The Teeth in the Tide

by Rebecca F. Kenney

  Something shifted around him—was it the light? The currents? He swirled around in the water and there, not fifty lengths from him, surged a mighty ship, its sails bellied out by the wind. Pale froth broke around its gleaming bow. Sheets of thin metal reinforced its structure, and spikes of the same metal skewed from its sides, endangering any mermaids who swam too close. Several mermaids escorted the ship even now; Rake glimpsed their dark forms flicking through the water, just below the surface. They waited, hungry, hoping that one of the sailors might lose his footing and tumble into the sea.

  Rake was not supposed to approach, not without invitation or permission, but the glorious sleek swell of the ship’s hull lured him, like the bead of luminescence dangling before the jaws of a deep-dwelling fish.

  He swam nearer, taking care to give a wide berth to the other mermaids.

  A flash of hair caught his eye, golden as the sun itself, and nearly as bright. Rake squinted painfully, shading his eyes with his hand. A man perched at the stern of the ship, his feet planted between the spikes that bordered the railing. In one hand he gripped a rope that draped from the mast, and with the other he reached out, cupping the wind in his palm, testing its flow. The sun touched the planes of his face. Even at this distance, he was beautiful.

  Rake had caught a glimpse of this man before, had heard the high mermaids speak of him in vicious, ravenous tones. This was the captain of the Wind’s Favor, one of the last ships that still dared to brave the waters around the island.

  The captain’s easy stance and lithe grace squeezed Rake’s heart, constricting his lungs. With every scale, every muscle, every drop of blood in his veins, Rake wanted to be that man. Regal. Magnificent. Free.

  An impossible dream. A senseless desire that soured his stomach and sickened his mind with wishes that could never be.

  Rake whirled away from the ship. He couldn’t stay in the light and the air. He had been summoned, and the longer he made them wait, the more harshly they would treat him when he arrived.

  He dove, a sleek arrow piercing the layers of the sea, flicking his tail to increase his speed. He snatched a few necklaces from a hollow in his cell and hung them around his neck, and he clasped gold cuffs to his arms. The mermaids crafted no such things—all his jewelry was salvaged from human shipwrecks. Humans, with their legs and soft voices, their fire and technology, fascinated him. He often traced the delicate shapes of the pendants and bracelets with wonder, wishing he could see how they were crafted in fire.

  Calla, the oldest of the three Queens, had given him most of his jewelry, and it was for her that he wore it every time he came to Court. She cared more for beautiful things than the other queens did, and for that reason she had saved his life when he was newly spawned. His carrier, a high mermaid serving the Court, had already produced three males, and was disgusted that she had been cursed with a fourth. She nearly tossed him to the current and let the merlows have him, but Calla intervened. “His coloring is unique,” she had said. “Put him in the nursery.”

  Rake remembered it, as all mermaids recalled each moment since their spawning with pain-sharp clarity. Once, he had hoped that Calla might care for him. But that hope had died long ago.

  He smiled bitterly, clamping the last cuff around his upper arm. He checked the gold studs that lined his lobes, three to each pointed ear. All were in place.

  Time to go.

  Sweeping out through the entrance to his cell, he swam past the quarters of the other Court males. Gast, the newest of the group, saluted Rake grimly, three fingers held to his brow. Rake returned the gesture and sped on, past a forest of tangled kelp, over a ridge, and across the training space where the mermidons practiced their lance-work.

  The coral columns of the Queens’ residence spiked stiff before him, rich violet, blood red, and faint green. He threaded his way through the outer rings of pillars to the central chamber. The darkness of the ocean wasn’t troublesome for him—he could see through it easily—but he loved the way the Court was perpetually illuminated by cages stuffed with bioluminescent slugs and glowfish plucked from the deepest crevices of the sea. The pinkish-orange glow reminded him of sunlight.

  And in that glow he saw the Queens—two of them, at least. Calla sat on a throne of coral embedded with sea glass, her skin a deep ochre and her scarlet hair twined with the blue frills of jellyfish. She had gills along her throat, like him, and her flat breasts were studded with pearls. Below them, her belly was swollen tightly. She would be spawning soon—within a week at most. And this was the third quarter spawning, which meant she’d be birthing lesser spawn—another dozen mermidon young to crowd the already teeming nurseries. Her crimson tail curved, its blue streamers fluttering through the water.

