Mermaid

by Carolyn Turgeon

  But she was ashamed of her selfishness. She was the future queen, after all, not a silly girl, and there was too much at stake to waste time mooning about.

  She did not even let herself take private satisfaction in being able to prevent Astrid, the girl she’d come to think of as her nemesis—though such a designation was not entirely fair, she realized—from marrying the prince. It was an empty triumph, at best. Instead she forced herself, several times a day, to remember the boy who’d drawn a mermaid in the dirt, all the suffering of her people that she would prevent, now and in the future. If only she could make her heart understand that its own wants did not matter, not when there was an entire kingdom to take care of.

  Edele had recovered quickly from the assassination attempt and had immediately occupied herself with Margrethe’s wedding as well as the altering of her own entire wardrobe. The only real sign of what she’d been through was her newly svelte figure, a result of being unable to eat for days. For that, she confided to Margrethe one morning, it had nearly been worth it, especially with Rainer set to arrive at any moment to attend Margrethe and Christopher’s wedding, just as he’d promised.

  “I will remember that,” Margrethe said, “the next time you complain about putting on a few pounds.”

  TWO DAYS BEFORE her wedding, Margrethe took a walk down to the water. It was so different here from the North. It was beautiful, of course, with its bright blue waters and gleaming golden sand, the scattered trees along the shore, the slew of boats tethered to the wooden docks, but she missed the gloomy beauty of the Northern sea. That endless expanse of rock and ice and silver sky. That sense of being at the end of the world.

  As she walked along the shore, she thought about Lenia. What had it felt like for her? Saving the prince, carrying him through that storm—how far had she taken him? I knew I should save him, she’d said. I couldn’t let him die. To think that there was such rich life under the sea. That a creature like that could come to earth, could be curious about their flatter, duller world.

  Margrethe stopped now, knelt on the shoreline. She swept her fingers through the wet sand, watching the lines form behind her fingertips. And then, a moment later, a wave slid over all of it, the sand and her fingers, wiping the lines away.

  And then, there. On the water. A fish’s tail shooting out.

  She shook her head. Stop it, she told herself. She stood up. Time to go back inside, she thought, before she went crazy altogether. Besides, she had a wedding to prepare for.

  She glanced back at the water, and then she saw it, unmistakably: a glittering face, staring at her from the water. There for one second, and then gone.

  A mermaid. She knew it, down to her bones.

  She waded into the water, searching for another sign, walking slowly along the shoreline, until she came to a small group of trees and caught sight of something. A glittering stone. Not anything anyone else would notice, but she recognized that bit of shimmer, and what it meant. She picked up the stone in her hand, and decided to keep it as a talisman. Somewhere she had the oyster shell, too, didn’t she? The one Lenia had left on the rocks after saving the prince.

  Margrethe smiled, squeezing the stone for luck.

  It was only late that night, as she went to her window for the hundredth time, searching again for the mermaid, that she realized, finally, who Astrid was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Mermaid

  FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING, LENIA SPRINKLED THE powder on her dinner, which the servants brought to her room. It was a warm broth filled with soft vegetables and meat. She watched the powder disappear into the liquid, like snow on the ocean’s surface, and then she held the bowl to her mouth and drank.

  Over the next days, Lenia dreamed again and again of her eighteenth birthday. She’d wake in the middle of the night clutching the air, afraid that she’d pulled Christopher underwater. If she’d just lost focus for a few minutes, let his mouth slip under the surface and water fill his lungs, he would have died right there in her arms, the way she’d watched the other men do. She would thrash about on the bed, searching desperately for his body, panicking, feeling the waves lapping over her, and then she would remember. Her own belly. The baby she was carrying now, trying to bring it to shore.

  She stayed in bed for four days. Each night she roused herself from sleep and dreams and forced herself to eat the soup she was brought, sprinkled over with powder.

  On the fourth night, a terrible cramping clutched at her insides.

  When a servant came in to clear away the dishes, she took one look at Lenia and screamed, dropping the wineglass she was holding.

  “Something is wrong!” she cried, running out of the room. “Fetch Agnes!”

  Lenia was covered in sweat, clutching at the sheets. The pain ripping through her body had blotted out everything else.

  This thing in her body, this baby. It was moving through her, making its way out, and she wanted to die, wished she could barrel through time, turn to foam at that instant. It would be a relief to die now, never again to feel like knives and swords were cutting through her, like her body was being ripped open from the inside and out at all times.

  Just let this baby live, she prayed.

  Soon she was surrounded by servants and women, all in a deep red blur of pain and longing.

  “Push, breathe, take my hand …” Instructions came from all sides.

  Her body opened and closed, opened and closed, and the thing inside of it pressed forward, and she was expanding, and all she could think was Let my baby live. This body, she realized, this frail human thing that could expire at any second, that was susceptible to cold and disease, to knives and sea, was stronger than she had ever imagined, to create this thing inside of it, to turn itself into a vessel through which a human child could come splashing into the world, whole and alive.

  A miracle, if it could happen that way, for her.

  Hours passed, and she moved in and out of consciousness. Through the haze of pain and voices she heard a name, her name.

