“There’s nothing wrong with what you’ve shown me!” Sarai reached toward Ydri, but she pulled away, and Sarai’s hand dropped between them. “There’s nothing wrong with being curious, Ydri. There’s nothing wrong with sharing, with making friends. That’s how you learn new things.”
She grabbed for Ydri’s hands again, and this time, with a shudder that turned into full-body trembling from her head to her tail, Ydri let her take them. Her hands were cold and they twitched in Sarai’s before curling around Sarai’s fingers. Sarai stroked her thumbs along the back of Ydri’s knuckles, trying to rub warmth into the cool, slick skin. Did mermaids even need to be warm? She wasn’t sure.
“My sister was invited to be acolyte to the queen.” Ydri flicked her tail, sending eddies through the water. “It’s a great honor. It’s what she’s always dreamed of.” Her hands tightened on Sarai’s, then released.
“That’s good for her,” said Sarai, not sure where the conversation was going.
“The offer can be revoked at any time,” said Ydri. “For any reason. And once revoked, it may never be offered again.”
“She’s not the one in trouble, though. Why is your problem suddenly hers too?”
“I’m a part of her family. I cannot disgrace her, not when she’s worked for this for so long. Don’t you have family you’d sacrifice for, to see them happy?”
Sarai pushed aside thoughts of Gretchen, of her months in the palace. Gretchen had taken a chance for her. Gretchen had risked her job for Sarai. She’d taken her in despite Sarai’s status. How could she deny Ydri’s sister the same familial bond? But this was different. Gretchen had a plan, one that had nothing to do with working in the palace. She had Rory and the dream of the farm. Even if Sarai had cost her the job at the castle, she would have been all right. This was Ydri’s whole life at stake. This was everything she lived for. Sarai swallowed hard. “You’ve worked hard too. Look at how much you’ve learned about us, how much it’s taught you about your own people!”
Ydri pushed off from the sand, swimming angry laps across the ceiling. “It doesn’t matter, Sarai! I should have been working to help my family succeed, to help my sister, to be a good daughter, not to undermine all they’ve done to better our standing!”
“You deserve to be happy too,” said Sarai, moving into Ydri’s path and catching her by the arm.
For a moment, Ydri stopped and stared at her, her skin cool against Sarai’s, her face inscrutable. Her hand came up, as if by its own will, to brush the tendrils of hair that had broken free from Sarai’s braid behind her ears, then slid gently down her cheek. She pulled back. “I cannot,” she said, breaking free, tentacles swirling through the water. “The honor of my family is paramount. And I cannot sacrifice my sister’s happiness because I have a—” she waved her hands, frustrated, tail lashing “—a curiosity.”
“But won’t keeping our people separate harm them too? Didn’t you say you thought our technology could help you? What about our clock? Or our science of metalworking? Or our secrets of plant breeding?”
Ydri’s eyes closed as she tipped away, tail twisting. “Yes, it’s unfortunate.” Sarai swallowed a lump in her throat, not sure she could believe what she was hearing. “But don’t you see, there is nothing to be done? The punishment is clear for interfering with your people. I’ve been demoted, removed from my position, and I’m lucky the punishment wasn’t worse.” She sighed, running her hands over her face. “I was arrogant, thinking I could study you without consequence, beyond our usual parameters. I should have listened to my elders.” She pushed herself up and turned toward the door, pulling it open. “Please, come with me.”
Sarai let herself be ushered through the door, arguing. “I know you’re afraid,” Sarai wheedled. “But think about all your work! All your research, all your plans! And I have so much more to tell you about my people!”
“Maybe someone else will find my notes, someday. I have copies stored of the most important information, copies the Council will never find. Maybe my children, or grandchildren, will be less rash, will be able to convince the council to grant them more leeway. But I can’t, Sarai.” She fanned backward with her tail, drifting away, and Sarai fought the impulse to dart forward and grab her, shake some sense into her.
