The Oyster Thief

by Sonia Faruqi

  by scroll to either the Elnath or Costaria home in Urchin Grove.

  When Rosette looked up, her gaze fell to the rose petal tellin shell at Coralline’s collarbone. Her eyes narrowed, and her face became vicious—she looked like she wanted to snatch off the symbol of Coralline’s engagement. Coralline wrapped her fist around the shell, as though she were shielding Ecklon himself from Rosette’s gaze.

  In the days since the engagement, Coralline had touched the rose petal tellin so frequently that she’d started to worry the shell’s delicate ridges would wear. She still didn’t understand why she’d had such a cold fin during Ecklon’s proposal, but, fortunately, it had evaporated just after supper. Now, she felt so excited about marrying him that she was counting the days to her engagement party (three days) and wedding (seventeen days).

  “There’s still time to the wedding,” Rosette muttered. “Time in which hearts can change. Say, Epaulette hasn’t ever invited you for supper to the Mansion, has she?”

  “No,” Coralline replied quietly. Although Coralline’s mother, Abalone, had invited Ecklon for supper often, Ecklon’s mother, Epaulette, had never invited Coralline, nor had she once accepted Abalone’s invitation to dine at the Costaria home.

  “Your shadows aren’t good enough to grace the floors of the Mansion,” Rosette said snidely. “My mother is Epaulette’s best friend, and we have supper with the Elnaths in their Mansion once a week. Our standing is similar to theirs; like the Elnath lineage, the Delesse lineage is one of wealth and prestige. It’s my destiny, not yours, to marry Ecklon.”

  Epaulette had wanted Coralline and Ecklon’s engagement party and wedding to occur many months later; Abalone had fought to set the dates for both as soon as possible. At the time, Coralline had resented the early dates, but now she understood her mother’s rationale. “Epaulette wants the engagement party and wedding to take place in the distant future,” Abalone had said, “because she’s hoping Ecklon will change his mind between now and then and marry Rosette instead of you. We need to reduce the period of time in which Rosette can play her games. . . . How do I know she’ll play games? Because I know her type—I was her type.”

  “You’ve loved Ecklon six months,” Rosette said, bending her long neck such that she and Coralline were nose to nose. “I’ve loved him since I was six years old. I’ll steal him away from you before your wedding, mark my words! And I promise I’ll ruin you!” Turning on her tail, she bolted in through the door of The Conventional Cure.

  Coralline found that her tailfin was quivering, and her hands were clenched so tightly at her sides that her fingers were stiff. She swam into The Irregular Remedy through the window, collecting her tray from the windowsill. Coming to hover behind her counter, she clasped the tellin at her throat anxiously, wondering whether Rosette would succeed in stealing Ecklon away from her. But Rosette couldn’t, could she? Ecklon loved Coralline, didn’t he?

  “Help! HELP!”

  A tubby merman entered through the door of The Irregular Remedy, his hands over his heart. Thick, charcoal-gray hair curled around his ears, even as the summit of his head remained as bare as a baby’s cheeks. Coralline recognized him as Rhodomela’s patient Agarum, but she recognized him only just, for a patchwork of veins now ran across his cheeks, and the majority of his scales had bleached from cobalt to a stark white.

  He wrenched off his checkered waistcoat and dropped it to the floor. Coralline helped him onto the stretcher next to the door and surveyed his body of folds. There was no blood anywhere on him, fortunately. She could set bones straight, she could prepare remedies for aching heads and tails, she could knead faltering glands into sudden functioning, but she was terrified of blood. It acted as a sort of tranquilizer for her; as soon as it entered her nostrils, she felt dizzy. Coralline hoped Rhodomela had not noticed her fear of blood, for it could prove fatal for her budding apothecary career.

  Agarum was having a heart attack, Coralline concluded from her quick examination of him. Her own heart thudding as though to compensate for his, she asked Rhodomela, “How can we save him?”

  She’d expected Rhodomela’s hands to be curling around one of her urns, but her knobby fingers were instead drumming a soundless beat on her counter. “As your probation comes to an end tomorrow,” she pronounced, “I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to test you. It has arrived today in the form of Agarum. Whether or not you save him will determine whether you’ll have a future at The Irregular Remedy.”

