I was a thing made from waves, and I am again. Today I fill my own lungs until they collapse, and I fill them again. I married that knight, I dare not speak his name—because I heard tales that it would grant something like me a soul. The moment that he and I wed, I felt it settle in my chest: a thing whose very shadow filled me with fear. A weight that dragged me down to the depths where no light goes.

The soul that I gained, when the cold of the ring touched my finger and froze me in the shape of a bride: it made me want you, Bertalda. It’s funny, to never have loved the man I married, to have only ever loved the woman he tried to leave.

Let me tell you how I met him. On a ride with your friends, you’d left a glove pinned to a twig, by the haunted lake I slept within. They warned you about the things that haunted that place, but you told them that you wanted the knight who courted you to be brave. You wanted him to suffer any trial for you, to conquer any spirit you dared to taunt. Part of you had always been cruel, but I had been more than your match. When you sent him wading knee-deep into that lake just for your glove, for your whim, I dragged him down. I ran myself across his body, entangled him with me, and he let me do it. Part of him was still loyal to you, even then: when we came to the surface, when he gasped for breath, he whispered your name into my ear.

When he emerged, he carried me to the nearest church. He dragged his feet on shame and duty alone, and I understood none of it. He still wanted you, but he swore to wed me after what he and I did. I couldn’t understand why, at the time. There was a look on his face, a sure thing that I now know as guilt.

The other water spirits warned me. They called out from the lakes, from the streams we passed, telling me that a soul would be more than I could bear. My uncle said, “You’ll be back.” It meant nothing, because I wanted to see if the tales were true. I was curious, and so I never had a choice.

Either way, I still had to see you. You intruded upon my home, and it was only right for me to visit yours in return. And I was bored, you see. I never had a choice. On the hand where I slipped on the ring, Bertalda, I’d been wearing your glove. It was a simple thing: I wanted to walk back to you, your fiancé at my side, his ring on your glove on my hand, and I wanted to see your tears. I had been cruel enough for that, right until I spoke my vows.

I didn’t feel the pleasure I’d hoped for, when I saw your skin redden and pale again. I caught the scent of your tears before they spilled, and somehow it hurt. Something worse still awaited me, the shadow of the new soul that weighed me down: the sinking burden of choice. I never had to choose before, not when I was water. Water only takes.

In my guilt, I chose to help you. When you’d lost your mind from envy, when the noble family you were so proud of abandoned you in your state, it was the first time that I felt pity. That is why I took you into our home, and for that I am sorry. Perhaps I should’ve let you have that home, that knight, that soul, instead of me from the very start. Maybe I had taken our husband’s soul, after all: maybe marriage does not give new souls to things like me, but steals them from our prey. When I saw you, how you felt when he abandoned you for me, I knew that our husband had lost some piece of himself. I knew that he would only lose more. When I felt hurt for you, was it his soul weeping? Today, I no longer have a soul. I know that I’ve kept the guilt.

I nursed you with that guilt, and you fed off of it. I swear it straightened your back, thickened your hair. Still, you returned the favor. It was only right, you said, for someone of your stature to take pity on me. You pretended I was an old friend from a distant land, and you showed me how to live in your world. How to be the wife you wished you were, for the man you wished you had. Did you hate me for it, even as we grew close?

You taught me how to write, how to mend, even how to dance. Whenever I encountered something new, you would whisper your guidance into my ear. I still remember the soft warmth of your breath, even when the rivers freeze over. We were so inseparable that people called you my husband, as if it were a joke. Sometimes, I wish it was.

Bertalda, it had all been decided without us. By my uncle, who always knew that I would return to the deep: it was never my choice. By your father, who raised you as the daughter of a Duke, so honored, so judged, so held to your standard that you would rather go mad than accept any loss: it was never your choice. By our knight, who wanted us both: it was never our choice. The water always knew we would return to water.

Now our husband lies dead in this place. His name, I struggle to speak it. I feel that I will drown again. I drown in me: I am in every river and I feel the weight of all the water in the world. I know that I deserve it. His name, Huldbrand, Huldbrand, his memory drowns me. I feel water board up my lungs like driftwood snuffing the leak on a ship.

I told Huldbrand that should he ever speak ill of me near the water, I would return to the waves, and my uncle would take me back. I told Huldbrand that should he ever wed another, I would lose my soul, and I would kill him. It was in our vows, as plain as the look of shock on the priest’s face. It was never my choice. Water knows only greed, knows only how to melt everything away into itself. How unfortunate it was that I wanted you both.

We both wanted to be with you, even before we loved you. I believe Huldbrand felt regret for what he did, coming home with me, and that he wanted to make up for it. The obligation, the guilt remained, and I still felt it in my chest. Maybe that was why I stayed with him. Maybe that was why I wanted you just as much as he did. I don’t know if we crossed a line, or if it had always been coming to this. There are no limits in water; in water, we all mix.

