Beautiful to Me

by E. L. Tenenbaum

  It happened when I was alone in one of the greenhouses, determinedly singing to a bird of paradise that refused to blossom before its season. Marel had been adamant in his attempts to make it happen anyway, so I, of course, had been chosen to bring his efforts to fruition. I was wholly involved in the task before me, to the point that I had to try out a whole repertoire of tunes on the stubborn flower. Finally—finally—it began to bloom, the orange petals yawning open to allow the slender purple ones tucked inside to peek through. I stood back and smiled at the flower triumphantly, and only then noticed that someone had joined me in the greenhouse at some point.

  I turned with an amiable smile on my face, which slowly faded when I caught sight of the jumbled expression on his.

  “Your Highness?” I carefully asked.

  I had never seen the prince look so distraught, and it worried me. I took an involuntarily step forward, maybe to comfort him with a touch on his arm, a kind word, something, but I stopped myself abruptly. He was the prince, I was only a gardener.

  “My sister,” the prince began without introduction, his accent unusually thick, his voice quite unlike his own, “my wonderful, darling sister, whom I love to the end of the earth and back, feels so indebted for the happiness I have brought her that she has reminded my parents that being already three years over twenty mine is long overdue. She has convinced them that there is a particular young duchess here, whom I…ah…must befriend. Immediately. Forever.”

  The dissonant staccato that ended his announcement temporarily threw me off from its meaning. When I finally understood what he’d said, a range of emotions made quick and merciless work of my heart.

  To start, I felt confusion and despair. Why was he telling this to me?

  Next, I felt anger and indignation. Why was he telling this to me?

  Plus, I felt envy and impatience. Why was he telling this to me?

  In short, an unexpected heat began somewhere in the pit of my stomach and snaked up to tightly grip my heart. Why was he telling this to me?

  “Your family is diligent in acting for the prince’s best interests,” I answered carefully, “and ensuring the kingdom’s future.”

  The prince turned a bewildered gaze upon me. “They are, very much so,” he admitted. “This duchess is said to be quite a prize.”

  “Congratulations,” I offered quickly, perhaps a little too quickly.

  I wasn’t prepared for the pain that immediately leapt to the prince’s face, a hurt he made no effort to hide. I was equally unprepared for the feeling that arose within me in response to it.

  The prince stepped closer, his agitation increasing with his proximity. “Don’t say that, Ariel,” he pleaded softly. “Please don’t say that.”

  His hand began to rise of its own accord, and I was certain he would reach out to me again, but my words stopped him in his tracks.

  A deep swallow. “Why not, Your Highness?” I asked.

  I was barely breathing and my mind wasn’t clear enough to figure out why on its own.

  The prince must have noticed, or at least picked up on some clue about what was going on inside me. If so, he surely must have understood it far better than I, because his expression suddenly softened and a small, hopeful smile begged to be set free across his lips.

  “Surely you care, you must care,” he said gently, his voice too low, dragged down with unreleased emotion.

  At that point, had I already lived three hundred years, I still wouldn’t have anticipated those words or their heavy implication. I stared at the prince, mute as a mermaid without a tongue. What was I supposed to say to him? That though I enjoyed being with him, talking with him, sharing in his experiences, I never imagined that it might mean anything more to him. That I couldn’t allow myself to entertain such a thought. That though I knew he sought me out on purpose, that though I knew his touch from the night before was no accident, my little mind could never fathom that I could ever be worthy of a prince’s attentions? Of his attentions? I didn’t even think I was remarkable enough to turn the head of a common man, so what was the prince doing here before me, saying these words, his hope filled eyes so close to tears? Until then, I hadn’t been foolish enough to give credence to such thoughts, and whatever choking, whatever vigorous drumming my traitorous heart was doing then was entirely beyond my control and directly against my mind’s wishes.

  Besides, wasn’t he supposed to be asking such things of Sienna, who would surely nod in gleeful agreement? Hadn’t she been the one to trade in her tongue and tail, to trade away her life and family, to forgo her magic and a painless life for a pair of human legs just so she could be near him? I was never even supposed to be here, on land, in this palace, getting to know him and those deep, soulful, enveloping black eyes, within which was the unspoken confession that he would defy his mother, his father, his sister for me. Me.

  It was supposed to be Sienna. It had to be her or she would die, melt away into the foam of the sea well before her time.

  But it wasn’t her.

  It wasn’t even close.

  There was no comparison between her and me. Surely, the prince knew that. Surely, he saw it for himself.

  So why was he still here, still looking at me with such undiluted hope?

  My shock must have registered all across my face, because his hope vanished, slumping his frame forward with its release.

  “Please say something,” he pleaded.

  “I…care, um, for the prince’s, uh…happiness.”

  “That’s it?” The prince ran an unsteady hand through his dark black hair, mussing it so stray strands slipped over his forehead. He took a shaky breath and nodded unconvincingly to himself. I soundlessly flapped my lips like a fish out of water, trying and failing to say more.

  He turned on his heel and strode toward the door, then abruptly stopped himself and strode back toward me, stopping again just a few inches from my very still frame.

