The Oyster Thief

by Sonia Faruqi

  “Now, for the final touch.” Into Coralline’s updo, Abalone carefully inserted a tiara, a little crown studded with shards of spirula shells that glinted silver.

  “I don’t need a tiara, Mother.”

  “But you do. Every bride wears one. It’s symbolic.”

  “Of what?”

  “Its shape, resembling a seahorse’s coronet, speaks of monogamy.”

  Coralline flinched at the word. “I cannot marry Ecklon.” She’d said the words to herself so many times that she didn’t realize she’d spoken them out loud until her mother’s eyes met hers in the mirror, as still as a pool of settled lava. Turning Coralline about by her shoulders, Abalone plopped her down on the corner of her bed. She perched in the desk chair herself, then, leaning forward, staring at Coralline intently, asked, “What was he like, darling?”

  “Who?”

  “The merman you fell in love with.”

  “How did you know I fell in love?” Coralline said, stunned. “Did Nacre tell you?”

  “I asked her several times, but she wouldn’t say a word. You seem to have quite won her over. I am your mother, though—I don’t need to confirm with anyone, not even you, to know that you fell in love.”

  “If you knew, why didn’t you say anything before now?”

  “Because I was hoping there would be no need. I was hoping you would come to your senses on your own. I see now that you haven’t. Who was he, darling?”

  “A human.”

  Abalone’s lips parted, and her cheekbones paled. Otherwise aristocratic and poised, she suddenly looked disconcertingly confused, as though Coralline had slapped her. “Where is this human?” she snapped.

  “He returned to land. I doubt I’ll ever see him again.”

  “Good. If you’d fallen in love with a merman superior to Ecklon—in wealth, position, prestige—he would be someone for your father and I to consider. But a human is inferior to even the lowliest of mermen.”

  “Love is not about superiority or inferiority, Mother.”

  “But it is.” Abalone’s eyes hardened. “I have a secret that I’ve never told a living soul, not even Nacre, but that I will tell you now to prevent you from making the greatest mistake of your life. Twenty-five years ago, your father wanted to marry Rhodomela, not me.”

  “Rhodomela!”

  “Yes. Trochid, Rhodomela, and I all attended the same school. As you can imagine, I was fashionable, wearing the latest styles of bodices; Rhodomela was studious, always the top student. I had more friends than I could count; Rhodomela had none except for her sister, Osmundea. I was everything Rhodomela was not, she was everything I was not, and the only thing we had in common was Trochid. Both of us wanted to marry him. I wanted to marry him because of his family; your father never ended up making much in the way of carapace, given the do-goodery coral connoisseur profession he chose, but he came from a well-regarded family. Rhodomela wanted to marry him because they had similar sensibilities, speaking incessantly of boring scientific topics. I always assumed Trochid would choose me over her, given that I was more beautiful, but he chose her.

  “One day, he confided to me that he was planning to propose to Rhodomela that evening at a restaurant, Codium. He showed me the rose petal tellin he was going to give her.” Coralline’s hand wrapped automatically around the shell at her own throat. “I nodded along and wished him the best, but I was crying inside from humiliation. How dare he choose her over me, with her hooked nose and plain face? Eager for revenge, I decided to take matters into my own hands.”

  “What did you do, Mother?” Coralline whispered.

  “I bought a rose petal tellin. Wearing it at my throat, I dropped by Rhodomela’s house and, giggling, told her that Trochid had proposed to me. Her chin dropped, and her face became even sallower than usual. Rhodomela was more intelligent than me, but I was more clever—she did not even think to doubt me. That evening, Trochid went to Codium, engagement shell in hand, but Rhodomela did not meet him there as planned. Confused, he eventually swam to her home. There, her parents told him that she had, without explanation, fled Urchin Grove. Over the next days, I circulated rumors that she had fled for a secret lover.”

  A small smile skirted about Abalone’s lips.

