by Liz Braswell
Ariel had to fight the urge not to gag. Was he really eating what he knew were someone else’s scraps? Did these “advanced” humans, with their machines and fires and carriages with wheels, know nothing about the spread of diseases? Surely there was a land equivalent of the unseen, tiny sick-fishes that surrounded and lived in those who were ill….
Thinking about this kept her from growing nervous as she approached the main royal apartments.
Two girls passed her, swearing and gossiping.
“Not me. I love how many baths she takes. It means I get a half watch to myself practically every night….”
“Sure, but is it worth it overall? My aunt is paying twice as much tax this season as she did last…while our princess bathes in expensive oils and burns through wood in the middle of summer!”
“But she doesn’t bathe in the oils or hot water. That’s the strange thing. Her baths are always cold and usually with mineral salt.”
“Whatever! She’s stealing from the poor of this kingdom to finance her stupid army and her stupid baths!”
“Shhhh! Keep your voice down!”
Ariel chanced a look at the girls as they passed, trying to guess their ages. Would she have been friends with them if she were human? Or was she, despite her looks, already too old? Did losing your voice and the love of your life and having to run a kingdom change you in ways more dramatic than mere years?
From the moist air that hit her a moment later it was obvious that Ursula was in the middle of one of her fancy baths right then. Good. It gave Ariel time to search the bedrooms.
She knocked tentatively on the royal couple’s apartment door. The way a servant might, or a nervous ex-lover.
No answer.
Disappointed and relieved, Ariel pushed the door open with her back and shoulders the way she had seen other servants do, so she didn’t need to use her tray-encumbered hands. And once she was in…
She sighed in relief.
She had never been in Eric’s room; humans had very odd notions of appropriate behavior. But if she had to guess, this was still Eric’s room—and only Eric’s room. No girly or princess-y things at all.
There was a bookshelf stuffed with maps and scrolls and folios of music. There was a drum from a foreign land. There was a portrait of the prince and a much younger Max, all smiles and sunlight. There were piles of arcane metal apparatus; tubes with thick glass lenses, pyramids with pendulums hanging from the apex of delicate golden crosspieces, things that were almost recognizable as rulers. There were several toy—model—ships.
There was a soft, puffy pillow on the floor that was obviously for the dog, but there was dog hair all over the foot of the bed.
There was a heavy desk under a small window, buried under endless sheets of music paper, inkwells, pens.
There wasn’t a single hint of anyone besides Eric in the room. Nothing of a tentacled sea witch with questionable taste in decor, nor of a human princess with human-princess belongings. There was nothing soft, brightly colored, pastel, glittery, flowery—no random scarf tossed over the back of the bed, no velvet or silk shoe kicked halfway under it. Nothing that wasn’t shipshape, masculine, and Eric-y.
Ariel wanted to stay and poke through things, try to get a glimpse of the boy she had loved. But her time was limited.
There was a doorway that connected his bedroom to an adjacent one. She tiptoed in. This was Vanessa’s room.
The royal couple was living side by side. Not together.
Not together.
Ariel didn’t really want to unpack her feelings around this, but she couldn’t help picking at them, like taking a stick and seeing what was in a crevasse of dead coral. Surely she hadn’t hoped for Eric to stay…single? After all these years? To remain as he was in her memory?
Surely she couldn’t blame him for having any feelings for Vanessa. The witch had cast a mighty spell on him. It wouldn’t be his fault if he did everything she said, fawned over her, slept in the same room as she.
None of these logical thoughts explained away the joy that she felt. Somehow Eric had managed to keep a portion of himself separate from his beglamoured wife; somehow he knew something wasn’t quite right.
Ariel allowed herself one tiny, triumphant pull of her lips into the ghost of a smile, then stepped into what was very obviously Vanessa’s domestic demesne.
