Beautiful to Me

by E. L. Tenenbaum

  King Rainn and Queen Emalyn had been married six years, but there was really no way to know if they didn’t yet have children from choice or not. Though it was rather difficult to imagine any king not wanting an heir. The way King Rainn doted on our children and minimized all his affairs of state to play games with them the past two weeks made me even more certain he was ready and wanting to have some of his own. Queen Emalyn, I wasn’t so sure about.

  So how I had the audacity to take her hand and place it over the life growing inside me, especially considering the way she’d been eyeing me since I came, will remain absolutely beyond my understanding.

  “There,” I whispered to her stunned expression, “do you feel it?”

  “The baby,” she breathed, awestruck.

  “Yes,” I confirmed with a smile.

  She gently pressed her hand further against my stomach in the hopes of feeling it again. I was glad for that little motion because it was enough to reassure me that I hadn’t insulted her. I studied her until she returned my gaze.

  “This,” I said, “this is magical. On my life, I’d stake it as the most wonderful magic of all.”

  Something changed in Queen Emalyn’s eyes then, something that turned her wariness into warmth, her hesitancy into happiness. I only understood it fully when, less than a year later, we were notified of the birth of her son. I couldn’t help but smile to myself when I heard the news, certain my impulsive gesture may have had something to do with it.

  While living so many years comes with the pain and emptiness of outliving my husband, my children, my grandchildren, and most of my great-great-grandchildren, too, I am still forever grateful for the life I was given on land. Though once I had lived almost too-long as a human, I had to leave the palace for good and came to live in the quiet of this seaside cottage.

  With so much time still to live, I had thought to attend the annual magical conclaves, to return to the life I’d left at sea, but a part of me couldn’t go back just yet, couldn’t face the royal family I had failed, couldn’t return to the kingdom I’d exchanged for another. I spent a lot of time traveling, my wonder never ceasing at all that is contained in this human land. I overlooked unconquerable vistas, I caught sight of unique animals, I wandered in bustling cities, heard and learned so many ways to speak, and met so many kinds of people I never could have imagined existed in my previous life. And once or twice a year, my ruling descendant comes quietly and alone to visit his ancient matriarch, to sit in her garden and admire her creations, to ask her advice and counsel, to hear tales of a time that was. Every once in a while, I steel myself for a row out to sea and sit under the moonlight, clicking my tongue at the waves. Callan and Cigny are gone now, the years of their lives being much less than those of merfolk, and I miss them as much as I miss my family. I wasn’t there when my parents became part of the sea, but I can feel them in the crest of the waves, in the mist sprayed up on the shore, in the water that stays behind to fill up tidal pools. I have not seen a mermaid since I left the enchanted kingdom, but I will see them when I regain my tail very soon, just before I too become part of the sea.

  One of the last conversations I had with my two friends was some years ago, when they came to tell me that my parents had requested permission to have another child, only fifteen years after I’d left.

  “Are they trying to replace me?” was my initial reaction.

  “It’s hard for them,” Callan said gently. “They must get rather lonely without you.”

  “They don’t even get to see their grandchildren,” Cigny reminded me, and I winced even though she hadn’t meant to hurt me.

  “So I will finally have a sibling,” I mused. “I wonder what they will tell him about me.”

  Would the child be anything more than plain and ordinary? Maybe the second one would be more like my parents, handsome and strong, eye-catching and affable. A merman who was never lost in someone else’s shadow because he cast a long one of his own. I wondered what his voice would sound like when he sang and how powerful his magic would be.

  The dolphins exchanged a quick glance, but it wasn’t over fast enough for me to miss it.

  “What?” I demanded to know. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Cigny nudged Callan to answer me, and he nosed her right back. With a deep huff and exaggerated roll of her eyes, Cigny, as ever, was the braver one.

  “Considering how things turned out,” she said, “King Trident and even the rest of Merdom are trying to bury the whole story in the past.”

  “They’ve forgotten?” I hesitantly asked.

  “Not forgotten,” Callan countered. “Just not really spoken of much.”

  “That’s no better,” Cigny hissed at him.

  I blinked at them, stunned. So my sibling would never even know I existed? Merdom would forget that I ever was? After everything, this was to be the end of my story? Even after she was gone, Sienna was still keeping me in the shadows.

  “Try not to think about it,” Callan encouraged sympathetically. “Think of all you do have.”

  I nodded in agreement, even though I was sure that I would think about it, a lot. I knew, having married a prince and having a magical voice, too, that I would not soon be forgotten and that I would be spoken about on land. But was that good enough for a girl whose heart had never really left the sea? I supposed it would have to be.

  “I am very blessed,” I conceded.

  “Yes,” Cigny emphasized. “You are. And if it helps, we will never forget you.”

