1

The story as it is told in the dry valleys north of Averon, where the only roads run down to the Cricket River and the only power is the freehold of Skadar, begins with a merchant envoy from the southern coast who traveled from Averon to talk about wool and lead, both of which the valleys yielded up in large quantities. As a gift, he brought a fish that Lord Skadar alone would enjoy, at the head of his table. Extolling the virtues of this fish, which was firmer of flesh and gentler of flavor than the fish found in the Cricket River, the envoy also enlightened the table as to the fishermen’s folkways. “Those who fish for it in the bays near Urchin Town,” he said, with the air of a man telling a ghost story, “sometimes eat the beating heart and swear it sharpens the eyes and eases pain in the joints.”

Lord Skadar had been enjoying the fish, and also the fact that he alone was eating it. He was known for his greed, caprice, and cruelty, as well as the occasional baffling act of kindness. Now he pointed at one of his serving-men, by the name of Kopki. “You. You like fish?” Kopki did like fish, and ate it whenever he could catch or barter for it, which was not often in these dry valleys. He felt a brief thrill at the idea that he might also be able to taste Lord Skadar’s fish.

He nodded. “Yes, my lord. I do like fish.”

“You are Kopki, yes?”

Kopki nodded again.

“Bring me another of these fish, Kopki. Alive, so I may dine on its heart.” Lord Skadar gestured for more wine, and Kopki withdrew into the kitchen. From there he went straight to his house, one of several outbuildings against the wall of Freehold Skadar. He lived alone there with his daughters Elora and Edana, and his first thought was how to provide for them while he was gone. That same evening, Kopki went to Lord Skadar’s sister Lady Penzie. Kopki’s wife had done sewing for Lady Penzie, before her death the winter before. Lady Penzie was as kind and generous as her brother was unpredictable and cruel. She agreed at once to take Kopki’s daughters in, and gave him a few coins as an apology for her brother.

In the morning as Kopki rode down to the landing on the Cricket River, he happened to meet the envoy from Averon, who clicked his tongue in sympathy. “A hard task for a man with no ship,” he said. “I can tell you, at least, where the fishermen land their catch near the mouth of this river.” He described the place, in a cove that faced Averon across the broad estuary of the Cricket, which in Averon was known as the Snake River for its sinuous course through the flatlands after it had spent its rage tumbling down from the mountains. Kopki had seen the river mouth and the cape on a map, and nodded his thanks. “You may sail with me,” the envoy said, but Kopki could not. “My Lord Skadar forbids it, for he wishes not to be indebted to you,” Kopki said. Instead he took working passage on a barge crew, portaging its cargo down out the hills and riding the flatwater to Averon Bay. From there it was a short way to the town the envoy had spoken of, and the odor led him to the fish market.

He offered his story to a group of fishermen mending their nets and chewing the stems of their pipes.

“Long way to be bringing a fish,” one commented.

“Salt it,” said another.

“No, my lord must see the fish alive,” Kopki said. “He is a suspicious man. He will have my head for treachery and cast out my daughters if I give him reason.”

“I’ll do you this kindness,” a third fisherman said. He beckoned and Kopki followed him to a cistern. It churned with fish. “Here.” The fisherman dipped out a fish identical to the one Lord Skadar had eaten.

“What are they called?” Kopki asked.

The fisherman pointed out a small red tab on the fish’s gills, bright against its speckled gray sides and the pale green of its belly. “Redgill,” he said. “Go to another town, it has another name, but that’s what we call them here. But you’ll never get one alive all the way upriver unless you can bring the bay with you.”

“I have to try,” Kopki said. It was two weeks since he had seen his daughters, he who was accustomed to make breakfast with them each morning and hear their voices murmuring to each other before they fell asleep each night.

“Then try,” the fisherman said. He gave Kopki a bucket and watched him walk away.

Kopki had only the money Lady Penzie had given him, and knew that the way back to Skadar was shorter overland. Also, though he liked fish he disliked boats, so he decided to travel overland, cutting off the river’s meandering course with a straight line across the highlands. He struck out north, around the walls of Averon and into the dry waste between the city and the foothills that rose toward Skadar. When the sun went down Kopki kept going along a starlit footpath, switching the bucket from hand to hand every hundred steps, until he grew too tired to see. In the morning he looked in the bucket and the fish was dead.

