by Sonia Faruqi
Assuming a commanding tone in an effort to hide her flush, she said, “I mean, something’s clearly the matter with your shoulder. Let me take a look.”
Izar’s fingers fumbled with his baby’s-ear shells, turning and twisting but unable to get them out of their buttonholes.
“Let me help,” Coralline said impatiently.
Perching next to Izar on the settee, she commenced with the top-most shell, at his collar. Her hands traveled steadily down his chest, one shell after another, and her flush traveled steadily down her face, coming to encompass her neck and throat. She’d never unfastened Ecklon’s buttons before, nor had he ever unfastened hers. It was the sort of simple but domestically intimate act she’d always associated with marriage.
By the time Coralline had undone Izar’s buttons, her face was fiery. She avoided Izar’s eyes, but he was smiling.
He slid out of his waistcoat. His chest was finely sculpted, and his shoulders were broad, she saw, each one as wide as her whole hand. But his right shoulder had a bruise over it the size of Pavonis’s eye and the color of a purple sea urchin.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded.
“You had plenty to occupy your mind,” he said, his indigo eyes pondering her.
Coralline didn’t want to think of the morning. Nor did she want to think of the fact that Izar had seen her mostly undressed, in her slashed corset. Rising, she shifted to the dresser, grateful for the slight distance that the movement created between them. When she returned, it was with a neutral expression and two jars of salve.
With her fingers, she dabbed his shoulder with horned wrack salve, a pale-green paste. “This will reduce the pain and swelling,” she explained. Then she turned his hand over and examined it. The gash along his palm still remained, but it was less pronounced than at the time she’d discovered him, yesterday morning. She applied the olive-brown balm of toothed wrack salve to it. When he turned his hand over, she saw that his knuckles were red and inflamed, the skin across them chafed. She applied toothed wrack salve carefully to each knuckle, asking, “Is this from the fight with the two brothers?”
“Partially.”
“What else?”
“I broke the mirror in my room last night.”
“Why?” She looked up at him.
“I didn’t like my reflection.”
Assuming he was joking, Coralline started to laugh, but she stopped when she saw that the set of his lips was serious. “Humans legs are hideous,” she said. “We merpeople are so much more beautiful. Why would you dislike your reflection?”
Izar threw his head back and laughed. It was the first time Coralline had seen him laugh. She found that his merriment changed his face, softening his jaw, vanishing his scar, making his indigo eyes sparkle like violet opal. It was no longer a harsh face, but a handsome face.
Covering her salves with their lids, she made to rise, but his hand wrapped around her wrist. She glanced at it sharply; the fingers unraveled. “Thank you for cutting me out of the fishnet,” he said.
“You don’t need to thank me. By saving you, I also saved myself.”
He gave her a quizzical look. She could not explain it to him, nor even properly understand it herself, but after the morning assault, she’d felt herself a victim, and after she’d cut him out of the net, she’d felt herself a victor. By wresting him out of the net, she’d lifted herself out of her temporary daze of powerlessness.
“You saved me as well, from the two brothers. Thank you for that.”
“That was my fault,” Izar said, a shadow crossing his face.
“How so?”
“I saw them looking you over last night and should have confronted them then. Had I done so, this morning would not have happened. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Coralline said. “You couldn’t have known their intentions. But if it makes you feel any better, I have a confession to make, too.”
“What?”
“I was planning to leave you behind this morning.”
Izar shook his head, as though to clear out his ears. Now it was Coralline’s turn to burst out laughing.
“Pavonis and I were planning to leave Bristled Bed and Breakfast before you woke up. But then, when those two brothers appeared, I decided to wake you up by rattling the desk against the wall.”
“Well, I’m glad for that!”
“I have another confession to make,” Coralline said, in a more serious tone, “and a favor to ask.”
“Anything.”
“I have no carapace left. I forgot my pouch in Tang Tarpon’s home. May I borrow some carapace from you?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”
“There’s no need.”
“But I will.”
