“Nia,” I whimper. “But that is impossible; she is betrothed to Marlin. She will have a natural marriage.” I have heard of girls with unnatural urges, cured, of course, by bonding and by having children of their own. But never a princess. Never a daughter of the Sea King.
“Natural? And what is natural? Your father deems my Salkas to be ‘unnatural’ too, and what are they but drowning girls? He believes that he is all that is natural and right, and anyone with differing inclinations must be deemed perverted in order to prove his point.”
“But Nia is a princess.” A princess who never joined in when my sisters and I were discussing which mer-man we found the most handsome, I realize. A princess who is always looking out of the window, searching for something she cannot name.
“And you think such things cannot exist within the palace walls?”
“But—” I am unable to continue for fear that I will cry. Nia. What will my father do to her if he finds out?
“Don’t worry,” the Sea Witch says, as if she can hear my thoughts. “Nia will accept her fate, marry the man your father has chosen for her. She will be… well, she will be fine. Nia does not have your restlessness.” She smiles. “Speaking of which, is it time that we should come to the heart of the matter?”
“What?”
“You are here to relinquish your tail, yes? You want to make yourself suitable for the desires of a man?” Not just any man. Oliver. “You desire two stumps of flesh to walk upon, stumps that can be spread open in a manner that no sea-tail will permit.” Her head drops as she whispers to the snake around her waist. “All this to satisfy a human who isn’t even aware of her existence.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I knew this was to be your fate from the moment my Salka told me what happened the night of the storm. I could taste your need.”
“It’s not just about Oliver,” I say. “Yes, it’s true that I love him.” The Sea Witch laughs at this, and I ignore her. “But this is about my mother too… She went up there, and she was captured and we don’t know what happened to her, not really. My father says she abandoned us—”
“A mother wanting a life of her own is not the same thing as abandoning her children. You would do well to remember that.”
“And,” I carry on, “he said it was my mother’s fault and we shouldn’t care about her but—”
“Your father says a lot of things.” Her expression is unreadable.
“I need to know the truth.” I am pleading with her now. “I have always needed to know.”
“You will find no answers up there, little mermaid.” Ceto’s shoulders sag. “None that you want to hear, anyway.”
“You don’t understand,” I say, fighting the urge to scream at her.
“You seem to be under the illusion that I understand very little,” she says. She fishes a small bone from the floor and feeds it to the snake on her lap. “That is a mistake, I can assure you.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, swimming back so I am out of her reach. “But I can’t stay there, I can’t be bonded to Zale, I just can’t. He, he…” I gag on the acid-burn words that could explain what he does to me at night, what he’s promised to do once I turn sixteen. Only two months left. “I’m begging you,” I whisper. “Please help me. I don’t know what I will be forced to do if you don’t help me.”
The Sea Witch softens. “I am sorry that it has come to this for you.” Her gaze falls in the middle-distance, as if deciding something. She sighs. “But very well. I shall brew a potion that will slice your tail in two, casing each part with human flesh.” She says it as if it’s easy, mundane. “I will give you legs. That is what you desire, is it not?”
“Thank you, Ceto.” The relief is swift, and sure, as if I didn’t realize how tense I was until she said those words. You will have legs. “Thank you so much.”
“There is no need to thank me just yet. Your legs will be admired by all who see them, as will your unusually graceful movements, but there will be a price. There always is. A sacrifice, and one that you will remember for the rest of your life.” She purses her lips. “You will be unable to forget, I’m afraid.”
“Why not?” I ask, my palms starting to oil. Somehow, I know that I’m not going to like her answer.
“Every step you take shall be one of torture,” she explains. “As if a blade of sharpest metal has shorn through the soles of your foot and broken the bones of your thighs, twisting into your stomach and chafing your organs. I wish I could make it otherwise, but it is a penalty that the laws of magic demand and as such, it is beyond my control. Are you ready for that?”
I don’t reply. I am too afraid, or perhaps, simply, I do not know what can even be said to something so horrifying.
“And, of course, once you have taken the potion there is no turning back,” she says, an uncanny echo of Cosima’s words to me last night. “The kingdom will be lost to you for ever; your sisters, your beloved grandmother. You will never see them again.”
“I knew as much,” I say, determined not to think of my grandmother, how she will feel when she discovers she has lost another girl to the human world. “I am not a fool.”
“My most sincere apologies, Princess Muirgen; I would hate to make you feel like a fool. Did you also know that the potion will only last for a month? Did you know that if this Oliver does not profess his undying love for you by the time the sun begins to rise on that morning after the next full moon – well…”
“What?” I ask. “What will happen then?”
