temple ruins, and just the monkey.” She applied a few more brushstrokes, herlips tugged down in a slight frown. “The little devil shat on my floor, and after the preliminary sketches, I asked that Mr. Hooft keep his family at home until I needed them for the final sitting.”

Now that she had been invited into conversation, Clara approached the giant canvas and studied the sketch of the family that was taking shape through streaks and dots of color. They were well-dressed, the wife and daughters all in immaculate white ruffs that presented their pink-cheeked faces like apples on a platter. Beside the mother’s elbow, a little table stood, and it was here that Alida was painting a wilting rose. Several brown petals rested beside the head of the rose, its leaves crumpled.

“The mother fades as the daughter blooms.” Alida stood back, a small crease between her brows as she examined the addition of the rose. Letting out a small breath of approval, she wiped her hands on a paint-stained cloth. “But such is life when a woman’s worth is measured in rosy cheeks, a firm bosom, and nothing else.”

Clara thought it a rather bleak view, but then, that was the story of her own life, was it not? Now that she was simply a nameless maid in a big city, she supposed she had no value to a man. It was freeing, intoxicating, the more she thought about it. She no longer had to practice worthless skills or preserve the paleness of her complexion, or do anything other than her tasks as a maid.

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