“I’m sorry you’re afraid,” she said instead, fighting back tears of anger and disappointment. “I thought we had a chance to learn together, here, to break some of the barriers between our species, but I guess not.” She turned to the door, which had slid quietly open to reveal a tall, slender mermaid with dark swirls tattooed across her chest. “Are you the person here to take me back?”
The woman glanced back at Ydri. “This is the strange one you’ve been keeping?”
When Ydri didn’t reply, she shrugged and turned back to Sarai. “It’s time. I will bring you back to the surface exactly where you were taken. Ydri, say farewell to your pet.”
“May your home be filled with peace,” said Ydri, arms folded over her midsection, tentacles wound against her hips, voice tight with misery. “I am sorry, Sarai.”
Sarai was silent. She resisted the temptation to look back at Ydri one last time as the spell lifted her from the cavern, staring upward into the faint daylight above until she broke the surface on the same beach she’d left days ago.
THE SUN WAS so bright above the water. She’d never realized it before, but as she strode along the street toward the market, she had to keep a hand above her eyes to block it out. Below the waves light was muted, speckled, dappling the ocean floor blue and green, scattered through eddies and currents. Here, the force of it–the brightness, the heat–pounded on her head and shoulders, harsh. A week above the water, and it still didn’t look right. Sarai couldn’t believe she’d lived her whole life in this burning world, minus those few glorious undersea days.
The shop she was looking for was somewhere around here. If the sign was still there, she might be able to start rebuilding again. The room she’d rented with a bit of the gold from the mermaids didn’t feel much like home, but at least she’d gotten a few nights’ sleep in actual air she could breathe.
It had taken her three days to recover from her undersea adventure, finding her abandoned clothes on the empty stretch of beach, going over all she’d learned and writing it in a little book so she wouldn’t forget. She hid the book wrapped in an old rag stuffed into the end of her mattress along with the gold, which she didn’t know what to do with. Maybe she’d give some to Gretchen for the farm, or give it to her brothers. There wasn’t enough to buy a house, but it would keep her fed and clothed with a roof over her head for a few months. But she didn’t know what to do with herself either. She kept recalling Ydri’s face grinning with delight as she learned about a particularly clever bit of human engineering to block out the image of her floating forlornly in the doorway of her dome as Sarai was torn away up into the light.
She’d always heard stories of mermaids in the same breaths as dragons and krakens and succubi, tales meant to terrify or titillate. And she’d known people who’d sworn they’d been taken by creatures under the sea, that they’d lost time and remembered bright lights and loud noises but not much else. She never thought she’d join their ranks. She’d keep her promise to stay quiet, though, half out of loyalty to Ydri, angry though she was, and half because anyone she tried to tell would think she’d lost her mind. She knew how tales of the merpeople were received. She knew how she’d thought of them before she’d met them.
The sign hung on the front door of the shop, a little tattered on the edges but plainly readable.
HIRING
SHOP ASSISTANT
MUST BE CLEAN
MUST KNOW FIGURES
INQUIRE WITHIN
She pushed open the door, breathing a sigh of relief at the darkened interior of the art shop. The air was still, motes of dust hanging suspended in the shafts of light from the open door, and she breathed in the smells of paint and parchment. Dimmer, with the light filtering
through glass and canvas, Sarai’s headache finally eased as she opened her eyes fully for the first time since she broke the surface.
“Can I help you?” A tiny woman, her head barely up to Sarai’s shoulder, stood behind a counter just to her left.
“I’m looking for a job,” said Sarai. “The sign said—”
“I know what the sign says, but you’ve answered my first question–you can read. And you can count?” interrupted the woman. “Understand numbers, add them?”
Sarai nodded.
The woman narrowed her eyes. “You have a husband? He know you’re here?”
“No husband, ma’am.”
The woman held out a hand. “Good. I’m Irene. You’re a hard worker? What’s your name, girl?”
Sarai shook her hand, a little blown over by the woman’s quick speech and quicker interview. “Yes, ma’am. And it’s Sarai.”
