by Liz Kessler
“Aurora . . .” Aaron said. “Your daughter was Aurora?”
The man’s head snapped toward him. “You know her name? You have heard the stories?”
What could we say? We had never heard these stories. But we knew all about Aurora. The one true love of Neptune’s life. The human who broke his heart when she tried to swim to him on her birthday and drowned.
Aaron’s ancestor, Aurora: Jeras was her father.
It was almost too much to take in. Jaw open, Aaron stared silently at Jeras. And then, in a small voice like a young child’s, he asked, “Are you my family?”
Jeras stared back at him for a long time. Eventually, with a slight lowering of his head, he replied, “I think I am, Aaron, yes.”
“Go on,” I said, reaching across to take Aaron’s hand in mine. “Continue with your story.”
Jeras took another sip of his drink and a long, wheezing breath in and carried on. “I planned and planned and worked so hard over those following months. It was all I thought about, all I cared about. I spoke to Terra’s people, and finally she allowed me to visit her.”
“What did she say?” I asked. “Did she go along with the plan?”
“She loved the plan! She saw power for herself. She had long wanted to extend her influence beyond the land. I was the broker to a deal that could potentially give her a chance to share authority with the king of all the seas.”
“And what was in it for you, other than your daughter living in comfort?” I asked.
“I told Terra that I would only arrange it if she would let me back into her circle. She said if I could make the deal happen, she would grant me whatever I wanted.”
“What did you want?” I asked.
For the first time since he’d started talking, Jeras looked uncomfortable. His face seemed to darken. His eyes flickered as he looked away. “I wanted power,” he admitted. “I said to her, ‘Make me big. Make me powerful.’”
“And what did she say?”
“She told me to go ahead. She told me to make the arrangement with Neptune, and she said that once I shook hands with him, she would do exactly what I asked of her.”
“A — a business deal,” Aaron stuttered. It was the first time he’d spoken since realizing they were related. “It was a business deal.”
Jeras wriggled awkwardly on his seat. “I . . . yes. Yes, it was,” he said quietly. Aaron glared at him, face set and hard.
“How did you make it happen?” I asked. “Did she know?”
Jeras shook his head. “Not at first. Terra helped me make contact with a few important people. Finally, the contacts led us to Neptune.”
“You met Neptune?” I asked, amazed.
“I was taken out to him on a boat. We met on a secret island in the middle of the ocean. At first, he laughed in my face, roaring, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’”
Yup. That sounded like the Neptune I knew.
“So what changed?” I asked.
“I showed him a drawing. It was my wife’s. She had drawn a picture of Neptune and Aurora together. On their wedding day.”
“Did she know about the plan?” Aaron asked. He spoke through his teeth. His hand clenched harder around mine. He was angry, I could tell. I wasn’t surprised. This was his ancestor we were talking about — the love of Neptune’s life — and we were discovering the whole thing had been a business arrangement.
“She didn’t know, either,” Jeras said. “Look, I know you are probably judging me — and there’s nothing you can think about me that I haven’t thought about myself. There are no words you can call me that I haven’t called myself.” He spoke to the floor. “And there is no forgiveness anyone could offer that I haven’t rejected for myself.”
He looked up and met my eyes. “I will never forgive myself,” he said.
Aaron’s fingers loosened around mine a little. “Go on,” he said stiffly. “What happened next?”
“Neptune fell in love with her,” Jeras said simply.
I stared at him. “From the picture?”
“Pretty much. He stared and stared at the picture, then he informed me he was keeping it, and he handed it to one of his assistants. He also informed me that I was to arrange for him to meet Aurora — and that I was not to tell her we had already met. I was not to tell anyone of the arrangement.”
“So they met through you?”
“I engineered it. They met — and the rest was up to them. They fell in love at first sight. Everyone could see that. They were married within weeks. It was a blissful time.”
“And the deal with the land gods?” I prompted him.
Jeras looked wistfully away from us. “Funny thing,” he said. “It never happened. After that first meeting, Neptune and I never referred to the business arrangement. We never shook hands. It didn’t seem to matter.”
“So you never became big and powerful?” Aaron asked.
Jeras held his arms out to point to his surroundings. “What do you think?” he asked. Then he shook himself. “But I didn’t care, not then. We were content. Aurora was bursting with joy. She gave us a grandchild. Thanks to Neptune and his generosity, we didn’t go hungry again. They were happy, happy times.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “Why did it change?”
Jeras’s face clouded over. “Despite the good outcome, my actions began to eat away at me. Each time I saw the joy on my daughter’s face, I thought about how her happiness had come about. I felt I had deceived her and betrayed my wife. I started to have nightmares. Anxiety gnawed at me. My secret began to destroy me. Even though Terra had never made me powerful, and although it was true love between Neptune and Aurora, I still knew what I had done. I knew I had planned to give my daughter away as part of a business deal. I couldn’t forgive myself — not until my wife and daughter knew the truth.”
Jeras paused as he took a few breaths. We waited for him to continue.
“It was Aurora’s birthday. She was so happy. She and Neptune had some big plans to celebrate that evening. I couldn’t go on feeling such conflict every time I saw her smile — and so I told her. I told them both. Aurora and Fortuna at the same time.”