Kopki had grown up in a land slashed by rivers, and since his seventeenth year had lived in the highlands near the freehold of Skadar. He knew nothing of places like this, sun-battered sand and winding gravel roads. But if he would ever accomplish his errand and see his daughters again, he must learn.

With this hard-earned lesson glowing like a fresh brand on his soul, Kopki turned south again. It was nine days before the summer solstice.

2

The same fishermen were sitting at the same dock when Kopki returned to Urchin Town. “Look, uplander,” said the fisherman who had helped him. “Your lord doesn’t care whether you live or die. He’s probably forgotten all about the fish by now.”

“Perhaps,” Kopki said. “But if he hasn’t, it’s my daughters who will feel his wrath.” The longer he was away, the more he feared that Lady Penzie would not be able to protect them. Lord Skadar would cast them out, leave them to fend for themselves among the peasants who wrung their bare survival from the land.

“Ah,” the fisherman said. “A man who cares for his children is a good soul. My father, Old Barnes, was such a man. You can call me Young Barnes. I’ll give you one more fish, since we had a good catch today.”

The other fishermen muttered among themselves, but Young Barnes found a bigger bucket, and gave Kopki a twine bag. “Keep the fish in this. Take it out when you dump the bucket and put fresh water in. Do that twice a day, and you might make it. Good thing your lord wants a fish that can live in both salt water and fresh.”

“What?” Kopki realized how little he knew about fish.

“Never mind, uplander,” Young Barnes said. “You’ve a long way to go. Stay close to the river.”

Kopki followed Young Barnes’ advice, trading speed for the ability to slosh the fish in the fresh water twice a day and thereby keep it alive. If he followed the river, it would bring him to within a few miles of Lord Skadar’s hold. If he got that far he could always send a messenger to bring a cart and a barrel to fill with enough water to keep the fish alive until Lord Skadar’s appetite decreed its end.

On the fourth morning, the bucket was overturned and the fish was gone. Tracks on the riverbank told Kopki a weasel had been about. Stupid, he thought. Why had he not anticipated that? He had tears in his eyes as he turned back south, tears of worry for his daughters but also tears of humiliation for what the fishermen would think when he arrived.

3

He made it a full ten days upriver on his third try, more than halfway, before he was robbed in a riverside mining camp. The miners might have killed him, but he gave them the last of his money from Lady Penzie. Even so, they taunted him by throwing the fish in the river and then beating him with sticks as he fled.

Downriver, on a flat rock, Kopki lay on his back looking at the stars. The night sky always reminded him of his daughters. Edana, his older daughter, loved to watch the stars. Had she been born to another father, she might have been able to study them as a scholar did. His younger daughter Elora was an artist with needle and thread. She was more at ease with things as they were, could tell the lore of the stars though she cared nothing for the philosophy of their movements. Kopki lay on the rock and realized that he knew nothing about what would become of them, whether he returned to Skadar or not. He had no power over their future. He barely had any power over his. Learning had never done him any good. Who needed letters to tote a fish up and down the banks of the Cricket River until it died—or he did?

4

This time when he returned to the fish market at Urchin Town with his twine bag and small barrel, money changed hands among the fishermen, even Young Barnes. Kopki had become a thing to be mocked. Young Barnes was impatient with him, working knots without looking Kopki in the eye. “I can only give you so many fish,” he said.

“I will work for it,” Kopki said.

“Work? What work can you do?” one of the other fishermen called. “You beg fish, you beg food, you fail your errand to your lord.”

Kopki stood up a little straighter. “I don’t fail,” he said. “I will succeed. But I need a fish.”

They mended their nets, and tapped out the bowls of their pipes, and didn’t meet his eyes. After a while Kopki could no longer stand the pretense that he didn’t exist. “Young Barnes,” he said. “Is it true that folk around here sometimes eat the hearts of these fish while they still beat?”

A silence fell over the group of fishermen. “We what?” one of them asked.

“I was sent here because my lord Skadar heard from a merchant of Averon that this fish is highly prized, and sometimes people eat of its beating heart for the effects on health and vigor,” Kopki said, feeling stupider with each word that forced its way out of his mouth.