“You will not see your sixteenth year,” she says, looking at me with something akin to sympathy. “Your heart will shatter, cutting your lungs to shreds, carving your brain to pieces. And your body will disintegrate, the waves taking you for their own. It is Sea Law. There is no return.”
The Sea Witch doesn’t understand that if I do not see Oliver again, my heart will crack in half anyway. I will live my broken life with my broken heart, never knowing what became of my mother; forced to smile while I sing upon my father’s request; becoming a respectable wife for Zale. Any fate is better than that.
“And if Oliver does fall in love with me?” I ask, pretending to be unconcerned about any other eventuality.
“You will live happily ever after,” she says.
“And the pain?” I ask. “Will that go away?”
“Oh no,” she replies. “But women are meant to suffer. And you will have a husband and a child and a kitchen to call your own. Isn’t that what every little maid wants?”
“Yes. That is what I want,” I say, and the Sea Witch looks away from me, as though disappointed. “I am prepared to take the risk,” I add. Oliver will love me; I know he will.
He has to.
“Very well,” she says, sighing. “There is more, though. That is the price that must be paid according to Sea Law. But I must extract my own.”
“What?”
The Sea Witch narrows her eyes. “You thought such a potion would come for free? This is powerful magic,” she says. “And not something that can be undertaken lightly. I will have to use my own blood to create the potion. You must see that I need a sacrifice in return?”
“What kind of sacrifice?”
The Sea Witch pushes herself up from the chair, the snakes shedding from her and wriggling through holes in the uneven floorboards. She moves towards me, her skin as luminous as a pearl. She touches my cheek, her fingers silk-smooth, tracing them down my throat.
“We have heard tell of your gift here in the Shadowlands,” she says. “My Salkas inform me that yours is the loveliest voice in all the kingdom.” She presses harder on my neck, and I cough. “In order to make this magic work, I would require your most important asset in exchange.”
“You want my voice?”
“Why so surprised?” she asks. “Did you presume that I would ask for your face or that magnificent mane of hair? No, it is your voice that I value. You should not underestimate its worth, little mermaid.” She swims bac
k from me. “I shall give you legs and you shall give me your tongue.”
“How?” I ask, pressing my lips together, as if afraid she will reach her hand into my mouth and pluck it out with her fingers.
“I shall cut it out, my dear. Don’t worry.” The Sea Witch smiles when I recoil. “It won’t take long.”
“But, but…” I imagine the pain of such an act, the violence. “Won’t that hurt?”
“Love is supposed to hurt. I thought you would have realized that by now,” she says. She means my mother, of course. That void in the centre of me which her disappearance has scraped clean, widening into an abyss with every new day.
“But without my voice, what do I have left?” I ask her. “How will I make Oliver fall in love with me before the next full moon?”
The Sea Witch shrugs, her hair floating up in the water and exposing her generous breasts. “You will still have your form, won’t you? Men have always been told that slimness is the most important attribute a woman can possess; more important than intelligence or wit or ambition, apparently. Although nowhere near as useful, if you ask me.”
“But if I can’t talk—”
“What has your father told you, since you were a hatchling?” she says. “Men don’t like women who talk too much, do they? Better to be silent.”
Viola wasn’t silent. Viola was loud and demanding, dismissing her brother with an imperious toss of her head, and Oliver looked at her as if she was mesmerizing, as if he could have spent the rest of his life listening to her voice and never tire of it.
“So,” she says to me. “A decision must be made, little mermaid. What is it to be?”
“Yes?” I say, the doubt turning the word into a question, but what else can I say? Either I am silent above the surface, or I spend the rest of my life screaming for mercy down here, the water muffling my cries. “My answer is yes. I am ready, Ceto.”
“I thought it might be,” she says, shaking her head. “But so be it.”
The Sea Witch places her hand over her mouth, making a retching noise as if trying to dislodge something caught low in her throat. A lump blossoms, pulsating as it dances up her oesophagus, until a flame spills past her painted lips and dances in the palm of her hands. I stare, fascinated. No mer-man is able to conjure flames, not under the sea. This is magic like nothing I have ever seen before, something my father could only dream of.
She crouches down beside a large copper cauldron in the corner of the room, pouring the fire underneath it as if it was liquid. She picks up a jewel-encrusted blade from the ground and uses it to stir whatever concoction has begun to bubble inside the cauldron. She raises the knife to the surface – a few murmured words, words I do not recognise – and she pulls its edge across her breast, cleavage to black nipple, dripping tar-blood into the mixture. It hisses as it lands, the steam curdling into shapes of cloud so unspeakably eerie that I shiver. What have I done? I think as every muscle in my body tenses in shock. What have I done, what have I done?
