“Why, great starfish! Cordelia! Can you believe it? This is Colin Songsmith’s little girl! You can stop puffing up like a blowfish. She’s practically one of us. Why, I’ll bet she came down to the river and told the fish to let us know she was there just so we’d fetch her, didn’t you, sweeting? Let’s look at you. Hmm, quite the young siren, except for your poor split tail and that dingy colored hair. Have you schooled yet? And how is your dear papa?”
“Dad’s fine. And he’s taught me music and Argonian history, and Mum teaches me magical ethics. Princess Pegeen taught me runing and calligraphy when I was just a child.”
“But have you schooled yet? Oh dear, Cordelia, I don’t believe she has.”
“Just like these half-breeds to neglect their children’s education and then set them loose on us so we’ll feel obliged to correct matters. I’ve a good mind to drown her.”
“Don’t be such a jellyfish,” Lorelei snapped, and dived off the sea serpent to swim protectively in front of Carole. “You saw her swim down the river. Any child of Colin’s is mer enough to swim far too well for the likes of us to drown.” Carole was very relieved to hear that. Neither of her parents had ever seemed sure how much she had inherited from each of them. Though Dad liked water very much, Mother’s aversion to it stemmed from a fear that witches could be melted by too much contact with it, as had once happened to an early Brown ancestress. If Lorelei thought Carole could swim well enough to protect herself against mermaids, then that was good enough for Carole. She walked a little closer to the edge of the shore and sat down cross-legged. Lorelei seemed to be the friendliest, so it was of her Carole asked, “I thought you could only sing ships onto the rocks in the ocean? Why did you sing up the river?”
Lorelei laughed a sparkling laugh and shook back her green hair, then looked up at Carole very closely, the way Great-Granny Brown had started doing after her eyes began to fail. “The fish told us, silly! You surely didn’t think you could sing fish out of the river this close to our sea and not have us hear about it?”
“I whistled, actually,” Carole said. Lorelei was so pretty. Her eyes were very big and green, even if they might be a little nearsighted, and Carole wished her own hair was that interesting chartreuse color and thick and straight instead of just plain brown and curly. “Would—would you like to hear?”
“Certainly not!” Cordelia said, slapping her tail against the side of the sea serpent. She wasn’t as beautiful as Lorelei. Her lavender hair didn’t go as well with her fish-belly pale skin and her eyes looked smaller and her mouth tighter. Lorelei didn’t wear anything above her shining tail except strategic locks of hair, but Cordelia wrapped a fishnet dripping with seaweed tightly about her shoulders. “We can’t have all of our fish committing suicide just so you can show off!”
“I wasn’t going to do that one,” Carole protested. “I know lots of others.”
Lorelei flipped a spray of water back at her colleague. “Go ahead, small fry, don’t mind Cordelia. She’s just mad because there haven’t been any fishing boats around to play with since Brazoria started sending them all to the war. And she’s such an old clam I can’t talk her into swimming down to the Gulf where all the fun is. I’d love to hear your song. Whistle me something, do.”
“Lorelei!” Cordelia snapped.
The green-haired siren surface dived and came up facing her. “We have to know what she can do, don’t we?”
“Do we?” Cordelia asked in a tone full of ennui, but she waved her hand that they could continue.
Carole was rather out of the mood to start with, but with Lorelei’s smiling encouragement, soon had a wonderful sand castle constructed by whistling the grains of sand into shape. Of course, she had to concentrate fairly hard to keep the doorways from collapsing or the merlons from drying out and falling over the side of the towers, but out of the corner of her eye she could see the sea serpent undulating gently to her tune and even Cordelia seemed impressed.
“I could put sea shell siding on it too,” Carole said, “But I guess that would be showing off.”
“Oh, no, small fry. We need you to show off. As I was telling my dear sister, we have to know what you can do if we’re to school you with us. It’s going to be hard enough for you with that awful split-tailed birth defect of yours to become a decent siren, but if your other talents are up to it, who knows what—” Suddenly the sea serpent dumped Cordelia unceremoniously into the water and flashed a loop of itself past Carole, up the river channel.