  Agarum raised his head slightly and mumbled an incoherent protest.

  Coralline stared at Rhodomela. Saving lives was not a game, nor was Coralline’s career. Also, how could Rhodomela rely on just one case, and such a difficult case, in deciding Coralline’s future?

  Rhodomela’s eyes twinkled, and her onyx tailfin flicked restlessly—she was enjoying Coralline’s distress. “You’re in a race against time, Coralline,” she said. “To help you, I offer you use of my full array of medications.”

  Rhodomela slid out from behind her counter to create space for Coralline to enter. It was the first time she’d ever invited Coralline behind her counter. Although a healer’s medicines appeared to be her most public possession, visible to anyone who entered a clinic, they were actually her most private, accessible to none but her, barricaded from the world by the fence that was her counter. And so, as Coralline slid behind Rhodomela’s counter, she felt as uncomfortable as though she were entering Rhodomela’s bedroom.

  Rhodomela’s shelves were so heavily stacked with urns that they’d turned crooked under their burdens. Coralline perused the labels of some of the urns: Temple Tingler, Troubled Tail Tonic, Spine Straightener, Rib Rigidity Release, Appendix Unclencher, Ear Cleaner. From her textbooks, she knew that critical cases often required combining two or three pre-existing medications, sometimes quite unexpected ones. Which urns should she choose?

  She pulled out one marked Artery Opener—given that it was intended for the heart, it should be sensible as one of the medications in her blend, she thought.

  Agarum’s arm dropped off his chest and swung off the stretcher. Practically all residues of cobalt had drained out of his tail by now, Coralline saw, leaving all but a handful of scales a bleached white. He lay just a finger’s width from death.

  “Hurry!” Rhodomela barked.

  What should be the second medication in her blend? Coralline’s fingers trembled over the urns, coming to a stop above Rapid Reviver. She looked to Rhodomela for approval, but Rhodomela’s expression was flat, her lips straight as a needle. Coralline picked up the urn. She opened Rapid Reviver and Artery Opener on Rhodomela’s counter. She snatched three pinches of Rapid Reviver, a fine, deep-green mush, and two smidgens of Artery Opener, a whitish glop. She combined them in a flask and shook the flask vigorously. She then held it before her eyes, hoping to glimpse an alteration in color, a fright of bubbles, a commingling of texture—something, anything, to indicate a reaction.

  But there was nothing. The green and white remained separate, lying limply against each other. It was failed chemistry—these two medications were not meant to marry. But this blend was all she had—she could only hope it would prove effective despite indications to the contrary.

  Coralline dashed to Agarum. His thick cheeks, contorted earlier, now lay pale and still, but his lips quivered: He was still alive. She cupped his head and touched the flask to his lips—but a hand hurled the flask aside.

  Rhodomela’s face, before she turned away, reflected bone-deep disapproval. The master apothecary darted to her shelves and, fingers moving as fast as four-winged flying fish, collected Rib Rigidity Release and Troubled Tail Tonic. She deposited pinches of the powders, brown and crimson, in a vial, then shook the vial. When she held the vial before her face, bubbles were frothing, and the brown and crimson colors were combining to form a smooth, brilliant emerald. Rhodomela inserted a syringe through the lid, filled it, then approached Agarum with her needle.

  Coralline blocked her path.
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br />   “Simple Recipes for Remedial Success states that the key ingredients of each of Rib Rigidity Release and Troubled Tail Tonic,” she said, “in other words, the pink flaps of halymenia and the brown fronds of lobophora—act as a poison when combined. I distinctly remember reading it in the textbook’s appendix.”

  Rhodomela pushed Coralline aside.

  “But you’ll kill him!” Coralline cried.

  Rhodomela looked at Coralline defiantly as she stabbed Agarum in the heart.

  His body shook violently from head to tailfin, his flab rippling like waves. Rhodomela held his face steady in one hand and then swung her arm back and slapped his face. His jowls juddered before settling into a conclusive stillness.

  Coralline came to hover to the other side of the stretcher, her breath rasping out of her gills. She’d never seen a dead body before—it was terrifying—and to think that she’d played a role in Agarum’s death, first with her failure of a potion, then with her failure to prevent Rhodomela’s attack.