  “Lenia.”

  She was dreaming, she thought, back in the sea with her sisters around her. Vela was there holding one of the pulsing sea creatures she loved to collect, Regitta was there with her son shimmying beside her, his tiny tail a bright green by now, and her twin, Bolette, was beside her, and there was Thilla looking back at her through the water and, behind her, Nadine.

  “Lenia! It is you!”

  A terrible sound then, a deep scream that wasn’t a scream, coming from her own body.

  Her body ripping, the baby coming out of her, the cries and wails, and she opened her eyes.

  “Lenia.”

  She looked up into Margrethe’s face. Behind her, Agnes was holding her baby. Everyone else, other than a couple of servants, had left.

  “It is a girl,” Agnes said, turning to Lenia and Margrethe.

  Lenia looked from her baby to Margrethe and back again.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” Margrethe said. “I don’t know how it is possible, but it is. I know it is.” Her eyes were full of tears. She was disheveled after what must have been hours of hovering over the birth table, but she was still every bit a princess in her purple gown, her long black hair piled elegantly on her head, a line of jewels running across it. “I am so sorry, for everything. I had no idea it was you. I’m sorry for everything that’s happened.”

  Lenia nodded. She was too exhausted to think.

  She reached up, mouthed “my baby,” hungry to touch her, and Margrethe smiled and turned to Agnes, who was washing the child in a small bath the servants had brought in.

  Moments later, Margrethe was placing the child in Lenia’s arms.

  It was so tiny, the size of a lobster.

  The baby stared up at Lenia with bright blue eyes.

  “She is watching you,” Margrethe said. “How strange.”

  Lenia stared down, terrified she would hurt the child, so light and tiny she was barely there at all.

&nb
sp; She checked her daughter over, looking for a fin or a tail. The baby’s skin was red and soft, and she had a thatch of white hair on her head, above her perfect, tiny face. She looked up at Lenia, out into the world, and she opened her rosebud mouth and let out a sharp cry.

  “Your baby is perfect,” Agnes said, walking over. “You are very lucky.” She smiled, and it struck Lenia, right then, for certain: She knows.

  But her baby was demanding her attention, twisting in her arms. The ferocity of the love that came over her then astonished Lenia. It eclipsed anything else she had ever felt. My child, she thought. Her human child, who could never survive under the water.

  I am sorry I will not be able to care for you …

  “Look at her!” Margrethe said.

  The baby continued to stare up at Lenia, her skin glowing and sparkling, and then she kicked her tiny, perfect legs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Princess

  MARGRETHE SAT AT LENIA’S SIDE, WATCHING HER hold her child. Both of them were sleeping now, the same perfect curving pout on each of their faces. The baby’s shock of hair was the color of the moon. A wet nurse waited quietly on a chair on the other side of Lenia, careful not to meet the eyes of the foreign princess who had inexplicably spent hours attending the birth of her rival’s child.

  The room was dark but for a torch burning next to the mother and child.

  Margrethe reached out and stroked the child’s soft forehead, ran her fingers across her long white lashes. She watched the baby’s glittering skin next to Lenia’s clear paleness, which seemed so out of place and strange now.

  Margrethe had known that there was something familiar about the girl. Her pale hair, her blue eyes, her otherworldly beauty. But never had it occurred to her that the girl might actually be the mermaid until the day she’d seen her leaving Christopher’s room, her hair loose, the color of the moon, the faintest glow on her features. It might have been an illusion, the shimmer Margrethe thought she saw on her skin, but she had seen it. Before then she had not imagined that such a thing was even possible. How could it be? How had the mermaid been able to leave the water and come to the earth? It made no sense that the world could work that way. But then later, when she saw the second mermaid watching her from the water, all her doubts had evaporated.

  “Why would you do this?” Margrethe whispered.

  She knew that everyone would be looking for her, that she needed to prepare for the arrival of her father from the North, and the wedding that would follow. But all of that seemed less important now. Nothing in her life had been as beautiful as that instant when she looked down and saw the mermaid emerge from the sea.

  She would give anything, she thought, to return to that moment.

  There was a knock at the door, and, to Margrethe’s surprise, Prince Christopher walked in, tentative and quiet. He stopped in shock when he saw Margrethe, and for a moment he seemed about to turn around and leave.

  Margrethe gestured for him to come forward. She put her finger to her lips. “Shhhh,” she whispered. “They are sleeping.”

  He walked toward her, watching her, and stepped into the dim light from the torch.

  She nodded to him, pointing to the baby. “She is beautiful,” she whispered.

  Christopher hesitated, then turned and looked at Lenia with the child in her arms. Despite himself, despite the discomfort he felt under Margrethe’s gaze, his whole face softened.

  He looked back at Margrethe, radiant.

  She watched him with a mixture of relief and sadness. “Go ahead,” she whispered, and she saw that he was almost in tears.

  He bent down and touched the baby’s tiny hand, which automatically gripped his finger. Laughing, he leaned over and kissed her cheek, ran his fingers through the shock of pale hair.

  He has no idea, Margrethe thought.

