“No,” Mirella said hastily.
“We’ve been worried about it, actually,” Allie said. “But…it’s really pretty here. I just thought— Maybe we could stay the winter, so you could keep talking to him and we could keep talking to our friends here.”
“What friends?”
They started throwing names at me. “Kassia.” “The man who sells the conchs, he talks to us a lot.” “And Miss Ariand. She said she could use some help in her accessories shop.”
One thing I had learned about managing my little sisters a long time ago is that I had to persuade them into doing what was best for them, and often that meant playing along until they came to their own conclusions. It was something my mother told me before she died. Don’t give people what they expect, give them what they really want.
My sisters thought I would argue about leaving, but they wouldn’t really like working in some boring shop. “Well, if you want to,” I said. “I suppose we could all work. Settle down. It’s very cold here, but it’s true. I wouldn’t mind talking to that man a little longer.”
They looked at each other.
“Really?” Mirella said. “We could stay?”
“Really?” Allie echoed. “All winter?”
My brow furrowed. For once, this wasn’t working. “Come on, girls, you don’t really want to stay. In this boring place?”
“But why not?” Allie joined in. “You afraid we might actually make some friends if we stayed in the same place for a whole year?”
“I don’t mind making friends,” I said. “It’s just—there are new places to see.”
“Why do we always have to see new places? What’s wrong with just seeing the same places? Maybe not everything is about places. Sometimes people are better than places,” Allie said.
I was a little stunned at just how firm and mature she sounded in this moment. My shy little sister—she was a grown woman now, past her eighteenth year, even if it was hard for me to see her that way. And Mirella was turning seventeen.
I had a squirmy feeling in my gut that I didn’t like at all. “You’re telling me you don’t want to travel anymore?”
“I don’t know, Talwyn…maybe. For a little while, anyway…”
“We never really have liked scavenging,” Mirella said. “It’s just what we do to survive.”
‘“I don’t know what sea crab got into your hair tonight,” I said, bristling. “If you hate it so much, you could have told me.”
“Not really…”
“This is a cold place to stay all winter,” I said. “Warmer waters await. New friends, too. We just need something good for trading. C’mon, let’s get out of here before the guards come prowling around. Help me.” I reached upward to the edge of the first crate and pulled myself up. Taria wrapped her arms around my tail and helped support me to reach higher and then Allie came in too. My tail was pretty strong, but my fins didn’t distribute weight in the right way to allow me to stand. Their arms helped support me in lieu of feet. The wooden crate at the top of the pile, which was stacked three deep, rested in easy reach.
Unfortunately, now my head was up close to a land-person level and I could see a guard swigging out of a bottle, leaning against a little building in the distance.
I got this weird little jolt, seeing the guard, because it was getting to the point where seeing any man at all made me think of Prince Wrindel.
I really needed to get out of here before I lost my head completely. I wouldn’t be one of those silly mermaids they told stories about, who gave up her whole life to marry a man with legs.
“Guard!” I hissed. I tried to pick up the crate, but it was pretty heavy. “I’m giving it a shove into the water,” I whispered. “Be prepared to grab it and go.”
“I don’t like this,” Allie said.
I ignored her, giving the crate a good push. It slid off the pile toward the water. At the same time, I dove backwards off the other side of the dock. My sisters let go of me, slipping in after me. The crate was bobbing, sinking slowly. The pins were heavy but the wood wanted to float. Allie jammed her hook into the edge of the crate and we dragged it along with us, swimming away as fast as we could.
If the guard noticed us, we never knew. Once we were underwater, we were unlikely to be pursued. We yanked on the rope, dragging the crate under. A few bubbles emerged from the cracks around it as it started drifting down.
The salty water felt good on my skin. This world was weightless and soft, my native element. We used a different pitch to our voices when we were under the surface, higher and more musical, so our words traveled. It was darker under the water, but my senses changed here, too. I saw the dim shapes of the rocks under the surface and the ocean floor, but I also heard obstacles from the way our voices traveled, and sensed things in the currents.
The merfolk said the ocean asked its children not to think, but to simply be.
As the years went by, I understood this more and more—not because I was good at simply being, but because every time I went to the surface, I started to think. And wonder. And question. Not just about things I was supposed to wonder about, like the beauty of a coral reef, or the meaning of the stars, but…other things. Things about the human world. What was it like inside their grand theaters, what use did they have for all their writing, and what were all their strange contraptions for?
This, the elder merfolk called “the Great Temptation”. Dolphins and octopi were intelligent creatures too, but mermaids were the only creatures of the sea who were cursed with the ability to speak to the legged folk and the potential to be intrigued by their world.
A world where I knew I didn’t really belong.
Wrindel spent a lot of time by the water. That was where I first noticed him, just standing on the shore, looking out at the endless gray water. There was something irresistible about him, from the first moment, seeing a man standing alone, right on the edge of my world. His boots were stripped off, his trousers rolled up to his knees, his feet crusted with sand, the wind whipping his hair into his eyes. That was how I would always see him.
“Talwyn, I don’t know if there are pins in here,” Allie said. “It doesn’t feel as heavy as it should.”