Irene harrumphed. “You’ll do.” With a sound like the closing of a cell, she opened the door to the stockroom. Sarai followed, letting it swing shut behind her.
IT TOOK SOME time to find a rhythm in her new life. Sarai moved to a room in the part of town near the shop, found an inn with relatively tasty, cheap food, and took the walk to and from her job slowly each morning to savor the sunrise. The city was noisy, louder than she remembered after her time at sea and underwater. The problem wasn’t just the physical noise level, though the volume didn’t help. There were so many people, all of them rushing and shouting and arguing and shoving in air too thin to dampen the force of the sound. At least, early in the morning, the crowds were thinner, letting her slip through without having to touch anyone or converse. And once she was inside the shop, she could handle the onslaught. But she sometimes stared out the dusty window at all the people hurrying by and marveled at how little they knew. There was the baker, Eduardo, who’d come to Holbrook from a city to the south and believed wholeheartedly he had been taken by pixies as a child. Sarai had laughed with the rest of them behind his back at this, but now she wondered if she should have believed him. And there was Herman, the town crier, whose fascination with the lost ships was known to all. She’d heard him telling the tale of his long-lost, great-great-great-something grandfather a dozen times already since she’d returned. And Carol, the cook at the inn, who Sarai saw every evening when she stopped in for her meal: she once found a shell inscribed with strange symbols on the beach to the north. She believed it came from a lost mermaid city. When Sarai looked closely, she recognized the writing from one of the books Ydri hadn’t translated for her.
All these people with all these questions—questions she could answer. Questions she wouldn’t answer.
The painting store job was fine, Sarai supposed. It paid well enough, a little more than what she needed to cover her room and board at the little boarding house a few blocks away. With the income, she could avoid using her reward money from the mermaids, and both shop and house were far enough from the edge of the water she couldn’t smell the salt air unless the wind blew just right. There weren’t many customers, but those who did come spent handsomely and some even tipped her for her help. The work was slow: doing figures in the evenings to calculate the day’s profits, finding exactly the right shades of pigments for the kingdom’s hired artists. Her favorite parts of the day were when Irene held painting workshops in the back garden when she’d set up a dozen easels and let her customers make use of the space for a small fee. Sometimes, if business was slower than usual, she’d let Sarai come out and watch.
Three weeks into her new life, Irene shooed Sarai outside, telling her to keep an eye on the rascals outside while Irene helped a confused carpenter’s apprentice find the pigment his master had sent him for. Sarai stepped out into the garden, breathing in the smell of paint and gardenia blossoms. There were eight painters set up in a semicircle, a small table in the center with a bowl of carrots and turnips on it for inspiration.
One artist, in particular, caught her attention on his previous visits, a young man in a deep-blue shirt and well-tailored gray breeches. His canvas didn’t show the bowl at all, just a blue expanse that was only now starting to gain hints of other colors as he worked. He was a tall, thin man with a wild shock of dark hair, and his gaze was intent on his work. The other painters all seemed to be working from the turnips, and all of them wore variations on Sarai’s own dress, simple, sturdy, merchant clothes. The man in blue didn’t fit in.
He was a noble, Irene said when Sarai asked later in the evening, but a minor one, a younger son of a younger son. Nicholas. She didn’t know his family name. Irene wasn’t one to pry into customers’ business.
Sarai watched him over the next few sessions, curious. His paintings were dreamy, sunlight through water, leaves rustling in the wind, and when she watched his sketches turn into a color-soaked canvas, something inside her warmed. They reminded her of the sea, woke the ache inside her she’d tamped down since her inauspicious return.
He seemed like a nice man, polite enough and certainly attractive if you found men interesting, and she wondered what he was leaving behind when he came to the shop. A son of a lord, Irene had said. He loved to paint: that much was clear. And as a younger son, his family was probably glad he wasn’t pursuing more expensive diversions–drugs or power through political machinations. Whatever he wanted, he could accomplish. No sneaking out to the docks, no disguises, not for the son of the nobility.
