My trepidation intensified as I jumped back into the water. Over the past couple of weeks, I’d learned enough to tread water until my grandfather lowered himself in. He touched my hand and I was able to breathe as we both dove under the surface. Being pulled along by my grandfather was no less exciting than when Ari did it, but it was much lonelier. My grandfather couldn’t hear me the way Ari could, and I couldn’t speak to him. I had no way to communicate with him beyond pointing. I had such difficulty remembering where the cave was but after an hour or so, I found the entrance. The cave was dark with only a few shafts of light pouring through. Even so, it was easy to see that Ari wasn’t there. He wasn’t in his small underwater house in Havfrue either. My grandfather, maybe in an attempt to make it up to me, took me along every coral-lined street in Havfrue to no avail. We asked around and found a few people who knew him, but no one had seen him for days. Eventually, we had to give up and head back to land.
As we broke the surface near the dock, he turned and thanked me.
“What for?” I asked, but I already knew. I’d righted a wrong that had happened twenty years ago. I’d reunited him with his eldest daughter. He took hold of the Havfrue Ruby around my neck.
“You know, I gave this to your mother on her eighteenth birthday with the promise there was enough magic in it to grant her one wish. I cannot believe after all these years, she’s not found anything important to wish for.”
“What do you mean?”
He smiled and let the ruby go. “It still holds its magic. I can feel it. I guess the wish now belongs to you.”
“If this holds a wish, why didn’t she wish for legs instead of visiting the sea witch? It would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”
He nodded. “It would. Perhaps she didn’t realize just how powerful the Havfrue Ruby is...perhaps she didn’t want to use anything associated with me.”
I kissed his cheek as he left me on the shore with the promise he’d be back to visit soon.
I made my way up to my bedroom and flopped down on the bed. The pain in my leg was now only a dull ache, but I used it as an excuse to think about something other than Ari. My head had been full of nothing but thoughts of him for hours, wondering where he was. I poured myself a bath and pulled off the dressings that Adella had applied. My leg was almost healed. She’d done an amazing job. Whatever was in those sea herbs of hers certainly worked better than anything I’d seen used on land. A faint scar still showed, practically silver on the skin of my thigh where the sea witch had cut.
However hard I tried not to worry about him, my thoughts turned back to Ari. If he’d decided to go back to the ocean, why wasn’t he at home? If he’d gone to the sea witch, he’d have found her gone. No matter how hard I tried to think of where he could be, I couldn’t come up with a plausible reason for him to disappear like that.
I’d just finished shampooing my hair when I heard a knock on my bedroom door. I quickly rinsed off and wrapped a towel around myself. I should have dressed before opening the door, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered if it was Ari, finally back from wherever he’d been. If I let him wait too long, he might leave again.
I opened the door quickly. It wasn’t Ari. Astrid, her hair a mess of straggly green and contrasting red eyes ran past me without waiting for an invite.
I’d seen Astrid upset before, but I’d never seen her cry. She just wasn’t the crying type. Snot dribbled down from her nose, and her cheeks were red and blotchy. In short, she looked a mess.
I passed her a towel and sat next to her on the bed. I’d been so caught up in my own stuff, I’d not spared a thought for Astrid. The last few weeks had been tough on her. First with the public rejection of marriage to Hayden, then losing her beautiful hair. I didn’t know what had happened more recently to make her react the way she was, but I could hazard a guess.
“Is this to do with Hayden?” I ventured. She nodded.
“What has he done now?” The guy had been acting like a total ass the last time I saw him. If he’d been that way with me, I could only guess how he’d been with Astrid. He’d told me he was only dating her to get back at me.
“He proposed to me.”
Of all the words I expected to come out of her mouth, never in a million years would I have guessed those.
“He asked you to marry him?”
She nodded her head and wiped her nose at the same time.
I knew I should be smiling and congratulating her, but after what he’d said to me the last time he’d seen me and the state of her now, I was rendered speechless.
“I know he loves you,” she hiccupped. “I overheard you two talking the other night.”
“I’m sorry,” I began, not knowing what else to say.
“It’s okay,” she replied wistfully. “I don’t blame you for anything. It was apparent that you had no idea of his feelings any more than I did.” She sniffed again, so I handed her another tissue.
“You said no to him, right?”
“I said yes,” she replied with a small smile on her face. It was not the happiest of smiles. “I know what you are thinking. Why would I say yes, knowing that he doesn’t love me, knowing that he’s in love with someone else.”
“I was wondering.”
“He’s a good catch. His father is the admiral of the navy, and he’s a sea captain. He confessed everything after I confronted him and told me he wanted a second chance.”
I tried wrapping my head around what she was telling me. He only confessed to her after she told him that she’d overheard everything he’d said to me. Would he have done that if she’d not heard anything? It wasn’t this that gave me pause, though. It was something else she’d said.
“What do you mean sea captain? Hayden isn’t a sea captain.”
