Ice & Smoke

by Elizabeth Belyeu

  As small conversations began to bloom here and there, I heard Tristan speaking quietly to Genevieve, clearly not thinking anyone else would pay attention.

  "I can see how you love music. I can see how you love the sea. I wish I understood why you seem determined to deny them to yourself."

  Genevieve looked up at him, startled like a caught deer, and I saw that she had her fingertips on his pipe, as if aching to pick it up. She looked down again, cheeks darkening with embarrassment—but she did not release the pipe.

  "In fact," Tristan continued, "there is much I wish I understood about you. I feel certain you understand me tolerably well, after all the words I have spilled at you… Your manner does invite confidences, I only hope they are not a burden to you. I would not have it be so uneven between us. I do not like to take without giving."

  Owain, at the other end of the table, was eliciting cheers and applause with some tale about a goose in a well. I tried to turn my attention to him… no, it was more truthful to say I pretended to turn my attention to him, while keeping my ear keenly turned to this intimate exchange between Genevieve and my betrothed.

  "I suppose it is no generosity to ask a reciprocation from you that you have no desire to give." Tristan let his hand rest beside hers on the table, not touching—but ever so close to touching. "Or simply cannot give. Yet I would make no assumptions about your ability to communicate. You are most expressive, when you wish to be—in your face, your stance, the movement of your hands. There is so much I would hear from you, if I could! Your thoughts and opinions, your ideas, your origin… but perhaps you would not wish to speak of that even if you could."

  Genevieve glanced up at him again, and then around the table at all her friends, her eyes thoughtful and growing determined. After a long moment, she reached out a trembling hand, and took up the pipe.

  She had played beautifully before, better than any bird or minstrel. That was as nothing to the melody she now produced. More noticeable than its beauty, however, was the startling way that the music seemed to press upon me, as if it did not merely fall upon my ears but spoke directly into my mind. All other conversation ceased, my companions falling into stunned silence. Images and feelings, dream-like but perfectly clear, rose inside my mind without my bidding, and I knew it had to be the music bringing them forth.

  The music showed me an underwater city, all shifting lights and seashells, tall spires of coral and crystal, the "air" filled with fish and long-fronded plants of every imaginable color and texture and size. And in this city were people, beautiful dark-skinned people who never merely spoke but sang, speaking mind-to-mind with music as Genevieve was doing now. People with no legs, but instead the tails of enormous fish.

  Merfolk.

  The song changed, from the grand wide spaces of the city, to the slight, delicate notes of a single maiden who lived there, who earned her living cooking the meals of more important merfolk.

  My hand covered my mouth as I recognized the mermaid as Genevieve.

  The sound of the pipe trailed suddenly away, the images it brought fading, until we were all looking at the real, present Genevieve—staring, in fact, as if we had never seen her before.

  Breathing hard, Genevieve stood with a loud scrape of wood across stone, and fumbled the pipe back into Tristan's hands.

  "Gen, was that magic?" Gareth said.

  Elaysius fluttered his wings. "Be not so, friend, there is no need for such distress!"

  But Genevieve was already fleeing, slipping her wrist out of Tristan's grasp when he would have held her back, and dashing up the stairs as fast as her feet would take her.

  Tristan would have gone up after her instantly. His leg not allowing it, he urged me to do so in his stead.

  "I will not, nor will I let anyone else," I said. "Genevieve has made it clear she wishes to have only her own company at the moment. When she has had some time to herself, then I will speak to her."

  Accordingly, as soon as I had emptied my plate of food, I set the menfolk to handling the dishes and went upstairs.

  Entering Genevieve's chamber, I saw it with new eyes—the garlands of dried seaweed and driftwood, the blue-shaded lamps giving their light a watery hue, the innumerable seashells hanging in strings so thickly that you could not cross the room without brushing against them. I had often thought it curious that she, who feared the sea, seemed determined to drag as much of it as possible into her chamber. How had she come to be as she was, a woman with the legs to walk on land, fearing the water from which she came? No doubt she would tell us, when she was ready. I would not press for answers.