A very familiar scream, cursing in a male voice in a guttural foreign language, and Bronwyn’s voice was crying “By the Rowan!” her family battle cry, were followed by the returning of the no-longer-empty loop of sea monster.
“Don’t worry, Carole!” Bronwyn cried, “We’ll save you!” Which was nonsense since the monster had looped himself twice, so that an extra coil pinned Jack and Bronwyn together with arms at their sides and Bronwyn couldn’t even get her sword free.
“Make him let them go,” Carole begged Lorelei. “They’re friends of mine.”
But Lorelei had dived under when the huge bit of monster lashed past. Nor was Cordelia in sight. Carole whistled sharply and about a league out to sea, the monster’s head snapped up. She began the sand castle song again, easing it into a sedate, relaxed line dance, that caused the beast to uncoil himself and lie out in a line, releasing Jack, Bronwyn, and the boat.
Dragging them ashore, Carole felt unaccountably annoyed. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Saving you,” Bronwyn said.
“I don’t want to be saved. I was just showing my friend Lorelei my magic. She seems to think I could be a pretty good mermaid.”
Offshore, the sea serpent wiggled back into its customary up and down conformation and both mermaids resurfaced, Cordelia resuming her seat on the monster’s back with a little scolding pat of her tail against its sides, while Lorelei did a double flip, dived under and surfaced at Carole’s feet. “That was wonderful, small fry, the way you made Ollie do what you wanted.” She peered with her wide, green stare at Jack and Bronwyn, and with less curiosity at Anastasia, who fluttered down beside them. “What are these?” the mermaid asked. Then, before Carole could answer, pointed at Bronwyn. “That looks familiar.”
“Lorelei,” Carole said with some pride, though she couldn’t have said whether it tickled her more to introduce her cousin the Princess to her new friend the mermaid, or vice versa. “I’d like you to meet Her Highness, Princess Bronwyn Rowan, Crown Princess of Argonia and—er—Jack. The swan is a princess too.”
“Yes, sweeting,” Lorelei barely acknowledged the last introduction with a bored flip of her hand, whose fingers were delicately webbed. “Aren’t they all? Which of you minnows is which, again? You all look alike to me.
“We are,” Bronwyn said. “Exactly alike.”
“Er—what she means is we have a common problem,” Carole explained. “It’s really Bronwyn’s problem, but you see, it’s a patriotic matter.”
“Does she have a father too?” Lorelei asked suddenly, studying Bronwyn more closely. “Bigger, but with coral hair?”
Bronwyn looked pleased. “No, actually I’m the first girl in Argonia to be born of a union between a woman and a cinnamon bear.”
“Never mind her, Lorelei,” Carole practically screamed over her tale-telling cousin. “That’s part of this problem she has. She’s cursed, and Jack and Anastasia the Alluring and I have pledged to help her.”
“Isn’t that cute?” Lorelei said, but she didn’t sound very interested.
“I’d say these rather wreck your plan to school her, don’t they, sister dear?” Cordelia asked, indicating the new arrivals with a wave of her hair comb and a voice suspiciously sweet. “They won’t survive long at sea.”
“No. I suppose not. You wouldn’t mind if we drown them, would you, small fry? It’ll be quicker and more merciful that way. They’ll never feel a thing, but we’ll enjoy it enormously.”
“I should
say not!” Carole said. “I told you they’re my friends.”
“But if you’re to school—oh dear, what are we to do with you? We can’t drown you, and we can’t just keep letting mortals go all the time. Cordelia is already furious with me about—” She looked up at Bronwyn again. “About that coral-haired giant and that eel of a wizard.”
She looked imploringly back to Cordelia, who sighed, adjusted her shawl, and dived off the side of the sea serpent to swim over and have a closer look.
“Oh well,” Cordelia said, after her inspection. “She is talented and there aren’t many new ones being hatched. Of course, she’ll have to learn to do things properly. But I suppose since we have Ollie, we can let her keep these as pets. We can moor them at the atoll, though I doubt they’ll like it.”
