The Surface Breaks

  “Oh, your father and Ceto have fought since they were children,” she says, suppressing a small smile. “They are two sides of the one coin. They need each other, as much as they are both loathe to admit that.”

  “Need each other? Father and the Sea Witch are mortal enemies.”

  “There are many things that you do not understand about the ways of the kingdom, my child. About its history,” she says. Then tell me, Grandmother. Tell me that which I do not understand. Let me learn. “All you need to know is that your father will never hear of this,” she continues. “Surely that is the most important thing?”

  Hope flares in me briefly – I am safe – and then dies down just as swiftly. This does not change much. Zale will still visit, and I am still not allowed to say no. I hate him, and I hate myself more. And my bones still ache and I will never see Oliver again, and what does it matter? For he woke with her name on his lips. Viola.

  “This is good news,” I say. “I am grateful, Grandmother Thalassa.”

  “There is more, is there not?” she asks. “Muirgen? I know there is more that you want to tell me.”

  I pause, unsure if I can trust her but I need to talk to someone, anyone and then—

  “I love him,” I say, the words shredding my throat in their desperation to be heard. My grandmother is silent for a moment, but her expression is not unkind.

  “Love him? This human man?” she asks. I nod. “After everything they have taken from us?” She runs her hands through her hair, silver strands like rings on her thin fingers. “You cannot tell a soul of this, Muirgen. Whatever you think you ‘feel’. Do you understand?” I catch the edge of panic in her voice. “Your father will… I can’t lose you too. I just can’t.”

  “But maybe my mother isn’t lost.” I watch my grandmother close her eyes as if in pain but I press on, regardless. “We never had a body to bury. Maybe if I go to the surface, I can find out what happened, finally discover the truth of it all. What if she’s still up there, waiting for us to find her?”

  “Stop it, Muirgen.” Grandmother’s voice is ragged. “Your mother swam too close to the shore. She was impetuous and headstrong. She was taken by the humans and she died in captivity. That is the end of it.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense. Father said that she chose to go, that she left us of her own free will – but he also said that she was captured. Which is it? And you always said that mermaids are too wily for the humans’ nets, so how did they take my mother if—”

  “Muirgen. I said enough. The Sea King told us what happened. His word is law.”

  I cannot deny the truth of that. None of us can. “Was he upset when she was taken?” I ask instead.

  “What?”

  “The Sea King. Was he upset when my mother was taken?”

  She hesitates, but only for a second. “Of course he was upset. He was outraged. As he should be, he had lost his wife, the mother of his children. He was…” She breaks off, swallowing hard. “I don’t want to talk about this any more. It was a difficult time for us all. I still don’t know why your mother did what she did. I thought I had raised her better than that.”

  “I don’t think she loved my father,” I say. “It must be very hard to be bonded to someone who you don’t love.”

  “Oh, Muirgen.” She softens. “I’m sorry. Zale isn’t a bad man, I’m sure of it.”

  You are wrong there, Grandmother.

  “He’s so old,” I say. “The bonding age is twenty. Can’t I have a few more years, at least?”

  “Your father was sixty-three when he was bonded to your mother, and she was only sixteen. Exceptions are made, from time to time.”

  And I will be sixteen too. Soon. So very soon. “But I want—”

  “I’ve told you before, wanting has never brought anyone in this family any luck,” she says. “A woman wanting more than what she can have only results in pain and loss and small children crying for someone who will never return. Wanting has brought—” She stops herself. “Muirgen,” she says, more calmly. “All you need to know is that the humans are different to us. They don’t even believe that we exist, not really. They tell stories about mermaids, stories they believe to be myths, legends. They are fascinated by us, and terrified by us as well. Do not underestimate that fear, and what they might do with it. Some men are very afraid of women, my child. And those men long for us the most, and are the most dangerous when they do not get what they want.”

  “But why would they be afraid of us? We have no powers.”

