by Liz Braswell
“Very well,” Grimsby said carefully, clearing his throat. From the new look in his eye it was obvious he was reevaluating her. She wasn’t the playful, simple girl who couldn’t speak she had been before. She was someone who had things to say, who had goals, plans, opinions.
A woman, perhaps.
“There is little I can do myself, besides, er, keeping an eye out for something that looks like a…polyp in captivity. Which I will absolutely do, of course. But it seems now that spells have been broken, certain truths are becoming apparent, and our kingdom is driven even deeper into war with our enemies, well, something else must be done about this whole matter immediately. And I do not have the authority to decide that. Neither does Carlotta. Ariel, I think you know what you must do.
“You must go talk to Eric.”
Ariel felt her cheeks flame and she looked at the floor—not moving her head, just her eyes. But only for a moment. She quickly regained herself and forced herself to look at the old man. His expression had softened.
“I’m a trifle surprised you didn’t seek him out earlier, on your own,” he said softly. “I don’t know much about magic and undersea kings, but I’m fairly certain the two of you felt something strong for each other….Isn’t that part of the reason you came back? To see him?”
She opened her mouth to disagree…but stopped. The old human was right.
He put a hand on her shoulder, like he might a soldier’s. “You two…began a series of events which wound up involving all of us up in this mess. And I think maybe the two of you can get us out of it. It’s fate, or some such. It feels rather right. Rather Greek. Don’t you think, Carlotta?”
“It’s fated,” the maid agreed. “I don’t know about the Greeks.”
“Anyway, Carlotta was right to bring you to me and I am right in sending you on. Whatever veil has clouded Eric’s thoughts is gone now, and I think he would receive you in the right frame of mind.”
“But how can I see him without Ursula finding out? She has guards and soldiers everywhere!” Ariel spoke the words clearly while her head was muzzy with possibility. “I won’t endanger my father!”
“Eric goes for a walk after dinner,” Grimsby said, straightening himself up. “Along the beach—a long way, north beyond the castle. He walks when he’s not…allowed to get on a boat.”
“I can provide a distraction for the princess,” Carlotta said. “There’s a hatmaker been begging for an audience. Vanessa loves posing and preening….We’ll keep her tied up in bows and feathers for at least a watch.”
“Excellent. It’s a plan,” the butler said, clasping his hands together.
“Thank you, Grimsby,” Ariel said, kissing him on the cheek. “This is all a little…difficult for me. It must be impossible for you.”
“Oh, no, not at all, dear child,” he said, blushing a little. “And think, when this is all over, I shall be able to publish my memoirs about how I helped a mermaid!”
She stood behind an old wreck, the hull of a fishing vessel that had been lost decades before and was then swept far up the marsh during a particularly stormy high tide. Blasted by sand and wind and sea, it now looked like the bones of a whale, its chest facing the sky.
When Ariel and Grimsby were trying to figure out the best place for her to meet Eric, Carlotta mentioned that the boat was a place where many couples, wishing to…speak in private…betook themselves. The thought should have given the mermaid a smile, but now she was overcome by the mood of the place.
The wind picked up and blew tiny whitecaps across tide pools like minnows jumping. Ariel put her hand up, feeling the breeze in her fingers. Things changed much faster up here than they did under the sea.
And yet change came nonetheless; it had been several days now since the height of the spring tide, when the full moon worked with the sun to grant the sea her greatest reach over the land. Now tides were lower and weaker, and would become lower still in the coming week. So too the power of the trident dipped.
Soon she would have to return to the sea.
A movement at the edge of the marsh caught her eye. Eric emerged from behind the stand of trees that blocked the view of the castle—and the view of anyone watching from the castle. His stride was sure and he looked around boldly, but it was with just a frisson of confusion; he had not been told whom he was meeting, only that it was important. He wore his old boots and beige pants, and one of the thick-woven tunics sailors in Tirulia wore on wet and chilly days. A faded blue cap was pulled firmly down on his hair. His ponytail escaped out the back, curling around his left shoulder.
