by Liz Braswell
“Fair enough,” Vanessa conceded. “I always knew playing with humans would be fun. You’re all a lot more—fun—than I imagined. It’s really astounding, the propensity for evil the least of you have. Here I was thinking that I was the master of tricky and binding agreements. Apparently I have a lot to learn. What’s that saying? ‘The devil is in the details’? You make me think that humans invented the devil.”
Eric said nothing. He wasn’t, as she said, stupid. And he was a little wiser than the first time around. There was no celebrating his victory over her yet. Something as horrible and ancient as Ursula no doubt had another shoe to drop—possibly seven shoes.
She shook her shoulders and settled back into a proper Vanessa pose, prim and pretty.
“All right, then, Prince Eric, a partnership. ‘For Tirulia.’ At least until one of us figures out how to…dissolve it.”
“All I care about is my country,” Eric said with feeling. Don’t think of her. Don’t think of Ariel. Don’t think of how you’re continuing to help her, looking for her father. While he was unsure if the witch could read minds, it was clear that Vanessa could read faces—and would. “And its people. As long as they are safe and happy and prosperous, I don’t care what mad little witcheries or whatever it is you do on the side.”
“What a generous offer. Thank you, My Prince,” she said, giving a very ornate bow—not a curtsy. “Mad little witcheries, indeed. Time was I would turn you into a barnacle for such language.”
“Those times are over, Princess,” Eric said with a thin smile. “Welcome to the human race.”
AT THE ABSINTHE HOUSE:
“I don’t know, Lord Francese. Do we even wish the good prince to return to his senses? At this stage? It seems that all is going along rather splendidly….I’ve already received several nice…shall we say…returns on my investment in the clearing of the Devil’s Pass. A pair of vineyards, in fact. Let the lad write his songs and the lady lead us into wealth!”
“I don’t object to the general idea of expansion, Lord Savho. And I’ve made quite a bit myself on the shipment of munitions from Druvest. But I think it’s rather ridiculous to consider us Druvest’s equal, or Gaulica’s. The world is changing, and I am not convinced Tirulia is ready to be the world power our dear princess wishes it were.”
“Oh, I agree, darling. And I feel nothing but empathy for that lovely prince of ours. He’s so haunted—such a handsome young man.”
“He is indeed, Lady Francese. I was just having tea with the princess, and upon leaving I saw him cutting such a lovely, gothic figure kneeling in an overgrown garden.”
“Whatever was he doing there, Emelita? Practicing his poetry?”
“Honestly…it rather looked like he was talking to a seagull….”
AT THE MARKET:
“Mad he might be, but I don’t think he wants us to be all over the place starting wars with which and who. And I agree.”
“Don’t you say that! Florin came back from the assault in the mountains with a necklace for me. There’s opportunities in the army for the youngest son of seven that don’t exist elsewhere.”
“He could get a place on a ship like everyone else, Lalia.”
“Yes, and come back with stinky fish. Not necklaces.”
“Well, I don’t like it. None of you are old enough to remember the troubles of Thirty-Five—”
“When none of the boys in your village came back alive, yes, yes, we’ve heard it before. This is different. Vanessa is clever! She has all these modern weapons, explosives, and tactics…our boys don’t even need to risk themselves.”
“Really? Dead times twenty isn’t a risk?”
“I may hire on to a fishing boat myself. There’s enough work to go around, though not enough boats….”
“Plus there’s that contest! A chest of treasure for finding a magic fish! That could buy you a thousand necklaces, Lalia….”
AT THE DOCKS:
“I think our prince has taken for the worse—have you heard? He’s started talking to seagulls!”
“So? He’s an artist. That last opera of his was supposed to be mighty fine. I can’t wait to finally see it when they put it on again. But maybe all this music work took something out of him, something vital.”
“You ask me about taking something vital out of him, I’d say you’re looking in the wrong place. It’s that princess of his….”
“Keep your voice down, Julio! Or we’ll be next to the front lines, feeding crows with our bones and not seagulls with our fish.”