Coralline returned the jars of salve to her satchel, then swam to the bed and crawled under the blanket.
Izar now understood why Coralline had given him a strange look when he’d offered to sleep on the settee. A settee no more resembled a sofa than would a stone bench with armrests. It was also far too short—his head lay on one armrest, while much of his tail dangled out over the other. He turned to look at Coralline, to the far side of her bed.
He knew he shouldn’t—he even clasped the armrest to prevent himself—but he found himself rising from the settee. Watching Coralline’s form with acute attention, he moved toward her vertically, slowly, like her seahorse, his tailfin flicking so lightly that, even had the floor been covered with sand, not a grain of it would have stirred. When he neared her bed, he paused, tried to dissuade himself from approaching any more—if she were to wake up, she would be alarmed—but he could not keep away. He came to hover just over her, his body horizontal, parallel to her own.
Coralline was lying on her side, with her tail curled up, the equivalent of knees pressed into the chest. Her blanket was pulled up to her chin, and her long hair draped over it like a cape of dark velvet. Her shades—her black hair, her bronze scales—formed his favorite pairing of colors, Izar realized, because it was the pairing of colors of Ocean Dominion’s insignia.
He had come within a hair’s breadth of killing the two mermen who’d accosted her. He would have killed them had she not stopped him. But why should he have been so upset? What did she even mean to him?
She and he were opposites in every way. She was a healer, he a destroyer. She was driven to rescue; he was driven to raze—he, Antares, and Saiph were called the Trio of Tyrants after all.
He smiled to remember her promise to pay him back for the carapace she borrowed from him. In Menkar, he had more money than he could count. He would have even more once he launched Castor.
Oh, how his Castor would light the ocean on fire! Whenever he and Coralline had entered a settlement—Purple Claw, Hog’s Bristle, Rainbow Wrack—Izar had looked down at the seabed and thought: Perhaps here—no, here!—would be a good place to launch Castor. But his thought exercises had been largely hypothetical. From his studies of the ocean floor, he knew that each and every settlement of merpeople would be a good place to launch Castor.
As soon as he returned to Menkar and created his army of Castors, he would become rich—so rich, Ascella would regret her affair with Tarazed. Gold and diamonds—he’d wanted to collect them from the bottom of the ocean for her. But what was it that he’d so loved about her? he asked himself for the first time.
He found himself comparing Ascella with Coralline. The differences between them were like day and night: Ascella, with her pale gold hair, Coralline, with her dark locks; Ascella, with her eyes of cold frost, Coralline, with eyes of the flowing ocean. In appearance, Ascella was like a rose, immediately noticeable; Coralline was more of a lily, simple but beautiful.
Like the art she liked, Ascella’s personality was abstract, artificial, and Izar had created an artificial version of himself for her, with his pressed suits and polished shoes, with their extravagant dinners at Yacht. It was not Ascella’s fault bu
t his own—artifice had marked his intentions from the beginning with her. He had sought a future with her in order to escape his past as a scarred orphan raised in a storage closet. That was what he’d most loved about her, he saw now—the idea of escaping his past through a future with her.
A strand of hair strayed over Coralline’s cheek. He twirled it around his finger—it was as soft and plush as a silk thread.
17
The Doom of Desmarestia
Coralline’s eyes opened leisurely. She turned around in bed to glance at the settee—Izar was not there. She sat up and looked about; from a snatch of indigo, she saw that his long form was sprawled on the mauve rug. She breathed a sigh of relief. Somehow, it brought her a sense of safety to see him there, in the room with her. Slipping off her blanket, she crept out of bed. She swept past him to a window and peered out over the town center of Rainbow Wrack.
Places have their own character just like people, she had read somewhere once but failed to understand before now. Her home village of Urchin Grove was, if she considered it objectively, a yawn inducer, as Pavonis often suggested. Purple Claw, the first settlement they’d visited on the Elixir Expedition, had appeared to have a similarly slow pace of life. Hog’s Bristle, meanwhile, could be considered a gangster town, with all its loiterers. Rainbow Wrack, in contrast, was picturesque and pretty, with homes and hotels built in pastel shades of shale. Coralline smiled to see an elderly couple swim past her window, hand in hand. She and Ecklon would be like that one day.