  Beside Calla sat Queen Bruta, on a throne of spiked bone and broken shells, her seat padded with cushions woven from hair both mermaid and human. Her skin and bald skull gleamed dull, dead white, like the shards of bone behind her, and her tail was narrow, ridged with skinny fins like an eel’s. Like Calla, she was heavily pregnant with the young she’d been gestating for the past two months. A servant quivered in the water before Bruta, filing the queen’s already razor-sharp teeth to more acute points.

  Several attendants moved at the edges of the Court chambers, transporting food in covered baskets woven from seaweed, offering up fresh collections of shells and jewels, laying out recently scavenged trinkets for the Queens’ inspection. Acrid’s throne, a starfish-studded fragment of whale skull, was empty, and Rake felt himself relax a little. Perhaps she wouldn’t be present.

  Then pain flared sharp along his ribs, and the whip of a stone-hard body threw him off balance. Queen Acrid rounded on him, her teeth bared in a feral smile. He glanced at his side, where scarlet blood spiraled from the slash she had made.

  “Welcome, Rake,” she said.

  “Illustrious Queen Acrid.” He bent his head to her.

  She snapped her jaws, her short purple hair shifting with the movement. Blue and violet dots speckled her face, thickening to a mottled mass over her chest and along her arms. Her tail was a medley of colors too—it might have been beautiful if he hadn’t been so painfully familiar with the spikes rimming the edges of the broad fin.

  Acrid’s stomach was flat, ridged with muscle. She’d skipped the last round of mating to recover from an accident involving a shipwreck and a spiked net. The down time hadn’t improved her temper.

  She whipped past him again, marking his other side with her teeth and then coming back again, mouth open, to consume the curls of his blood in the water. She set her blue-splotched lips to his ribs, licking the cuts, and Rake kept his face impassive, already erecting the mental walls that protected him during sessions such as these.

  He had images ready in his mind, scenes and figures that would enable him to perform without being truly present. Some of them were his own, and others had been gifted to him by a creature whose existence Rake kept secret—the only being with the power to transfer a memory. From that dark entity, he’d gleaned a stolen vision of a human couple, kissing by a ship’s rail. A buxom woman leaning from a lifeboat, her neckline sagging as she peered at the water.

  Among his own memories, his favorite was the form of a young human girl Acrid had given to Bruta one year, as a spawning present. The girl’s clothing hung from her beautiful body in ribbons, and she spasmed, eyes wild, as the water flooded her weak lungs. Rake had stared, longing to touch her, to save her—but it was already too late. No use risking his own life for a corpse that was merely meat to his Queens. But in his imagination the girl lived on, warm and smiling, soft curves and slim parted legs. He conjured her now, his sweetest memory, his shield against the claws that sank into his flesh and the hard bodies that bruised him.

  But Calla swept forward, her crimson tail swishing behind her, and she said, “Acrid, this is not a mating session. Remember yourself.”

  Acrid snarled, a screech echoing from her throat, but she swirled away.

  Queen Calla�
�s eyes were golden, her pupils horizontal slits. “I have been watching one of the high-spawn, a four-year male. I elected to keep him as a future servant for our attendants, but he’s been causing some trouble—talking too early and too much, resisting orders, making forays beyond the nursery limits. Normally we would throw him out, as I have no use for difficult males.”

  Acrid hissed her assent, and Bruta snapped her jaws together, taking off one of her attendant’s fingers and cracking the tooth file in half. The wounded mermaid cringed away, clutching her hand, and Bruta plucked the floating finger from the water and ate it. It was all Rake could do not to flinch at the crunching of the bones.

  “In this case,” Calla continued, “We know the male’s parentage. And we have decided to give him one chance. Not because the little slime-scrap deserves it, but because he is of good stock.”

  “Good stock?” repeated Rake.