  Genevieve, I realized as I moved further into the room, had not noticed me. She was standing near her window, her face pressed to first one and then another of her dangling seashells, kissing and stroking them, holding them to her ears to hear the sound of waves within. Her face was a mess of both fresh and drying tears.

  "I should not have been surprised to learn your origin," I said, low and gentle, though she still jumped and turned toward the sound. I assayed a sheepish smile and added, "The signs were obvious enough," gesturing round at the room.

  Genevieve bit her lip, looking wary.

  "Gen, why do you look at me as if I might turn you out? Do you truly think we would reject you—your friends who have known and loved you so long? How silly."

  Genevieve, wiping at her tears, managed a smile, but tremulously. She showed me her hands, which were calloused and scarred, bearing all the signs of cooking and cleaning and gardening. It took me a thoughtful moment to figure what she meant by the gesture.

  "Do you think I will scorn you now that I know you were never of high birth?" Her expression confirmed my guess. "Oh, Gen, I have been so very foolish. I thought I was paying you a compliment, by attributing your grace, skill and goodness to noble blood. What nonsense. Braith says his master, who is certainly the very worst of men, is high-born—so we have proof that that is no guarantee of good character. My only excuse is the very limited company I have been forced to keep, to give me such odd ideas of the world. I hope you will forgive me any discomfort I have caused you." I took both her hands in mine—neither pair less work-battered than the other—and was relieved when she tugged them free only in order to throw her arms around me.

  After a long embrace, I pulled back and said, "I do confess myself a little dizzied by the number of surprises my longtime companions have brought me in the last few days! It seems that none of you are what I always assumed you to be. Sweet, simple Gareth is a wizard, you are a mermaid, and silly little Elaysius is rather an excellent warrior… Next we shall discover Winifred is a unicorn!"

  Genevieve smiled and poked at my ribs.

  "What, I? There are no surprises there, I am only what I have always been. In… most ways. I am no longer the heir to a kingdom, I suppose—I haven't been for years, and never knew it. So there, you are right, even my assumptions about myself were incorrect. Another new discovery."

  Genevieve hugged me again, and I clung to her tighter than was probably comfortable, feeling for a moment as if I might otherwise float away and be lost.

  ◆◆◆

  The garden needed quite a bit of attention if it was going to recover from its trampling during the ghoul-battle. Grubbing away at the task in the midday sun, I was just building up a temper about my lack of assistance—Gareth I had set to coaxing back our scattered chickens, Owain had his horse to tend, and Braith had his injuries, but where was Genevieve? And Tristan?—when Elaysius came drifting in on the breeze, singing at the top of his lungs.

  "Right then, you'll do," I said, and pointed to the tangled melon vines. "Sort that out, if you please."

  "But of course, dearest princess! I shall do any and all things thou biddest me."

  "Of course you will," I said indulgently, but I had to reflect, as I continued my work and he began his, that it was the truth. He had never flinched from any task given to him, despite the fact that—for instance—the melons he was currently at
tempting to move were larger than his entire body.

  "I was just telling Genevieve," I said, gathering the pieces of a shattered squash, "that you are in fact a great deal less silly than we credit you with. I think it likely that you cut down as many ghouls as Tristan, at a tenth of his size. Any number of us might be dead were it not for you, I certainly among them."

  "As always, thou art the kindest of ladies," Elaysius said absently, pulling up a dandelion and twirling it in his hand like a quarterstaff.

  "It seems to me that I know very little of where you come from, Elaysius, or what you hope to return to, once your quest is finished. Even though I have asked you more than once."

  His only response was to throw the dandelion high into the air and draw his sword on it as it came down, slicing the stalk into three pieces.