Ariel grasped the bleached wood of the boat at the sight of him. He seemed…so much realer. All those times she had dozed off with visions of the young, handsome prince in her head…and here he was actually coming to meet her. Life was far more detailed than dreams. His neck bent into his collar, his hands were shoved deep into his pockets like he was cold. Something unimaginable in a fantasy.
Ariel looked down at the outfit she wore, just a dress and apron. How cold was it? For humans? Was she dressed inappropriately?
Eric continued to look around for whomever he was supposed to meet. He put a hand to the back of his head and scratched there, pushing up the edge of his cap.
It was this gesture, this boyish, unprincely, unrehearsed gesture, that made Ariel step out from behind the boat.
“Eric?” she called.
The reaction that overcame him was not the one that she expected: his face fell into a snarl of impatience, exhaustion, and disgust.
“Vanessa, how many times have I told you that I need these walks—”
But when he turned and saw her, really saw her, he fell silent.
Ariel smiled. Then she carefully took off her headscarf so he could better see her hair.
“You…It’s you…” he whispered.
“It’s me.”
He started to open his mouth, but she interrupted.
“Before you say anything else, this is my voice. Vanessa stole it. Which you should know…I hear you wrote an opera about it….”
Eric’s hands fell to his sides, useless. His fingers fluttered as if there were something he wanted to do with them, some sign, some gesture, but he couldn’t think of what.
That’s oddly familiar, Ariel thought.
“It’s all true…the opera…” He didn’t blink as he stared at her. She could almost feel his gaze on her hair, the braids, her eyes, her dress, her feet, her arms.
He rushed forward—then stopped. His eyes were as clear and blue as the hot summer sky. His skin was not as peachy-dewy as when they first met; it was tauter, drawn more over his cheekbones, his brow, his nose. It was darker and drier, too, but no less handsome. Just different. She lifted a finger, overcome with the urge to feel it.
Eric caught her hand in his before she could finish the motion, and took her other hand in it as well.
“You’re a…mermaid?”
“Yes.”
“And you can talk now?”
“Yes.”
“And you came back for me?”
His eyes shone with open emotion: hope and wonder after a long period of darkness, the beautiful look of a child who, having passed through the gloom of puberty, is suddenly shown that unicorns and fairies are real after all.
Ariel was taken aback. She hadn’t expected this, not exactly. She hoped for his joy, she expected his confusion. But this was…too much. She wanted to disappoint him about as much as she wanted to put a spike into her own heart.
“I came back for my father,” she made herself say. The Queen of the Sea had little difficulty stating the truth out loud; a younger Ariel would have stuttered. “I received word he might still be alive, as a prisoner of Ursula.”
“Oh,” Eric blinked. “Your father. Of course.”
“That’s the main reason I have returned. We had thought he was dead all these years. I’m here to rescue him.”
“I just thought…I mean…I had hoped…you came back to ta
ke me away from all of this. To go live happily ever after somewhere. Under the sea, maybe.”
“You would drown under the sea.”
“I’m drowning up here. I’ve been drowning. For years. Under water, it felt like. Now that I’m waking up, of course it makes sense that you would come. And…end it.”
Ariel had a brief flash of where some of his thoughts were heading: to sirens who sang their lovers to their deaths, the human men and women still ecstatic even as their lungs filled with salt water.
“Ah, no,” she said. “That’s a little…morbid. I’m not—it’s not like that.”
They were both silent for a moment.
Suddenly Eric was touching the back of his head again in awkwardness and embarrassment. But there was a lightness to his movements now, an energy that seemed new. A youthfulness.
“I’m sorry, yes, that was Mad Prince Eric speaking,” he said with a laugh. “The Melancholy Prince. It’s a bit of a role, I’m afraid. To keep me as sane as I am. This is all very strange. I can’t believe it’s real. That my opera was real…but I knew it was real, somehow. But…was it exactly like I recalled? Did it all really…happen exactly that way?”