After Ursula made her (predictably) dramatic exit from her study, Eric stayed, pulling out his composition book and turning to the piece called “Interlude for a Villain’s Lair.” Since the sending Triton to Ibria thing had all been a ruse, Vanessa was probably still keeping the king as close to her as possible. If she had just killed him, she wouldn’t have hidden the fact; she would have bragged about it. The sea witch wasn’t terribly complicated once you got to know her. Almost predictable in her less dangerous habits.
He carefully checked off everything that was the same as the last time he searched the room: creepy, evil dagger? Check. Teapot and tea accessories? Check. It all looked pretty much the same….In fact, the only really new item was an untidy pile of maps and charts on the table. Eric riffled through them. Some were immediately obvious and discouraging: troop numbers, approximate locations of enemy forts and towers, friendly towns. There were atlases with arrows drawn on them in pencil, where future land grabs might be made. There was a list of world leaders, mostly minor, with notes next to each name: Friendly! Neutral. Mad? Aggressive.
Her plans were like a little girl’s fantasy, all sketched out in a book titled something like Princess Vanessa’s Plan to Conquer the Known World, in curlicue letters, with hearts dotting the Is.
Eric shook his head and pushed the papers aside. Beneath were the plans for the new warships and marine cartographic charts, with coasts, depths, and dangerous reefs sketched in, channels described, destinations plotted….
He frowned at the coordinates.
She wasn’t sending the fleet up the Verdant Coast to harass and intimidate their neighbors like she had threatened—and as would be logical, were one beginning to conquer the continent.
It looked like…
It looks like she’s sending them out to sea? Deep sea?
Along with the charts was a map, mostly blank and unlabeled. There was no key, no compass rose, no marks around the outside to indicate latitude or size. The background was plain as if it were just open sea or field, but with no decorative patterns to indicate either. On this was drawn what appeared to be islands, sketched by an unskilled hand, but ringed as if the topography were known. One large bean-shaped mass had a few details to differentiate it from the others: a scalloped edge on one side, and what looked like a tiny crown in the middle of the right half of the bean.
Eric stared at it, puzzled. It didn’t look like any part of the world he knew, or even illustrations of New South Wharen. He looked around on her desk to see if there was anything else that might give a hint as to what it was, but only found different versions of the strange map, smaller and even more crudely drawn. First drafts. Some of these had arrows on them in the same way the war maps did, but they floated over the open spaces and had no troop numbers or anything indicating enemy defenses.
Mysterious. Was it a map to invisible sources of power? Were the arrows ley lines, flows of magic or power that were all the rage among modern seers and bored gentlefolk?
He took the smallest, crudest map and folded it into his pocket.
Maybe Ariel would know. They would meet again at the next tide, in nine hours. In the meantime, he would go through atlases and research it as best he could until that time. Her father might have to wait a bit while he did.
On his way to the library he passed through the drawing room, where serious visitors were entertained with brandy and harpsichord music and interesting books and globes. Vareet was sitting
at the fancy mahogany desk, drawing.
Eric walked by her—and then stopped.
He had never seen the little maid entertaining herself with her own pursuits in public. He rarely saw her smiling. Once in a great while he saw her skipping through the halls, overcome by some fancy, or grinning as she exited the kitchen, special gifted treat in her hands. But whatever she did when she was given her—precious little—time off, she did it on her own, someplace hidden.
“What are you doing, pretty lass?” he asked, kneeling down. It was a little awkward. He had no trouble throwing balls to children who were chasing each other outside, or getting into mock fencing bouts with young footmen. But he had no clue how to approach a quiet little girl.
Vareet’s face was carefully neutral. She showed him her pictures: standard five-legged horses, unrecognizable human-monster things, squiggly grass—all the sorts of figures children normally drew.
What she was drawing on was remarkable, however: strange vellum, whose tactile surface was almost unpleasant to touch. As Eric looked at the pictures and tried to figure out what to say, Vareet impatiently turned them over so he could see the back.
