Bestaymor expelled a dramatic sigh before nodding her head in acquiescence. “Very well,” she relented, “but at least wear this.” She held aloft a lovely wreath of entwining white hyacinths dotted with flawless, luminous pearls.
Sienna studied it carefully, no doubt measuring its weight as best she could with her eyes. Eventually, she nodded. Bestaymor smiled gratefully and carefully placed the wreath on her granddaughter’s bright red hair. If possible, she looked even more beautiful, her face radiating with excitement, her head topped in a white halo of purity.
I still think that one moment, that most singular image, best captured Sienna’s too short life.
“Happy birthday, dear Sienna,” Bestaymor said, punctuating her well wishes with a kiss on each rosy cheek.
Sienna replied with a reassuring squeeze of her grandmother’s proud old shoulder. Then she swam from her room and continued straight out of the castle without a backward glance. She left without breakfast and aimed straight for the surface, where she would stay all day, hardly enough time to quench her burning thirst. Which only worsened by the time she returned later that night.
Sienna finally swam home when night was almost morning, and all five of her sisters were there to greet her upon her return. I was only there because, well, I was always there, ever the faithful, misguided shadow. Though I’ll admit, I was curious. We all knew how much this day meant to her, and all hoped that her glimpse of the surface would be enough to curb her foolish desires.
All our hoping was in vain.
Not only had the day only whetted Sienna’s already insatiable appetite, but something far worse had occurred just before she’d reluctantly began her return home. It was something so small, so usually irrelevant, it’s still difficult to imagine how it could so much alter the course of one life, not to mention those unwittingly entangled with it.
For in addition to the looming trees, chirping birds, warming sun, frolicking children, whinnying horses, and distant mountain peaks, in addition to finally setting eyes upon all she’d dreamed about since she was old enough to choose a dream, Sienna caught a glimpse of something she hadn’t quite anticipated. Something that captivated her so much it became the epitome of all she ever sought in human life. Something that would lead her to trade her tail for a pair of legs in an ill-advised deal colored in every shade of disaster.
Just as she was about to dive back to Merdom, she noticed a ship at sea and the noise the winds carried from it indicated quite a bit of merrymaking happening onboard. Curious, and free as a mermaid could ever be, Sienna swam up for a closer look.
Aboard ship were blurs of movement, as men and women danced and sang in the funny way humans do. There was much food and much laughter, and Sienna rightly concluded she had stumbled upon a celebration of sorts. It wasn’t long before she discovered that the humans were celebrating the birthday of royalty, much like she was in swimming above the surface for the first time.
As she watched, there was a sudden, tremendous crackling followed by a piercing whistle that seemed about to split the sky. Bright streaks of color shot into the air. Sienna dove underwater in fear, but soon enough lifted her head again to find the streaks had exploded into showers of sparks as if the very stars were raining down around her.
I would later learn she was talking about fireworks, just as I would learn what a favorite pastime it was for those humans to set them alight over the water.
Then, it wasn’t the fireworks that were to be the source of her fall, and all the ways my life changed because of it. Rather, it was what their bright flight into the darkened sky illuminated. No, not what, but who. A—
“Prince,” Sienna breathed to her sisters. “With large eyes and thick hair, both dark as an octopus’s ink. By far the most handsome, most captivating man, or merman, I have ever seen.”
Sienna swooned onto her bed and her sisters shared uneasy glances. This wasn’t at all what they’d been expecting. One of the older ones, the pretty blonde, dared to speak first.
“Surely he can’t be that handsome?” she started carefully, knowing full well how spoiled, how obsessed her younger was and could be.
Sienna rolled onto her back, not even bothering to hide her dreamy smile. “He was and then some,” she sighed. “What I wouldn’t give to speak with him, to walk with him, to have him the rest of my life!”
The blonde sister exchanged a nervous glance with the others. Already this was sounding more serious than any of Sienna’s myriad other daydreams. The trip above water was meant to cure her, not make her even worse. What if she became contagious and every mermaid thereafter yearned for a human man?
The eldest sister, a lovely brunette with deep green eyes and three little green sea stars in her hair, sat on the bed beside Sienna. “Sienna, this prince, handsome as he may be, is only human,” she said gently. “You cannot have a life together.”
The sister obviously thought Sienna as naïve as I’d been about the human ability to live underwater, because none of us could conceive an alternative meaning to Sienna’s words. At that point, I’m not sure Sienna could either, but that was never really enough to stop her from going after whatever she wanted.
As such, she turned her defiant blue eyes on her elder sister. “I will swim to the surface every day until his ship passes by once more. Then I will swim over and speak with him—”
The next sister cut her off with a shake of her head. “Sing to him instead,” she suggested. “No human can sing like a mermaid. Once he hears you, he will surely be bound to you forever.”
“Forever?” Sienna asked, eyes wide with hope and anticipation.
One by one, the sisters nodded.
