by Liz Braswell
She plunged ahead instead, toward where she remembered the grand ballroom was.
There was less chaos here, and fewer people. But just as Ariel thought she had escaped the last of them, she saw someone looming, blocking her escape at the end of the painted hall.
Carlotta.
The friendly maid who had tried to show Ariel the proper way to bathe. Who had taken it upon herself to pick out an outfit for the mermaid and show her how to dress nicely. With the floppy bow. Who hadn’t been upset when Ariel made a fool of herself using human things the wrong way—who had only found it delightful, and a wonderful curative for the often moody prince.
Carlotta’s black hair was still thick though shot through with grey, and in its usual bun—and not under the bright red kerchief Ariel remembered. Her bodice and new little hat were starched white cotton, pure and strict. But the strangely formal uniform upset Ariel less than the look in Carlotta’s eyes when she saw the mermaid bolting toward her.
Surprise.
Realization.
Suspicion.
Their moment of glowering silence was interrupted by voices down the hall:
“Where did she go?”
“Did you see her?”
“You check downstairs, I’ll check this floor.”
They would be upon her in a moment.
Carlotta reached out and threw open a small door: a broom closet, its edges cleverly concealed in the overly ornate golden moldings.
She raised an eyebrow at Ariel.
The mermaid decided, for no reason she could logically explain beyond the past kindness shown her, to trust the scowling woman.
She dove in, trying not to wince as the door was slammed behind her. A cloud of dust rose from the brooms and rags and other cleaning implements. A distinct odor of mold and dry rot assailed her nose.
She tried not to sneeze, holding her face and nose with both hands, pressing her palms into her cheeks.
Queen of the Sea, she thought. Look at me now.
Voices outside the closet, muffled but loud:
“Carlotta—have you seen a maid? She wasn’t authorized to be upstairs, and…”
“Oh, you don’t mean the pale one, about yea high, skinny as a bean?” Carlotta sounded exasperated and very, very believable.
“Yes, with the blue skirts…”
“Blast that girl. She’s new. Not gifted with much besides her girlish figure, I don’t mind saying. You know, up here.”
Ariel frowned despite knowing it was a lie. She could practically see Carlotta tapping her head in illustration.
“I told her the wash was for Lord Francese’s manservant, not the lord himself. And then she disappeared. Should have known.”
“There is a problem of security in the castle, Carlotta. The spies…”
“If that girl’s a spy, I’m the pope,” Carlotta snorted. “She’s just a pretty dumb thing from the country. I’ll give her a good talking to when I find her and lock her in her room without supper.”
At this, the guard laughed. “You’ve never withheld a meal from anyone—or anything—in your life. You’ll probably scold her and then force five rolls on her to fatten her up. But you’ve got to talk to her. Princess Vanessa…”
“Say no more. It will be resolved, or she will go.”
“Thank you, Carlotta. I’ll inform my men.”
Ariel waited for the clicking footsteps to fade, then waited some more.
Just when she thought it might be safe to open the door a crack, it was thrown wide open. A serious, annoyed-looking Carlotta filled the entire frame and blocked most of the light.
“Come with me,” she ordered, in a tone she had never used on Ariel before.
The Queen of the Sea meekly obeyed.
They went through the ballroom, over the beautiful inlaid floor covered in meaningless brown and golden curlicues. Ariel wondered what it would be like to glide over the slippery polished boards, music swirling around her. She had only danced with Eric once, on a cobbled plaza to an amateur violinist, but even that had been incredible.
The ceiling was a frescoed masterpiece: a sky with little fluffy clouds at the edges, winged putti peeping out among them. Giant glazed windows let in sea light, sparkling off the water as well as from the sky. Circling very deliberately was a single white gull, who managed to keep her head pointed at the castle wherever she was in her revolutions. Jona.