  But as she watched, Agarum’s eyes opened. He looked at the two faces peering down at him, then sat up slowly, as though awakening from a long slumber. With his hand over his heart, he bent carefully to collect his waistcoat off the floor. He slipped his arms through the checkered fabric and clutched it closed with a hand. From his waistcoat pocket, he extracted a slipper limpet and placed the five-carapace shell in the crock on Rhodomela’s counter. He bowed his head at Coralline and Rhodomela in silent gratitude, then swam out the door, a new spring in his tail, which was darkening again to cobalt.

  “How did you save him?” Coralline stammered.

  “I rely on my own judgment more than anyone else’s,” Rhodomela replied coldly. “I urge you to do the same. Don’t believe everything you read in your medical textbooks.”

  Coralline plopped down on the stretcher vacated by Agarum, her spine limp. What would her inability to save Agarum mean for her probationary review tomorrow? Would Rhodomela fire her? Coralline bit her lip to control her urge to cry; if Rhodomela saw her crying, she would definitely fire her.

  “What’s that?” Rhodomela asked.

  Coralline followed her gaze to the invitation scroll on her tray. Under the present circumstances, with her dismissal all but imminent, she could not bear the thought of inviting Rhodomela to her engagement party and wedding. But nor could she think of a graceful way to bow out of inviting her, now that Rhodomela had seen the invitation scroll. Without a word, Coralline rose and handed the ivory parchment to her.

  Rhodomela’s fingers untied the golden ribbon, and her eyes scanned the parchment quickly. “You’re making a mistake,” she said, looking up. “You should not marry.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because love is a farce.”

  It was not Rhodomela’s fault, Coralline told herself, continuing to bite her lip. It was Rhodomela’s life that had turned her bitter. Her parents had been mysteriously murdered twenty-five years ago in the middle of the night, when Rhodomela had been twenty-five herself. Rhodomela continued to mourn them to this day; since their death, no one had ever seen her attired in anything but a plain black bodice. Her only living family member was an elder sister, Osmundea, who lived in the distant village of Velvet Horn and who was also said to be a spinster.

  Coralline recalled what her mother had once said about Rhodomela: “The Bitter Spinster’s pain has numbed her to all emotion.”

  “I love Ecklon,” Coralline said softly. “Have you ever loved anyone?”

  Rhodomela’s face whitened.

  “I’m sorry,” Coralline said, a flush creeping up her neck, making the skin prickle. “It’s none of my business. You don’t have to answer—”

  “Once. I loved once, long ago.”

  A large, circular bronze-and-black insignia glowed on the glass door, the letters O and D intertwined over a fishhook that slashed the circle in half. Antares and Saiph sat to the other side of the glass, laughing so hard that they failed to notice him.

  From the other side of the glass, Izar felt as though he were observing a private scene, a father-son moment he had no business witnessing. He knew that if either of them were to turn to see his face at this moment, they would see him staring at them with the desperate loneliness of an orphan—the orphan that he was.

  His mind traveled back to the day he had met them. Suddenly, he was three years old again. The moon was glowing like a low-hanging white pear in the sky, and the wind was whipping his hair mercilessly about his cheeks. The jagged gash along the side of his jaw was bleeding a scarlet trail down his neck. He was trying to stanch the flow of his blood with his hands, but he couldn’t—there was always more, and then more still—surely, it would all trickle out of him until he was a crumpled sack of skin. Antares’s hand on his shoulder had been the only thing that had steadied him that night.

  Kneeling to be close to Izar’s eye level, Antares had asked, “Do you remember anything of your life before this day, son?”

  Izar had tried to remember—he’d tried so hard that tears had squirted out of his eyes—but his mind had been as empty of memories as the sky above of clouds. “Who am I?” he’d asked in a trembling voice.

  “Your name is Izar,” Antares had said, speaking slowly, as though to aid Izar’s comprehension. “You’re the son of one of my fishermen. I was passing by in a trawler in the middle of the night, and I saw merpeople attacking your father’s fishing dinghy. Merpeople drowned your parents, but I managed to rescue you from their clutches.”

  “Why did they drown my parents?” Izar had asked.

  “Because they’re evil. They’re vicious savages.”

  Izar had attempted anew to conjure images of his parents in his mind, but there’d been nothing—not a whisper, not a glimpse, not a scent of them. He had felt as though he was standing before a mirror but seeing no reflection.