  “Of course we don’t,” she says, looking away from me. “But the humans do not understand that. They fear that their men will be overcome with madness and dive into the depths of the water to make a bride of one of us, finding only death instead. And then they blame us, as men have always blamed women, for prompting their lust, for fuelling their insatiable greed for something they cannot have.”

  “But…” I know that I am about to say the unsayable. “Why can’t they have us? If that is something a mermaid wants in return. What is to prevent it then?”

  My grandmother skims her fingers across my tail. “Have you forgotten something?” she says. “The humans find our tails disgusting.” I stare at the dark green scales flecked with silver, catching the moonlight and making it seem as if I am aglow.

  I can believe that. I can believe it easily.

  A mermaid or a monster? What is the difference?

  “Yes,” she continues, mistaking my silence for shock. “They prefer their own legs, those clumsy stumps that allow them to walk upright. It is most puzzling.”

  “But could they…”

  “Could they what, child?”

  “Could a human learn to love someone with a fish’s tail, do you think?” I hold my breath.

  “No,” she says, not ungently, and I feel something split inside my chest. “A man would need a woman with legs. For all our beauty, to the humans we are freaks, curios.” She rubs her eyes and I can see how weary she has become.

  “If only…” I whisper. “If only I could find a way to…”

  “Find a way to what?”

  “A way…” Grandmother leans in to hear me properly. “Find a way to grow human legs. Father has powers – perhaps he could…”

  She rears back. “Have you gone mad, child? The Sea King despises the humans, especially after what happened to your mother. He would rather see you dead than what you’re suggesting.”

  She is right. My father would rather bury me in the shifting sands than see me happy with a human above the surface, and a part of me always knew that. I must obey his rules, be a good girl and live the life that he has chosen for me. I will wait here in the kingdom until the end comes and my soul is scattered on the waves for the fish to feed on.

  “You are of the sea, child,” my grandmother says. “This is where you belong.”

  But I do not want to belong here.

  “I will leave you now,” she says. “Muirgen, you are young, beautiful. You have the purest voice that has ever been heard in this kingdom, a gift that could make hardened sea-warriors shed precious tears. You have your sisters. You are betrothed to the most respected man in the kingdom after the Sea King. You are blessed, child.”

  “I can’t, Grandmother,” I am gasping now, the words breaking apart. I can’t seem to control them. “I can’t be bonded to Zale. I would rather die.”

  “There’s no need to be so dramatic.”

  “I’m not being dramatic,” I say, stung by the accusation. “It’s not true love with Zale.”

  “True love? My dear, those were nymph-tales. That’s not real life.”

  But it could be. Oliver has proven that to me. He represents the possibility of love, of something more than a life under the sea has to offer me. “Grandmother,” I say, “Zale frightens me. And sometimes,” I gather my courage, “sometimes, he comes to my room at night and—”

  “Stop it,” my grandmother says. “That is not true. Zale is a well-respected member of
the kingdom, I do not believe that of him.”

  And I know then. I know it is over. My grandmother had been my last hope.

  There is a clanging noise outside, metal hitting the pearl steps, and both of us shrink back.

  “What was that?” I say as Grandmother swims to my bedroom door to check. “Is someone there?”

  “There’s no one there,” she says, peering into the dark. “It must have been a fish.”

  “That sound was too heavy to be a fish.”

  “There’s no one there,” she says again. “We are tired, and it is the darkest hour of night. It was nothing.” Our eyes meet, uncertain.

  “Goodnight, Grandmother,” I say.

  “Goodnight, Muirgen,” she replies, and she doesn’t return to my bedside to kiss me on the forehead or tuck me in, to tell me she loves me and to pray to the sea gods to protect me while I sleep, like she normally does.

  I lie there, imagining the phantom legs that I know must be trapped inside of me. I picture them, stretching, pushing, ripping my tail apart. Craving the earth beneath them, solid.

  There have been rumours, before, of mermaids who decided that two hundred years was too long a time to spend in the kingdom. Maids who have wrapped seaweed tightly around throats and scraped sharpened seashells across wrists, praying to the sea gods to melt their bones to foam when their pain became too much for them to carry. Defective, the whispers in nursery went. Broken. More like Rusalka than maid, and it was always mermaids who chose this fate. No man would ever feel so utterly without hope.