If Sienna knew the prince couldn’t resist a mermaid’s song, or live much longer after if he didn’t, is still unknown to me. Bestaymor and our teachers instructed us how and what to sing, but they never explicitly explained what would happen to humans once we’d lured them into the sea. What I do know, and what I have decided to believe, is that the sisters weren’t acting out of any maliciousness toward the human prince. Rather, they simply thought that if they could not get him out of their sister’s mind then they would get him out of her life in the most straightforward and permanent of ways. Months later, irony would emit a mighty laugh when a mermaid’s song turned the handsome prince’s head and made him really take notice of her. And then he would drown, but under a very different kind of wave.
Catching sight of the look on the other sisters’ faces, I was sure I was the only one in the room with a sense of foreboding, an iron anchor weighing down my tail. Despite all the warning signs that popped up throughout the years, that was really the first time I just knew something bad was about to happen. At the same time, I felt I couldn’t let it.
And that was how my misguided urge to prevent something I probably shouldn’t have known about involved me in something I never should have been anywhere near.
Still two months shy of my own fifteenth birthday, I couldn’t follow after Sienna when she made her daily, and often nightly, excursions above the surface in pursuit of her handsome prince. It would be several weeks before Sienna caught sight of him again, but thinking on it now, the time passed rather quickly. In the meantime, I did have two friends who were more than eager to help me out should the need arise. Well, sort of.
“Remind me why I’d agree to this?” Cigny asked soon as I’d finished explaining about Sienna’s intentions with the prince a few days after her birthday.
“Because humans can’t live underwater,” I told the very ones who’d explained it all to me.
“Yes, yes, but who cares?” Cigny pressed.
“The princesses do whatever they want,” Callan agreed. “And it won’t be the first time a man’s been tricked into the sea with a mermaid’s song.”
“But why?” I wanted to know. “To what end?”
Two blank looks were my response.
“And why does it matter so much to you anyway?” Cigny challenged. “You don’
t know this prince. You’ve never even seen him.”
“It just doesn’t feel right to me!” I insisted. “Why should Sienna drown a human just because she wants him for herself?”
Again those looks.
“Because she’s Sienna,” Callan finally said.
He was right. He was absolutely right. That was really the only reason to it, though the other princesses were to blame as well. They were the ones who encouraged her to sing the songs that lured humans to their deaths. The very songs learned from Bestaymor for that very reason, though they were really meant to protect merfolk who’d been careless or caught unawares. They weren’t meant to be used on a whim, to drown an innocent human who’d done nothing but catch the princess’s eye. Though considering Bestaymor’s stories, she would probably say that a human life was of no account if such was a princess’s will.
“Please help me anyway?” I pleaded. “Just let me know if you see his ship?”
Callan and Cigny exchanged silent words with their eyes.
“We’re not promising anything,” Cigny began.
“But if we happen to notice it,” Callan continued.
“And nothing else is going on,” Cigny added.
“Then we’ll let you know,” Callan concluded.
That was good enough for me. Besides, I didn’t really have much choice.
So it was, sometime close to sunset a little over one month later, that I heard the familiar whistle of my two closest friends letting me know that a specific ship had been spotted. I immediately swam upward and drifted just below the surface, not daring to break through before my birthday, not daring to risk letting the princesses know I was there, not like they’d ever really noticed me before.
“Happy now?” Cigny nickered at me when I caught up to them.
“Shh,” I hushed her back, motioning to the princesses.
Cigny rolled her eyes. “You afraid of them? What could they possibly do to you?”
“I’m too close to the surface,” I hissed back. “You know that.”
Cigny looked to her brother to back her up. “The most powerful beings in the sea are bound by stronger rules than a crab.”
“Oh, hush,” was all I could reply.
I kept my distance from the sisters but kept them in my line of sight, not quite daring to go too far or get too close. I could tell from their tails that they were floating in a line, certainly singing into the glory of a setting sun. I found out later that many of the men onboard rushed to the railing the moment they heard the sisters sing, some more than eager to fling themselves overboard. They didn’t even know what they were hearing, they simply knew they wanted to hear more, and they would do anything, go anywhere to do so.
At first, nothing happened. Then the colorful play of light tickling the water from the sky unexpectedly began to darken. Before long, all light was shut out completely. Strong winds churned the ocean and bucking waves dangerously rocked the prince’s ship to and fro. An angry staccato of raindrops furiously pelted the surface before being angrily swallowed into the rising swells of the sea.
And through it all, the princesses sang.
I was not, nor could I have ever been, prepared for what happened next. Even now, I’m not entirely certain what drove me to act the way I did, to unknowingly risk my own life for what would be the very reason Sienna destroyed hers.
As the sea continued to rage and the sisters continued to sing, their lovely voices soaring high above the roar of the unfurling storm making them sound all the more hauntingly angelic, a heavy splash somehow broke through it all. At first, I mistook it for a barrel or some other item that had come loose on deck, but once I located the source of the noise, I very quickly saw that whatever fell over had arms. And legs.