“You are too charming,” Jack said, with a sweeping bow to both mermaids, “But as the Lady Carole has mentioned, we have a mission to perform on behalf of Her Highness. We could not possibly be persuaded from it…”
But Cordelia had already instructed the sea serpent to return to shore, where it caught Bronwyn up in a coil. Lorelei was smiling at Carole and holding out her hand, singing a little song under her breath. It was such a lovely song. And they were both so beautiful. Somehow she knew from that song that schooling was something marvelous, and she felt she must learn what the mermaids wanted her to know. After all, they were part of her lineage just like witches and she already knew witching. She must school. She had to. Just for a little while. Bronwyn’s curse had waited all her life. It surely could wait a while longer. Slipping dreamily into the waves, she swam towards Lorelei.
* * *
The mermaids’ atoll wouldn’t have been such a bad place to spend time if not for the weather. There was nowhere for any of the humans to shelter from the squalls that gusted across the barren rock and whipped the gray sea whose pounding waters provided the only scenery from horizon to horizon. Anastasia fared a little better, since the crags of the atoll protectively ringed a central blue pool in which the swan could swim, as she did, gliding relentlessly back and forth, back and forth, every morning as soon as her head was out from under her wing. Her chariot, which she had dragged behind her while she rode the sea serpent to the atoll, was moored on one side of the pool. Bronwyn thought it strange that after so many years of being bound to the chariot the swan didn’t gladly abandon it when she had the chance, but she supposed the familiarity coupled with the fact that the boat was now the only thing the swan possessed enhanced Anastasia’s proprietary feelings. But chariot or no chariot, the transformed princess was no happier about being stuck on the atoll than Jack or Bronwyn. Though the pool contained fresh water rather than salt unless inadvertently mingled with unusually high waves, it grew none of the plants of which Anastasia was fond, and she was obliged, as were the rest of them, to subsist on seaweed salad.
Carole felt the cold and wet less than the other humans. All she had to do was mimic the mermaids and submerge to feel comfortable. Cordelia and Lorelei made sure she was submerged a good deal of the time, often with her feet lashed together to teach her, they said, to swim properly instead of kicking. When she’d tried to talk to Bronwyn and Jack, Cordelia had scolded her. “Split-tails haven’t the sense of a piece of driftwood about what’s important. You have a great deal to learn to overcome your handicap and be considered even a freakish kind of mermaid. You really must concentrate on your lessons instead of chattering with these others.”
Carole had looked for a moment as woebegone as Bronwyn and Jack felt, and Bronwyn had hoped that she would start thinking of some plan to get them off the atoll. Maybe Anastasia would mend enough, in a few days, to fly them to land, one at a time, while the mermaids were showing Carole how to scout for ships or taking her on tours of their past conquests, wrecks sunk far beneath the waves.
But that night the weather was fair and when Carole climbed up on the rocks to be with her friends, the mermaids joined them and Lorelei sang to them all and braided pearls in Carole’s hair and the sappy look on her cousin’s face told Bronwyn that if she and Jack left now, Carole wouldn’t accompany them. Not that Bronwyn cared, the way the stupid little witch was acting, but Aunt Maggie wouldn’t like it, and it would be a shame to go through all these perilous adventures and live only to get killed by one’s own aunt when one got home.
But as little as Carole seemed to care about her friends’ welfare, the mermaids resented them anyway. On another of the nights they spent on the atoll, Lorelei asked teasingly, “Won’t you let me drown just the boy? Just to keep my hand in? It’s been ever so long since a ship has come along.”
Carole had jerked away from Lorelei’s comb, giggling, as if she thought the mermaid was joking. “No, silly,” she said, using one of Lorelei’s pet expressions. “Of course you can’t drown him.”
Cordelia, stringing pearls onto her fishnet shawl, tapped her tail impatiently against the rock. “There’s no of course we can’t do anything, small fry. This is our territory and you’re our guest, and I’ll thank you to mind your manners. I’ve a good mind to drown him myself just to teach you a lesson.”
Jack, all the air gone out of him after his first day of seaweed salad and soaking, could only look miserable.
“You do and I won’t let you ever catch any ships again!” Carole said. “I’ll warn them all away, I swear I will!”