  I am desperate now, more desperate than I ever thought possible. But I still have hope. There must be a way to escape this. There must be.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It is dark that night when I leave the palace, the kind of dark that suggests that, above the surface, the moon has been smothered by clouds. I had waited until the palace had fallen silent, only leaving my bedroom when I could be sure that everyone was asleep. Tracing my fingertips over my comb and mirror, murmuring goodbye to my marble statue. I won’t need them where I’m going.

  Down the stairs of my tower, past my sisters’ dormitory. Pausing outside the door, wishing I could say goodbye. But they would make me stay. Stay here and marry Zale. They would have me spend my life dreaming of Oliver. Dreaming of my mother. Dreaming until I dream no more. I can’t do it but still, I wish I could tell them that I love them. That, like my mother before me, I must leave them.

  Creeping through the foyer, the floor smooth in diamond-shapes of gold and pearl. Holding my breath in case I wake the servants, wretched fear paralysing my thoughts, stuttering them into words rather than sentences.

  What if… Father… Zale… Oliver…

  My mother. My mother. My mother.

  Winding through the narrow streets of sand, daisies of red and purple lining the paths, seashell houses crammed together. They are all closed at this time of night, the lips of the cockles pushed up to meet one another. I imagine the mer-folk nestled inside, and I wonder what their dreams are made up of. Have they ever dreamed of the escape of an open sky the way that I do?

  As I swim away from the kingdom and into the Outerlands, the darkness thickens and although the path ahead is clear, it feels like I am wading through tangled sea weeds. The water is dryer here, a desert wasting on my tongue, the sea grass and flowers withering, as if diseased. The shantytowns, made from shattered grey shells and a prayer, seem to sway with the pull of the tide. I have never been here before. I refused to accompany Sophia on her charitable visits, certain I would say the wrong thing or be caught staring at the Outerlands mer-folk.

  They are different, those who live here. Not different like the humans or the Salkas, they are still mer-folk, but the Sea King does not wish them to live within palace grounds. The ones who pray to the forbidden gods, those whose bodies were hatched misshapen, maids who did not adhere to the standards of beauty my father prefers, those who were sterile or barren. “I’m not going to exterminate them,” my father said, when I asked why the Outerlands even existed if he found the people living within so objectionable. “It’s just better that they live amongst their kind. They’ll be more comfortable that way.”

  No one stirs as I move through the shanties but I stop anyway when I come to the whirlpools that separate our world from that of the Sea Witch; a wall of pounding, swirling water twisting from sea-bed to the surface. I look back, my breath uneven. Half expecting to see an army of men led by Zale, charging towards me. I have never been this far from the palace before, not once in my near sixteen years. And to move past the whirlpools, to swim through the chewing currents and allow myself to be spat out on the other side, is strictly forbidden by Sea-King Law. His people are not permitted to travel beyond the Outerlands, especially not to the Shadowlands. If I do this, I remind myself, there is no going back.

  “If I do what you’re suggesting, there is no going back,” I had said to Cosima tonight.

  A knock on the door. Grandmother had just left and I assumed it was her again. I knew it was not Zale; he never knocks.

  “Come in,” I had called. It was Cosima.

  “Crying, sister?” she asked.

  “What are you doing here, Cosima?”

  She sat next to me, adjusting her tail in line with mine, and I knew she was comparing them, my dark green against her royal blue, searching for a flaw in my scales that would mean she had won, for once.

  “I heard you,” she said in a strange sing-song manner. “I heard you talking to Grandmother.” My chest tightened, squeezing all the air out of my lungs. What had she heard? And, if she had heard the worst of it, what would she do?

  “So, that was you earlier,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage. “I knew it wasn’t just a fish, no matter what Grandmother thought.”