There was a ridiculous bed shaped like a scallop, or maybe a deep-sea clam. The ridges were wide and deep but far too precise and symmetrical for either creature. Its plaster shell was open, so the bed was in what would have been the bottom half of the mollusk; the top half stood upright as a decorative backdrop hung with golden lanterns and convenient little shelves for knickknacks. The whole thing was upholstered in purple silk the color of a deadly Portuguese man-o’-war.
The rest of the room, crowded by the bed though it was, was further filled with mismatched and disturbing treasures. There were statues of twisted and tortured heroes, their faces distorted in agony. Covering one entire wall was a painting of squiggly, squirming humans in some sort of fiery cavern. There was pain on their faces but glee on the visage of the one who was tormenting them—he was red and bearded and had a trident like Triton’s.
Triton himself didn’t appear to be anywhere obvious in the room. Ariel moved farther in, picking up and putting down the disgusting little pieces of bric-a-brac. Among all the horror was an ironically delicate vanity covered in mother-of-pearl—and, intriguingly, all manner of exquisite little glass bottles. Scents from the east, oils from the west, attar of roses, nut butter, extract of myrrh, sandalwood decoctions, jasmine hydrosols…Everything to make someone smell exquisite.
Or to mask whatever it was she really smelled like, Ariel thought wryly.
Or were the oils and butters for more medicinal reasons—for the cecaelia’s skin? Ariel found herself looking at her own hands, rubbing them over each other lightly. Last time she had only been in the Dry World for a few days. Was it—literally—drying? Was it difficult, or painful, for creatures from the sea to remain for months battered by void and air, despite their magic?
Ariel shivered. Magic didn’t make everything simpler. Crossing the thresholds of worlds was no minor thing.
But none of the bottles looked like it contained a polyp.
Father? she asked silently. Where are you?
Footsteps rang in the hallway outside.
Frozen, Ariel waited for them to pass.
But they didn’t. They came in…to Eric’s apartment.
The mermaid looked around. If whoever came in knew that Vanessa didn’t like heels of bread or drink wine at that time of day…the jig was up.
The intruder continued to pad around maddeningly. There were accompanying sounds of things being lifted, patted, folded. A maid, straightening or cleaning…Ursula’s room would be next.
What should she do?
What would she do if she were the old Ariel and a shark were hunting her?
Without a second thought, the Queen of the Sea folded herself down as small as possible and hunkered down under the vanity.
Less than a second later the maid came into the doorway.
Ariel saw padded cloth house shoes and closed her eyes, willing invisibility.
As if the person standing there knew Ariel’s position and were bent on drawing out her torture as long as possible, she continued to just stand there: neither leaving the doorway, nor entering Vanessa’s room.
Ariel felt the strange sensation of sweat popping out on the back of her neck. It was thoroughly unpleasant, and tickled besides. She had to fight down an urge to scratch, or move, or stretch. I am a queen, she told herself as the itch became maddening. I am not ruled by my body.
“Max!” the maid called out. Ariel could just see her skirts move as she put her hands on her hips. “Max, where are you? Dinnertime! C’mon, you silly thing. You can’t have gotten far….”
There was no impatience in her voice, only love for the old dog.
B
ut Ariel was so angry with the servant’s existence she wanted to turn her into a sea cucumber. Just for a few minutes.
“Well, I know you wouldn’t want to be in here, the princess’s room,” the maid said, her final words heavy with meaning. She spun and left, going all the way back out to the hallway. “Maaaax…”
Ariel breathed a heavy sigh of relief. She unfolded herself carefully, avoiding hitting her head on the ornate edge of the vanity.
Whew! That was ridiculously, painfully close.
She proceeded into the dressing room, where Vanessa kept her ridiculous assortment of clothes: bright-colored gowns with tiny, corseted waists and laced bodices that dove deep to expose vast amounts of décolletage. Wraps and shawls and jackets and hats with jewels and goldwork and more often than not the feathers—and sometimes the entire body—of some poor, exotic, and thoroughly dead bird.