  “Disillusioned, despondent, Trochid permitted himself to fall in love with me. I hoped Rhodomela would never return to Urchin Grove, but she did in a few months, when her parents were mysteriously murdered in the middle of the night and her sister’s son was abducted. Osmundea later left Urchin Grove to recover from her grief, moving to Velvet Horn, but Rhodomela remained here. By then, my lie had become reality. Trochid and I were not only engaged but married. No one ever came to learn of my deception. Rhodomela may be a master apothecary, but I turned out to be a master trickster.”

  A long moment passed before Coralline could find her voice. “Do you think Father would have been happier with Rhodomela?” she asked.

  “Probably. They completed each other’s sentences; they read the same books. Rhodomela understood him in a way that I didn’t—and still don’t. Even after a quarter-century of living with your father, I generally don’t have a clue as to what he’s thinking.”

  Coralline tried to imagine her father’s life with Rhodomela. Their home would have been neat, minimalist, full of books, the silence broken by observations on remedial algae and coral reefs. Abalone was ashamed of Trochid’s stump of a hand, perpetually reminding him to tuck it behind his back, but Rhodomela would have been no more bothered by it than Trochid was by her plainness. In fact, if he were married to Rhodomela, he would still be happily working—he would not have been pressured into a miserable early retirement.

  Her father would have been much happier with Rhodomela, Coralline thought, and Rhodomela with him. And it would not have mattered much to Abalone. She would eventually have shrugged off the sting of rejection and married another merman from a well-regarded family. Then, she would have been just as happy, or unhappy, as she was now.

  “Everyone assumes Rhodomela wears black because she continues to mourn the death of her parents,” Abalone said, “but I alone know that it is the loss of Trochid she is mourning. She still loves him; she will love him until the last breath leaves her gills.”

  Coralline’s heart broke for Rhodomela. At The Irregular Remedy, when Coralline had asked Rhodomela whether she’d ever loved anyone, Rhodomela had replied that she had loved once—she’d been referring to Coralline’s father. She’d continued that love is a farce; now Coralline understood why Rhodomela had said so. When Rhodomela had visited the Costaria home to treat Naiadum after the black poison spill, her glance had clung to the wedding-day portrait of Abalone and Trochid on the mantel—perhaps she’d been imagining herself in the portrait in place of Abalone.

  Abalone mocked Rhodomela for being a Bitter Spinster, but it was she who had made her so.

  “Why did you tell me this?” Coralline asked, wishing her mother had not burdened her with the secret.

  “Don’t you see, darling? You’re replaying the love story of your parents. In the present case, Rosette is the equivalent of me, and you are Rhodomela. Trochid was almost Rhodomela’s, but I stole him away just in time—as Rosette is continuing to try to steal Ecklon away from you. And, just as I circulated rumors that Rhodomela fled Urchin Grove for a lover, Rosette has circulated rumors that you fled Urchin Grove for a lover. More importantly, you are like Rhodomela in her tragic flaw. The biggest mistake of Rhodomela’s life was not that she believed me regarding Trochid’s proposal; the biggest mistake was her refusal to settle. She could have married someone else, even if not the love of her life, and she could have built a pleasant enough life with him. But she had an all-or-nothing approach—and so nothing is what she got. You know how her story ends, but you can choose your own ending. I don’t want you to become a Bitter Spinster, unhappy, alienated, ridiculed.”

  Abalone paused and stared at Coralline.

  “Rhodomela did not have the options you do
. Other than Trochid, there was no one in her life. But other than this human”—she pronounced the word derisively—“you do have someone, and not just an ordinary merman. Ecklon is the most eligible merman in the village, yes, but beyond that, he loves you in the truest sense of the word. You owe him your freedom itself; by negating your murder charge, he saved you from lifelong imprisonment. Your attitude toward prison seems strangely passive, but you would never have been able to swim outside, snip algae, marry, have children.