On that side were runes—but not by a child’s hand, as outlandish as they were. It was definitely some sort of written language.
“Oh…are these Vanessa’s?” Eric whispered. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
The little girl said nothing, just quickly gathered up the rest of her drawings and prepared to go.
“I’m just going to hold on to this for a while,” the prince said of the one he still held. He would show it to Ariel, to see if she could make head or tail of the writing. “I really like the way you made the horse’s neck. It almost looks like it’s…really…moving.”
“It’s a bunny,” Vareet snapped. Then she skipped off, exasperated.
The prince gave a wry laugh. Mad Prince Eric, indeed, who had secret friends in butlers and maids—but also in seagulls and little girls, and who could understand neither.
As the tide turned she surfaced on the north side of town, on an isolated beach. Sheltered from the sea by grass and the mainland by sand dunes fringed with scrub, it wasn’t only perfectly hidden from the castle and its spies; it was also the perfect place to raise baby seagulls, and to tend to older ones.
She hadn’t seen Scuttle in a while.
But as soon as the mermaid emerged from the water she saw something strange was up. The gulls were screeching even more loudly than usual, wheeling and crying and diving so furiously she couldn’t understand what they were saying. She shaded her eyes against the sky and scanned the bright edge of the dune for her friend.
“Scuttle?” she called.
“Ariel! Look, everyone, it’s my friend Ariel!”
An inelegant but enthusiastic tumbling mess of a bird thrust his body over the edge of the dune, letting gravity drag him toward her, opening and closing his wings in more of a controlled fall than an actual flight. The sand was soft and Scuttle wasn’t going that fast; Ariel wasn’t too concerned. When he finally came to a stop, she knelt down to stroke his head—pulling her hand back at the last moment when she saw several fish tails sticking out of his beak.
“Sorry,” he said, smacking them back in and down his gullet. “Sorry, Ariel. But they were already dead. But I don’t like you seeing that.”
“Uh, thanks.”
“Jona—she’s a first-rate great-grandgull, that one. She’s been bringing me a feast. Everyone else was just stuffing their own gullets. Not her. She thought of her great-grandfather first.” He preened his chest feathers and wings to remove any lingering fishy oil. “What’s up? You got a lead you need me to check out, or something?”
“No, I just came here to see how you were doing.” She scratched him under his chin, but was distracted by his words.
“Awww, that’s great, Ariel. That’s really nice. I appreciate that.”
“Scuttle, what ‘feast’? What are the gulls ‘stuffing their gullets’ with? What’s going on?”
“Oh, you don’t know? All the fishing humans are going crazy! Worse than us, if you can believe it! At least that’s what they say. Piles of fish for the taking.”
Ariel took this in, trying to figure out what it meant. Piles of dead fish? That seemed unusual, even for humans. Surely with everything else going on with Ursula, it wasn’t a coincidence.
“What are they—I mean, the humans—doing with the piles?”
“I dunno. Not guarding them very well, I gotta say. You getting any closer to finding your dad? Jona told me all about the carriage and Ursula and everything.”
“Nothing yet,” Ariel said slowly. “I think I want to go see what’s going on before I meet Eric. Where is Jona? I’d like to get her help.”
Scuttle turned over his shoulder and squawked. Someone else squawked back.
“My boy here says he saw her out over the water—away from the docks. I’ll bet she was looking for you.”
“All right—if I miss her and she comes back here, tell her to meet me back in town.”
“Will do, Ariel,” Scuttle said, giving her a salute. She turned to go. “And…Ariel? Thanks for…thanks for just coming to visit. Not just ’cause you’re the Queen of the Sea and all important and everything. I missed you, Ariel. It was hard…those years…when you didn’t come to the surface anymore. I mean, I completely understand why. You had every reason. But…I still missed you.”
“Oh, Scuttle, I’m so sorry….” She nuzzled his beak with her nose, closing her eyes. “As soon as I get my father back on his throne, I’ll have way more time to visit.”