The silence stretched out long enough that Kopki could tell the fishermen pitied him too much even to laugh. Young Barnes said, “I’ve caught more of these fish than there are ticks on a herd of buffalo, and never once have I heard of eating the living heart out of them. You’re on a wild goose chase. Best go home.”

“My lord Skadar will certainly kill me if I return without the fish,” Kopki said, though in his confusion he no longer had any idea whether that was true. What world was this where he could doubt Lord Skadar’s cruelty?

“Look,” Young Barnes said. “I don’t care what you do with the fish. But the Book says to care for fools and madmen, and as long as you need a fish, you come here and you’ll have one.” He clapped Kopki on the shoulder. “I hope you get one back to your home one day.”

“Don’t encourage him, Barnes,” one of the other fishermen groused. The others joined in. They didn’t want Kopki around. He was bad luck, a lost cause, might as well be drowned in the harbor as waste another fish.

Young Barnes ignored it all. He filled Kopki’s bucket with fresh water, put a new fish in it, and set it on the docks at Kopki’s feet. “This time you’ll get home,” he said, his eyes shining and a hopeful smile on his face.

Kopki thanked him, but the other fishermen had made him despise himself, and because of that he despised Young Barnes a little for his charity.

He walked the day back to Averon, along the canal that bisected the city and thence to the riverside docks at the mouth of the Cricket. There he struck up a conversation with a boatman whose vessel Kopki recognized from the landing below Lord Skadar’s hold. He outlined his plight.

“You live in a cruel place,” the boatman said. Kopki agreed. “But I cannot help you,” the boatman said. Kopki cast his eyes to the cloudy sky and begged why. “My boat is full and even were it not, how would you work for your passage?”

“Anything,” Kopki said.

The boatman was too hard a man to be called kind, but his heart could still feel pity. “I am sailing across the strait to Kadwal,” he said. “If you are still here when I return to go upriver, I will take you. But you will work.”

“Anything,” Kopki said again.

For two weeks he kept the fish in its twine bag in the river, and helped find crayfish and tiny frogs to feed it. Then the boatman returned, and welcomed Kopki aboard. His crew—four men from the far reaches of the world—thought Kopki’s predicament comical, and mocked him unceasingly. He took it all in good fun until one of them said something about his daughters, and then Kopki spoke harshly to them.

The next morning he woke up to see them cooking his fish over a small fire in the bow.

A heavy mantle of sorrow settled over Kopki’s soul. So, he thought. I will never see my daughters grow into women. They will never know what happened to me, and naturally they will assume I could not complete Lord Skadar’s errand, so ran away to another land, abandoning them to his caprice. At least Lady Penzie will care for them until they are grown.

The boat’s crew mocked him, tossing him the fish’s head. Your prize! they cheered. He smiled as if accepting that he was justly the butt of their joke. The boat’s cat wound between his legs and Kopki let it have the fish head. The crew booed and jeered. Kopki picked up his traveling bag and vaulted over the side of the boat into the river.

The ability to swim was rare in the parched valleys around Freehold Skadar, but Kopki had not come to that country until he was grown. As a boy he had swum in the rivers of Cape Fen, a flat land flanked on three sides by mountains with the fourth facing the sea. Now he took to the lazy current of the Cricket with pleasure that was also surrender, drifting downstream as the boat poled its way upstream toward the home Kopki was growing more and more certain he would never see again.

5

Desperate, Kopki stole a horse the night after he acquired his fifth fish, and rode it due north along the desert road before the watch could be raised. He had a fish, also stolen, in a bucket sealed with wax, and his plan was to ride through the night and cut over to the river in the morning, when he could meet it at the end of one of its sweeping curves. He was already feverish when he conceived of this plan, and he quickly rode to the brink of madness when a sandstorm boiled up from the depths of the desert and left him choking and lost, cradling the fish bucket like a child while sand caked his nostrils and scoured his eyes. The horse fled sometime in the night and in the morning, Kopki woke up half-buried. He struggled free of the sand and turned a complete circle. There was nothing to see but distant brown hills, and everywhere sand and tiny rocks. The horse was gone, its tracks erased. By stealing it, Kopki realized, he had condemned it, and also condemned himself.