“Hmph,” Cordelia said. “Not much chance of that. No ship can resist a siren’s song. You know that.”
“They can if they can’t hear it and they’ll be so busy dancing to my tune I promise you they won’t hear a thing.”
To demonstrate she puckered up and whistled a jig that made the mermaids first pat their hands and slap their tails against the rocks, then dive into the sea and frolic like porpoises, who were diving and frolicking a little further out. Fortunately, the sea serpent was off on some business of his own or he would have been trying to dance too, which would have drenched the island with his waves, making their water too salty to drink.
Jack and Bronwyn shuffled about on the rocks, twirling each other, kicking up gravel and bruising their feet on the stones until one of Bronwyn’s feet happened to bump against her shield. Touching it released her from the spell long enough that she could reach down and grab the shield and Jack at the same time. Relief flooded through her as she and Jack collapsed together on the rocks, glad not to have died dancing.
Lorelei surfaced, her cheeks pink with exertion. Both mermaids managed to hoist themselves onto the rocks, though they were still hand-patting and tail-bobbing most alarmingly, while molting iridescent scales onto the rocks as they writhed rhythmically against them.
“Oh, stop,” Lorelei panted. “Cordelia, puff, do make her stop. I shall drown of all this air if I must do this any longer.”
Cordelia was forced to capitulate and after that, for a time, the mermaids ignored Bronwyn and Jack, though they were rather more severe than before with Carole, insisting that she sing instead of whistle, if she were to be a proper mermaid, and endeavor to learn the bubbling language in which the mermaids spoke to Ollie and the other sea creatures, and master particular songs of calling in those languages.
One day Lorelei undertook to give Carole jiggling lessons. This segment of the witch’s education afforded Jack in particular considerable diversion, since Lorelei felt compelled to do a lot of demonstrating. Carole couldn’t seem to get the hang of it, which was no wonder, since she was not only too young to have the wherewithal to perform the task properly, but was also too strictly brought up to remove her shift, whatever the mermaids did, and so spoiled any small effect she might have been creating. Not even the wet and cold could keep them all from laughing, and that evening dinner was made merrier by the absence of Cordelia.
A moray eel had brought a message that sounded most urgent from a herd of seals, Lorelei explained when she brought the humans their seafood salads, and dear Cordelia had simply had to respond in person. “I know she’s an awful old jellyfish at
times, but she’s very conscientious about her stewardship of these waters.”
“Stewardship?” Jack asked, pushing a slimy green strand of seaweed around on the slab of rock in front of him with his dagger. “When you wreck all the boats? That’s an odd term for it.”
Anastasia stopped gliding in the pool to reprimand him. “I am surprised that even a young hooligan such as yourself would lower himself to speak to these—these…”
But Bronwyn, who was glad for a chance to have a general sort of conversation going after almost a week of the swan’s silent belligerent swimming, Jack’s morbid silence, and the mermaids and Carole addressing each other exclusively, encouraged Lorelei to continue. “I suppose you do have a great chore, knowing which ships are the best ones to sink and keeping the waters clear of the wreckage they so inconsiderately leave behind and so on.”
“You’re very smart to see that,” Lorelei said, pleased. “Most mortals just get stuffy about the drowning, and don’t think of the services we perform, livening up the sailors’ dreary lives with a little romantic adventure, keeping navies from getting too large, giving the fish a fair chance to fight back—”
“I suppose it’s being brought up a Princess,” Bronwyn said chattily. “It gives one a larger scope on things.”
“Maybe so,” Lorelei said. “But I swear, no one would believe the things that go on in these waters unless they swam in them every day. You think Ollie’s a monster? You should see some of the abominations that have been growing off the coast of Frostingdung these last few years since the selkies were driven away.”
“I’m sure they’re no scarier than the beasts I’ve routinely faced during my many brave exploits,” Bronwyn began, but Carole swiftly cut in, as she was annoyingly in the habit of doing.
“Do tell us, Lorelei.”
“Some say the seas began to change when Loefwin slew all magic, others say it was not until he brought his Lily Pearl with her mother, Belburga of the pointed teeth and her sister—”
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