  Cosima picked up a mirror from the squat wooden cabinet beside my bed. A relic from a storm seven years ago. Vicious winds, a starving sea, Salkas screaming for flesh-revenge with wild, unfettered abandon. Calling the names of men who were long dead, men who broke their hearts or their bodies, and sometimes both. Corpse after corpse after corpse. It was raining humans for months afterwards.

  Cosima gazed at her reflection in the mirror, tousling her golden hair. “Don’t try and deny it,” she said. “I heard everything you said to Grandmother. You love him. You love a human man.” I thought of Oliver, spewing sea-water out of his mouth, as if it was something poisonous. How beautiful his face was, even when pallid and cold. And then I thought of him calling her name, Viola? Viola?

  I didn’t say anything. It was too dangerous a thing to admit, especially to Cosima. I just focused on catching my breath, one in (You’ll be fine, Gaia), breathe out (Stay calm, Gaia). “What’s wrong with you, Muirgen?” she said when I remained silent. “It’s not fair to Zale. You are to be bonded in two months and this is how you repay him for that honour? He should be with someone who loves him, who understands him. Someone more suited to the rigours of ruling the kingdom. Someone who…” she trailed off. “Anyway,” she said. “Someone else.”

  “I never wanted any of this to happen.” I went to take her hand, but she snatched it back. “Cosima, please. You know this isn’t my fault.”

  “What’s not your fault? That you stole Zale from me?”

  “I didn’t steal him. You and I were such good friends – we loved each other, didn’t we?” There was a lump caught in my throat. “I miss you.”

  “Zale was mine,” she said. “Everything was perfect before. Perhaps if you hadn’t been born then our mother wouldn’t have lost her mind and deserted us.” I drew back as if she had slapped me, but she didn’t stop there. “And you don’t even appreciate Zale. You’re so ungrateful that you fall in love with the first human man you set your eyes on. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you admit it to Grandmother tonight. The humans took our mother, Muirgen.”

  “You’re always saying that she abandoned us, now you’re saying it’s the humans’ fault. Make up your mind, Co
sima.”

  “Don’t get smart. Those creatures murdered her for sport. Have you forgotten that?”

  I had taken a deep breath. “We don’t know that for sure, do we?”

  “What?” She was astonished at this. She obviously hadn’t heard everything I said to Grandmother tonight. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, we don’t know what happened to her after she was captured. We only know what Father has told us.”

  “And that is enough. His word is law, you foolish girl. Have you completely lost your senses?”

  “I just want the truth. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  “And you’re prepared to do anything to get ‘this truth’?” she snarled, her face fierce.

  “Well.” I don’t know. I don’t know. “I think so.”

  “It’s going to take more than ‘I think so’ to do what needs to be done, Muirgen. Don’t be pathetic.”

  She didn’t think I was brave enough, I realized, and I felt something smouldering inside me. “Don’t talk to me as if I’m a child, Cosima. Yes, I am prepared to do anything to find out what happened to her.”

  “Okay,” she said, and her features fell clean, as if she had never known anger in her life. “Okay, Muirgen.” A brief smile. “I understand.”

  “You do?” I grabbed her hand again, the relief at finally being heard almost overwhelming. This time she didn’t let go.

  “You’ve always been such a curious mermaid, haven’t you, Muirgen?” Cosima was the only one who ever called me that. “Even when we were children.” She shifted closer to me, cuddling into my side. “Do you remember?”

  Cosima and I, exploring shipwrecks. I’m tired, she would complain at the end of the day, let’s go back to the palace. I would wave her off, happy to stay by myself. “We used to be such good friends before Zale got in the way,” Cosima continued, wrapping a ringlet of hair around her finger. “I miss you, Muirgen. And I want you to be happy. And you’re not happy down here, are you?”

  I thought of my father, lining his daughters up in order of their beauty, his satisfaction in my face and my body. His inevitable disgust when I would begin to age and lose my bloom. Zale, his hands and his tongue, and wanting to scour myself afterwards, excavate my bones to make myself clean again. And then Oliver, and that heat running through me when I remembered his dark eyes, and I wanted to feel like that again and again and again. And I thought of my mother. I will never stop thinking of my mother.