“We’re far enough away,” Mirella said. “We might as well check. It would be silly to keep lugging this crate if there isn’t anything useful inside.”
“Fine,” I agreed.
Allie took another tool from the belt woven from fishing net she wore around her waist: a small prying bar. We stole useful tools from shipwrecks whenever we could, and used them until they rusted. Allie liked this part best. It was no wonder, I thought begrudgingly, that she wanted to work in an accessories shop, where she could carve shells, poke holes in things, and shape wires and netting. She loved working with her hands.
The crate had been sort of half-floating along with us. Mirella and I held it down as best we could, sending up small clouds of sand, while Allie pried up the edge.
She pulled out a small box, one of many inside nested in some shipping straw. The box was made of paper that was already starting to fall apart in her hands. Inside was a small cylindrical object with a silver pointed tip.
“Not pins,” Allie said.
“That’s obvious.”
“What is it?”
“Maybe some sort of knife.”
We surfaced to get a closer look.
“If it’s a knife, it’s very strange. It feels like it opens in the middle.” I tried to open it. At first it wouldn’t go, and then it snapped, and something like squid ink burst out onto my hands.
“It’s an ink knife!” Allie said. “But…what for?”
We all paused, sensing the water move strangely around our tails, and ducked under the surface again—just in time for a net to suddenly sweep around my arms and face. I screamed, and Mirella reached for me—only to snatch her fingers back as a flash of magic struck her.
My breath came in short gulps as I heard a woman’s voice sing out behind m
e, “Talwyn Silverfin, your days of thieving are over.”
Chapter Two
Talwyn
The woman jerked the net toward her, bringing me with it as the tight, matted weave tangled me up even tighter. The more I fought, the more I seemed to get stuck in it. I tried to fight back with the strange knife-thing, or better yet, get the bone knife at my belt, but my arms were caught.
I saw Mirella and Allie in front of me holding their knives, clutching each other’s hands, their long hair floating around them. It was too dark to see their faces well, but the moonlight filtered down into their hair in an eerie way. My little sisters… I couldn’t bear to see them scared, and even less could I allow them to see me be scared.
But they had never been as bold as I was. Even now, they wouldn’t go in a shipwreck unless I checked it first. They were afraid to see dead bodies or even skeletons. They weren’t much for fighting either. Maybe I coddled them.
The woman swam close to me. I recognized her now. Rusa had come from the northern waters around the same time we traveled in from the south, and had offered healing services to the villagers here. Charms and curses, too, some people said, but I wasn’t a villager, so I missed a lot of the gossip.
“Please,” I said. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you as my prisoner. That’s all.”
“Why?”
“You’re a thief. The staid village merfolk will never trust a scavenger, you know. No one will vouch for you. And you will never fit in here. You’ve caught the Great Temptation.”
“That isn’t true,” I said, as I practically felt my sister’s worry on the currents that surrounded us. They weren’t moving. “Everything I do is for my family. My sisters and I lost our parents young, so we had to do something.”
“You take your pickings and sell them to the land folk, don’t you?”
“Yes…”
“What do you ask in return?”
I knew my answer would damn me. I asked for music, dancing, wine, a taste of their food. I asked them to throw us a party, and they made a fuss over us. Three mermaids was a thrilling excuse for a village to put on a festival, right there on the beach. “It’s different,” I said. “It’s not the Great Temptation. We don’t stay. We don’t want to be a part of them.”
“No,” she said. “Prince Wrindel is your Great Temptation. And it works both ways. He is as tempted by you as you are by him, and he’ll suffer for his desires, too. Don’t worry. I won’t hurt your sisters. The village will welcome them, with you out of the way. All I want is you.”
Rusa was the kind of figure the merfolk told stories about to frighten their willful young girls into good behavior. How did she obtain all the jewels she wore? I had heard some of the village girls whispering about it. They said she traded with lords and princes for them. But just what did she trade?
“Please!” Allie cried. “Don’t take her! Talwyn raised us! She’s all we have! We don’t trouble anyone; we just mind our own business.”
“You’re grown up girls. It’s time you learned to handle yourselves. Settle down with a nice merman. Talwyn has done you no favors with all this mischief. Don’t you dream of having friends and starting families of your own? You are tired of roaming the seas, aren’t you? It gets old. I know.”
Allie bit her lip. Horror rushed through me. Rusa had probably overheard them in the village, expressing their desire to stay. She was preying on them now, trying to turn them against me.
“What are you up to now?” Rusa smacked the crate with her palm. “Stealing pens?”
“‘Pens’? What is that? How do you know?”
“I know everything. I’m a witch.” She tugged on my net.
I struggled, whipping my tail around, trying to bust the net with my hands. Useless, but I had to try. “Wrindel wouldn’t hurt me!” I said. “We’re friends. He wouldn’t fall for your tricks.”
“He will,” she said. “I have a plan to make you irresistible to him.”
I managed to get my hand free between the net, and I reached for the first thing I could get my hands on: the necklace she wore. I yanked on it with all my might. My sisters rushed to my aid. Allie sawed at the net with her dagger. Taria slashed at her arm, nicking her skin. If this was the last I saw of my sisters, at least I could be proud.
