The curse must be broken. My father would live.
Chapter Twenty
Talwyn
Wrindel hurried me up the back stairs of the palace. I was wearing my elven dress, but my fins dangled past the hem, plain to see. The halls were empty here, however. We heard music in the Hall of Marble Pools and people singing, “Hail, hail to the health of the king!”
“Do you think I’ll really be allowed to stay here?” I asked.
“That’s your doing, sunshine,” Wrindel said. “You broke the family curse. Well, not only did you break it, you found out it existed. No one is going to tell you to leave.”
He brought me to the pool on the balcony outside his bedroom. Water poured in constantly from a waterfall cascading in from a channel leading from the top floor of the castle, and flowed out into the moat below, so while it might not be as good as sea water, at least it was always clean.
It certainly was small, only about four feet deep and just wide enough that I could swim in a generous circle. But if Wrindel didn’t live in a palace full of water, I wouldn’t have been able to stay near him at all. And although it wasn’t ideal, I was just glad to be close right now. He had stepped back into his room to change out of his wet clothes. Through the glass doors, I watched him strip off his boots. I could see his bed from here. And he could see me, too.
I took off my dress. It wasn’t comfortable to wear in the water. He grinned at me and shook his head.
“We might have to get you a little shell top,” he said, walking out in bare feet and a clean pair of trousers, buttoning a fresh shirt.
“A shell top? That doesn’t sound comfortable.”
“That’s what mermaids wear in pictures.”
“I am not a mermaid in a picture.”
“Clearly.”
I waved for him to sit down beside me, and covered his hands with mine. “You don’t need to button that right now,” I said, pushing myself up on the tiled edge of the pool to kiss him. “Although,” I realized, “You must want to see your father.”
“I do want to see him, and yet…I also don’t. I’m glad he’s alive. Now I’m afraid he’ll have the energy to argue. I asked one of the maids to bring us breakfast before I face that conversation.”
A tray of breakfast was delivered shortly. Wrindel brought it out to me, and fixed my coffee with milk and sugar as he knew I liked it. I sat on the edge of the pool so I could keep my tail wet but we could eat together. He knew I didn’t really like the sweet breads the elves loved for their breakfast, so we had fruit and glazed ham.
“Not so bad, is it?” he said.
“No, it’s quite nice, actually,” I said. “But it’ll be boring if you’re not here. Will you teach me to read?”
“Of course. Although Ellara might be a better teacher.”
Someone knocked on the door from within the room. I heard a voice call, “The king is here to see you.”
“Already?” Wrindel scrambled to his feet. He quickly threw one of my other dresses at me. “Put that on.” He rushed to the door.
I had barely covered up my breasts when the door opened and the king was brought out to the balcony in a wicker chair with wheels.
“I told ‘em I don’t need this thing,” he grumbled.
Wrindel stood behind him, a little stiff. I supposed we had grown used to living without scrutiny.
“So, you are the one who saved my life,” the king said.
“It was somewhat accidental,” I said. “But I’m glad you are feeling better.”
“Much, much better, yes. Gods, to think that all those years…a bloody curse. That witch ought to hang. But as grateful as I am to be alive, Wrindel is still a prince. I’m a lenient man, but princes can’t do anything they like.”
“Father—”
“What is your intention with her, Wrin?”
“To make her my bride.”
“Is she going to change back into a human?”
“I don’t know,” Wrindel said. “I don’t care.”
“This is scandalous.”
“She saved your life.”
“Your grandfather—”
“Forget Grandfather!” Wrindel snapped. “Talwyn and I have a completely different sort of relationship. She makes me want to work for our happiness. If that feeling isn’t love, what is? I think my hardest day with Talwyn will be better than my best day with anyone else.”
“I understand that,” the king said. “I’m glad to see you caring deeply for someone. But…you may come to regret not having heirs…”
“I already regret a lot of things,” Wrindel said. “But I don’t think this will be one of them.”
“Ah, you’re so young…” The king waved a hand. “You don’t know your own mortality yet. You don’t realize how much you will desire to pass on your line.”
“Young, but I have always known loss,” Wrindel said. “I think I certainly do know my own mortality. I want children, and so does Talwyn, but if we can only be uncle and aunt, it will have to do.”
The king shook his head. “If you’re sure, I don’t know what I can say. I thought I’d be dead.” He gave Wrindel a brief, one-armed embrace. “Don’t tell the court I gave my approval. I’d be irresponsible if I didn’t try my best to knock some sense into you.”
And thus it was all as well as it could be. I stayed for two nights and then I returned to my sisters. My mating season would not begin for several weeks more, and I wanted to make sure my family had been managing without me.
Managing?
I went to our old cave and they weren’t there. In the village, I found them living in a stone cottage decorated with coral.
“They said we could live here,” Allie said. “An older woman used to live here but she passed on and it’s been abandoned ever since. Isn’t it adorable?”
“And where is Mirella?”
“She’s been fishing with Arilon.”
“Who is Arilon?”
“You don’t remember him? The big guy with the reddish hair?”
“Oh. Yes. I remember him now.” It was so hard to imagine little Mirella, who I used to tell bedtime stories, swimming around with a muscular, gregarious merman. “Well, it seems like you’ve been doing well.”
