Mermaid

by Carolyn Turgeon

  “Come back?”

  Bolette’s face appeared next to Thilla’s, and then Regitta’s, and Nadine’s.

  In the distance, she could hear the castle coming to life.

  Lenia sat up. She looked in wonder at her own skin, shimmering and hard, all the pain in it gone. Her powerful tail, curving onto the sand. Her tail.

  For a moment, one moment, she felt everything there is to feel, all at once. The most intense euphoria coupled with the most searing grief. In a moment, she had lost everything, and gained everything back.

  Or had she dreamed it all?

  The world smelled different, tasted different.

  And then she saw Margrethe lying on the ground just a few feet away from her, passed out. Edele fretting over her, ripping apart her own dress to stanch the wound.

  She looked around for Christina, saw Vela sitting on the beach and holding the baby in her arms. Christina was staring up at her aunt, smiling.

  In confusion, Lenia looked back to Thilla.

  “She will be all right, Sister,” she said. “Your friend. She hurt herself for you.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What happened?”

  His soul is my soul. His blood is my blood.

  She looked more closely at Margrethe, her hurt leg, the blood on the sand under her.

  “They will be coming now. The guards up there.” Thilla pointed. “They are getting another human to take care of her. They heard her cries. We must go now.”

  “Go?”

  “It is time for us to go, Sister,” repeated Vela. “They will all be all right.”

  And then Lenia understood. Margrethe had saved her, but now she had to return to her own world.

  The guards were running down to the water. The prince’s new bride was missing. She was here by the water, wounded. The castle would be in an uproar.

  There was no choice.

  Lenia saw that things would be all right. That they would heal Margrethe, and Margrethe would care for Christina, and Christina would grow up beautiful and beloved in this castle by the sea. Would she look out at the water and sense something? Would she feel pulled to it? Maybe later in life, one day, when she was old enough to understand, Lenia could see her again. Maybe by then Thilla would be queen, and Lenia would be mated to one of her own kind, to Falke if he would still have her, and they would be surrounded by merchildren, and she could tell her own children stories about their half sister, who lived in the upper world with her human father, under the stars.

  She looked back at Margrethe, whose eyes fluttered open and focused on hers.

  There was so much Lenia wanted to say to her, but the sun was in the sky, the guards were approaching, and the court physician, the prince—they were all running to the water, and she had to think of her own people now, her sisters, who were slipping back in the water, waiting for her to return home.

  She turned then to Vela, who held out her daughter to her. “Say good-bye to her,” her sister whispered. “She will be safe here. She will live well.”

  Lenia cried out as she took her daughter, holding her close to her breast, inhaling her. It would be her last scent, one she would never forget. As Christina stared up at her, as her heart split open, Lenia realized she had been wrong before. She could feel more pain than she’d felt when Sybil cut out her tongue, when the potion ripped her body in two. There was this, now.

  “Good-bye, my love,” she whispered, willing the words into her daughter’s heart, her soul, the web of light inside her tiny body that would keep this memory alive, even after death. Then Lenia spoke to Margrethe. “Please,” she said. “Keep her safe.”

  Margrethe nodded.

  Edele walked to Lenia then, nervously looking over her shoulder at the approaching men. “You need to go,” she said gently. “I can take her.”

  Lenia nodded to her, this flame-haired girl, and carefully handed Christina over, making sure her blanket was tucked around her. She watched as her baby curled into Edele’s arms and shut her glittering blue eyes. There was so much she wanted to tell her, to help her in the world, but there was no more time.

  “Come, Sister,” Thilla called.

  And with one last look at her baby, and one last look at her first and only human friend, Lenia turned back to the sea, and pushed her powerful tail behind her.

  EPILOGUE

  The Princess

  THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED THAT DAY WAS WHISPERED through the castle corridors and courtyards and along the benches of the great hall. The guests who were present for the meeting of the two kings, and for the marriage of Princess Margrethe to Prince Christopher, took the story with them, back to their grand estates, back to the snow-covered countryside, and up to what used to be known, in those days, as the Northern kingdom. The old woman who found the mermaid on the sand wearing nothing but a ruby necklace, the lady-in-waiting who took Christina from the mermaid’s arms, the soldiers who saw a glimpse of the mermaid and her sisters as they disappeared into the sea, who claimed to see the mermaid glimmering from the ocean, her blue eyes glowing from the water as she turned back one last time before vanishing from their lives forever—they told what they saw, and the stories were repeated and changed over time.

  Margrethe and Christopher raised Christina as their own daughter, and they went on to have children of their own besides, a boy and two girls, who grew up together in the castle by the sea, in the early days of the new kingdom. Eventually everyone forgot that Christina had ever belonged to anyone else. The mermaid had been in the castle for too short a time to have a child, people said—it could not have been more than a few months, after all—and everyone remembered how Margrethe had disappeared into the birthing room for hours and hours, just before the wedding. No wonder the wedding was so rushed, some whispered. No wonder the baby was kept largely out of sight of the court until she was a little moon-haired girl so charming, and with such a pleasing voice, that no one thought anymore about the strange circumstances of her birth.