Sarai pushed down a little finger of rage burning in her belly. He wasn’t at fault because he could do what he wanted and suffer no consequences.
One of the other painters, a round, brown-skinned seamstress, stopped on her way out, leaning over to marvel at Nicholas’s work. “Look at those trees,” she said, reaching out and stopping an inch shy of the wet paint. Nicholas’s cheeks reddened. He really was very pale, Sarai thought. She wondered if these painting classes were his only time in the sun.
“It’s interesting to imagine what this place looked before our ancestors arrived,” he explained, pointing at the hills in the background of the painting. “See, that’s where the castle is today, and the tannery.”
“What an imagination!” The woman shook her head. “Do you really think our city looked this way?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I think so. I’ve studied the old records. I find it all fascinating–how it must have looked before castles and roads and farms and people.”
The bells rang the hour then, and the woman gave Nicholas one more appreciative once-over before bidding him a quick goodbye and hurrying on her way. Sarai considered Nicholas for a moment, turning away to fold the woman’s easel before he saw her.
“WHAT DO YOU think?” Nicholas asked Sarai one day as the rest of the painters packed up their things. She started, cheeks warming at finding herself caught staring. He really was a nice guy—pretty easy when you’ve had your life handed to you.
“It’s beautiful,” she admitted. “It makes me feel like I’m flying.”
The canvas was an open sky above a rough, white-capped, blue-gray sea, clouds drifting with delicate ash and blue and purple shading, the small figure of a bluebird streaking across one quadrant, and she leaned closer.
He grinned up at her. “Here.” He opened the easel’s clamp, carefully pulling the canvas free. “It’s for you.”
“Oh, no!” She backed up, hands in front of her, suddenly guilty about the thoughts she’d had moments earlier. “I couldn’t!”
“It’s impolite to refuse a gift,” he chided, grinning at her, and held it out again, and this time she took it. “Give it a few hours to dry,” he said and packed up his paints, brushing past her to the exit.
She stared after him.
“Close your mouth, girl,” said Irene from right behind her. “A tuna has better manners.” Sarai spun, setting the painting back on the easel and busied herself with cleaning up the rest of the garden as the other painters left. “He’s a charmer, that Nicholas. Can’t seem to keep girls from swooning after him. Not that he
seems to take notice of them.”
Sarai glanced up at his retreating figure. “He gave me a painting,” she confided, gesturing helplessly at the canvas. “What do I do with it?”
Irene shrugged. “Hang it up, throw it away, eat it for breakfast; it’s yours now.”
“It doesn’t mean he’ll want something back, does it?”
“You can never tell with men,” said Irene kindly. “But he’s a nice one, if you’re interested in him. Likes to ramble on about the past, despite being so young. He’s sweet to me even though I’m an old bird. Though he won’t be looking for marriage, not with his pedigree.”
“Oh, I know,” she assured Irene. “I’m not either. Not looking for anything with any man. He just seems nice, that’s all.”
“He is, I suppose,” Irene replied, a calculating look in her eye. “Why don’t you take a day off this week, Sarai. Meet some of your neighbors. You work too hard, girl.”
“But what will you do?”
“Hah!” Irene let out a snort and pointed a finger at Sarai. “I lasted without you for forty years, girl. I can go a day doing the counting and the stocking. It’ll do my old bones some good.”
Sarai made a noncommittal noise under her breath and picked up the broom.
That night, as they closed, she gently touched her fingers to the corner of the canvas, confirming the paint was dry, and carried it carefully to her room. She propped it on top of her wardrobe, where she could see it, then sat on the bed and let herself look. Would Ydri have found it as beautiful as Sarai did? Would she have hung it in her cavern beside the ring and the clock? Sarai closed her eyes and let herself imagine those deep black eyes, those long, webbed green fingers brushing over the canvas. Then she pushed the thoughts aside, focusing on the sky at the top of the painting rather than the sea.
Surface Tension Page 7
