The Mermaid Bride

by Lidiya Foxglove

  “I think her memory loss is magically induced,” the woman said. “You can tell the memories are there. Magic is blocking them.”

  “I feared as much,” Wrindel said. “And there’s nothing you can do?”

  The woman paused, looking at me strangely. “No.”

  Wrindel saw them out the door before turning back to me. I was sitting stiffly in his bed, feeling like I had failed some sort of test. “I’ll never get my memories back? I can never return to the sea?”

  “Is that so bad? You want to stay here with me, don’t you?”

  “I—I do. But I’m worried about my family.”

  “Tal—” He hesitated. “Of course you are. I could put out inquiries to the other merfolk…”

  “Are you keeping something from me?”

  He paused. “I have to.”

  “Why?”

  “If I told you, you would have to leave. You could never return to this world. I need to keep you safe.”

  “I don’t understand! You’re lying to me?”

  “No!” he barked. “It’s part of the curse. I have to lie to you, and you need to keep from poking into the truth, because you would lose me and I’d lose you. You have to trust me.”

  I rubbed my arms. This made me very nervous. “But…my family. If I could just talk to the merfolk…”

  “You can never go to the shore again,” he said, his words coming more painfully. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Never? I can never—swim in the ocean?”

  “The palace is full of places to swim.”

  “This woman wants to keep me from the ocean,” I said. “She must be my enemy. Maybe she wants to hurt my family! I have to protect them.”

  “I don’t think she wants to hurt your family. I think she only wanted to deliver you to me.”

  “How do you know? Why?”

  “That…I’m not sure.”

  “What kind of answer is that?”

  “I’ll ride down to the docks right now and take my ship out to signal the merfolk. I’ll find out what’s become of your family. I swear it. I can’t lose you.” He grabbed a cloak and rushed out the door.

  When he was gone, I stomped around the room. Stomping was new to me. It was rather satisfying. Last night had been so beautiful, and now it was spoiled beyond repair. I knew that this wasn’t his fault; I believed he wanted my happiness above all else, but how could I stay without knowing? And even if he did find out the situation with my family, how could I live without ever feeling the ocean water again? This choice was so terrible, I didn’t know how I could make it.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Talwyn? It’s Ellara,” a voice called.

  I opened Kiara’s compact and checked my appearance, straightening out my hair and forcing a smile onto my face. “Come in.”

  “Good morning. Wrindel told me I should make sure you’re all right…” She was dressed simply in a gown of pale blue cotton edged with lace, and held something cupped in her hands. “I brought you a mouse, if you want it. If they scare you, I’ll take it away, but it’s my magic to tame them, and I think they’re cute.”

  “What is a mouse?”

  “See?” She opened her hands. She was holding a small, furred creature with tiny round ears and even tinier feet. It sniffed the air tentatively and then squeaked.

  “Oh, it is cute!”

  “Do you want to hold her?”

  Ellara passed the mouse to my outstretched hands. It climbed into my palm and lifted its head to me.

  “She wants to be petted,” Ellara said. “Like this.” She stroked the mouse’s head with one finger.

  “Ah, it’s so soft.” I was charmed despite my distress. “We don’t have furry things underwater.”

  “I can bring a little bed in and she’ll sleep by the fire. It’s just too cute when they do that. Ithrin doesn’t quite get how I can spend fifteen minutes just watching a mouse sleep.” Ellara smiled and then she noticed Kiara’s compact. “Is that—? Did you steal that from her?”

  I nodded.

  Ellara burst into laughter. “She never goes without that thing! Of course, she’s probably already bought a new one, but—” She shook a finger at me. “You’re all the trouble she was hoping I’d be.”

  “She hoped you’d be trouble?”

  “Goblins have a reputation for it,” Ellara said. “We steal things, too, traditionally. But I’ve been good. I’m half-elf after all, and I don’t want to embarrass Ithrin. I know Kiara’s been hoping to catch me at something, though.”

  “I’ll give it back to her,” I said. “Just not yet. If…I stay here at all.” I looked at her. “Ellara, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have to choose. Either Wrindel, and the sea and all my memories.”

  “Ithrin told me,” Ellara said.

  “What would you do?”

  “How can I possibly answer for you? From my perspective, it would be easy. Most of my memories aren’t very good. It would kill me to forget Father, but I know he wouldn’t want me to choose the memory of him over my future. Of course, I’ve never had to choose between entire worlds.”

  “I think I’m happier here,” I said. “But I can’t just consider my own happiness. I think…I left someone behind.”

  “Why don’t we go to the library?” Ellara said.

  “Is there a book about mermaids who turn into humans? Wrin has a book with a picture of a mermaid by his bed…”

  “He was reading some legends,” Ellara said. “But maybe we can find a true account. There is a book for absolutely everything in the palace library. You won’t even believe it.”