Coralline swam out the window. Pavonis had told her he’d come find her somewhere in the town center sometime in the morning. (Yesterday evening, he’d unceremoniously dumped Altair and Nacre in a coral reef, then had left to explore the town.) Coralline hoped Pavonis would collect her late in the morning, for the last two days had been exhausting, and all she wanted was to luxuriate in the relaxed looseness of an aimless morning.
She looked at shops with a wanderer’s carefree curiosity. Personalized Parchments, a tiny stationery store. Lobata, a casual restaurant. Devil’s Apron, a dessert bistro. Pyropia, a clinic named after the gauzy algae used for bandage.
Coralline turned away from Pyropia, but not before tears sparked in her eyes. She’d wanted to start her own clinic one day, Coralline’s Cures; the dream now felt a delusion. Swimming away from Pyropia, she entered a colorful public garden alongside a row of small homes. But even among the bright columns of algae, she found she could not sheathe herself from her profession—what she most missed about The Irregular Remedy was its remedial garden.
In the public garden, she saw a patch of coralline algae splattering a rock, its branches congealing and separating like networks of capillaries. The sight of her namesake algae made her inordinately happy—it was something familiar in an unfamiliar world—and she found herself staring at it as she never had before, even though it carpeted the rocks in the reef garden outside her own home in Urchin Grove. Coralline algae was parchment-thin, she noticed now, but coated with a fine, articulated armor. Like everyone else, she’d always considered coralline algae fragile, but now she thought it looked resilient. Similarly, everyone had always considered her fragile, but perhaps she wasn’t—perhaps she was resilient but hadn’t had the opportunity to show it before the elixir quest.
She hadn’t snipped algae for a few days, and it felt as unnatural as not having eaten for a few days. A longing to snip made itself felt as a pressing ache in her tail. Most clinics cultivated their own remedial gardens, but healing algae did not have to come exclusively from a remedial garden. It could grow anywhere. She looked about the public garden and noticed the thick, coarse, hair-like strands of green rope. She was badge-less, disbarred, unable to use any medications she prepared for anyone other than herself—but that did not mean she could not prepare them. It would be like preparing supper despite being unable to serve it—most would consider it pointless—but it would still offer her a measure of gratification and happiness. Who was she to deny herself?
Racing back to Honeymooners Hotel, Coralline darted into her room through the window. Izar was sitting on the settee, dark circles underlining his eyes, as though he’d hardly slept. He flashed her a smile, but she’d already picked up her apothecary arsenal and was out the window again.
Swimming back to the garden, Coralline placed her apothecary arsenal neatly on a rock, being careful to not scratch its pearlescent case. She started her medicinal preparations by snipping the vesicles of horned wrack, in order to refill her jar of horned wrack salve. Next, she cut iridescent cartilage, admiring its brilliant-blue hue so fervently that she almost cut her fingers. Then, she sheared the straggly golden-brown strands of sea oak, followed by the olive-brown fronds of dabberlocks.
Pulling out her blue-shale mortar and pestle, she ground all the algae she’d collected in separate batches, then stuffed them neatly in individual vials. She’d forgotten to bring her pen to the garden, so she would label the vials later, she decided. She rose to hover horizontally again over the garden, seeking her next suspect, when she spotted desmarestia algae.
Coralline had snipped desmarestia just once in her life, upon mistaking its olive-brown fronds for dabberlocks. She’d learned her error only when people had gathered around her and screamed, “Who are you trying to poison? Whoever it is, remember that the Doom of Desmarestia will settle upon you!”