A terrible frozen veil settled over his mind as Kopki realized that none of this would have happened without the fish. He was trapped, he would always be trapped. He would never be free, never see his daughters again. Kopki began to despair. He could not live with the thought that his daughters would grow up believing he had fled the Lord’s wrath instead of coming home to them. Neither could he stand the idea of giving Lord Skadar his cursed gift of this cursed fish. If Kopki had to suffer, so too would Lord Skadar, whom Kopki prayed would die bewailing his unconsummated desire to eat of the fish’s beating heart. He held the wax-sealed bucket in his hand and then he let it fall. The sand around it darkened.

Afterward, Kopki was angry with himself. He should have at least eaten the fish, he thought, and maybe he could have learned the truth about eating its heart. But he was not the kind of person to do that to an animal, he thought. Except he had. He had broken open the bucket and watched the water drain away into the sand, watched the fish gasp and flop and die because he, Kopki, was doing the same and he could not be alone. Kopki’s soul was so full of pain that he had to let some of it out, and only the fish was there to receive it. Now the fish was dead and soon Kopki would be too.

The whims of the powerful, he thought. They cheapen us, they debase us. Exhaustion and Lord Skadar’s cruelties had overwhelmed Kopki’s capacity for love. He felt this happening but could not find a way to stop it. He was worn down to nothing, his humanity a memory. Nevertheless, Kopki turned south again, driven by the last glimmer of shame that his daughters would think he did not love them enough to return.

6

The fishermen treated Kopki as a pitiable obligation by this time, like a stray dog or an orphan child. Young Barnes did not have to plead his case, but neither did he owe Kopki any kindness. He dipped a fish out of the cistern, put it in Kopki’s bucket, and turned away.

Kopki was going to die on this voyage, he was sure of it. His body was failing, his mind wandered, he could not remember the sound of his daughters’ laughter. They would be better off without him.

Still he pressed on, hard-won experience keeping him away from dangers on the early part of the voyage. On the fourth morning, as Kopki was sloshing it through fresh water before cutting inland to avoid the mining camp, the fish said, “Your ruler is cruel. To my kind as well as yours.”

So, Kopki thought. It has come to this. Surely talking to a fish was a point of no return. But what did he have to lose? “And in his cruelty, my lord has made me cruel. I am a husk, fish. There is nothing human left in me but despair. You are the sixth fish I have tried to carry upriver. The last one I killed myself, when I was in the madness of a sandstorm. All the others I lost, or died.”

The fish was silent for a moment, long enough for Kopki to consider that sun and failure and shame might have finally driven him mad. Then it asked, “Do you still love your daughters?”

“I hate that my love for them has driven me to this,” Kopki said. “I will never be able to look at them again without resenting what I have suffered. Is that love? It once was, but now I don’t know.”

“Ah,” the fish said. “An honest man. Listen, honest man, I know a way we can both get what we want.”

“Well, I’m talking to a fish,” Kopki said, “so I might as well hear the rest of the story.” He felt he must be very near death.

“I can grant wishes,” the fish said.

“Impossible!” Kopki snorted. He felt disappointed that his final illusions should be so trite. Then he reconsidered. “How many wishes?”

“Two.”

“You’re lying, fish. Even a man only gets one time to use magic. How can a fish have two?”

“I will tell you if you take me to the place where you killed the other fish.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Kopki said. “I was lost, maybe I won’t be able to find it again and even if I do you will be almost dead.”

“Take me,” the fish said. “Or I will die, and you will spend your life trying to bring a fish to your lord, and failing every time until you die in the desert or finish your journey to madness or take ship in Averon and sail for the Passage of Snakes.”

Kopki knew the fish was telling the truth. So he went, cutting away from the river, and he found the place by the vultures circling the dead horse. It was only a few miles from a bend in the river. There was no sign of the fish.

“You will never make the journey back with me,” said the fish. “I will certainly die along the way.”

“But your wishes,” Kopki said.

“Why should you have them?” the fish asked.

“Because if you do not give them to me, you will die,” Kopki said.