  Acrid burst into titters. “By the deep, you are stupid, Rake!” She curled in on herself, laughing, and then wrapped her spiked tailfin under his chin and tipped his face up. “You’re the good stock, idiot. The fingerling is one of your spawn.”

  Rake’s heart twisted. “How do you know?” he said, before he realized how insolent the question would sound.

  Acrid jerked her tail up, knocking his lower jaw against his upper teeth. “How dare you speak to us this way? I should have your scales torn out, and your fin slashed.”

  Rake sank to the sand immediately, stretching full-length and face-down before them. He had no doubt Acrid would keep her word. His heart thundered, but not so much from fear this time—from wonder. If he did have a male-spawn, he wanted it—wanted him. Wanted, with a longing so harsh and hungry that it frightened him.

  “I am a worm, a slug,” he said. “Of course you, my Queens, wisest and fairest in the sea, have ways and knowledge that I cannot understand. I beg your forgiveness for my foolish question.”

  Bruta grunted. “I say throw the idiot’s spawn to the merlows. Our lower sisters have been too hungry for too long. A little appetizer should soothe them.”

  Rake closed his eyes. No, no, no. But if he begged, they would know how much he wanted the child, and they would kill the spawn for fun.

  He risked one glance, one tiny look upward through his lashes at Calla. At times, he suspected that among all the males, he was her favorite; and as he met her golden eyes, he hoped their frail connection would be enough.

  She blinked at him, a thin film closing sideways first over her eyes before her lids flicked down. He couldn’t read her expression.

  “Bring the spawn,” she said abruptly, and one of the mermidons at the edge of the chamber darted away into the dark water.

  Rake stayed as he was, face-down just above the sandy floor, even when Acrid seated herself on his back and began pulling out strands of his dark blue hair, one at a time. When he didn’t react, she gathered all his hair into her fist and yanked his head back, trailing a pointed claw along his throat.

  “You are so boring today, Rake,” she said.

  “I am sorry for my failure, my Queen.”

  “Maybe you’re hungry.” Acrid waved to another servant. “Bring my breeder food.”

  The mermidon brought him a basket of fish and swollen scallops. “Eat,” said Acrid. “Restore your energy, so you can better amuse me.”

  She gripped his wrists and pinned them against his back, so he was forced to struggle and snatch at the food with his teeth as it floated up from the basket. Acrid giggled, and Bruta laughed, and even Calla smiled.

  “That’s better,” Acrid said, releasing Rake’s wrists only to pry his jaws wider and shove a whole fish into his throat. “Now we’re having fun. Because if you aren’t fun, what’s the use of you?”

  He choked down the fish and stared into her glassy white eyes, trying not to let his own eyes reveal how much he hated her. “I live for your pleasure, my Queen.”

  “Yes, you do.” The triumph and hunger in her eyes turned his stomach.

  “Presenting the spawn, as requested, my Queens.” A mermidon spoke from an archway, and from behind her she drew a small male with indigo hair, pale skin, and a skinny tail that flashed with golden scales.

  The gills along Rake’s throat stilled. That coloring and those dark blue eyes matched his own—except that the young one’s eyes were flecked with gold. His gaze darted to Calla, but she only swished her tail irritably.

  “What are you waiting for? Take the little slug and go. You are responsible for him now. If he breaks our rules, shows disrespect, speaks out of turn—”

  “—or annoys me,” Acrid put in.

  “—or annoys Acrid, he will be thrown to the merlows.”

  Rake bowed his head. “Yes, my Queen.”

  “Take him and begone.” Calla turned away.

  Rake darted forward, seizing the young one’s wrist and pulling him along, toward the ring of pillars. But before they reached it, Bruta said, “Wait.”

  Rake tensed. So close.

  He turned. “My Queen?”

  “The slug has misbehaved. We should show him what happens to the worthless.” Bruta beckoned another servant. “Fetch the human meat. The one we caught earlier today.”

  Swallowing, Rake tightened his grip on his spawn’s thin arm.