A human. A human was overboard. Just as the sisters had hoped.
I dashed toward the drowning man, pushing my overgrown frame to swim fast enough to catch him before one of the sleek-framed princesses noticed. I grabbed the falling human and yelled to Callan and Cigny to help me push him back through the turbulent surface, to help keep him above the mountainous waves. The ship the man came from was too unstable to board, so we had no option but to aim toward shore, pushing against the rebelling sea to give him whatever air remained between the water falling from above and the waters rising from below. Callan and Cigny came with most of the way but had to turn back closer to shore when the water got too shallow. I didn’t pause for such considerations.
Fighting against the storm, I awkwardly dragged and wriggled the human onto the sand until I was sure he was safe from the waves snatching at his feet. I stayed with him until the storm abated, resting beside him on the shore, the weight of breaking the rule faithfully followed by all merfolk for centuries in surfacing before my fifteenth birthday creeping up on me. Even worse, I had dared to come ashore. However, as with most other details of my life at that point, I didn’t think anyone would notice or care.
It was then, under a still dark sky covered with thundering clouds, that I had my first glimpse of the world above water. There was nothing this maddening, this frightening in our enchanted kingdom, and what I could see looked nothing like the beautiful world I’d always heard about. I was more transfixed by the war between waters being fought on the sea, dumbfounded by a place that could hold so much beauty, but so much terror as well.
The harsh cough from the man on shore beside me pulled me out of my reverie. He began to spit water from his mouth, so I tried to roll him onto his back so he wouldn’t choke in the sand. He ended up ungracefully flopped on his side, coughing and sputtering water out of his lungs. His eyes fluttered open a moment before shutting again, and it was only then that I realized how wonderfully dark they were, deep black like his hair, black as octopus ink. The prince! I studied his finely featured face a moment, the careful angles of his nose and jaw, the length of his lashes, the thickness of his hair. He looked to be about a few years older than us, a recently minted adult by human standards. I had to agree with Sienna in thinking him a rather handsome being.
Due to his condition, the prince would never learn the truth about that fateful night, and no matter what happened between us, I never felt the need to tell him. How could I ever explain it anyway? For, while the tales are right in telling that the otherworldly voice the prince heard that night was Princess Sienna’s, I was the one who rescued him from the watery grave she and her sisters were trying to pull him into. How could I ever tell over the one part without having to admit to the other?
I waited with him long as I could, watching the steady rhythm of his chest rising and falling. When I felt I could stay no longer, when it seemed enough time had passed to confirm the prince would survive, I wriggled away from shore and dove back into my home. I was loath to leave the prince by himself, but I wasn’t willing to risk him waking up and seeing me there either. We were not allowed to interact with humans. We were different. We could only be the death of each other.
As I swam away, I felt sure about my decision to save the prince’s life. It was simply the right thing to do, and no one but myself, Callan, and Cigny would ever be the wiser.
How wrong I was. How very, very wrong.
I thought no one cared enough to notice me, to pay attention when I broke the surface before my turn came. But there is always someone watching, always someone to see what happens, even beyond the surface.
As it turned out, someone had been paying attention to what I’d done that night. Someone with the power to do something about it, too. But I would only find that out later, when Sienna became unreasonably desperate in her attempts to claim her prince.
For two full weeks after the storm, Sienna swam to the surface every day, carefully hugging the shore, the banks of rivers and waterways, in her anxious attempt to find her prince again. It wasn’t long before she found out more about him as well, about the palace he lived in, about the maritime kingdom he would one day rule, about the steps behind his home leading straight into the waves.
For years, Sienna had been obsessed with humans and their world, because, for whatever reason, she was certain they were closer to the Divine, sure they were greater, more favored by Heaven than their cousins-of-a-sort in the sea. If it was because they lived closer to the skies, because their world and struggles were much more complex than ours, or some other irrational notion, I’ll never know. All that stands is that Sienna never stopped to consider that every living creature needs a Heaven-given soul to exist. She never stopped to think that she might have always had what she’d been running after her whole life. She just had to look for it.
The night she snuck out and sought out the sea witch, she sold the very soul she was so desperate to have. She sold it for a pair of human legs and the chance to live a life that was never meant to be hers.
Up the Creek Without a Tail
I did not witness firsthand much of what immediately followed, and even now can only assemble an acceptable picture from the bits and pieces I later learned.
Sienna’s deal with the sea witch should have been a secret, except she suddenly disappeared one night and King Trident’s anger ignited merciless whirlpools and towering tsunamis across the oceans, so the truth was relentlessly chased and quickly found.
In short, Sienna, the most blessed of her sisters, the unblemished pearl of her father’s eye, had finally crossed the line and unintentionally brought shame upon herself and her entire family. Bestaymor took it the hardest. She never was the same after word was out that Sienna had traded her merfolk life for a human one. Her voice became raspier. It lost some of its magical lilt. She clutched her ivory shells closer. She stopped telling stories.
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