Carlotta hurried on through the great room into a white corridor at the end and pulled Ariel into a small space lined with benches and tables. It looked like a staging area for servants to plate hors d’oeuvres and wine before bringing them out to hot and thirsty dancers, very much like at the palace in Atlantica—but this one had a ceiling, and the tables were all at one level. Under the sea, you could swim to whatever height you needed. How limited humans are….
But she didn’t have time to ponder such things. Carlotta stood in front of her, arms crossed.
“It’s you!”
Ariel nodded and shrugged. Well, obviously.
“Where have you been?” Carlotta demanded. “Where did you go?”
The mermaid winced. How could she explain?
“Eric loved you. You two would have been so happy together…” the maid continued accusingly. Ariel wondered if she had been spying on them any of the times they almost kissed. “And then you just…disappeared! And he married that horrible, horrible Vanessa, and now she’s ruining the kingdom and he’s…he’s not the prince he was. Not the boy he was. That boy’s gone. Where did you go?”
Merfolk and humans and fish and all those who spoke seemed to be the same: they wasted language, throwing out words like chum, hoping some of them would land accurately and truthfully convey what they were thinking or feeling. Ariel paused, carefully weighing and measuring the other woman’s words while she figured out how to answer.
Eric married Vanessa. This was an objective fact; Ariel had seen that happen.
Vanessa is ruining the kingdom. Interesting! So the changes in the castle were probably due to her.
Eric is not the boy he was. Also interesting, and terrifying. He was still under the spell Ursula cast to put him under her power. That would certainly explain the haunted, hunted look on Eric’s face when she had seen him earlier. He probably knew something was wrong, but not precisely what.
Ariel pursed her lips. Then she mimed a formal walk, hands together.
She drew her hand gracefully down her hair, indicating a veil.
She put her hands together again: flowers.
Vanessa marrying Eric.
“The wedding, yes, yes, the wedding. They got married,” Carlotta said, impatiently.
Ariel tapped her head, pointed at the maid.
“I remember it! What do you mean? Think about it? It was just the wedding on the yacht. Beautiful. Hideous. At the same time. There was nothing…”
Ariel shook her head. She tapped her head harder. She rotated her other hand: Come on, there’s more.
“What are you trying to say…? They were married, and Max ruined the lovely cake, and oh…” Carlotta’s vision went cloudy; she stopped focusing on the girl before her. “He ruined the cake because…he was scared. There was a storm. No, the sky was clear. No—but there was lightning. Lightning…from…a man in the water. A man with a beard, and a crown, naked…like Neptune himself…”
Carlotta frowned, rubbing her head.
“What is this nonsense? Why is it coming to me now, clear as day? Clear as a picture: the man in the sea wasn’t drowning. He was throwing lightning. And Vanessa…he and she were…fighting? They were fighting like…titans, from the old stories. There was magic. All around. Dangerous and violent. And then you—and then he…And then you and the naked man were gone. Both gone. But Vanessa stayed….”
She sat down heavily on a stool. Her skirts puffed up around her, almost as if in sympathy. “I…haven’t thought about that in years. I know I’ve thought it before, or dreamed it before. I haven’t wanted to.
It’s like it hurts to remember. I couldn’t remember.”
She looked up at Ariel.
“Some funny business about Vanessa, isn’t there?” she ventured. “That man—he was your father, wasn’t he? He really was Neptune—or someone out of the Old Testament. A patriarch. He wasn’t evil—I never felt that for a moment. And then you disappearing…into the sea. Eric acting strange and moony around Vanessa. She isn’t…she isn’t a good…person, is she?”
Ariel shook her head very slowly. No.
“She isn’t like…us, is she?”
No.
“And what does that make you, then?”
Ariel hesitated. Would knowing the truth put Carlotta in danger? She already knew half of the truth. The main truth. That Vanessa was not a good person. That there had been a battle. And all the strange and terrible things that had happened on her prince’s wedding day. So how would knowing this little extra bit make a difference, really?
Ariel looked around the room, searching for the answer. She didn’t have a sign for it.
Finally she put her hands together and moved them sinuously forward, cutting the air like water.