  “Your attitude toward Ecklon is also unfair. You are taking his virtues for granted simply because he is too humble to flaunt them. By taking on a personal case, Ecklon risked his professional reputation to protect yours; by marrying you, he is not only going against his mother’s wishes, but is jeopardizing his personal reputation. To the people of Urchin Grove, it does not matter whether you actually murdered someone—you will always bear the taint of an accused murderess. And with your desmarestia-sea-oak solution, you’ve triumphed over medical convention but have failed miserably when it comes to marital convention—everyone is now calling you the Queen of Poison. The law may be forgiving, but the marriage market is ruthlessly unforgiving.”

  “What do you want from me, Mother?”

  “I want you to marry Ecklon.”

  Coralline thought of telling her mother about her death prognosis. But she wasn’t quite sure she believed Mintaka’s curse anymore, or at least not the abbreviated time frame of it. You will die soon after the light dies, Mintaka had said, but who knew what the word soon meant for stars, given that their life span ranged from millions to billions of years? Also, how would Coralline die? Urchin Grove was not Hog’s Bristle; it was not overflowing with loiterers and dagger wielders. The greatest danger in this village were darts of gossip. Unfortunately, she might be alive for a while yet, Coralline admitted to herself. She’d hoped death would prevent her from having to make a decision about marrying Ecklon, but she herself would have to make the decision.

  “I haven’t told Ecklon about him,” she whispered.

  “Good. You did well to have kept the human a secret.”

  “But I don’t want to live a lie.”

  “Happiness is a lie, darling. It’s something carefully cultivated, mindfully pruned, like the algae in a garden—seeds of truth can ruin it all. Happiness is like the corset you’re wearing—many strings must be tightened to keep it in place. Take comfort in the knowledge that time is the greatest of all healers. One day soon, when you wake up in Ecklon’s beautiful Mansion, you will smile at Ecklon next to you, and you will remember the human as having been no more than a distant dream.”

  28

  Past and Future

  Izar stepped inside his Invention Chamber, his hands balled into fists before his face—Serpens or hired men could be anywhere, lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce. But all was still. That said, it was clear someone had been here.

  Long, new shelves had been carved into the walls and loaded with sheaves of iron and magnesium, as well as belts of bullets, which formed narrow, comet-shaped cylinders. And the floor, which had been hopelessly cluttered before, streaming with Izar’s mementoes of his inventive work, had been tidied. Izar looked upon the space as upon a forest that had been razed. He felt as though robbers had come into his home, and, though they had not stolen his things, they had decided to make the place their own—the greatest theft of all. There was now a coldness to the Invention Chamber, a methodical aspect, a rigidness and regimentation; Izar was looking upon the first steps to mass production, he knew.

  He would have to kill Castor. He had known it the moment Saiph had said it would be Castor who would kill Coralline. At that time, there’d been a distance to Izar’s knowledge that he must commit murder, a distance of both time and space, and Izar had refused to think about it. Now, he acknowledged to himself that to kill Castor would be to kill a part of himself, because the robot was an extension of himself. He had endowed Castor with his own vices—apathy, violence, even the scar along his cheek.

  Izar raised his eyes to Castor’s home, the bulletproof tank of water. But the tank was empty. Castor was gone. Saiph must have had him loaded onto a ship—perhaps they were on their way to Urchin Grove already.

  His spine suddenly weak, Izar keeled over, his hands on his knees, his eyes staring unseeingly at the floor. He listened to the rasps of his breath. His exhalations made him think of smoke—the smoke that would soon spout from Castor’s arm. He would do his best to try to get to Coralline before Saiph, but there was something he had to do first: save the ocean from his creation. Saiph was clearly planning on building an army of Castors, but he wouldn’t be able to if Izar destroyed this Invention Chamber, if he destroyed Ocean Dominion itself.

  He strode to his shelves of combustible chemicals, clear and colored, gathered over the years from all corners of the world. He snatched a pail off a hook and emptied the contents of all the flasks into it. The pail became only half full, but Izar knew it contained the power to burn down the entire building, from the underground all the way up to the thirtieth floor. It was still early in the morning, the workers had not yet arrived, but, just in case, Izar pulled the handle of the fire alarm on the wall to ensure there would be no casualties. A strident sound like that of a police-car siren started blaring all around him.

