Betta fish on a forearm

The queen's pages came again this morning asking why the fighting fish in the north hall no longer flare for the audience. I told them the truth: they have stopped fighting because I have stopped letting them see each other. Each one lives alone now in a blue glass jar no wider than a teacup, and the light through the glass turns their fins into something I have no word for. You will laugh, but yesterday the eldest, the one we call Ashgrey, spread her fins against the window and the whole room went violet and teal, like the dye vats at Carrow when the sun gets in.

The old dye master came to the hall at dusk with his ledger. He wanted a pair for the silk works, to copy their colours into the bolts of cloth the court wears at midwinter. I refused, and he said I would be paid in gold and given a house by the harbour. I thought about that house for an hour. Then I thought about how a fish that flares for the dye house is a fish that spends its last weeks being looked at through a brass loupe.

So I did what you would have done. I carried the jars down the water steps before the bells and let them go in the old overflow channel where the river runs back to the sea. Ashgrey went first, and she did not hurry. For a long while her fins hung open behind her in the grey water, a veil of blue and red unrolling like cloth off a bolt, until the current drew the colour off the stones and she was gone.

Tell the dye master nothing when you write back. I will know if you do. Burn this, or keep it in the box with the moth-eaten scarf.

Yours in the salt and the hush, Ysolde