Damnit, don’t think it.
Rusa made a screeching sound at me, and she hissed spell words. Bubbly water rippled toward me. Allie turned to her with the knife, but I didn’t see what happened. When the water hit my head, darkness fuzzed my vision. I thrashed, trying to hold onto consciousness, but it was no use.
When I woke, I was chained up in darkness. I sensed the small room around me, with square walls. It must have been the interior of a shipwreck—probably a holding cell for prisoners on board. Merfolk homes were usually formed in caves or constructed with rocks, and were never so neatly built.
Shackles held my hands behind my back. I pushed my tail against the floor, holding my wrists straight, trying to slip free. The cuffs were tight.
I took a moment to calm myself and reflect. This might be the wreck we’d plundered last spring, in fact, when we first came to this region. I remembered it having a room where I found a drowned skeleton chained to the wall by his wrists and ankles. If so, she’d dragged me quite a ways.
“Rusa!” I shouted. “Where are you? This is a really dirty trick!”
She drifted down stairs, accompanied by a light-fish with glowing skin, and a shark for…well, I probably didn’t want to find out what the shark was for. “Talwyn,” she said. “Is there anyone who would miss you, besides your sweet little sisters? And they are better off without you. I don’t think they really enjoy this vagabond life you’re leading.”
“My sisters are welcome to leave,” I said. “But they love me, and I love them, and they’d rather stay with me. Our life is pretty exciting. I would think you’d understand. You’re not one for settling down. You travel all over the realm yourself.”
“Yes,” the witch said. “But I am alone.”
I couldn’t tell if she was sad about that, or proud. She was hard to read, ancient as she was. Every inch of her face was lined with wrinkles. I had never seen a mermaid so old. The ocean was reasonably dangerous, so although mers could live almost as long as elves, it was rare to meet a mermaid who was facing her natural end.
Yes, Rusa must be near the end of her life, but she seemed so powerful that it was hard to believe. She was clad in an impressive amount of jewelry. The strangest piece was a necklace with gold settings to hold jewels, but only one stone remained: a milky blue-green colored gem. And the there was the heavy black jewel that kept luring my eyes. It gave me a shiver whenever I looked at it, for some reason, as if it held dark power. She came closer to me. I cringed back as reached for my face. Her fingernails scraped my cheek as she touched me.
Her thumb popped something in my mouth. I hadn’t realized she was holding anything, and it took me by surprise. It was small, hard, and round, like a little polished pebble. She immediately covered my mouth with her palm so I couldn’t spit it out.
“Swallow it,” she said.
“Nn-nn.”
“You can swallow it, or I can make you swallow it.”
The shark circled. I glanced around. There must be a way out of this. There was a way out of everything, right?
But between the shark, and the shackles, and the fact that she had magic… I’ll admit it. I was afraid things could only get worse.
Maybe it meant I wasn’t as brave as I thought I was, but I swallowed the pebble. I felt it sliding down my throat, hard and unpleasant. “What is it?” I gasped as she removed her hand.
“It’s a spell, naturally,” she said. “I’m sorry for this part, I really don’t enjoy it myself, but this is not easy magic, as I told Wrindel. Everything that makes you a mermaid has to go into that stone.”
“What does that mean?”
“After the stone passes through you, its mag
ic will have seeped into you, and your magic into it, and—”
“You’re going to make me crap out that stone?”
“Well, where else do you think it’s going to go?”
“You’re disgusting.”
She shrugged. “I heal people, dear. I’ve seen and done much more unpleasant things than that. Don’t pretend to be prissy. I know you’d pluck a treasure right off a bloated corpse if I put one in front of you.”
“I can’t believe anyone would let you heal them. You just kidnapped me. Why would you do anything nice?”
“Well, we’re not that different, are we? Everyone knows about you Silverfin sisters. You wait for shipwrecks. You pilfer things from the dead. You fend off other scavengers with knives and spears. You steal crates off docks. Are you nice?”
“I don’t make the shipwrecks happen. I don’t hurt anyone, not unless they hurt me.”
“Stealing things hurts someone. You know that. You think petty crime is charming, don’t you? Rather rebellious? Why do you steal things? What is your aim? You want something in the end. You get a little amusement from the humans, a few trinkets, perhaps? No, I can’t feel sorry for you. Although I do like you more than I expected. You remind me of myself more than any girl I’ve bargained off.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
Rusa grinned broadly. Despite her age, she still had most of her teeth. “You’re right. I do. But I do like you more than most. The thing is, the more I like you, the more I like selling you. I’m cruel, dear. Maybe some day you shall see, it’s more fun to be cruel than anything else. Once you learn the satisfaction of cruelty, it will never disappoint you.”
My face felt tight with tears. Luckily it was easy to hide tears underwater. All I had ever wanted to do was make my little sisters happy.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe I was selfish. Maybe they would have been happier if we settled down in one village, made more friends, found contentment. But certainly, I might be a thief, but I had never been cruel.
“I don’t think you answered my question,” I said. “Why would you heal people when you’d rather be cruel?”
The Mermaid Bride Page 2