“I don’t know; we’ve missed you terribly!”
But things had certainly changed in two weeks. It was hard not to feel as if my sisters had been waiting for me to leave! Suddenly they had friends—and a beau, in Mirella’s case. They were both working in the village, sprucing up the new cottage. When we had dinner that night, neither of them said a single word about scavenging shipwrecks or trading with human fishing towns.
They didn’t miss it at all. I don’t even think they realized I expected them to say something about our old lives. They asked me about the Palace of Waterfalls and Wrindel but they seemed entirely satisfied with the arrangement.
But if I was only going to spend one sixth of my days with Wrindel, what would I do with myself? I couldn’t see myself spending my days making shell jewelry.
No one had seen Rusa since the night I spoke to her. So while my sisters joined in the social life of the village, I went fishing on my own. Rusa was getting old. Maybe I was crazy to want to spend time with the woman who cursed the elves, but I also had to admit—we had the Great Temptation in common. She understood me.
No one in town knew quite where the old witch lived. She came to them; they didn’t go to her. So it took me some days of search, but one day I spotted a soft glow coming from the ancient remains of a shipwreck. It was too old to scavenge. The ship had broken into two when it sank, and was crusted with sea life, but glowfish weren’t native to this area. They were traded up the coast from the south; a magic fish that came from a saltwater lake called the Sorcerer’s Sea. They could be trained to remain in one place, to permanently light a dwelling.
“Rusa?” I ducked through a decaying window. The glowfish swam toward me like a lonely pet, casting a soft light on glinting jewels.
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I gasped as if I’d seen a ghost.
All of Rusa’s gems were sitting on the floor of the ship in precisely the arrangement she would have worn them, as if she had laid down and died, and her body had vanished. Where her heart would have been, King Lefior’s diary rested.
I knew in my gut that it was a message. I picked up the diary and opened it.
Her voice sang out of the book.
My time has come to leave this world. I shall die alone, as I have lived. Each of my jewels has some power or value. Each was traded to me by some wealthy man in exchange for a mermaid bride. If you have found them, I believe you deserve to have them.
She meant this for me, I knew. I supposed it was a sort of apology. I slid the bracelets up my arms. I draped jewels around my neck. I stuck the combs in my hair.
I didn’t feel more magical. I didn’t develop any great powers. When I got home, I even swallowed another damned shore-stone, just in case, but it didn’t give me legs.
However, four weeks later, something had happened. For one thing, I had missed my cycles. And strangely, I had an intense craving for sweet bread.
Chapter Twenty-One
Talwyn
“Pregnant?” Wrindel looked so happy.
How could he look so happy? We’d agreed that we didn’t want this.
“I really think so. All the signs are there. But I’m scared,” I admitted, crossing my arms at the edge of the pool. “What if it comes out…wrong…?”
“What if it comes out right?” he said, stroking my hair. “You want children. We would have an heir.”
“Unless it comes out right…but as a mer. Or what if it had a tail, but it couldn’t breathe underwater?”
“I don’t know,” Wrin said. “I suppose it would die. I don’t want to think of that.”
His feet were in the water. It was very warm today, maybe the last warm day we would have. I pinched his toes one by one. “You’re happy about this and damn the consequences, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m happy, sunshine. You’re going to be my wife. I want a family with you, no matter how complicated. What’s done is done. Our child will live. The gods blessed us up there on the hill. You said it yourself.” He hooked his hands under my arms and pulled me out of the water and onto his lap.
“Tal, I swear to you, we’re going to make this work,” he said, looking deep into my eyes. “I know it’s been strange. I’ve been getting all kinds of heat for choosing you in the court. Well, when I was burying my sorrows by fucking some courtesan, people admired me as much as they criticized. And what was that? It wasn’t healthy and I knew it all along, but I needed something to fulfill me when my family was so fractured. This feels right, nothing but right. You and me. I don’t care what they say. You don’t need to be like me, for us to be together.”
A well of intense emotion swept over me. All the time I spent with him before, I wanted so badly to shed my mermaid skin, to get rid of my true form and be like him. I thought it was the only way. When I read King Lefior’s diary it only confirmed my suspicions: of course we could not be in love if we were different species!
I had it all mixed up. Being in love didn’t mean lying and hiding parts of yourself and trying to be someone you weren’t. We could only be in love if we accepted the truth of what we were, and how we felt about each other, and were willing to struggle through all the troubles.
He kissed me, leaning me back onto the painted tiles by the pool. His legs slipped into the water, soaking his clothes, his legs hugging my tail. His erection stroked against me, and gods, I wanted him. I tugged at his hair, dragging kisses across his cheeks and mouth and everywhere, starved for him.
I clawed off his shirt. He kicked off his boots and they sank to the floor. Only our heads were above water now, our embrace buoyant. I was light in his arms, and he could easily shift me into position to bite at my nipples.
I moaned, my arm flailing toward the edge of the pool. My ragged nails tried to clutch at the slick tiles, only to slip away. I grabbed his shoulders instead. Feeling his skin bare and wet felt right to me in some primal way, like he was becoming more a part of my world as I became part of his. And the unrelenting attention of his mouth was driving me to madness.