Carlotta stared at her, mouth open like a gaping fish’s.
Then she shook her head.
“You know what? Forget I asked. I don’t think my tired old brain could deal with it right now anyway. The important thing is that Vanessa is bad, really bad, which is fairly obvious if you just see what she’s doing….”
While pleased that Carlotta had come to the same conclusion she had, Ariel was intrigued by this news. She reached out and tapped the maid’s shoulder and shrugged obviously. What is she doing?
“Well, she has us at war with our neighbors. Look at Garhaggio,” Carlotta said with a snort, throwing her arm out at the window as if the village were right there, visible. “Never had a problem with them before—never had much to do with them at all aside from occasionally getting their nice cheese in. It is a nice cheese, though. I love it, the fancy white rind. They say it’s the mountain spring water.”
Ariel tried not to look impatient.
“…I’m just a senior house maid, I know!” Carlotta said, seeing her face. “I don’t know about politics and wars and international policy. All I know is that Garhaggio was burned to the ground. By us. By Tirulia! So no more cheese. And there is a conscription for able-bodied boys here. So, I suppose, we can burn down more cheese-making villages that won’t bend the knee to Tirulia. And yet we’re friends with Ibria now? We’ve been on uneasy terms with them for over two hundred years!
“Strange, sneaky-looking men and women roam the castle, and they all have Vanessa’s ear. And yet the princess also thinks everyone is after her. So everyone thinks everyone else is a spy and hopes for a reward by turning his neighbor in. Vanessa is turning the kingdom upside down, and no one trusts anyone else, and we’re nearly at war with everyone around us.
“And you’re back,” Carlotta finished with conviction.
Ariel looked at her sideways. She couldn’t figure out where the maid’s look of satisfaction came from as Carlotta resolutely crossed her arms and nodded like she understood.
The Queen of the Sea started to tilt her head. Yes. I’m back. And…?
“And you’re here to set everything right, aren’t you?”
The mermaid blinked her large aquamarine eyes.
“With Vanessa and Eric and all. You’re going to make things like they were,” Carlotta said, somehow perfectly mixing the utter belief of a five-year-old with the stern voice of an adult who knew Ariel would do the right thing. “You’re going to defeat her, or make Eric fall in love with you, or something. Maybe you’ll make him forget that you and Vanessa ever existed….I don’t know or care about the details, although you did seem like a nice enough girl at one time.”
Ariel put her hands up and started to shake her head.
“Don’t you start with that,” Carlotta said, putting her hand up. “I may not be a scholar or a wisewoman, but it wasn’t until after you showed up the first time that all of this happened. Whatever your role, you had some hand in this, in the destruction of Tirulia and our way of life—and Eric.”
Ariel’s queenliness faltered for a moment at his name. Everything else was just supposition, theory, people who had nothing to do with her. But Eric, that sad, aging sailor on his lonely boat…
Carlotta was right. He was an utterly defeated man.
And despite Ariel’s mix of bitterness and wistfulness about the realm of humans and her misadventures in the Dry World, none of what happened afterward would have happened at all without her interference.
Not that she would take any blame for the chaos Ursula had wrought: the Queen of the Sea would not be held responsible for the evil sea witch’s doings. But the truth was that Ursula would not be there, causing havoc, if it weren’t for Ariel.
The world, both wet and dry, spun for a moment as Ariel thought about this. Although the humans had complete dominance on the planet, although they controlled all land and nature and everything around them, she, a little mermaid, had introduced a foreign element that threatened to utterly destroy the kingdom of Tirulia. Like a single pathogen infecting a coral reef. She wondered how far it would spread if she simply…found her father and left. Would Ursula stop with this one kingdom, or would her mad quest for power and glory continue until she took over all human lands?
Ariel’s plan was to find her father, restore the trident to him, and leave.
Perhaps her plans had to be amended somehow.
She nodded slightly.
Carlotta sighed. “Thank you.”