  "It is your right, of course," I said, "to divulge information about yourself only when and where you choose. I only hope you know that my desire in asking is merely to be as good a friend to you as you have been to me, comforting and supporting you in whatever trials you have to bear. You have suffered so in your attempt to help me, trapped here in our circle. I do not even know why you chose to make the rescue of a human princess your sworn quest to begin with."

  After balancing the yellow bloom of the dandelion atop his own head, Elaysius turned back to his task with the melons, and finally, as if off-handedly, replied. "Would that it had a nobler origin, my lady, but in truth, it is mostly this—that word of thy predicament came at an opportune time. Passionately did I desire to escape mine home court afore Midsummer's Day. The great tradition among my folk, if thou didst not know, is to be married on Midsummer's Day."

  I cocked my head. "Were you angling to escape a marriage?"

  "No! That is, yes, rather—but not mine own."

  "Ah," I said in understanding. "You wished to avoid witnessing the marriage of another."

  "Which I most thoroughly accomplished! Why, I have not been forced to witness them together at all these five years. So thou seest, dear princess, the service thou hast done me." Elaysius beamed at me, blue light filtering through the thousand tiny yellow petals of the dandelion.

  I pulled the fairy knight against me in a tight embrace. "I am glad to be of whatever help to you I can, my friend."

  ◆◆◆

  Smoke from the kitchen chimney informed me, late in the afternoon, that Genevieve had reappeared and begun preparations for supper. Thoroughly sick of the garden, I brushed the dirt from my hands, released Elaysius from his labors (whereupon he streaked away like lightning, perhaps fearing I would change my mind), and started for the kitchen to help Genevieve.

  How many things about Genevieve were clearer, I thought as I walked, now that I knew she was a mermaid! The way she had burned herself when she first saw fire, as if she had no concept of what it was; the length of time it had taken her to "regain" the use of her legs, after her presumed shipwreck; her clumsiness in the beginning, as if the strength of gravity and the speed of her own limbs were new and strange.

  Even her skill at cooking had developed strangely! She had been fascinated by our food and our kitchen from the first, and clearly had some previous knowledge of such things, yet made the most elementary mistakes. She could manage a cooking fire very well now, but still she would rather pickle, ferment, or marinade a dish than roast it, and seemed amused by her companions' aversion to raw meat. All of which made perfect sense for one accustomed to preparing food underwater.

  "It all makes perfect sense," came a voice through the wide kitchen window as I approached, startling me with its similarity to my own thoughts. "But there are a hundred questions left unanswered still," the voice continued—Tristan, unmistakably. Was that where he had been all afternoon, pestering Genevieve? "The most compelling of them being, however did you come to be here? Whatever your origin, you now undeniably walk on legs over dry ground."

  Genevieve came into sight at the window, stirring something in a bowl and glancing shyly at Tristan.

  Tristan followed after her, clumping on his crutch, his voice teasing. "Come now, will you remain an enigma? Do you think that necessary to retain my interest? I assure you it is not so."

  Smiling and a little flushed, Genevieve turned away.

  "Perhaps you have the capability of going back and forth between tail and legs, as Braith does between his human and draconic forms?" Tristan reached out and took gentle hold of her wrist, his expression sobering. "Perhaps someday you will return to the waves, go back to your people and think of us no more?"

  How had I found myself eavesdropping again? Guilt pricked me, and I drew breath to call out to them, but could think of nothing to say. I was perfectly visible had they looked in my direction, but they were looking only at each other, their gazes locked in a significant sort of way that made me feel unwelcome… and quite awkwardly jealous.

  Genevieve shook her head, denying Tristan's conjecture with a force that made her hair ornaments clack.

  "What, then?" Tristan asked.

  Genevieve put down the bowl, then bit her lip and reached—for Tristan? For his pocket, I realized, pulling out his little pipe. She raised it to her lips and began to play.