Scuttle looked delighted—and a little surprised. “So you’re just gonna…come up now? To the Dry World? To stay? Or visit a lot? I mean, after whatever happens with your dad?”
Ariel paused. Once it was all over, of course she would go back to hanging out with her friends, old and new, in the world beyond the sea. But…how would she do it without the trident? Would her father help her? Even if she successfully rescued him, his views on the matter certainly wouldn’t have improved by years of imprisonment. What if he refused? What if he didn’t let her go?
I’ll just have to find a way on my own.
But…another part of her pointed out, that was how this whole thing started in the first place. Her father had refused to let her go, so she found another way, and it led to him being captured and her losing her voice and Tirulia gaining a tyrant. She squinched her face up at the conflicting thoughts.
Deal with it later, Ariel, she ordered all the voices, wrapping her headscarf tightly around her face and neck once again. She would get the job done first—find her father, defeat Ursula, set everything right. Then she could work on the happily ever afters.
She had just reached the edge of town when Jona wheeled down out of the sky to perch on a rock nearby.
“I was looking for you,” the gull said. “Be careful. There are a lot of shiny buttons walking around. I think you’re a persona non grata here.”
She tried not to look proud of the words she used, but failed badly.
“Shiny button—oh. Soldiers. Yes. That’s why I…Wait, how did you recognize me?”
She had to push the headscarf fully out of her face to see the gull clearly at all.
“I can spot half a sardine carcass sticking out of a flowerpot a quarter mile away,” Jona answered. “I’m a gull.”
Ariel smiled.
She carefully clambered up the rock next to the bird. Climbing things was still a tricky proposition; you hurt if you fell in this world, where everything was heavy and hard and inclined to falling. A very light breeze tickled her forehead as she stood on her tiptoes get a good view of the town….
…which brought with it one of the most revolting odors she had ever smelled. Bodies, rotting flesh. Death and decay in staggering amounts.
She almost fell off the rock.
“Are you all right?” Jona asked politely.
“What is that…horrible…
stink…?”
“You mean the gigantic piles of dead fish the humans are leaving on the wharf.”
She had, at least, the good taste to avoid smacking her beak as she spoke.
“Scuttle said…I didn’t think…Why aren’t they being…”—she tried to swallow her nausea; she had to know—“eaten by the humans?”
“Don’t know,” Jona said with a wingy shrug. “But it’s been a very popular development among us and the rats and cats.”
Ariel couldn’t see anything from her higher position, and the wind was terrible, so she slipped back down from the rock, stomach still a little rocky itself. You’re a queen. She pulled herself upright as best she could.
“I’m…going to go look into this,” she said, trying not to breathe through her nose. Eric, even her father could wait. She had to find out what was going on to leave her subjects dead and rotting in piles. Jona nodded and launched herself into the air above her.
As she approached the main street Ariel noticed that even the humans who regularly ate fish were covering their faces and noses with cloth; she didn’t stand out in the crowd wearing her headscarf. The stench was overwhelming. Some people looked sour and complained bitterly. Others looked excited and rushed to and fro, mending nets, grabbing friends, chatting and shrieking in glee.
And there, on the docks, just as the gulls had said, every kind of fish was rotting in piles. From the species that humans loved to hunt and eat to the ones that were deadly poisonous. Squid, octopodes, eels, sharks, branzinos, rays, hake, oarfish, at least one small dolphin…they were all represented among the dead, baking and decaying in the sun.
The Queen of the Sea just stood there staring, overwhelmed by horror and sadness.
Finally she began to do the only thing she could for all of them now: she whispered a prayer. Again and again, willing their spirits to find the eternal ocean of heroes, where they could be happy and free forever.
Ariel had repeated it twelve times—with no intention of stopping—when she was interrupted by a familiar voice.
“I’m so sorry, my lady.”
Ariel looked up. Argent the Inker stood there, a disgusted look on her face. She put a hand on the mermaid’s shoulder.