“I didn’t actually see the performance myself. I heard about it secondhand, from a seagull who saw it.”
“A seagull?” Eric asked, startled. “Like—a seagull. Like one of those birds flying around up above us right now? One of those…many…birds…”
He frowned. There were at least a half dozen of them circling silently directly overhead. Eerily.
“They’re keeping an eye on me,” Ariel explained. “Making sure I’m all right.”
“Of course they are,” Eric said, nodding absently. “Protective seagulls. Why not. So—wait.” He turned back to her. “Is this the story? Because this is how it goes in my opera: You really are a mermaid. You really did trade your voice to come up on land. And it was because you had…you had fallen in love with me?”
He said the words carefully, trying to sound like an adult while sounding more like a child terrified of being disappointed.
Ariel closed her eyes. When put that way, it sounded really epic, the stuff of legends—or painfully stupid. Not just the folly of youth.
“I…always wanted to go on land, to see what it was like to be human.” She reached out and touched the Dry World planks of the wrecked boat, the whispery traces left by human hands on its shape, the nails made of iron forged in fires that glowed without the help of undersea lava. “I collected things that I found, that had fallen to the bottom of the sea from ships. I really…I really had quite the collection. I was fascinated with all these things—some of which I still have no name for, the things you people make. And then, one day, I found you.
“There was a storm, and a ship. I think most of the crew died. But I managed to save you and take you to shore. You were so…handsome and strange.”
“Strange?” he asked in surprise.
She laughed softly. “You had two legs, silly. And no fins. Strange.”
“Right. Of course. Strange from a mermaid’s perspective,” he said quickly.
“‘From a mermaid’s perspective…’ Yes. Anyway, I’ll skip the more complicated parts, about my father, and other things that happened. Suffice it to say I made a bargain with Ursula the sea witch that if I couldn’t make you fall in love with me in three days, she would keep my voice forever—and me, as her prisoner.”
“Three days? That seems rather short. To make someone fall in love with you, I mean.”
“I’m a mermaid,” Ariel reminded him. “For thousands of years you people have been falling in love with us at first sight, immediately and forever upon hearing our songs. I didn’t think it would be a problem.”
“But you weren’t a mermaid. You were a human.”
“Yes, and I had no voice, which made things even harder than I imagined,” she said bitterly. “But, I suppose, just as hard as Ursula hoped. I also suspect she had her hand in little incidents that went wrong along the way.”
“So I was looking for the beautiful mermaid who sang me awake,” Eric mused, thinking back on the time. “And all the while she was right there before me.”
“YES.”
Ariel said it a little louder, a little more fiercely than she had meant. Her eyes blazed.
Eric looked at her, surprised.
“You had legs,” he pointed out.
“I had the same face and hair, Eric,” she said, using his name for the first time.
“But you couldn’t sing. You couldn’t even talk. I remembered that better than how you looked. It stayed with me. I was coming out of unconsciousness, Ariel. Please have a little pity. I had swallowed copious amounts of seawater—I was coughing it up for the rest of the day, and lay in bed with a fever for three nights. I narrowly avoided pneumonia and there’s still a little bit of a twinge in my lungs on certain days if I cough too hard.”
“Oh,” Ariel said, taken aback. She hadn’t thought it was like that at all. From her perspective she had saved him, fought with her dad, and returned triumphantly as a human to woo him. She hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what had happened to him in the meantime.
Same old Ariel, she thought with a mental sigh. Impulsive—and a little thoughtless.
“Would you have stayed? A human?” he asked curiously. “If I had fallen in love with you, and you got your voice back, and could stay on land?”
“I…suppose so…?”
It was a question she had thought about many times over the past few years. The answer had changed with time. Back then, she absolutely would have stayed, and lived happily ever after as the human princess married to her true love in the Dry World.