Desmarestia was a poisonous algae, an acid kelp that killed its consumer in a matter of minutes. Its telltale symptom was writhing. Everyone was so afraid of it that, since time immemorial, it was a source of superstition: The Doom of Desmarestia was said to settle on those who dared swim over the acid kelp, leading them to grow as bitter as its fronds over time. Had she been in Urchin Grove, Coralline would have skirted the bush; now, she considered it. At the moment, she possessed just one weapon against the world, a dagger; desmarestia could serve as a second weapon. The more weapons she possessed, the stronger she would be during her elixir quest.
Her hands rising and falling as fast as the heads of garden eels, she snipped some fronds of desmarestia, reveling in their rough, forbidden texture.
As they swam southward to Blue Bottle, Izar admired Coralline in profile. Her scales were shimmering like newly minted coins, and her hair was swishing down her back like a mare’s tail. She wore a pale-pink corset with ruffles for shoulder sleeves and a dozen tiny cream shells for buttons—it made him think of a scone.
“Do you know what the world needs?” she said, turning to look at him.
“What?”
“Corsets with pockets.”
“Hmm. How did you think of that?”
“Waistcoats always have pockets, but corsets don’t. It’s disadvantageous to mermaids.”
“What would you put in your pocket, if you had one?”
“A dagger.”
Izar didn’t know what to say.
Coralline turned to Pavonis, on her left, and said, “Can we please swim closer to the seabed?”
“Just because we didn’t encounter any constables after leaving Hog’s Bristle yesterday,” the whale shark said, “doesn’t mean we won’t encounter any today. You’re safer up here.”
“But what if we’re attacked by a ship again today?” she persisted.
“If we were attacked yesterday, what are the chances we’ll be attacked again today?”
Izar swallowed his twinge of guilt. None of them knew that the ship attack yesterday had been not a random incident but a targeted attempt to kill him. But Izar shared Pavonis’s rationale toward probability—Serpens had caught him yesterday by a stroke of sheer luck. The chance of another such capture today would be no greater than that of two meteors striking the earth on consecutive days.
Glancing again at Coralline, Izar tried to think of something to say. . . . What had he ever talked about with Ascella during their dinners at Yacht? Art, jewelry, Castor.
“From an early age,” he said, “I’ve had a fascination with fire.”
“That’s an
odd fascination,” Coralline said, frowning. “My father says that fire vaporizes water, and water vanquishes fire, and the two can never truly meet.”
“They can. I’ve invented underwater fire.”
“That’s impossible.” She said it not in a conflagratory tone but in the way she would counter someone telling her the earth was square.
“I assure you—”
A net fell over him.
Again.
His tail lashed like a sword within the net, but he only succeeded in entangling himself further. It was a different net than yesterday’s, not the lightweight one he’d invented but a net of thick, strong twine. Izar had designed his lightweight fishnet to capture schools of small fish; this more old-fashioned net was intended to capture large, powerful creatures like Pavonis. Attached to a beam of a rod like those used for construction cranes, it worked by means of lifting its prisoner into the air and letting him suffocate there.
Suddenly, Izar found himself wrenched out over the waves and suspended in air, curled within the net like a fetus in a womb. Because it was a cloudy day and the glare of the sun was less pronounced, his eyes adjusted more quickly than they had yesterday. Serpens was staring at him from the bow of the Silk-fleet Ocean Dominion ship, Izar saw, his eyes glittering cheerfully above his red beard. He could easily shoot Izar with the gun in his hands, but Izar knew he wouldn’t—he would instead watch him suffocate slowly, painfully, to death.
Coralline stared up at Izar from just below the waves, her hand wrapped around her dagger. His body was thrashing spontaneously for oxygen, his gill slits flat against the sides of his neck, his scales bleaching one by one from indigo to a dead white. He dangled four feet above her, in the air, so she could not simply cut him out of the net as she had yesterday. She could do nothing for him, yet she could not do nothing—the quandary made itself felt as sharp pangs in her tail.
“We have to leave!” Pavonis said in a panicked voice. “We’re so close to the surface that they’ll attempt to catch us next.”