  She was right. My mouth gaped open like a fish as we entered the room. In the front of the room were several large tables beneath a skylight. Behind them, books lined all the walls on every side of the long and very tall room. The spines were all sorts of colors, some with gold, some books thick and so tall that I would have struggled to pull them off the shelf, many of them bound in leather. Ornate ladders were attached to the shelves and rolled on wheels. A man was at the top of one of them, putting the books back on the shelf.

  And in the center of the room were drawers and racks that held scrolls and huge individual papers—mostly maps, Ellara said—and collections of letters and documents.

  “Where do we even begin? How do you find anything in here?”

  “It’s organized,” Ellara said. “Either by topic or alphabetically.”

  “Alphabetically?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll explain that later. It’s a lot to learn if you don’t know anything about reading and writing. But all the knowledge of the royal family of Wyndyr is here in this room. Some of the books are a thousand years old. I’ve spent hours here reading about the elven histories and stuff about court manners and politics, preparing to be queen, especially since the king got sick. If you have a question and the answer isn’t here, well…” She threw up her hands.

  “So where do we begin?”

  Ellara checked the shelf, and then she consulted the locked cases along one wall, which seemed to hold old and fragile books. She had a key for them in her pocket. “The perks of being a princess,” she said, with a fanged grin. She quickly found a large stack of material about the merfolk. Her petite form staggered under the weight of them as she heaved them onto a table. I couldn’t help because I was still having enough trouble staying balanced on my feet, but she just said, “I do this all the time.”

  She looked through the first few books. She flipped through the pages so fast I wasn’t sure how she knew what she was looking at.

  “Oh, I’ve been reading since I was a child,” she said. “You get very fast at it. I see lots of the usual legends and tales in here…bits about merfolk life…”

  “Like what?”

  She read me some selections, and they were mostly wrong. More nonsense about mermaids laying eggs.

  “I don’t know if we can trust these books,” I sai
d.

  “But they all say the same thing about mermaid brides…” Her eyes skimmed more pages, densely packed with more letters than I could imagine deciphering. “A man can take a mermaid’s jeweled talisman and she will lose her memories and belong to him…but if she ever lays a hand on the talisman, she will turn back into a mermaid.” She glanced at me. “Did Wrindel take something from you?”

  “Not that I remember…”

  “If he did, he couldn’t tell you, or he would lose you.”

  I frowned. “That fits with what he said earlier. But that would mean…he stole something from me, knowing he would steal my memories, too.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know what would happen?”

  I gnawed on a ragged edge of my nails. I didn’t like this at all. If Wrindel stole me away from the sea on purpose, to prove to me that I belonged with him…it wasn’t much of a choice he offered. Not if I could never remember what I’d abandoned.

  Ellara cracked open a huge book with hand painted pictures of mermaids inside. Dust drifted upward and made me sneeze.

  “Oh, I don’t know these words,” Ellara said. “It’s some ancient language.”

  She turned thick but disintegrating pages. They flecked little pieces off into her hands. We gazed for a long time at the pictures, nevertheless. The colors were beautiful and bright, as if they had been painted yesterday, but the renditions were fairly crude and often quite strange. Many of the pictures showed life under the water, but I stopped at a depiction of one mermaid placing a green stone into another mermaid’s mouth. In the next picture, the mermaid was tied up on the beach, looking distressed while a man pulled a comb from her hair. On the facing page, the mermaid had turned into a naked human girl, crawling on the shore with large tears splashing from her eyes while the man stood over her. It looked like she had been traded off against her will.

  A story unfolded through the pages. The weeping mermaid had legs and wore a dress. The mermaid and the man were in bed together, with his body on top of hers. In the final picture, she was holding a baby.

  “I don’t think I want to see this book anymore,” I said. “This doesn’t seem like a very happy mermaid.”

  “Well, it has nothing to do with you and Wrindel,” Ellara said, but she gave the pictures an uncomfortable last glance before shutting the book again.

  An older woman with spectacles came over to us, looking excited. “Yes, that book is a puzzle,” she said. “As you can see, the letters are our own, but no one has identified the language. It’s one of the oldest books in the library. You can tell by the way the author wrote the letter ‘p’. You see, back in those days…” The next five minutes of our lives were occupied by a history of the letter, and I tried not to fall asleep. “Did you need any help?” the woman finally asked.

  “I think we’re done with this one, actually,” Ellara said. “But Miss Pennry…do you have any archives from King Lefior?”

  “Of course, we have lots of letters, ledgers and records from all the kings in the history of Wyndyr.”

  “But we’re looking for something in particular,” Ellara said. “Anything you might have on the mermaid he kept here at the palace.”

  Miss Pennry paused. “That was long ago.”

  “I know it was!” Ellara said, sounding slightly amused. “Come on, it may be a somewhat forbidden topic, but you must have something. You always do.”

  Miss Pennry seemed begrudging, but she said, “Let me see.”

  She bustled off through a door, leaving us to keep thumbing through the books in our stack. I fidgeted, starting to grow restless with the words I couldn’t read.