  With the silvery, lilting notes came a return of that image in the mind's eye, of Genevieve as she had once been—adrift in a bright city of seashells, her floating hair all worked through with bits of shell and seaweed, and a scaly silver-green tail in place of legs.

  'Adrift' was indeed the proper word, for this mermaid had no family and few friends, was no one in particular to anyone, until the day—sunlight broke bright through the song, dry air harsh on skin accustomed to smooth, heavy water—until the day she came to the surface, and met there a man, a sailor, as beautiful and strange as the sun and air that surrounded him. A man whose voice made no music at all, carried no songs into the hearts and minds of its hearers, yet said such kind and wondrous things to her…

  The song twisted with pain. Genevieve loved her sailor more than life, but they could never be together, could have only stolen moments, fleeting touches, as she followed the ship he served, far away from the city that was her home. Into dark and dangerous waters—and there she found a dark and dangerous merwoman, one who had powers unheard of in her city, the power to give the mermaid what was most important to her—in exchange for something whose importance was only second-most…

  She came to the sailor in the night, fully human at last, stripped of all that had made her a mermaid—her gills, her tail, and her magical voice.

  Stripped of all, it turned out, that had made him love her at all.

  He was not totally unkind. He had not, the song insisted, expected her to surrender so much for him—was grieved and dismayed to realize how much stronger her feelings were than his. He told her to go back to her city, back to her family, back to the mermen who could love her as she deserved.

  Genevieve did not tell him that this was impossible, that her transformation was permanent. She let him think all was well, bade him farewell, and dove back into the water.

  Here the song grew rough and frightening, as Genevieve found that the waves that had always been her friends were no friend at all to a human, with no gills and no idea how to swim. In darkness and terror and despair, she resigned herself to death in the ocean where she no longer belonged.

  Instead, she woke in a warm bed, where a bevy of odd creatures welcomed her, gave her a new home, a new name, a new life.

  I thought the song would end there, and it almost did, the song trailing out on a note of hope and bittersweet acceptance. But then something new entered the song—something bright and strong and brave and beautiful, something I immediately recognized as Tristan.

  And within six notes, it was impossible not to know that Genevieve was deeply, fiercely, unwillingly, and very much hopelessly in love with him.

  My knees threatened to collapse beneath me. I watched in stunned silence as Genevieve at last set aside the pipe, breathless both with playing an
d with tears, trembling as she waited for Tristan's reaction.

  Which reaction was to tenderly, wonderingly, pull her close and kiss her.

  Some sound burst from my throat, though it could not have been a word. I saw both faces turn toward me wide-eyed, but I did not return their gaze. I ran, reckless and unseeing, desperate to get away, far away from what I had just seen.

  "Ariana! Wait!" came Tristan's pained and frantic voice, but I did not wait. I ran for the stable.

  I hid in the farthest corner of the farthest stall. Elaysius and Gareth tried at first to speak to me, concerned, but I shouted for them to leave me be, and eventually they did. I heard them go out for their supper, heard Lightning's rough breathing, easily audible over the comings and goings of the other horses.

  I could hardly resent Genevieve for loving Tristan. Who could resist him? And he had done nothing to encourage her, not that I could tell. For this much, none need be blamed. She had not, perhaps, intended... but Tristan, Tristan had kissed her, while betrothed to me. For this I could do nothing but blame him, and blame him soundly.

  It came to me quietly that there might be some hypocrisy in this. Had I not thought of Braith in ways unbefitting a maiden betrothed to another? Perhaps, but thinking and acting were very different creatures. I had not kissed Braith! And if he had kissed me, it had been most unexpected and unsanctioned and most likely part of a ritual in any case. It was not the same.

  And—and the way he had kissed her—so full of tenderness and delicate, wondering joy, as if he had been granted some gift so unlikely as to be utterly unhoped-for... It was quite a contrast to his cheerful, gentle, yet painfully awkward kisses with me.

  Tristan was not in love with me, not in the least. He was in love with Genevieve.