Another long pause. Then, in a voice so quiet I had to lean in to hear him, Jeras said, “Aurora couldn’t believe it at first. She made me repeat myself three times. Each time, I watched the happiness drain out of her, until it seemed she was a doll made of cloth with nothing to hold her up.”
“And your wife?” I asked.
“She didn’t say a thing. She stared at me, looking at me as if she didn’t know me. As if I were a stranger. She wouldn’t speak to me.”
Jeras paused to take a few slow breaths before continuing. “Aurora could not take it in. I tried to tell her that even though it had started as a business arrangement, it had become love almost immediately. I told her that I had never received the favors the land gods had promised. That these were no longer important to me once I saw how happy she and Neptune were together. I tried to convince her that Neptune adored her with all his heart. Anyone could see that was the truth — but she no longer believed it.”
Aaron clapped a hand over his mouth. “That was why she swam to him,” he whispered.
Jeras nodded, lowering his gaze to the ground as he did.
Aaron had always known the history of Neptune and Aurora. I knew it, too. Aurora had swum to Neptune on her birthday and drowned in the process. We always thought she had tried to get to him for love. Now it seemed it was out of desperation.
“She ran out of the house,” Jeras went on. “Said she had to ask him herself. She needed to hear from his lips that he loved her. She said she would never believe another word I said to her.”
A tear fell from his face to the floor. Jeras swiped a hand across his cheek, and then, voice almost breaking, he said, “They were the last words she spoke to me.”
The fire crackled and hissed in the corner of the room as we sat there. I had no idea what to say.
After a while,
Jeras stood up. He went over to the fire and threw a log on it. Then he reached down and picked up a large, round rock. He brought it over to us. It had something carved onto it.
“My wife took to her bed when we heard the news and never again got up,” Jeras said. “I spent every day trying to explain why I’d done what I had, trying to get her to understand.”
“And did she?” Aaron asked.
Jeras shook his head. “She wouldn’t listen. She told me I was never again to speak to her, lie beside her, or come near her unless I could find a way to make things right.”
“And?” I held my breath while I waited for him to reply.
“I promised I would,” Jeras said. “Promised over and over that I would somehow find a way, even though I knew in my heart that it was impossible. Our daughter was gone. Nothing would ever be right again.” He paused, before adding in a whisper, “My wife didn’t speak to me again. She died a week later.”
“Oh, Jeras,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
He held the rock out so we could see the carving. “I found this beside her in the bed.” It was a picture of a heart — broken into two pieces. “I buried her beside her favorite lake.” Jeras’s voice was a croak.
I glanced at Aaron. A wet track wriggled down his cheek. “You lost everything,” he said.
“I deserved to,” Jeras replied. “Terra came to see me with her team of officials when she heard what had happened. She saw my grief, and for a moment, I thought she would decide it was punishment enough.”
“But she didn’t?” I asked.
“The grief of a mere lifetime was not enough for her,” he replied. “Or for me. She knew Neptune. Knew that he would find out what I had done. She cursed me to live until he forgave me — which we both knew would never happen. That way, I would suffer for longer than a natural lifetime.”
“Wow,” I breathed. “And that was it?”
“That was it from her side, but even that was not enough for Neptune. He sent people to see me. We had been living here on this island in the middle of the ocean ever since Aurora and Neptune had married. They lived together in a castle not too far away.”
“Halflight Castle!” Aaron exclaimed.
“You know it?”
“It was my home!”
Jeras allowed himself the tiniest hint of a smile. “Of course it was,” he said softly.
“Are you telling us we are near Halflight Castle now?” I asked.
Jeras lifted his shoulders in a slow shrug. “Geographically, yes,” he said. “But Neptune created such magic around that castle, it’s almost impossible to find.”
I knew that. I’d only just managed to swim there myself. It was where I’d first met Aaron!
“Neptune and Aurora were very happy there for their brief marriage,” Jeras went on. “Neptune had found this island not too far across the ocean, and Fortuna and I lived here. There were other people on the island, but we kept to ourselves.”
“So did Neptune’s people find you here?” I prompted him.
“They did. They questioned me for hours, and I told them what I’d done.”
“You admitted that you’d told Aurora about the deal?” I asked.
“I welcomed the chance to confess. I needed to let it out. And anyway, I was beyond caring about myself. I had nothing to live for or care for — there was no punishment that could give me more pain than I was in.”
“So what happened?” I asked gently.
“A few days after the visit, the skies darkened, and the sea around us began to rage, huge swells exploding into enormous waves across the beaches. A terrible storm came. Others thought it was just bad weather.”
“But you knew better,” I said. I knew better. I knew all about Neptune’s power to create a storm at sea when he was in a bad mood. And I knew enough about his feelings for Aurora to know that this was probably the worst mood he had ever been in.
“Neptune blamed me totally. He was right to. I blamed myself in equal measure,” Jeras went on. “He came after me, and when he found me, he threw everything he had at me. Quite literally.”
“What do you mean?” asked Aaron. “What did he throw at you?”