  And then, Miss Pennry came back with a small, yellowed book. “Take it somewhere else,” she said quietly. “And don’t tell the king. I think this is what you’re looking for, but I’ll warn you, it isn’t a pleasant tale.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Selection from the Diary of King Lefior

  March 12th

  Our bitterly cold winter seems almost at an end. Today it was warm enough to take a walk by the shore without losing one’s nose. I wore a fur-trimmed cloak and fur-lined gloves and two layers of wool on my arms and legs. As I walked, in the distance, I saw an apparition of a girl. A mermaid, sitting on the rocks, hair past her waist and nothing but a string of shells to wear. I tell you, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful and so strange. When she saw me, she started to sing in that high, haunting voice I sometimes hear off near the rocks of the Wolf’s Jaw. But when I came close, she dove into the water.

  March 13th

  I went looking for that girl again. And I found her. She let me get a little closer this time before she disappeared. I don’t think she’s afraid of me. She always gives me a look almost as if she expects me to follow her. Would that I could.

  March 19th

  Blessings to the goddess of the water. I finally got close enough to speak to my beauty after a week of days. She was testing me, but it was worth the pursuit. One might think that speaking to her would break the spell she has held over my imagination, but it has not. We must have talked for an hour or more. I was late for the feast with the ambassador from Yirvagna, and even then my mind wandered back to her words.

  She is so different from the ladies of the court. Very frank, and wise for her years, with tales of a world I can hardly imagine. For all that, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it’s her lovely face I can’t get out of my head. I believe I’d already be looking for a courtship ring if not for her fish tail. Have I fallen in love with a creature of the ocean? That would be torture indeed. No one must know.

  March 22nd

  Winter turns to spring, and we’ve had our feasts and revels to celebrate the change of seasons. The court waits with bated breath for me to choose a wife, but once I thought they were drunk enough not to notice, I snuck off to see my Rusa. I brought her a bouquet of tulips, and she said she’d never seen them in all her days.

  April 2nd

  My favorite thing in the world is to sneak some object or food off to show her, watch her turn it over in her hands, poke it or taste it. Today I brought her an iced cake. She said it was ghastly. Too sweet. Nothing is so sweet under the sea, she said. Rusa tastes of salt.

  April 21st

  It was inevitable that someone from the castle would catch me at it eventually. I’ve now been speaking to my girl for a month of days, and have missed a few appointments. No one understands what a lonely job it is to be the king. Everything is expected of me, every problem laid at my feet, and I have no one to share it with.

  What I did not know about Rusa at first is that she is well versed in the art of witchcraft, and the other merfolk turn to her for answers. She can be as pretty and coquettish as any girl of the court, but beneath it all is such a tough and clever mind. She would make me a perfect queen—if she was not bound to the sea.

  I have been sleeping very poorly. My subjects have noticed. Today Gairor told me he had seen me with her and informed the rest of the council. They advised me to stop seeing her, as I knew they would, but the one benefit of being the king is that they cannot stop me.

  May 2nd

  I have been teaching Rusa to read. It has become nearly unbearable to leave her each day.

  May 15th

  The solution was before me all this time. I thank the gods for granting me a palace of water! I have brought Rusa home with me, and even as I write she is swimming about in the pool outside my doors. I told her I will not write long so I can read to her the Tale of Jola and Aranath.

  May 16th

  You’ve never seen such a lot of chattering, cross old crows as my court. They are furious just because I’m happy. They will never let up until I have heirs. I am the most powerful elf in the realm—in the entire world, most likely—and yet my body and my heart are not given choices. If I were a fisherman, no one would give a damn.

  May 25th

  Rusa takes to reading like she has been starved for it. She can almost read primers on
her own. I am glad of this because so much of life is denied to her. I give her everything within my power, and she endures the snide remarks of the court with excellent humor, but how long will that be enough?

  June 2nd

  Can’t sleep. My desire is driving me mad. She takes me in her mouth, but I want to take her in my arms and know what it is to be deep inside her. I would take her in any form, if I knew any children that resulted would be born elves. I would not subject her to carrying and birthing some twisted half-breed.

  June 25th

  The basin of water has finally been installed in my box at the theater and last night I took her to an operetta. You can imagine the gossip but I have learned to turn off my ears. Rusa was captivated by the music and she has such an astonishing memory for it that I can hear her right now out my window: “Oh, little bird, why do you sing when you are so sad?”

  July 14th

  Uncle Virnan came to visit and “discuss” Rusa with me. He begged me to send her back to the ocean this very day. He said it is better “for her” to end it now before it goes too far. It would be incredibly painful for her now; we go to the theater three days a week and she reads a book or two every day. She has adapted to my world and it would be cruel to send her back now.

  July 25th

  Despite it all, this has been the happiest summer of my life.

  July 28th

  She says I don’t listen to her concerns, and that I don’t stand up to the rest of the court on her behalf.

  How can she make such accusations? All I do is listen to her concerns. They consume me. I hardly know who I was before I met her. She has no idea of what pressures I face. She is quick to remind me, after all, that merfolk do not have nearly so many rules and expectations.