  “I wish,” he began, his voice broken but clear, “I wish you would see, that you would listen, too.”

  He paused, and his eyes took in the entirety of my face, starting from my own inky black hair, traveling over my too-wide eyes, down my still-too-pale skin, to my neither very full nor very red lips. His dark eyes shot back up to my amethyst touched blue ones and searched them for something, something down in the very depths of my soul. He raised a hand and this time he allowed his fingers to linger as they softly traced my cheek, my jaw.

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I needed air—no—I needed water, calming, refreshing water. Right. Now.

  “I hear you, I see you,” he whispered. “Always have.”

  He dropped his hand and my skin felt suddenly cold from its absence. He dawdled a moment longer, perhaps waiting for me to speak, before turning again and leaving the greenhouse without another word.

  My heart called after him, it yelled at him to return, it berated my mind for being too submissive, too fixated on helping someone who never cared a whit about me, but my lips remained pressed together.

  I shudder to think of how clearly he heard that, how my silence was louder than anything I could have said.

  The last morning of Queen Cordelia’s visit, she came to the gardens to bid me farewell. I would have made sure to send her off with the rest of the palace as was fitting, but I had developed a rather strong desire to keep out of sight of her brother, who would surely be there when she left. So much so, that in the days following our discussion, or interaction, or whatever it was in the greenhouse, I had taken meals in my room and fled to the gardens early each morning, keeping myself busy until very late at night with petty details that had me erratically moving from section to section. Acutely aware of the view from the prince’s study, I stayed away from the hedges, finding a myriad of tasks to keep me occupied elsewhere and out of sight.

  I was thus knee-deep in the dirt of the vegetable garden, pulling weeds and pounding in small stakes to mark the boundary of each new row, when the queen found
me.

  I made to rise and curtsy when she approached, but she waved me back to my work.

  “You’ve been so busy of late,” she remarked, though not unkindly, “I wouldn’t want to pull you away from anything important.”

  “I’ve come to realize just how much I’ve neglected, Your Majesty,” I replied. “And with the season changing, there’s so much more to do.”

  The queen nodded and made one or two comments more before her voice trailed off completely. This may or may not have had anything to do with the ferocity with which I was pulling out small weeds or the way I kept unintentionally snapping the thin stakes each time I pushed them too hard into the ground.

  “I had breakfast with Arlando this morning,” she said abruptly. “Just the two of us.”

  I ripped a weed so hard it tore up the surrounding soil.

  “My brother hasn’t been himself this past week and I fear it’s because he’s been rather troubled,” she went on. “A state he’s achieved at an alarming rate in just a few days.”

  I said nothing in reply, just pressed my lips tightly together and continued to savage the garden. I knew the queen was watching me carefully, but I was too beside myself to do anything about it. Why should I care if the prince was troubled anyway? Why should it bother me if he was anyone but himself? Didn’t I know almost better than anyone else what it was to feel like a stranger in my own skin?

  “I introduced him to the most charming girl just a few days after I arrived, but he couldn’t muster more than a few words to say to her,” she continued, unknowingly rubbing salt into the open wounds of a bleeding heart I had no idea how to mend. “He didn’t even ask about the kinds of books she prefers to read.” She paused, searching for words to capture something only she sensed. “He’s just been so…distracted.”

  The stake I was trying to press into the fresh soil snapped. I didn’t move at first, my frustration at the way every little thing was going wrong rendering me temporarily immobile. I was almost upset enough to march myself over to the sea and demand my tail back from Tatiana, announce that I was done with the whole misguided affair, and leave Sienna to the fate she’d unwisely chosen for herself. It was clearly past time for me to return home. Who cared if I would now be leaving a part of me behind, a part I had never known was mine?

  And yet…I couldn’t just leave. Not anymore.

  “You seem rather distracted yourself,” the queen pointedly remarked.

  I finally flung down the wrecked pieces, no longer pretending there was anything I could do to set it back to rights. I glanced up at her, the full range of my distress and frustration unwittingly evident on my face. I tried to rein them in, but it was too late. She’d seen it all.

  “Oh dear,” she sighed.

  “I apologize, Your Majesty,” I rushed to say, with all the sincerity I could muster. “I didn’t mean for—I didn’t think—I wasn’t—and then it just happened. But I want him to be happy and do what’s right and I don’t know what to do!”

  She quieted me with a wave of her hand. “I understand,” she said in a tone at once regretful and resigned

  “I’m so, so sorry,” I whispered forcefully, so she would understand that I hadn’t meant to betray her, that I hadn’t meant for any of this to happen, that I hadn’t intended to have anything but soil and stems and petals in my hands, not a heart. Definitely not my heart, and certainly not his heart either. “I could never even imagine, never anticipate anything like this,” I added brokenly, my voice choking with tears that would never come to relieve the pressure of my tangled emotions.

  The queen nodded sympathetically, studying me closely where I knelt in the dirt at her feet. I suppose her unshakeable practicality finally won out, because she finally relented and reached out a hand to me. I was reluctant to take it in my muddied state, but I also couldn’t refuse her. Gingerly, I grasped her fingers, but dropped them as soon I stood up. The queen looked me over once before nodding to herself in confirmation of some inner thought.