  Margrethe often came upon Christina, in later years, staring out at the sea. Walking along the shore and dipping her feet in the water. Margrethe would wonder then if the girl had any sense of where she had come from, if she felt any pull toward the sea beyond what they all felt, always living in its shadow, always hearing the slapping of water against land and watching the moon and stars and sun reflected in it. But Christina seemed like a regular enough girl, though her skin continued to shimmer until she was an old lady and her voice bewitched everyone who heard it, throughout her life.

  How can any of us tell when that thing comes that will make everything different? As she stood in the frozen convent garden at the end of the world, all those centuries before now, Margrethe had no idea that she was about to witness a miracle—the last mermaid to come to land, at the very end of the days when mermaids still longed to return to it. In her later life, Margrethe often thought about how had she not been looking out at the water at that precise minute, back when she was just a girl of eighteen standing at the end of the world, she would have missed the miracle altogether. Even as a very old woman, Margrethe would sometimes look up quickly from her books, the ancient tales she had loved to read since she was a child, afraid that she was missing something magical come to light for just one instant, before disappearing again.

  They say that no one from the world of the sea ever came on land again after what happened to the sea queen’s daughter, who suffered so much among humans, although no one knows for sure. And as the story changed and grew and shifted into a legend of a little mermaid who fell in love with a prince and longed for a human soul, no one ever talked about what the mermaid left behind.

  As most children do, Christina went on to have children of her own, and those children had children, and, as the world became larger and wider, those children spread throughout it, all of them burning with the same curiosity and love of adventure that had led King Christopher, as a young man, to look for the place where the world ends.

 
; Now, many centuries after those days when the mermaid came to earth and then left it, after so many daughters and sons have been born, there are people all over the world who carry the mermaid inside them, that otherworldly beauty and longing and desire that made her reach for heaven when she lived in the darkness of the sea.

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD LIKE to express my endless love and devotion to those who helped me create this book: Catherine Cobain, who bought a book about a mermaid from a list of ideas and thereby rudely forced me to write one; Elaine Markson and Gary Johnson, who helped so much in the conception of what this book would be and who pointed to the princess as a character worth exploring; Heather Lazare, who then bought that idea and (patiently and thoughtfully) helped me bring it to life; and Charlotte Mendelson, who (also patiently and thoughtfully) worked her magic from across the ocean; my friends Massie Jones and Rob Horning, who helped me brainstorm about long-ago wars and rival kingdoms, and Rob also for not only reading drafts of this book but also not minding too much when said drafts were still being created on train rides through Austria and the Czech Republic; my friends Mary McMyne, Joi Brozek, and Eric Schnall, without whose wondrous and constant input I might possibly die, or at least weep in a wistfully attractive fashion; and my friend Jeanine Cummins, who insisted that the mermaid be half the voice of this book and gave so much general input that really, if you don’t totally love Mermaid it is probably her fault.

  Thank you to my mother, Jean, father, Alfred, and sister, Catherine. They are not only tremendously supportive but fantastic editors and writers, which is very convenient.

  Thank you to Two Alices and the Grail in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, and to Al-Hamra in Berlin, Germany, since I wrote most of this book at and in them.

  Thank you to everyone at Three Rivers Press and at Headline.

  And thank you to Mr. Hans Christian Andersen, for being so inimitable, so wonderful, and so totally, gorgeously weird.

  Reader’s Guide

  1. Mermaid is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Have you read the story? Have you seen the Disney film? What are some of the differences and silmilarities between the other versions and this one?

  2. What do you think of retellings of fairy tales? How do you account for their popularity? Do you think there’s any special power in taking a known story and envisioning it in a new way?

  3. How would you describe the mermaid world in this book? Is this an attractive world to you? Why or why not? How does it compare to the human world in the book?

  4. What does Lenia find so compelling about the human world? Does she have an accurate view of it?

  5. Think about Lenia’s choice to return to the sea witch and trade her voice for legs. Would you ever make such a sacrifice—for love, for salvation, or for any other reason? Why or why not? Talk about the theme of sacrifice in the book. Who is making sacrifices and for what purposes?

  6. Compare Lenia and Margrethe. What do they have in common, and how are they different? What do you think about the relationship that develops between them?

  7. How would you characterize Margrethe and the choices she makes? Does she change throughout the book?

  8. If you could switch places with Lenia or Margrethe, whose life and world would you rather inhabit for a day, and why?

  9. Describe Prince Christopher’s relationships with Lenia and Margrethe. Does he behave honorably toward them both? What do you think of him?

  10. Mermaids are an incredibly popular subject in many cultures. What do you think accounts for their appeal? What makes mermaids such a rich subject for the imagination? Can you think of other books in which mermaids play an important role?

  Also by Carolyn Turgeon

  The true story of Cinderella’s fairy godmother.

  “Turgeon writes beautifully. She tells this deliberately ambiguous story with delicacy and wit. This is a magical novel, in many ways.”—Boston Globe

  GODMOTHER

  The Secret Cinderella Story

  $13.95 (Canada: $15.95)

  978-0-307-40799-3

  Available wherever books are sold