Was it always wrong with us? In that church, on the day we wed, Huldbrand was praying. He had always felt so fearful, so watched by God, obligation, guilt. Once, he told me that God would not abide by his marriage to me, that our pairing was unnatural. Bertalda, would he have called what you and I did unnatural as well? Beneath the waves, we all mix with God. There is no prayer, it’s the same as speech.

I asked why he married me. He told me, “Because I bedded you.” I laughed, because there was no bed in that lake. He laughed, but he could not smile. He knew I wasn’t human in the end, that my flesh and bone and blood were tied to the water of me by wedlock alone. Even on our happiest days, I saw him look twice whenever we crossed a stream.

Do you remember when we traveled? Of all things, it was Huldbrand’s idea. He sold his family’s armor, sold all except our home for money for the road. We walked, we took carriages, we rode horses—and because I never believed that Huldbrand would insult me, we sailed. I loved to be far from the shore without going back to the waves. The part of me that was still water spirit, still feeling and urge alone, loved to mock my uncle. I loved to turn the waves, to stop the rain and calm the sea when we sailed, even when it put hateful eyes on me. 

I can’t tell why it made Huldbrand angry. Maybe it was what the sailors had said about me, about my magic. Maybe he felt ashamed, overshadowed by his wife, or maybe he finally had enough time to think about what I was. I remember how the way he looked at me changed, how he started to spend more time with you instead, how you welcomed it eagerly. I saw a streak of your cruelty again, and maybe that is what drew me to you. Cruelty and want, so much like my own. I’d always kept your glove, Bertalda. He was asleep when I found you together. Were you awake that night, or half-dreaming? Your eyes were closed, but you whispered to me. It was the first and last time that you said you loved me. I knelt there on the bed, grieving something that I can no longer understand. When you both awoke, we said nothing.

We traveled more after that. Do you think we were trying to run? From you wanting him, wanting me, wanting you. The snake can’t flee from the tail it swallows, but it can try. It was only when we dared, in some madness like death, to sail along the Danube at the height of its rage, that we finally broke. In those days, when we were still close in our love and our hate, when I knew that he took you in his arms at night and felt no jealousy, he finally thought to insult me.

Water is greed; water feels no jealousy. Bertalda, I never resented you for wanting him. I only hated that he hated me, that he thought he needed to choose, that you thought you were hurting me through him. You said nothing when you knew you had him, but I remember what you whispered to me when we first met. It was that Huldbrand never suited a thing like me, that a knight was always meant for a duchess.

I still tried, for you. When you lost the cross you wore, when I gave you a string of seashells and pearls, when I tied it around your neck, I knew that I would try as long as I lived. That night, laced between your fingers like water, I told you. Even when I knew that he could hear us.

When Huldbrand ripped the string from your neck, I felt something break in him and in me. You cried when he called me “witch,” but I felt very little as the water took me back. I saw that word forming along his lips with every scowl, long before he said it.

Had he been jealous of us? Sometimes, when you and I kissed, I closed my eyes instead of watching for him. Part of me still wishes he had seen us. Water is greed, but water feels no jealousy: when it can take, it takes. When our closeness was unspoken, taken for granted whenever we wanted, the three of us were happy. We could have been like water.

I should have kept my distance, held each of us away from each other like the moon from the shore from the bed of a deep lake. When we crashed together, it wasn’t like mixing and becoming whole again. It was bodies, and warm and close enough to steal our breath, but it was only bodies. When I returned to the water, when Huldbrand moved on and wed you without wasting a breath to mourn me, when you returned to our home and opened the fountain to bathe—

I remember your body, the first time you used that fountain, the night that I took you in. How I stared when you looked back at me. How I joined you, how we dried each other’s hair afterwards and felt whole. I boarded the fountain up the next day, and you hated me for it. But I always knew—

My uncle would rise from the depths and take me back, if he could. We had never been together without a man nearby, ready at any moment to pull us away. And the day Huldbrand insulted me, the day I flowed back into the Danube, the day he took you back and married you as if I’d never lived, I knew that our husband would die.

When I rose from the fountain, it was at my uncle’s command. I never had a choice. I held myself over Huldbrand and wept, I pressed my mouth to his. It was never my choice. The shock on his face was a wretched, blackish blue, the sea beneath the night. He drowned under my kiss, under the tears I shed, and I knew that I had lost him. My uncle laughed, it was the noise you would hear within a conch.

I count only one blessing: it was not out of jealousy. Water is not jealous. Water is greed: it takes when it takes. There is no choice, no feeling. Before you, as you watched, I felt only shame.

I circle Huldbrand’s grave now, a stream around his corpse. I feel the blood dry, feel whatever water remains seeping into the soil and down into the mouth of my river. Sometimes I see you wandering here, as ruined as the day I took you in and brought us all together. I cannot bear to take shape, cannot show my face to you, Bertalda. When you bathe in my stream, I skate over every inch of your skin, and I pray that you know. When your body shivers as you cling to the headstone, I fall from you in droplets. I weep with all of me.

♡

December 21, 2025