  “As I can never forget you,” I told her, because it was true.

  When Arlando first became sick and it was clear his life would soon be over, I took up the shears I’d rarely touched since the day we wed and set out to put forth the idea brewing in the back of my mind since seeing Queen Ella’s slipper in its glass case all those years ago. Since I’d first come, Marel and the head gardener after him had devised ways of growing the types of hedges I created without the power of my voice, so there weren’t many left that didn’t have a specific design to them.

  Still, I found one in the perfect spot, within view of the king’s study window, but not enough that he would notice if it wasn’t pointed out to him. I tested the weight of the shears in my grasp, remembering my early days at the palace. I grinned as I gripped them firmly, then selected the perfect song with which to shape a final masterpiece.

  It took some time to get the hedge just right, and by then Arlando was already significantly weaker. Still, when I’d finally finished, I offered him my arm and took him out to the gardens. Throughout the years, he’d never lost his youthful charm, unending inquisitiveness, or the romantic nature Cordelia had teased him so much about when they were younger. I didn’t tell him our walk was to anywhere specific and I didn’t let him look up until he was correctly positioned.

  When he was, I leaned over and asked quite directly, “And what do you think of this one?”

  My prince raised his eyes and they widened in delighted shock at the hedge I’d so carefully crafted for him.

  The branches rose up in a delicate curve to mimic the tail and torso of a mermaid. Rows of deep red marigolds made up the voluminous waves of her hair, and two circles of bright blue bellflowers marked her eyes. I’d interwoven yellow hyacinth with blue delphiniums to give her yellow tail a hint of the magical blue that would have tinted it in the sea.

  It was obvious to the few who still knew that the mermaid was Sienna.

  Arlando gripped my hand tightly and I had to lean over to hear his next words.

  “I knew it,” he whispered.

  He wasn’t just talking about mermaids. He was talking about Sienna. I simply nodded in return.

  That was the last time he stepped foot outside, though he saw the hedge often enough from his window. That hedge is still in the royal gardens, where it’s carefully maintained to stay true to its original design, though it’s not always easy for humans to grow the specific flowers out of their seasons.

 
In his will, Arlando specifically instructed that the hedge always be taken care of, that it never grow long enough to lose its form. So far, our descendants have respected that wish, though the reasoning for his request has long been lost to time. About one hundred years after his death, when memory had faded and facts grayed like a stormy ocean sky, the stories began to form as later generations sought meaning in their ancestors’ deliberate care of that particular hedge.

  It’s the reason why Sienna is the only mermaid ever mentioned in the story, because no one ever knew that there were two. Though why our names were ever confused is beyond me. What makes the most sense to me is that someone named the blossoming mermaid Ariel because by then no one remembered the details of the prince’s foundling, but they did know of a queen who had crafted and designed the hedges and was said to possess magical abilities to make her flowers bloom in any season through song.

  The owner of such magic seemed fit enough to lend her name to a creature as magical as a mermaid. Especially as she was the same Ariel who, despite her occasional mad wanderings, no one can quite remember getting sick and dying, but whom everyone knows doesn’t live at the palace anymore.

  So they tried out the name and it stuck. With that, the legend around that hedge, and the tales it inspired, grew.

  Which is why I write it all down now before I return to the sea that calls to me with a symphony of voices from all the merfolk who ever lived, Sienna’s, as always, ringing out above the rest, bright and happy just as she was in life. There, I intend to live out my final days in my natural mermaid form. I have heard so many versions of the stories, so many twists of the truth, and though it may seem unimportant now, I would like at least one true version to remain behind when I leave. Because I know how large the tale has grown. I have even heard that there are sculptures of mermaids inspired by the stories. One in particular has her positioned on a rock, head turned forlornly out to sea. The statue is surely lovely, wrong as it is, and I feel I owe it to Sienna to set her story straight while I still can.

  Yes, Sienna was a mermaid, but she never missed the sea. Properly, that sculpture should be turned around so she can gaze longingly toward land where she always wished to be.

  Living along the coast as I do now, I think of her often, especially when I gaze out the window and watch the waves peak before they topple against the shore. I often wonder what would have been if she’d stayed in the enchanted kingdom as she should have, or if I had never been sent after her. Would Arlando have eventually married someone else, a noble woman with enough mind to interest him? Would Sienna have gained sense enough to return to the sea had she been left unfollowed? Or would time have eroded all inhibitions and Arlando would have chosen her as his wife after all, a beautiful creature to bear him beautiful children?

  There’s really no way to know, though I do have my suspicions in each regard.

  Truth is, she’s where she belongs now, as part of the foam of the sea. Even I’m not foolish enough to think that my body will ever find eternal rest if buried in the ground.