  The baby opened her eyes then and looked up at Christopher. She let out a loud cry, and immediately Lenia was awake, sitting up and holding the baby to her.

  The wet nurse stood and said, in a low voice, “I think she might be hungry, madam.”

  Lenia looked frightened but let the woman gently take her child from her arms. She looked up at Christopher and then to Margrethe, and back again, as the wet nurse quietly left the room.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  She nodded, attempting to smile.

  “I thought … Would you like to call her Christina? It was the name of my grandmother.”

  She nodded again, smiling softly now, so dazzlingly Margrethe had to look away.

  How could she have even thought she might compete with this creature?

  “Christina,” he repeated.

  Margrethe watched the two of them, paralyzed by the intensity of the emotions moving through her. So much pain and euphoria, a sense that, even though her own heart was broken, the world could contain such beauty and magic she almost could not bear it. What did her own pain matter, in the face of that?

  “I will let you rest now,” he said to Lenia. “I will return later to look in on you and Christina. My daughter.”

  Lenia nodded, and, with an awkward smile at Margrethe, Christopher left the room.

  They both watched him go, then turned to each other.

  Margrethe felt tears beating at her eyes. The next thing she knew, she was crying, big, fat tears rolling down her face.

  “I am so sorry,” she said. She felt Lenia’s hand on her own, saw her expression through the blur of tears. “I did not know it was you. It never occurred to me it could be you.”

  Lenia kept her hand on Margrethe’s, moving her fingers back and forth.

  “You brought him to me,” Margrethe whispered.

  Lenia shook her head, so faintly that at first Margrethe thought she imagined it.

  “I thought you brought him to me,” Margrethe said. “And that I was meant to love him.”

  Lenia just stared up at her with those blue eyes.

  “Do you remember me? You brought him to me. We spoke on the beach. I would …” Her voice broke. “I would have given anything, to see your world. And then you … Now you’re here. I don’t understand.”

  Everything seemed to crumble, all around them. The sight of the mermaid, with her pale, wounded skin, bloody and tired from birth, made human, dulled down, broke Margrethe’s heart completely.

  “I believed in beauty, in magic, because of you … I thought …”

  Margrethe remembered then, the way Lenia had looked at him that first day. The radiant love on her face. It was what Margrethe had wanted, too. To feel like that. The way the nuns felt, trembling with love.

  “You saw him in the sea. You must have … loved him, to save him. You loved him. He is only alive because of you. And now I have … I just didn’t understand. Is that why you cannot speak? They say you have no tongue. Is it … Is that how you were able to come here?”

  Lenia nodded then, never taking her eyes off Margrethe’s.

  “You traded your voice, your tongue, and your tail, for human legs?”

  Lenia nodded. She opened her mouth, and Margrethe saw the stump of her tongue. She winced at the sight of it.

  Margrethe dropped her voice to a whisper. “Can you … Can you change back?”

  Lenia shook her head, but she did not look sad.

  “I am so sorry,” Margrethe said.

  Margrethe felt like she’d destroyed everything beautiful in the world. And at the same time, she loved the prince. She did. But she did not know how much she loved the mermaid, through him. Would she have felt the same way about him if she’d never seen Lenia bent over him on the beach, seen the shimmer she’d left on his skin?

  In that bleak and windy place, once the mermaid had returned to the sea, Christopher had been the closest thing to magic left in the world.

  “I have to marry him,” Margrethe said, sitting down on the bed and putting her arm on Lenia’s. “I would give him up, I would give up everything, for myself. I would die right now, to let
you have him. But I must marry him. My father has agreed, he is on his way now, with the rest of the court; there will be peace, the two kings in the same room, breaking bread together, and we will be whole again, the way we were before.… So many people have died, have suffered, because of this war, and our union will end all of that suffering.”

  Lenia nodded slowly, and Margrethe could not read her expression. Numb. Resigned. Peaceful.

  The wet nurse returned then, and both women looked up at the infant in her arms.

  “Christina,” Margrethe said. “She’s so beautiful.”

  The nurse handed the child to Lenia, who clutched her in her arms. The baby seemed to melt into her. And then it was not numbness or resignation that Margrethe saw, but joy. Pure joy.

  “I will do everything I can to give you and Christina the best life possible,” she said. “Here, in the castle—”

  But when Lenia looked back up at her, Margrethe stopped in midsentence, stunned into silence by the tears running down Lenia’s cheeks, sparkling like tiny diamonds.

  THE NORTHERN KING and his court arrived that day with great ceremony. After days of frenzied preparation, the Southern court was ready for his arrival, and the two kings stood in the same hall for the first time in decades, shaking hands and vowing allegiance to a common goal, one united kingdom. Huge crowds gathered at the castle—some to protest but most to celebrate the ending of the war, the beginning of a new, better age. Armed guards were positioned everywhere.

  Margrethe barely paid attention to any of it. While the castle filled with diplomats and aristocrats and visitors from the North and the Southern countryside, while great feasts were prepared and dances given and entertainments of all kinds brought out for the celebration, and while soldiers positioned themselves at every doorway, Margrethe spent every possible moment with Lenia.