But now…as someone who had been Queen of the Sea…and, perhaps, had more time to think…Who knew? There were so many details to the world that she hadn’t understood back then, when her vision was colored in bright primary hues and the borders between truth and fiction were defined in bold black lines. Would she have aged and died as a human? Would it have been worth it? Would she miss her friends, her family? Could she wake up every morning and not choke on the dry air?
“…on the other hand, it’s also possible my father, the King of the Sea, would have stormed your castle, drowned all the inhabitants, and dragged me back home. He’s a bit controlling that way.”
“Drowned? Everyone?”
“I mean stormed quite literally,” Ariel said with a tight smile. It was a power she now controlled, by means of the trident disguised as a beautiful and ostensibly harmless hair comb.
Eric took a moment to digest this.
“I guess falling in love with mermaids is pretty dangerous,” he finally said.
“Did you?” Ariel asked in a small voice. “Fall for me? At all?”
Eric gave her a measured look, treating the question seriously as she had his. “I did fall for you, just not in the way I expected it would happen. And maybe not in the way you hoped. It wasn’t a lightning bolt. As I got to know you, I realized you were the most…energetic, fun, enthusiastic…alive girl I had ever met.” He smiled at the memory—and Ariel felt her breath catch. “You know, for a boy who’s all about sailing and running around with his dog and exploring, you were just about as perfect a companion as he could ever want. And beautiful, to boot. I would have been very lucky.”
He said this wistfully.
Ariel wasn’t sure when she was going to start breathing again.
What if, what ifs…
“…So yes. I think I did,” he said, taking her hands and squeezing them. “No, I know I did. You were one in a million. Even an idiot like me saw that. But then…Vanessa came along….”
He looked confused.
“She had my voice,” Ariel supplied. “And you remembered the song.”
“Yes! But…it was more than that. Somewhere between Wait, that’s the girl who saved me! and the next moment, everything went…fuzzy.”
“Ah. Well. She cast a spell on you. On all
of you, I think, somehow. But primarily you,” Ariel said bleakly. “I think she knew her stolen looks and voice wouldn’t be enough when coupled with her, um, very original personality. So she…”
“Stolen looks?”
“That’s not what she looks like. At all. Even as a cecaelia. She’s much older. And shaped differently. Her arms are shorter.”
“She’s…half…octopus?”
“No, she’s half god,” Ariel said impatiently. “And what’s wrong with octopuses? You don’t seem to mind girls who are ‘half fish,’ as you say. What’s the difference?”
“There is a difference,” Eric said, looking a little sick. “It might not be logical, at all, but for some reason, there’s a difference.”
“Well, you’re married to a person who is old enough to be your grandmother—at least,” Ariel said with a smirk. “With or without tentacles.”
He looked sicker.
“Besides,” Ariel said. “Octopuses are some of the smartest creatures in the sea—only dolphins and whales and seals surpass them. And dolphins have frightfully short attention spans. Octopuses are creatures of great wisdom, and ancient secrets.”
“All right, all right. Octopuses are great. I’m a bigot with tentacle issues.” He leaned against the boat for support, resting his head on his arm. “I knew my marriage was a sham, but this…surpasses all of my nightmares. I guess in my clearer moments I just figured she was a pretty and somewhat vicious enchantress.”
“She is a witch. She is incredibly vicious. I can’t speak to her looks objectively…” Ariel replied crisply.
“Oh, you’re much more beautiful than Vanessa.”
Eric probably really meant it. But he was still breathing funny and his eyes were turned inward. Contemplating marriage and tentacles, no doubt. He ran a hand through his hair and looked like a wild creature for a moment, trapped and ready to bolt. To go mad and die quietly in the wilderness.
Ariel felt a wave of sympathy for the anguished man. If her life had been hell, at least she had been aware of what was going on. He was just now dealing with truths that were even uglier than he expected, and that had been his life for the past few years.