  “I wish you safe travels, Your Majesty,” I said weakly, returning to the original reason she’d sought me out.

  In reply, the queen lifted my chin with her finger and studied me from one angle then another, much as Marel had that day he’d credited my gardening to faery magic.

  “Don’t worry, Ariel. It will be all right,” she promised, before leaving me there to wonder about just what she meant with her vague words and just how worried they should make me.

  After all, they could mean she would have a talk with her brother and tell him to leave me alone. Or that her parents would force the prince’s marriage to this supposedly charming duchess before he could do something foolish with a no-name, no-history commoner. They could also mean that, now that I had finally learned how to love this human world, I would be thrown out of it and permanently returned to where I truly belonged.

  The Last Attempt

  Days after my little chat with Queen Cordelia in the garden, I found myself knocking on the door of the prince’s study. After many hours of deliberation, wherein the pain in my heart was surely a match for the pain in Sienna’s feet, I came to the conclusion that it would be best for everybody if I immediately returned to the sea. Without me to distract him, Sienna could have one final chance with the prince in her little remaining time of the bargain, and I was sure she would succeed once his head was cleared of all silly notions about a particularly unexceptional mermaid. The very fact that the prince had fallen for someone humans didn’t agree even existed was further evidence of the cruel twists of irony’s unforgiving hands.

  I had spent the few days since the garden conversation trying to set things to right. To Marel’s delight, I had coaxed every one of his birds of paradise into full bloom, though I would never tell him about the melancholy songs I’d sung to achieve that. Every hedge I’d designed was closely trimmed and detailed to perfection with sketches drawn up to offer reference for tending to their more specific parts. I’d even managed to control my hands long enough to command the vegetable garden back into order.

  The night before I found myself at the prince’s door, I lay awake and relived the feeling of swimming in the sea. I thought of the golden glint of sunlight beneath the waters, of the enchantment of the moon’s silvery glow. I thought of two pink bellies and a world that blossomed in shades and colors not found on earth. I imagined myself wholly surrounded once more by water, how it buoyed me as I sliced through with my glittering tail. I focused my mind on the life I’d always known, of the creatures I ruled over by virtue of my birth and worked hard to convince myself that I missed it more than I would ever miss this life on land. I told myself it was time to stop fooling myself, to stop being someone other than myself, it was time to go home.

  When I woke, I said goodbye to my room and the sea life frolicking above, promising the carved figures that I would soon be among the real life creatures that had inspired their design. I made sure the room was neat, my few dresses pressed and put away, then I swept up the latest book from the prince and exited the room, leaving the door open behind me to show it was unoccupied and no longer required privacy.

  I don’t know what would have happened had the prince not answered the door to his study, even in his partly disheveled state, small dark rings forming above his cheeks to reflect the shadows from his eyes. I suppose I would have left the book on his neat mahogany desk, then turned and walked right out of the palace and straight into the sea, not stopping for a moment until I felt my legs replaced with the tail always meant to be there.

  But Heaven had other plans for me that day, which were made evident when the scruffy-faced, shadow-eyed prince opened the door himself. For the briefest moment, he seemed slightly taken aback to see me there, but that look was quickly replaced in favor of another, more meaningful one.

  “Ariel?” He barely breathed my name, the whisper of the wind on a quiet sea, each syllable the beautiful white crest of a wave. He held the door open for me. “Come in.”


  And against the blaring warnings of my more rational mind, I did.

  His study wasn’t anything like the way I’d seen it before. Instead of the neat room I’d visited a handful of times, disarray now held court, which was largely the fault of the crumpled papers littered all over the desk and floor and variety of texts pulled from the shelves and left open in odd places about the room. I would have been certain the prince was in middle of researching any of the numerous topics that interested him, or working on some other official business, or even new invention, had I not caught sight of my name at the top of one of the angrily discarded pages.

  Before I could look, or feel, any further, I closed myself off and thrust the book into the prince’s hands. “I very much enjoyed this one, Highness,” I said emphatically. “Thank you.”

  The prince glanced at the world in his hands, his numb confusion of its presence there evident on his face. “But I didn’t yet bring you another,” he stuttered.

  “I know,” I said simply, my entire being wholly focused on the few words I was allowing to cross my lips.

  The prince’s head shot up sharply at that, his ears hearing what I hadn’t yet found the courage to say.

  “You’re leaving?” he asked, not bothering to muster the strength to quell the hurt those two simple words caused him.

  He was still standing in the doorway, giving me the distinct disadvantage of having to pass him to leave the room. So I hesitated. And that made all the difference.

  “Why?” he asked, and Heaven alone knows how those three little letters almost broke me.

  I shrugged because there wasn’t anything I could say to him, nothing that would make sense at least. I fished about for something, anything to offer anyway, figuring he deserved some sort of phrase or even weak explanation to hold onto until he found his footing, and his senses, again. I also had to get him away from the door, so I could get out of the palace before the damage I’d unwittingly caused was truly irreparable.