“And if you do not have them, you will never complete your errand and see your daughters. Yet you must answer for what you have done to that other fish, which could have been me,” the fish said. “You see? We must each surrender something. Now back to Urchin Town.”

“Why?” Kopki couldn’t understand. “Do it now. I have nothing to surrender!”

“Of course you do,” the fish said. “But we must start over so we are both taking the same risk. I will tell you on the way how it is to be done.”

“What risk are you taking?” Kopki was screaming now. At a fish, in the desert.

“That your lord will disdain your gift and torment Kopki or his daughters. That you will speak the wrong wishes and doom us both. That in your madness and self-pity, you will tear out my heart and eat it just to have one thing your lord cannot. Shall I keep going?” Kopki said nothing. “Now go quickly,” the fish demanded, “or I will be dead before you can water my gills again. The fishermen will not give you another fish. I heard them talking around the barrel before you came.”

Defeated, Kopki set out for the river again.

7

At the edge of the fish market in Urchin Town, Kopki and the fish talked. The fishermen prodded each other and pointed Kopki out, making signs to ward off his madness. But they left him alone. Young Barnes kept his back turned to Kopki, and this somehow made it easier for Kopki to accept what would come next.

“I ask only this,” Kopki said. “Show me to my daughters before I am brought to Lord Skadar.”

“Of course,” the fish said. “It will be quite an extraordinary thing, to see such a creature living so far from its home. Make your wishes, Kopki.”

“I wish the fish would stay alive until we reach Lord Skadar’s table,” Kopki said. He had considered the wording carefully.

“Your second wish?”

Kopki took a deep breath. “I wish to be you, fish, and that you were Kopki.”

When he stepped off the boat at Cricket Landing, Kopki asked for a horse to get him to the freehold with all due speed, since he carried something special for Lord Skadar himself. A stevedore unloading a barrel of salt snorted. “No need to worry, then. Lord Skadar’s in the ground these past three weeks.”

Kopki held the fish a little tighter in its waxed leather bag. “Who rules the freehold now?” he asked.

“Lady Penzie,” the stevedore said. “Though she had to exile her own sister to cement her claim.”

Kopki relaxed. “Then I have something special for Lady Penzie,” he said.

He found her in the freehold’s dining hall, sitting where Lord Skadar had sat these many years. “Kopki,” she said with a warm smile. “I feared the worst.”

“My lady, so did I,” Kopki said. “More than once. My daughters are well, I trust?”

“Delightful girls,” Lady Penzie said. “You must see them at once, Kopki. They have missed you terribly, and at times despaired of you ever returning.”

“Just one thing first,” Kopki said. “My late lord’s errand is complete. I have brought him the fish he wanted.”

“Alive, all this way?” Lady Penzie looked at Kopki as if seeing something different in him that she should always have noticed. “I assumed you had heard of my brother’s death and returned knowing I would not hold you to his caprices.”

“Ah, that would have been easier,” Kopki said. “But instead I have this fish.”

He opened the bag and showed her the fish. She viewed it with visible distaste. “Throw it in the river,” she commanded. “It is an unwelcome reminder of my late brother’s cruelty.”

Kopki promised he would, but instead he sent word about the fish to a magic broker in Averon, who bought it as soon as he could make the trip upriver and view the prodigy for himself. With the money Kopki paid a tutor to teach Elora about the planets and stars, and the numbers that directed them in their paths. Along with those lessons, he gave her an orrery, wrought from bone in a mountaintop monastery far to the north in the Riven Lands, where the stars are more numerous than a bright girl’s dreams. For Edana, he bought needles and scissors of good steel, traded all the way from Ie Fure on the Sulfur Sea, where it is said the strongest steel is forged. And with those instruments he gave her a strong lens on a stand, ground in the workshops of the Agate Tower, where the labor of apprentice wizards imbues every instrument with ambient magic. It would preserve her eyes. Thus he made sure his daughters would always be able to care for themselves. For himself, Kopki returned to his service in Lady Penzie’s hall, and lived a long and happy life.

If his daughters ever noticed anything different about their father, they said nothing in his presence. But once or twice during the years just after his long absence, they did have occasion to remark to each other that he seemed to have lost his taste for fish.