She felt the silk of one long pale-rose sleeve. It was expert workmanship and utterly beautiful and thoroughly disgusting that such labor had been wasted on the evil woman. In a fairy tale, Ursula would be the wicked, lazy girl who wound up with dried seaweed and empty shells. And maybe shrimp crawling out of her throat.
She noticed something funny about a button on the sleeve just as she was about to let it drop: it was etched like scrimshaw, with lines so fine and thin they must have been made by a master—or a creature of magic.
The design was of an octopus.
Not a friendly one, like many that Ariel knew; this was elongated and sinister, with strangely evil eyes.
Ariel’s own eyes darted around the room like a barracuda distracted by sparkly things. It was immediately clear, once she knew what to look for, that every piece of clothing and accessory had the octopus sigil somewhere on it: the diamond brooch on a collar, the buckle on a belt, a hidden embroidery on the more traditional Tirulian dresses.
Whatever her motivations were in staying among the humans she’d married into, Ursula had not forgotten her origins or her true self.
But there was nothing in the closet that could have been her hidden father; not a bottle or a jar or even a repurposed shoe. Maybe there was a hidden panel somewhere, or maybe the sea witch kept him locked up in a real dungeon, downstairs.
And then, along with a current of moist, soapy air…
…came a voice…
Her voice.
In the trailing end of a song.
“…up on the land, where my lover walks. But I can only pine from the foamy waves….”
Her voice.
She hadn’t heard her own voice in years.
The day when Ursula first took her payment, it had felt like Ariel’s very soul had been sucked out of her body. The young, silly merthing she was then hadn’t even realized it. Like a ghost she went on with her quest, her desires, intent on her prize, not even realizing she was already dead to the world.
Okay, perhaps it wasn’t quite that dramatic, Queen Ariel corrected herself gently.
But seeing Vanessa wed Eric, and her father killed, and realizing she would never get either man—or her voice—back…a part of her had truly died that day.
And now that witch was using her voice to sing in the bath.
Ariel wouldn’t let the rage that was coursing through her veins control her. She wouldn’t. She was a queen, and queens didn’t lose control. Not for sweat, not for rage.
It was no easy task; like sweat, this kind of anger was a new experience.
She had been sad. She had been melancholy. She had cursed her fate as a voiceless monarch, railing against her lot quietly. Once in a while she had a burst of temper when she wanted to be heard and no one would listen, when people were shouting over her and ignoring her hands, as if because she had no voice she had nothing to say.
This was like nothing she had experienced before. It was like lava, burning through her skin and threatening to consume her whole.
Without thinking she moved toward the direction of the sound.
“…heartless witch of the sea…ha ha!…heartless, heartless indeed, ensorcelling me…”
The air grew moister, but not with the accompanying clouds of steam one expected from a luxuriously royal bath.
“Oh, let him see me for who I am, for without a voice, my face alone must speak for me…”
This was a pretty, wistful aria, but Vanessa let the last note quaver just a little too long, seeing how long she could keep the vibrato going. Then she broke into a peal of laughter that, despite being in Ariel’s voice, sounded nothing like the mermaid.
Ariel pushed the far door open a crack. Some previous king or queen had designed the royal bath to look as dramatic as possible, almost like a stage, perhaps so he or she could soak while members of state gathered around asking for decisions. There was even a sort of viewing balcony or mezzanine that the hall led to, above the bath; this held a few cabinets to store bath-related bric-a-brac and a privacy screen for robing and disrobing—although despite the plentiful storage, Vanessa’s morning clothes were thrown carelessly over a chair. Wide and ostentatious spiral stairs led down to the bathtub itself.
“If I could dance with him but once, I know he would love me….One waltz in the sand; I would be free…. I don’t know, it’s really not so great. Not much to write home about. The sand, I mean. It gets positively everywhere and feels nasty in your foldy bits.”
When Vanessa stopped singing and lapsed into her own editorial comments, the cognitive dissonance was almost overwhelming. Ariel’s voice was higher than the sea witch’s and lacked the burrs and tremolos the cecaelia was fond of throwing in when she was being dramatic. Yet still the tone and nuance was all Ursula.