  “I’m sorry for your loss. From this moment on, you should consider me your father, just as I will consider you my son.”

  Antares had carted him to the Office of the Police Commissioner of Menkar. The chief police commissioner, a moustachioed man named Canopus Corvus, had written a brief report on Antares’s description of the human-merpeople altercation. A reporter from the newspaper Menkar Daily had simultaneously interviewed Antares for an article. Meanwhile, Doctor Navi, summoned by Antares, had stitched and bandaged the gash along Izar’s jaw.

  By the time Antares had taken Izar home, the sky had been bright with morning light. He had taken Izar straight to the backyard. Saiph had been playing in the grass, his hair like smooth, heavy waves of sand—just like Antares’s at the time. Izar had gleaned at a glance that Saiph was Antares’s son. Two years older than Izar, standing a head taller, Saiph had crossed his arms over his chest and glared at Izar. Meanwhile, Antares had knelt in the grass, unclasped a large wooden box, and turned it over. An assortment of wood blocks had tumbled out—squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, semicircles. “Build me a replica of our home, boys,” Antares had demanded.

  Izar’s shoulders had slumped with tiredness, his jaw had throbbed mercilessly, but he’d sensed that Antares was not a man to tolerate protest. He’d looked at the house, memorized its lines, then commenced his construction. He and Saiph had completed their models at the same time. Izar’s had been square, three stories high, as tall as himself, with semicircular windows like half-open eyes, and a roof embedded with a circular skylight; the edifice had been a precise replica of the house. Saiph’s structure had risen to his knees, its shape haphazard, its lines crude; it had borne no resemblance to this home or any other. “Excellent work, Izar,” Antares had said, beaming.

  Excellent work, Izar—perhaps Antares would pronounce the words today as well, when Izar told him of Castor. Izar knocked on the glass door. Antares and Saiph jerked their heads in his direction simultaneously. Izar flashed his identification card against the scanner outside the door and entered.

  Striding through a fog of cigar smoke, he pumped Antares’s and
Saiph’s hands in greeting. He then settled into the chair next to Saiph, such that both he and Saiph were facing Antares from across Antares’s grand mahogany desk. Antares poured him a glass of whisky and lit him a cigar. Izar took the glass and grasped the thick, dirt-brown stick between two fingers. He didn’t care for cigars—he was driven by fumes from his underwater-fire work, not smokes—but cigars and whisky formed a ritual at their weekly meetings, as fundamental as the handshakes preceding them.

  He glanced out the thirtieth-floor window. Skyscrapers loomed over Menkar’s shores as bright, glassy rectangles interspersed with long-fingered palm trees. Located along the southeastern coast of America, Menkar was among the largest cities in the country, and, in Izar’s opinion, the greatest. He had not been born in Menkar but wished he had been, for he loved the dry, dusty city.

  He turned back to face Antares, who was sitting deep in his leather chair, a cigar dangling out of the side of his mouth, steel-gray eyes gleaming beneath tufty gray eyebrows. “Updates, vice presidents,” Antares commanded.

  The atmosphere changed subtly but perceptibly; by mentioning their titles, Antares transformed from their father to their boss. Izar and Saiph sat straighter and patted the buttons of their pin-striped suit jackets. Saiph began with his update first, as always.

  “In the last week, I terminated a dozen men whose roles had become redundant. I fired another five who disagreed with me.”

  “Good.” Antares nodded, sipping his whisky. “Everyone’s a resource, boys, and every resource has a shelf life. Now, what’s the update on Ocean Protection?”

  “I’m continuing to keep an eye on the organization,” Saiph replied. “They’ve been rallying dozens of people to their protests outside our building, with signs that say we’re murdering the oceans.”

  “What have those loonies taken to calling the three of us these days?”

  “The Trio of Tyrants.” Saiph scoffed.

  “Those nutcases would have us believe that just because the upper half of the merperson body resembles ours,” Antares said, “they are equal to us rather than inferior. But regardless of Ocean Protection’s idiotic beliefs, we would be wise to not underestimate them. Their supporters keep growing, not to mention their media coverage. So long as we avoid environmental fiascos like oil spills, though, they won’t have anything specific to rally against.”