Chapter 2: Bound

"Get out of my boat," said Mei.

The man in the bow stayed where he was. He sat on the bench in her old net with his back straight and his hands on his knees and water running off him onto her boards, and looked at her with those eyes, gold as a temple roof, and didn't blink. Mei had met a great many strange things on this water in twenty-four years. Dead merchants. Drowned brides. A goose that could count. She had never met anything that sat in her boat as if the boat had been built for it and she was the one who'd wandered in.

"I would very much like to get out of your boat," said the man. "Believe me."

"Then go."

"I can't."

"You got in."

"I was put in." He dragged the net tighter. "By the law of the waters, which is older than your ferry, older than your town, older than your grandmother's grandmother, and considerably less pleasant than any of them." He looked down at the net round his shoulders, and his pale face tightened in a way that on anyone else she would have called embarrassment. On him it looked like a thunderstorm deciding whether to start. "Have you got any clothes?"

"Who are you?"

"Have you got any clothes?"

"Not until you tell me who you are."

He breathed in through his nose and lifted his chin, and at the side of his throat, just above the edge of the net, she saw something catch the lamplight. A patch of scales. Small and fine and overlapping, the color of mother-of-pearl, coming and going on his skin like a blush.

"I am Ao Bo," said the man. "Eighth son of the Dragon King of this lake. Eighth Prince of the waters from the hills to the sea." He looked at her down the length of the ferry with enormous dignity, dripping. "And you are a ferrywoman who charged me three coppers for a plaster."

Mei looked at him. At the gold eyes, and the pearly patch at his throat, and the edge of the black plaster on his back.

"You're the fish," she said.

"I am not a fish."

"You were a fish a moment ago."

"I was in the shape of a carp. There is a very great difference."

"Not to the people who eat them," said Mei, and reached under the stern bench for the bundle of clothes she kept for passengers who fell in.

The clothes had been left behind by a carter the summer before, a short man with long arms, and the man who said he was the Eighth Prince of the waters was not short. The undyed jacket stopped a hand's width above his wrists. The trousers stopped at the middle of his shins. He put them on in the bow with his back to her, fast, and turned round with his long wet hair hanging over his shoulders and his bare feet planted on her boards and the sleeves riding up his arms, and looked at her as if he dared her to say anything.

She bit the inside of her cheek, hard.

"Now," said the prince. "I'm leaving."

"Good."

"I'm going home."

"Lovely. Mind the step."

He stepped up onto the bow, light as a cat, and dived.

It was a beautiful dive. She had to give him that. He went off the end of the ferry in a long clean arc, hands together, and went into the black water without a splash, as a fish goes in, the way she had never managed in her life. The ripples spread out round the place where he'd gone. The lamp swung. The frogs went on.

The water spat him out.

It didn't throw him. It just refused him. He came straight back up out of the lake as if he'd hit the bottom of a basin, and his head broke the surface with a gasp, and he floundered there in the black water in his borrowed jacket with his hair over his face, kicking.

He tried again. He took a breath and went under. The lake pushed him back up like a cork.

Mei leaned on her pole and watched.

He went under a third time. He came up a third time, coughing, and this time he didn't try again. He swam back to the ferry, slowly, with great dignity, and hooked his long arms over the side and hung there in the water, and looked up at her with his gold eyes full of a rage so total that the lake around him actually seemed to chill.

"It won't let me," he said.

"I noticed."

"My own lake won't let me."

"Do you want a hand up?"

"No," said the Eighth Prince of the waters, and hauled himself over the side, and lay on her boards in a spreading puddle with his arms flung out, staring up at the stars.

"It's simple," he said, some time later, when he was sitting on the bow bench again and she had given him the blanket from the cabin, which she was charging him for. "You saved my life."

"I pulled an arrow out of a fish."

"You saved my life. That arrow was going to kill me. It was meant to."

"Meant by who?"