  Grabbing a set of matches off a shelf, he lit a match, admiring the golden phoenix in his hand—a tiny blaze capable of toppling a behemoth.

  Kelp Cove was a large, circular arena ringed with a forest of thick, long, bright-green fronds of kelp, which acted as a curtain. Two hundred chairs sat on the pearl-white sands, facing a white gazebo with twirling pillars. Waiters wearing crisp white waistcoats erupted regularly from a kitchen along the side of the arena, bearing platters of devil’s tongue, the red algae laid in finger-sized bundles on triangular limestone plates. The waiters also carted decanters of wine, which shimmered in various shades of green.

  “I hope the service is up to your caliber,” Epaulette said to Abalone. The comment was in reference to Abalone’s complaint about the waitstaff at the engagement party.

  “It is,” Abalone said stiffly.

  Epaulette wore a red corset, as though she was bleeding to death at her son’s wedding. Her silver-gray eyes held a matching wounded expression.

  Coralline saw that two plump mermaids were rapidly approaching her, Abalone, and Epaulette: Sepia, Abalone’s best friend, and Telia, Sepia’s twenty-five-year-old daughter. A baby was squealing at a deafening pitch in Telia’s arms.

  In an effort to avoid all of them, Coralline dashed away from her mother’s side and started roaming about Kelp Cove alone. At her engagement party, she’d been intimidated by the presence of a hundred guests; at her wedding, there were twice the number, many of whom had seen her in handcuffs, but she felt indifferent to their stares. A whisper floated over to her ears:

  “Ecklon saved his bride, but look at how ungrateful she looks, the Queen of Poison. Her lover must have dumped her, so she’s with Ecklon again. I wish Ecklon would marry me instead! Maybe he’s changed his mind about her, maybe that’s why he’s nowhere to be seen just before his own wedding—”

  Pretty, purple-tailed, with an aquiline nose, the mermaid broke off upon catching sight of Coralline. Ordinarily, Coralline would have bolted away, pretending to not have heard, but now, she looked at the mermaid coldly before resuming her meander.

  Where was Ecklon? she wondered. He was clearly not with his boss, Sinistrum Scomber, as he had been at their engagement party—Coralline could see Sinistrum grimacing by himself toward the perimeter of Kelp Cove. At her engagement party, when Ecklon had been late, Coralline had feared he’d had a change of heart; now she hoped for it.

  Rosette arrived at Coralline’s side. She was wearing a sleeveless silver corset, and her long red hair was swaying in a fishtail braid down to her waist. “If Ecklon marries you instead of me,” she pronounced quietly, “I’ll kill myself.”

  She and Roset
te had something in common after all, Coralline realized: a desire to die. That was part of the hideousness of love—it created desires no reasonable mind could understand. Coralline patted Rosette sympathetically on the shoulder. Shrugging her hand off as though Coralline was mocking her, Rosette dashed away.

  As Coralline continued to swim slowly through Kelp Cove, she noticed juvenile red crabs starting to skitter along the seabed, seeking refuge among pebbles. A long, thick gray eel sought shelter under a rocky overhang. A bush altered from green to pale gray, and a large, round eye became visible in the gray. The eye coalesced into a face, and the face bloomed into a body, and the body, with eight winding arms, sprang off upon a spurt of black ink. The octopus, a creature of three hearts and blue blood—blood that pulsed with copper rather than iron—disappeared like an apparition.

  Why were animals hiding or leaving? Coralline wondered, craning her neck toward the surface. The waters above were turbulent, ripples cascading downward, but the turmoil was likely caused by the ring of kelp—currents felt more pronounced in circular arenas, just as sound had a way of echoing off curved surfaces. But then, as Coralline watched, the waters swelled measurably, and this was a swell she recognized, one that pushed her away. A white belly materialized, five times her length. Guests tripped over themselves in their rush to get away, but Coralline threw herself at the visitor, Pavonis.

  “Don’t you have an appointment with the grave?”