  However, after all my years of living, after all the things I’ve seen, I’ve come to understand something I wish I could have told our sixteen-year-old selves, something that may have affected the way things drastically changed so soon afterward. I cannot, so instead I leave it in writing now and for the future.

  Thinking back to that moment on the ship, when she balanced on the railing with her hand around the knife that would have set her free, Sienna did something that I would never have anticipated from her. And I don’t believe myself alone in that regard. Dropping that knife instead of shedding innocent blood to secure her life was the most meaningful and selfless thing she could have ever done. People who live twice her years don’t often approach an opportunity like that.

  But it was more than that, too. When Sienna turned from the prince’s sleeping form and ran to the deck, she hadn’t just spared the life of a prince, but all the lives and generations to follow, the children and grandchildren we raised and watched flourish throughout our years together. That was part of the reason why I finally designed that hedge, why I’m leaving this account now. So people will know of what she did. Of how, for one remarkable moment, she thought only of someone else before herself.

  Sienna could have lived three hundred years and never come close to what she did in that one moment, when she finally found within herself what she’d been seeking from the very start. That was her moment of immortality, which she indeed only had the chance to confront once she’d impulsively traded in her tail.

  However, that was also something that came from deep within herself, something that was part of her no matter what skin she wore. That something, that ability to choose as she had came right from the soul she had within her all along.

  And in the end she proved that, with more than words could ever say.

  * * *

  THE END

  The faery tales continue in

  Human Again

  Available Spring 2019

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  HUMAN AGAIN

  Sneak Peek

  Ever After

  Once upon a time, I was a beast masquerading as a man, though I usually hid it well enough so no one would know. Then a faery’s curse unleashed it from under my control, and it nearly destroyed me. All these years later, I still suffer from what she did to me, still suffer from her ironically angry response to my own anger.

  I’ve heard many versions of the faery tale my life was said to have become, a story of a man who was turned into a beast only to be redeemed by love when it was almost too late to save him from losing his humanity forever. While much of what the storytellers, the minstrels, those gathered around late night fires claim is true, they are mostly, if not entirely, glossing over the finer details wherein the real story lies. They forget that I was never a beast, but a man, a man who daily battled a merciless rage, an icy anger, a deep ravenous void that refused to be filled. I never had fangs, or horns, or a head full of fur, sharp claws, or a body outwardly different than any other human noble. Spinning tales of a curse, waxing poetic of a cure, they forget to talk about the before. And they certainly never mention the long road of after. Because therein is the true terror of my tale, in looking back and knowing that all the while I was outwardly a man, a man ruled by a beast.

  Rather, they tell about the presumed happy ending, dwell on the supposed ways that Kiara saved me, and my soul, from being a lost echo in the crevices of my mind. Though Kiara pulled me back from the precipice, I still face the danger of tripping and tumbling headfirst into an abyss so dark that light is swallowed before it has a chance to shine. There are yet battles to be waged; the beast has been silenced, but it is not vanquished. It will never be gone.

  Because love is not enough and it takes more than a gentle touch and forgiving heart to make a man whole again, as much as any broken man can ever be. Because a man cannot go through what I did and come through unchanged, because everything, every thing, especially magic, leaves a mark.

  Some days are easier, some days my human side is so strong it seems impossible that it would ever again relinquish control to the wild animal within. Those days I smile freely and am every bit the man I’m supposed to be.

  But there are some days that it takes only one wrong step to send me hurtling back into the darkness, one misplaced word to reignite the all-consuming fire of rage and with it the power of the beast. On such days, I try to disappear before I hurt anyone, stubbornly waiting out the darkness as minutes tick by like years and I fight to reassert control.

  I’d be better off without those days. For they are all that stand between me and my supposed happily ever after.

  So let this account tell the truth of my so-called faery tale, let it be known how black a heart
can be, how deep a beast can sink its claws, and the sort of scars it leaves behind. Let it tell of how many shadows can shroud a man’s soul and how even a sliver of light can give it a heretofore forfeited hope that it may yet be redeemed.

  Let it tell my story so others may yet know why it was I chose to fight at all.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Caroline and Fire & Ice, for your unending efforts in making this series beautiful and getting it seen.

  Thank you Miryam, for your unending patience as we dive beneath the surface and nitpick details that won’t even make it into the final draft.

  Thank you to my family, cousins, and friends for believing so much in these books.

  Thank you to all those who volunteered to review.

  And to you, the reader, thank you for hauling anchor and sailing with me to an enchanted sea.

  THANK YOU FOR READING

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  About the Author

  E.L. Tenenbaum is fairly certain a bookstore is really the happiest place on earth. In addition to being an author, her love for stories in different shapes and sizes has led to a degree in journalism, a stint as a script reader, and a few runs as writer/director for community musical theater. When she's not reading, or writing, she enjoys speaking at middle/high schools as a visiting author.