“It was like a series of explosions. Like cannonballs being hurled across the ocean — only they were made of water. A tirade of bombs, miles wide and built from deep-sea swells, plowed into the island. The first one exploded on the sand near me. I was thrown across the beach by the force of it.”
“Yikes,” I murmured.
“And that was only the beginning,” he went on. “One after another, the water bombs came for me. Half of me wanted to give up and let them hit me. The other half — I don’t know. Maybe it was instinct, maybe cowardice. Whatever it was, I ran from them. They chased me up the hill, each one punching a hole the size of a lake into the cliffs, until finally they stopped. I don’t know why. I never found out whether Neptune thought he had finished me off or if the top of the mountain was too far for his reach. Or maybe the fire of his anger had simply run its course.”
I knew full well that Neptune’s anger hadn’t run its course. It was Aurora’s death that made him ban marriage between merpeople and humans for hundreds of years. I decided not to tell Jeras this. I didn’t want to make him feel even worse.
“Whichever it was, the water bombing had changed life here for good,” he went on. “Neptune made the island forever inaccessible. Cut it to shreds so the sides of the island were impossible to climb, shrouded it in a cloud that would keep it hidden from the rest of the world, and left behind him the biggest, angriest waterfall the world had seen.”
“With you stuck at the top of the highest mountain,” Aaron said.
“Yes. Cut off from my wife’s grave so that I could never even visit her,” Jeras said. “The fierce torrents in the tunnels were Neptune’s final word. The only way off the top of this mountain was a route that I could never make. His magic ensured that they would always run too fast for anyone to survive them.”
“Did you ever try?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. A few times. Told myself it didn’t matter if it killed me since I had nothing to live for. But thanks to Terra’s curse, it wouldn’t even do that. Just left me feeling as close to death as you could get, but without actually dying. Plus, whenever I tried to get through, it spat me back out this side again. I couldn’t do it.”
He looked at us both. “Nobody can do it. It’s not possible,” he said. “Which leads me to you two.” Jeras stared hard from one to the other. “You are my descendant,” he said to Aaron. “You are also Neptune’s descendant. Does this mean what I think it must mean? Are you one of land and sea?”
Aaron nodded. Jeras turned to me. “And you, too?” he asked.
“Yes. We’re both semi-mers,” I replied.
Jeras laughed softly. “Semi-mers. I like it,” he said. “Either way, your journey here cannot have been easy. And yet you made it anyway. You must be desperate.”
“We are,” I assured him.
“And it wasn’t me you even wanted to find. It was — a giant?”
“He is in your wife’s drawings,” Aaron said. “He’s the only one who can save the island.”
“Save the island — from what?”
“From an earthquake that is going to kill us all,” I said.
Jeras stared at me; his dark eyes felt as if they were boring holes straight into my mind. Then he got up. “OK,” he said. “I have told you my story.” He went over to his fire and poured water from a carved-out shell into his makeshift pan. “Now I will make some more tea,” he said.
As the pan began to hiss and bubble, Jeras sat in front of us. He reached out to touch Aaron’s arm.
“You have given me a reason to care,” he said. “I have not had that for hundreds of years. So we will drink tea together, and as we do, you will tell me your problem. And after that, I will do everything I can to help you find a way to fix it.”
Jeras was as good as his word. He sat silently while we
told him everything, his dark eyes fixed on us as he listened.
Only when we had finished did he speak.
“I understand what you’re telling me,” he said. “I believe you as well. I, too, have felt an occasional rumbling and mistaken it for thunder. I, too, have drawings of my wife’s that point to future events. I’m sure that her forecast is correct. All the others were.”
“But?” Aaron said.
Jeras held his arms out wide, to indicate the extent of his house, of the mountain, of everything. “But there is no giant,” he said simply.
“There has to be,” I insisted. “You said yourself that your wife was never wrong. We’ve seen the pictures. We need the giant.”
“Listen to me,” Jeras said firmly. “There. Is. No. Giant.”
He was right. It was time to face the facts.
“So what now?” Aaron asked, his voice rising with panic as he spoke. “What are we supposed to do? Fortuna got it wrong!”
Jeras was shaking his head. “I don’t understand it,” he muttered almost to himself. “Fortuna never got anything wrong. She can’t have —”
“Look,” I interrupted them both. “Whether she ever got anything else wrong or not kind of doesn’t matter now. However it has come about, she got this wrong. So we need to forget about the giant. The giant doesn’t exist. We can’t sit around here discussing the ins and outs of how and why the drawings are wrong. What matters is that there’s an earthquake coming, and we need a new solution.”
Jeras and Aaron stared at me, identical looks on their faces. If I hadn’t been so filled with panic in that moment, I’d have commented on how similar they looked, how touching it was to see Aaron with a father figure like this — but there was no time to dwell on things like that. So instead, I did what I always do when times get hard and I’m trying to figure out what to do.
I got up and started pacing.
Around and around the room. Pace, pace, think, think.
Come on. There must be a solution. There has to be.
I paused my pacing to sit on the floor and twirl my hair around a finger. The other thing I do when I’m thinking.