She smiled again, this time a genuine smile full of happiness. I could see the pride in her face. “Actually, he is. He was offered the position a few days ago after volunteering to go out to sea and bomb Havfrue when the tide was way out. Not many men would do it, but Hayden was the first in line.”
I hated him then. First in line to bomb Havfrue. It made me sick. He must have gone straight to his father after our little talk. After I’d told him that I was in love with Ari.
“When did he propose?” I asked.
“It was the morning after you disappeared, not that we knew that you’d disappeared at the time. He was on his way to his boat when I apprehended him. He didn’t have much time, he was on his way to handle some important mission, but he asked me to marry him.”
Just hours after declaring his love for me, he’d proposed to Astrid. What a louse!
“Do you really want to marry him, Astrid? After everything that you now know about him?”
“I do. I really do. I know it’s not perfect, but I love him.”
I knew how love can make you do crazy things. I was willing to give up my life for Ari, but I knew he loved me back...or at least, I thought he did. Now with him missing, I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I was as naive as Astrid was. Maybe we were both lovesick idiots together. Still, some of the things she said didn’t quite add up.
“If you want to marry Hayden despite everything, why are you so upset? What are the tears for?”
“He’s been gone for a few days. I haven’t seen him since the proposal. He told me he didn’t want to marry me the way I looked. He said I looked ghastly and that I should find someone to bleach my hair back blonde. I don’t know what to do. I was hoping I could somehow go to the sea witch and beg for my hair back, but I was just told that the sea witch is dead. I’m stuck with this forever.” She pulled a clump of hair up and let it fall again.
I couldn’t believe Hayden would say such a thing, but the fact that Astrid still agreed to marry him was even more unbelievable. Astrid was a strong woman. What had Hayden done to her to make her want him so badly that common sense flew out the window?
I desperately wanted to find Ari, but Astrid needed me more right now.
“M
y mother employs hairdressers. I could ask one to come up and help with your hair, but before I do that, I think we need to talk.”
Astrid gave me a grateful smile. I wondered if she’d still be so happy when I finished telling her what I thought.
By the time the hairdresser arrived an hour later, Astrid had heard all I had to say. I’d always loved Hayden, but the way he was behaving right now was downright obnoxious, and I wasn’t about to let Astrid get herself caught up in whatever was going on with him.
She listened. There were tears, but she took in everything I had to say. My heart almost broke for her as I spelled out what her life would be like married to someone who bossed her around and, worst of all, was only doing it to make someone else jealous.
As the hairdresser got all her equipment out and laid it neatly on the bed, Astrid took a deep breath and nodded. This past week had been tough on her, and her strength had been zapped, but I saw the look of determination on her face as she followed the hairdresser into my en-suite bathroom.
As I waited, I tried piecing together everything that she’d told me about Hayden. Not about his love for me. I already knew that. I needed to find out more about where he was. She’d told me he was in a rush when he left. He left the same day as Ari disappeared. I hated thinking it, but in the back of my mind, I wondered if Hayden had something to do with Ari’s disappearance.
Whichever way I looked at it, the timing of everything seemed suspicious. The morning I was found missing was the same day that Ari also disappeared, and it was the same morning that Hayden left, supposedly on his own ship. I didn’t want to believe that Hayden would do anything so awful, but the way he’d been acting recently, I wouldn’t put anything past him. My heart ached at what Hayden had turned into. He claimed it was because of unrequited love for me, but even that didn’t add up. Yeah, he’d kissed me once, but it was so many years ago. Surely, if he had a crush on me, I’d have noticed? I sighed, not knowing what was going on in his mind. I’d always been able to read him like a book before and now...?
“What do you think?”
Astrid stepped out of the bathroom looking amazing. The hairdresser had done something so wild, so fantastic that Astrid had never looked better. She’d not done what Hayden had asked of her. She’d done something so much better. The hairdresser had shaved the sides of Astrid’s hair, leaving it long on top. The messy algae color it was before was now a much brighter green with blue ends that fell in glossy waves down her back. The grin on Astrid’s face told me that I’d done the right thing in telling her not to follow Hayden’s wishes. If he loved her, he’d love her no matter what her hair color was, and I had to say, she’d never looked cooler. My parents would probably not be too happy about having a green and blue-haired, partly shaven, lady of the court. However, I could hear reporters shouting all the way up here, so I figured they had enough on their plates not to worry about hair color. One thing was for certain, the royal family was getting its fair share of airtime on the kingdom’s news stations.
“You look...I can’t even express how fantastic you look. I love it. It looks like you jumped off the cover of a trendy magazine.”
“I know,” she squealed, jumping up and down. “It’s amazing. I love it too.”
And with that, the Astrid I knew was back to her old self.
While she’d been getting her hair done, I‘d been mulling over a theory, and if I was right, she wouldn’t be the only one returning to their own self. It would also make the smile on Astrid’s face just that little bit wider. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell her what I thought. If I was wrong, it had the potential to hurt her more, but I needed someone on my side and without Hayden and Ari around to help, she was the only person I could think of that would be up for the adventure.