  A few moments later, two mermidons towed a cage into the throne room. Inside the cage, gripping the bars, floated a dark-skinned human boy several years younger than Rake himself—maybe fourteen or fifteen. He was alive. The mermaids had fitted him with a breathing device that locked tight around his head. Rake scanned the strange headgear—an old piece of technology, one of a handful of priceless treasures that the high mermaids had brought with them when they fled their old cities and came to this part of the world. Whatever science had crafted the device was lost in the Great Upheaval of the world, when cities, both above and under the sea, crashed down, and continents shifted and currents changed. Rake knew of the cataclysm from overhearing the oral histories recited at Court. But he had never seen one of these ancient charms—in fact, he had doubted their existence. If this breathing mouthpiece was existent and functional, what of the other legendary devices? The ones which allowed a mermaid to change form and take on the shape of legs? Could such a thing be real?

  Rake thought of the human captain. Of his sturdy legs, his bold stance, and his freedom.

  “Pull him out of the cage,” ordered Bruta.

  The mermidons did so, angling their heads so their mouths nearly brushed the boy’s dark skin. Their necks jerked, lips trembling at the scent of flesh, but they dared not eat. The delicacy of human flesh was reserved for honored high mermaids and Queens. Occasionally the merlows barricading the island got a taste when a human tumbled into the sea, but since the merlows had little intelligence beyond the instinct to devour, they were exempt from the law.

  Rake himself had never tasted human flesh, and though he was curious about the flavor, the idea of eating something that could speak to him was distinctly off-putting. Even dolphin flesh gave him difficulty. It was something about the eyes. He hated consuming anything that looked intelligent.

  Bruta swept up to Rake and took the male-spawn’s face in her hands, her nails etching blood-marks in his pale skin. “Watch, little worm, and learn your place,” she growled. “You are worthless. You are good for nothing except breeding our spawn and sating our appetites.”

  Rake’s soul bent at the words. Hearing them poured into the young one’s ears set his teeth on edge.

  The spawn nodded, his cloud of navy curls bobbing, and Bruta shot away, straight to the human boy floating outside the cage. The human’s stomach caved with each terrified breath as Bruta traced his ribs with her claws.

  “There’s not much meat here,” said Bruta, her voice thickening with hunger. “But come, my sisters. Come, and eat.”

  Acrid shrieked with excitement, the power of her voice furrowing the waves. Calla’s eyes widened, her muscles tightening, and she unhinged her lower jaw,
her throat gaping dark and hungry behind glittering teeth. She uncoiled like a spring, tearing toward the boy as Acrid did the same. They met in a savage swirl of lashing tails and swift jaws, slicing through the boy’s flesh easily. Blood clouded the water, and the mermidons inhaled it eagerly, snatching red chunks and white bones tossed aside by the feasting queens.

  Even with the queens and their guards distracted, Rake dared not leave until he was dismissed. But he turned to the tiny male beside him and looked into the eyes that so nearly matched his—eyes that already held hurt and hate and a spark of indomitable spirit.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “I have no name,” said the small voice.

  Rake thought for a moment and tried to remember when he didn’t have a name. He had felt amorphous, lost amid all the other spawn, until the day he gave himself a name as bold and fierce as he wanted to be. “I will call you Jewel, because you are precious to me.” A small act of rebellion, of claiming, and Rake clutched it with all his will.

  “Why am I precious to you?” the boy asked.

  Rake smiled. “Because you exist. Is that not reason enough?”

  When Jewel smiled back, Rake felt his heart swell. Warm and light as the air. Golden as the sun.

  -3-

  Kestra

  Kestra was washing the breakfast dishes when Mai burst into the kitchen, leaving the back door wide open.

  “Close it!” chided Kestra. “You’ll let in the flies.”

  “Hush, you fool!” Mai clapped a hand over Kestra’s mouth. “Listen.”

  Kestra’s hands stilled in the soapy water, her fingers tucked between the plates to keep them from clinking.

  “Wait,” whispered Mai.

  And then Kestra heard it—a long, bright note winging its way across the rooftops of the town.

  Kestra’s heart exploded into butterflies. “The bugle.”

  Mai nodded, grinning. “A ship’s been sighted.”

  Kestra’s mother passed by, a basket of laundry balanced on her hip.

  “May I go and see the ship come into port?” Kestra asked.