Ariel edged silently out onto the mezzanine and peeped over the side.
Vanessa was clearly enjoying the bath. Her brown hair flowed around her in slippery wet ringlets that very much brought to mind the arms and legs of a squid. Great quantities of bubbles and foam towered over the top of the tub and spilled out onto the floor, slowly dripping down like the slimy egg sac of a moon snail.
Vanessa was splashing and talking to herself and playing in the bath almost like a child. Ariel remembered, with heat, when she had been in that bath, and was introduced to the wonders of foam that wasn’t the just the leavings of dead merfolk. The whole experience had been marvelous and strange. Imagine the humans, kings of the Dry World, keeping bubbles of water around to bathe and play in. There was no equivalent under the sea; no one made “air pools” for fun and cleanliness.
For just a moment—so quickly that Ariel could have dismissed it as a shadow or a trick of the light and bubbles if she didn’t know better—a tentacle snaked out of the water, then quickly back in, like it had forgotten itself for a moment.
Unthinking, Ariel reached for the comb hidden in her hair. True, the trident’s power wouldn’t work on dry land. But she didn’t need its power. With barely a thought to nudge it in the right direction, the comb melted into fluid gold and reformed into something with heft: a three-pronged dagger, deadly and sharp.
If she had been human born and raised, she would have attempted to hurl it into the witch’s heart. She had a perfect view and the advantage of height.
But she had been raised in a watery world where friction was a constant enemy. Except for the strongest, no one ever threw things across or up; stones slowed down and sank almost immediately.
Ariel crouched down, preparing to sneak and then run, driving the dagger into the witch’s flesh with her own hands.
She lifted one delicate foot….
“What’s that?” Ursula suddenly demanded.
The mermaid froze.
“Did you hear…? Was that a…”
Ariel put her back flat to the cabinet that was right behind her, sucking in her stomach and trying to shrink.
There was splashing, frantic. It sounded like far too many appendages or people were in the water for it all to be one person.
“No one is supposed to interrupt my baths!” Ursula shouted.
&n
bsp; Ariel could tell by the change in pitch that the sea witch was standing up now, possibly on six of her legs.
The mermaid tried to slide along the cabinet toward the dressing room door, but the revolting carved-ivory handles and drawer pulls kept tangling in her ugly dress. One particular thread pulled tightly across her legs until she couldn’t move.
Ariel gritted her teeth and forced her hip slowly out—and the string popped with a heart-wrenching twang.
She stopped breathing.
“Vareet! Vareet!” Ursula called out. “What is that? Go investigate!”
What if she just got up and ran? Would Ursula be able to see who it was? Would they send the guards after her? Would she be able to make it out in time?
Ariel worked muscles that were still new to her, stretching and bending her foot, trying to silently move her thighs so she could crab-walk to the door.
“Maaaaaaax…” came a lilting voice from the distance.
The same infuriating maid from before.
“Ugh,” Ursula swore, strangely echoing her own feelings. “If that stupid dog comes in here I’m having it muzzled. And Max, too.”
There were more splashing and sloshing noises; the sea witch was settling back down into the water. Ariel could once again hear her own voice, muttering and grumbling to herself. A pail of water was poured, a tap turned, the tub refilled.
Relief and disappointment and continued fear competed like braids in a lock of hair hanging from Ariel’s soul. She fell back against one of the cabinets. What am I doing? She was nothing like the warrior merfolk some of her ancestors and relatives were. She never cared enough to train for the Mer-games and win the golden crown of sea heather. Cousin Lara, with her mighty spear, was better made for this sort of thing.
Ariel was here to find her father. And so far, she had failed. She had been utterly distracted.
She should go back and thoroughly search Vanessa’s room while she had a chance. If ancient plays, poems, and songs taught nothing else, it was always one of these two repeating themes: one, don’t ever fool around with a god’s wife or husband, and two, revenge always leads to sorrow. And while she had never been the most diligent student as a princess, she loved a good story.