Somehow the maid intuited the squall that had just risen and dispersed in Ariel’s mind, and seen through her large eyes to a calm decision made underneath.
“And now, were you trying to sneak in the castle for the reasons of this mission?”
Ariel nodded, again, feeling somehow foolish.
Carlotta laughed.
“And did you think doing it in the dress of a long-drowned princess, a visitor to Davy Jones’s locker, would somehow fool us?”
Ariel looked down at her outfit. She now saw the worn shades of blue that striped and stippled the garment in uneven strengths. The strangely frayed hems, threads dried in all positions, used to the freedom of the sea and not to hanging in proper ragged fringes, straight down. The circles and whorls of salt she had thought sparkled so prettily under the sun. Her shoes, decorated with dead barnacles, which had a sad elegance about them.
“You’re seeing it now,” the maid said with a sigh. “And your hair, of course.”
Ariel put a hand to her locks in surprise. Her hair, while healthy, thick, and long, was hardly an unusual color. There were merfolk families who had tresses the blue of waves, the green of gems, the purple of poisonous mollusks.
Once again Carlotta read her correctly.
“Maybe red is normal for…wherever you’re from,” she said quickly, skipping over any thoughts that she didn’t want to acknowledge, “but here it’s very, very distinctive. The people up north sometimes have it…and right now, everyone is suspicious of northerners. Come with me and we’ll get you dressed up right, with a headcloth to cover your hair. And then you can save us all. Is it a deal?”
Ariel nodded, and Carlotta nodded, and no more words were needed.
There were fairy tales—known even to those who starred in those fairy tales—about human girls who worked for merwitches or mermaids in return for their help. The mermaids in the story would be so charmed by the good little girls that they not only help but also bedeck them in gems and pearls, and brush their hair with jeweled combs, and let them choose whatever gowns they desire out of a treasure trove of goods that were lost at sea.
This is a very strange, upside-down version of that story, Ariel decided.
Carlotta searched for the plainest, oldest, most unremarkable shift she could manage, a maroonish thing that was more bag than dress. It acquired a little shape once a suitabl
y stained apron with braided ties had been fitted around Ariel’s waist. They didn’t even bother with stockings, just a pair of ugly boot-like slippers. The final touch was a rusty grey headscarf the maid expertly knotted at the nape of Ariel’s neck and pulled down close around her braids, making sure it stayed there with a strip of dishrag she tied at the back of her head, above her ears.
Like a crown.
“All right, that’ll do, though maybe you’ll want to smear a little bit of dust on your cheeks,” Carlotta said, eyeing her professionally.
Ariel looked down at her outfit. When she had been in the Dry World the first time they had outfitted her with a pretty little dress that the maid had thought was appropriate for a beautiful girl of no readily apparent station: she could have been a student or a modest princess. The mermaid tried not to smile, amused at the difference.
Then she thanked the woman the only way she could, managing it awkwardly without the supportive, thick feel of the water around her: she bent at the waist and bowed her head, giving Carlotta the respect that normally only another member of royalty received.
“Hmm,” the maid said, suddenly a little unnerved. She made as if to curtsy, then patted down her hair. “Something’s different about you, girl. You’re not the same little strip of a thing who came dancing into our castle, making our prince smile….You’ve changed. Somehow. I don’t know how, exactly.”
Neither do I, Ariel thought back.
Now she could search for her father properly. In her new outfit Ariel felt invisible, like she was wearing a magic cloak that allowed her to go anywhere unseen. Carlotta had given her a tray with some random food scraps on it—heels of bread, a goblet, some small fruit knives—that made it seem like she could have been on her way from anywhere in the castle. For a moment Ariel wondered if there were any spies from the north, or anywhere else, posing as servants. Apparently it was quite easy to go unnoticed if you dressed the part, kept your head down, and acted servile.
The one time a guard stopped her, Ariel just gestured the tray at him. That was enough: he grabbed a heel of the bread, leered at her, and ushered her on.