“Follow me,” I said beckoning her with my hand. “We are going to get our boys back.”
A boy recovered
Knowing what had happened was one thing, or at least, thinking I knew what had happened. Knowing where they were was another problem entirely. I had an inkling, but I didn’t want to be sailing around forever looking for them. I grabbed Astrid’s hand, and the pair of us headed downstairs. There was only one person I needed to speak to, and I was pretty sure I knew where to find him. I opened the door to my father’s conference room to find it packed to the gills with reporters. Only by standing on my tiptoes could I see my mother and father at the other end. As soon as the reporters saw that Astrid and I had entered the room, they swung around and began snapping photos of the two of us together. I guess finding out the queen was half mermaid wasn’t enough for the press, they also had to expand on the switching brides too.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” my father called out. “Please, can you let these fine ladies through?”
The group of reporters parted, leaving a small pathway for us to squeeze through.
“What is it, Erica?” asked my father as we neared the front.
“I was hoping to speak to Admiral Harrington-Smythe,” I replied in a voice low enough so that the reporters wouldn’t hear. “I thought he’d be in here with you.”
My father shook his head and leaned in to me. “The old chap has taken a couple of personal days. I think the thought of bombing that underwater place affected him a bit. It’s a good thing the water came back really. I’m not sure if he’d have been able to go through with it.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You mean to tell me that the admiral hasn’t been seen for three days?” The exact same three days that Hayden and Ari have been missing. Interesting!
“That’s right.” He turned to Astrid. “Oh, I love your new do. Very fetching. It almost looks like you’ve got the ocean on your head.”
Astrid beamed. I grabbed her hand again and pulled her back through the crowd, ignoring the microphones thrust in our faces and the questions the reporters were throwing at us.
“Where are we going?” asked Astrid as I pulled her through the front door of the palace and ran down the long driveway.
“We are going to find out where Hayden and Ari are. I think Hayden’s father might know. I just hope he isn’t with them because if he is, I’m out of ideas of where to look.”
There were no reporters by the front gates. They were all inside, but there were still plenty members of the public waiting there to get a photo of the palace or one of the members of the royal family. They were going to have a field day today because I planned to go through the gates.
The guards on the gates weren’t too happy about me having them open the gates, but they had to do what I asked them. As an afterthought, I had one of them accompany us across the street. I’d been in Hayden’s home many times over the years and had always been welcome, but now, when Hayden’s father answered the door, he all but slammed it in my face.
“I’m looking for Hayden,” I began. “I was wondering if he was home.”
I knew full well he wasn’t home, but I wanted the admiral to acknowledge the fact.
“I’m afraid he isn’t,” the admiral sniffed, trying to shut the door. The palace guard I’d asked to come with us wedged his foot in the door to stop it from closing entirely.
“Can you tell us where he is?” I asked again, this time trying to sound more confident. The truth was I’d always been a little scared of him, but I wasn’t about to back down.
“No,” he blustered. “I don’t know where he is. I’ve not seen him for days, now if you wouldn’t mind.” He looked pointedly at the guard who looked to me for guidance. I shook my head.
“Admiral Harrington-Smyth,” I started again, filling my voice with steel. “I think you do know where Hayden is. I think you just don’t want to tell us. I’m not planning on leaving here until I get some answers!”
His face fell as he opened the door wider. “You’d better come in.”
He shuffled to the living room where he called for his wife.
“Evaine, darling. Could you be a dear and get some tea for our guests?” Evaine Harrington-Blythe
looked surprised to see us as she came into the room. “Erica, Astrid, how wonderful to see you both. If you are here to see Hayden, I’m afraid you are out of luck. He hasn’t been home for days. Goodness only knows where he’s taken himself off to.”
“Yes, yes,” said Henry impatiently. “Would you bring the tea for us and some of those wonderful cakes you made this morning.”
She smiled and left the room. I had a feeling that wherever Hayden was, his mother knew nothing about it. His father on the other hand...
“You know where Hayden is?”
The Admiral shook his head. “Not exactly. He didn’t tell me where he was going, but three days ago one of your father’s naval ships was stolen. One of my senior men told me that they’d seen Hayden commandeering it.”
“Commandeering?” asked Astrid.
“Stealing, hijacking, whatever you call it. He took the ship without my permission. That’s why I’ve not been to work. I can’t begin to think of a way to explain to your father, the king, why my son would steal one of his majesty’s fleet.”
“How did he manage to steal a ship?” I asked.
Henry raised his hands to the sides of his face and began to massage his temples. “He told the crew that he was there on my orders. It was one of the smaller vessels, but even so, sailing it on his own would be incredibly difficult. Almost impossible, I’d say.”
“Do you think he might have someone with him?” I asked, thinking of Ari.
“It would make more sense for him to have another member of the crew on board, but all of the Oceanis crew...that’s the name of the vessel, are accounted for. I’ve asked them to keep this quiet for now, but I knew it would get out eventually. I’ll go and tell His Majesty this afternoon.”
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