“Wrin, I need you.”
“I need you, too.”
I tore the buttons of his trousers and pulled out his cock, stroking it to see his eyes slightly glaze. I could feel its hard thickness under my hand and my body craved him inside me.
“Show me how to do it,” he said.
I laughed. “Gods, I hardly know myself, but it can’t be very different. The mers would say that your horn goes in my cave. We’ll figure it out.”
Indeed, we certainly did.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Talwyn
Oh, but then the weather started turning cold. Cursed November. Wrindel was far too cold to climb in the pool with me. He had to find an elemental mage who could warm the waters for me every day, even though I was much heartier against cold than an elf, but the pool could freeze over without intervention. Rusa and King Lefior’s love affair had spanned spring to fall—maybe winter had broken them up as surely as anything else.
Still, we married that month, in a ceremony in the Hall of Marble Pools that was attended by everyone in the kingdom and all their cousins, or so it seemed to me. I could spend a little time out of water, and I did, wearing a long gown and a headdress of pearls, sitting on a stool so we could say our vows.
I felt the weight of the silk gown I wore, covering my tail. I saw Kiara and a few other girls watching me with sour expressions. Violinists played beautiful, celebratory music in the background but I couldn’t help but think that other royal weddings were not like this one.
For one thing, I had no family in attendance. My sisters wanted to come, but I forbade them. I didn’t want them to see that I didn’t fit in. I worried that some of the elves would snub them.
Then, we had to alter the ceremony because I couldn’t walk in. It was hard not to feel self-conscious and fret over what my presence would mean for the rest of Wrin’s life.
Wrindel slipped a silver ring on my finger, formed like a small crown of vines with tiny leaves.
“I vow to honor you and protect you for all of my days,” he said. “I pray to the gods that you shall only know good luck and happiness, but I swear that no man or misfortune will tear us asunder. Through spring and summer, autumn and winter, you are my one and only, Talwyn Silverfin.”
Then he leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “And I vow not to take any crap over this, nor allow you to do so.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, and my vows came easier then. I knew I didn’t make a conventional princess, but I was pleasantly surprised when we adjourned to the banquet and many ladies and gentlemen of the court welcomed me and thanked me for helping to save the king, and after our wedding I felt a little less shy at spending time in the Hall of Marble Pools or the moat where people could see me. Visitors from abroad always wanted a glimpse of me; a mermaid princess taking a swim in the palace moat was something quite notable apparently.
Our original plan for me to only spend the mating season with Wrindel was quickly abandoned. Wrindel’s room was being remodeled with an extension to the balcony pool so I could sleep near him.
But I still wanted legs. Gods, I wanted them! I think the Great Temptation burned in me worse than ever. I wanted to be free to roam the palace and the town and the world beyond. I wanted to stroll gardens and ride horses. I wanted Wrindel to part my legs and do all the things he used to do to me. I knew we must be happier than Rusa and King Lefior, but—sometimes I poked at Rusa’s jewelry and couldn’t bear that she had done this to me. Given me a taste of legs, and then taken them away forever.
This was it. This was my life and I knew I just had to accept its joys and not wish for more, but wishing for more was how I had always lived.
I was spending a lot of time with Ellara, who had taken over m
y reading lessons for the most part. She told me all the court gossip and became the ear for all my frustrations so I didn’t lose my mind. Besides that, as soon as the curse was broken, Ellara got pregnant herself. We talked of babies for hours, chided ourselves for being so boring as to talk of babies for hours, and then talked of them for hours more. My pregnancy was starting to show; I could feel my child kicking.
I never, ever spoke of the possibility that something bad might happen. I couldn’t bear it. I needed to know that he or she would be a child of the surface world. Gods, even if my baby was a mer, I wasn’t sure I could stand it. It was one thing for me to choose this life for myself, but it seemed such a cruel way to grow up. I desperately wanted someone to assure me that the children of mermaids and land folk were likely to have legs. I kept pestering every foreign dignitary who wanted to see me swimming in the moat, hoping someone would know a mermaid bride, all through the winter, into the spring. I heard rumors. Plenty of rumors, gone stale with centuries. Nothing I could cling to.
One day I happened to ask one of these foreign dignitaries while I was wearing Rusa’s bracelets.
He looked at me with shock and walked over, giving me a slight bow. “How do you speak Alimandan?”
“I—I don’t.”
“You’re speaking it now.”
“No, you’re speaking elvish!”
He laughed. “You must have some magic that takes away the barriers of language. I have heard of this.”
“My bracelets belonged to a witch…”
“Ah, yes. They make these bracelets to use on the spice roads for trading. This is rare magic. Don’t waste it on me. I don’t know anything of mermaids. The spell will not last forever.”
I was still thinking of it later, when Ellara and I were reading an old book of merfolk legends, and suddenly I thought of something. “Ellara…the old book from the archives with the pictures of mermaids…the one that’s written in elvish script but in an ancient language… Do you think if you read the word aloud while I wore the bracelets, I might understand them?”
The Mermaid Bride Page 12