He looked away at the dark water, and back. "I'd rather not say. And by the law of the waters, a life saved must be repaid with a life saved. Until I repay it, I'm bound to you."

"Bound how?"

"I can't go home. I can't change shape. And I can't go beyond the light of your lamp." He nodded at the brass lamp on its pole at the stern, burning steady behind its horn shade. "As far as that light reaches, I can go. No farther."

Mei looked at the lamp. She looked at the edge of its light, a soft gold circle on the black water, maybe forty paces out. Beyond it the lake was dark all the way to the hills.

"That's not very far."

"No," said the prince. "It isn't."

"What if I put it out?"

"Then I'd advise you not to." He didn't smile. "I don't know what happens. Neither do you. Shall we find out together?"

She left the lamp alone.

"So," she said. "You save my life. And then you can go."

"Yes."

"And I'm not in any danger."

"No."

Mei thought about it. Then she stood up, and walked to the side of the ferry, and leaned out over the black water, a long way out, until her toes were on the edge of the boards and her whole weight was over the lake.

"Oh no," she said, without much feeling. "I'm falling."

He was there before she'd finished the word. She didn't see him move. One moment he was on the bow bench in the blanket, and the next his hand was round her arm above the elbow, cold and hard as a mooring ring, and he had hauled her back onto the middle of the boards so fast her feet left the deck.

They stood there, his hand still on her arm, hard as river stone, each of his fingers distinct through her sleeve.

Nothing happened. No light, no sound, nothing breaking. The lamp burned on and the lake lapped at the hull.

The prince looked down at his hand on her arm. Then he let go of it as if it had burned him.

"It has to be real," he said. "You have to really be dying."

"I could really be dying."

"You were leaning over a lake you've lived on your whole life," said the prince, "in water you could stand up in. The law isn't stupid."

Mei rubbed her arm where his fingers had been. It was still cold. "Well," she said, "the law and I are going to have a conversation."

She cooked supper on the little clay stove in the stern, as she did every night. Rice, and a piece of salt fish, and greens from Auntie Tang's garden that she hadn't paid for yet. The smell of the fish frying came up into the night, and she glanced at the bow, and the Eighth Prince of the waters was sitting there in his blanket with his face turned away and his shoulders set, as if the smell had personally insulted his family.

"Do you want some?"

"No."

"It's good fish."

"I'm sure," said the prince, without turning round, "that it was."

She stopped with the chopsticks halfway to her mouth. She glanced from the fish to his back.

"Oh," she said.

"Yes."

"Is it..."

"I don't know that one personally," said the prince, stiffly. "Eat it. It's already dead. It would be a waste."

She ate it. She ate it slowly, and didn't look at him, and it was the first meal in years she had felt bad about. When she'd finished she scraped the rice into a bowl with the greens and nothing else, no fish, not even the oil, and carried it up to the bow and put it down on the bench beside him.

He stared at it for a long time.

Then he picked it up and ate it, with his fingers, because she hadn't given him chopsticks, and didn't say thank you, and she didn't ask him to.

It was the second watch before she lay down. She took the cabin. He could have the bow bench, she told him, and the blanket, and the night air, and he could thank her in the morning.

He didn't thank her. He sat in the bow with the blanket round his shoulders and his knees drawn up, looking out past the edge of the lamplight at the dark lake, at the water that wouldn't have him. In the light his long hair had started to dry, and it wasn't black after all. It was the dark blue of deep water under ice.

She lay on her bedroll in the cabin with the door open and watched him anyway.

"Fish," she said.

His head turned.

"What did you call me?"

"Fish. I can't call you Your Highness Eighth Prince of the Waters from the Hills to the Sea every time I want you to hand me a rope." She folded her arms behind her head. "How long?"

"How long what?"

"How long is this going to take? You saving my life."

The prince looked at her across the length of the ferry, across the stern bench and the stove and the box of paper money, the gold of his eyes catching the lamplight like two coins at the bottom of a well.

"That depends entirely on you," he said. "I'd suggest you start drowning."