“You have done what needed to be done,” Ceto tells me, once again seeming to read my mind. “Isn’t that all any of us can do?”
“Wait,” I say. “I have one last question for you.”
“Tick tock.” She wags a finger back and forth. “Time is running out.”
“Do you know if my mother is alive?” I ask, wishing I didn’t sound so forlorn. “Could she be?”
“The Sea King said Muireann was dead, did he not?”
“Yes, but—”
“Yes, but what? You doubt his word?”
“No,” I say automatically. “The Sea King only tells the truth. He wants the best for us. We are lucky to have been born his daughters.”
“Then why do you ask?”
“I…” I don’t know. “Wait. Did my mother come to you in search of legs too?”
The Sea Witch runs her fingertips down the smooth side of her blade. “Your mother did not need my aid in such a matter.”
“But she came to you for help? Ceto, did my mother come here?”
“There was no one who could help Muireann of the Green Sea,” she says. “Not in the end.” Before I can ask what she means by that, she holds out the knife before me. “Now, show me your tongue.”
And I do as she tells me.
The blade sinks into the flesh, slashing it in two, and I try and scream with the brutality of it, at how fast it happened, my head thrown back in scorching agony. She saws at my tongue, hacking at the sinews, the flesh obstinate; refusing to let go. I gulp, my hands reaching out in desperation as if to say come back, I made a mistake. I have changed my mind. But I cannot say it. I have no words.
It is done and I am silent.
It is done and there is no return.
CHAPTER NINE
The sun has not yet risen when I emerge from the water, gasping in the moon-glossed air. What have I done? I scream silently to the sea gods.
After the Sea Witch had plucked my tongue out, I kept trying to speak, becoming more and more agitated with the futility of my attempts. What have you done to yourself, Gaia? She handed me the potion. “Go to Oliver’s homeland,” she told me, “and drink this when you reach the steps to his estate, not a minute before.”
I pretended to look around me, hoping to convey that I did not know where he lived, and Ceto groaned. “Gaia, Gaia, Gaia,” she said, and I wanted to ask her how she knew my true name. “How much you are prepared to give up for one you know so little.”
I was to go through the wood of snake-plants outside (“Wave the potion at them if they threaten you,” the Sea Witch advised, my terror of those creatures clearly evident. “They will not touch you once they catch sight of the bottle. They know the power it contains.”) and the swamp, pushing my way into the battering whirlpools, back past the Outerlands, and then the palace. The lights were still out there, all my family and servants asleep, and I tried to call out, to tell my sisters that I loved them. But I could not. I refused to allow myself to feel sad, it would only be a waste of energy. This was my decision and I had made it willingly. Even so, I blew a kiss and I prayed for their forgiveness.
And here I am now, staring at the house where Oliver lives. It is vast, made of grey stone and windows that are stained with colourful pictures, a large wooden door that is twice the height of any human man I can imagine. I drag myself up the beach, flopping on the steps to the estate, the marble hard against my back. I hold the draught up to my eye line, watching as it glitters in the moonlight. No return, the Sea Witch’s voice said in my head. No return.
But there is no return anyway, not since I have given my voice away. I open my mouth, attempt to speak once again, but there is only a deafening silence. It is like a phantom limb, my misplaced tongue reaching for words that are just out of its reach. I uncork the bottle, gagging at the acrid smell. As I hold it to my mouth, it chews at the skin, my lips instantly beginning to blister. I drink it in one gulp.
A halo of flames, searing across my skull and melting down my face, setting my hair on fire and dissolving my skin. Flesh peeling off in strips, drifting in the air around me like snowflakes until the sky is dusty with skin. A blade heaving through my torso, twisting and tearing down, cutting me to pieces. I need to scream, anything to release the torture, push it out of my body and away from me, but there is nothing here for me, nothing but my pain. Oh, the pain. It is all that exists and all that will ever exist.
Blades coiling in my pupils until blackness pares holes out of my eyes and everything plummets dark. A pinprick of light, expanding, trained like a spotlight upon my father, demanding my attention. He is beating the palace floor with his trident, like a heartbeat. Where is she, girls? he says. One of you must know! They plead their ignorance, Cosima a fraction too slow to be convincing. Cosima, my father says. I don’t know, she replies. I don’t know. He comes closer to her. Tell me, child. You can trust me. He pushes her back until she is lying on her bed, her hair spilling on the pillow. I don’t know, she says again, and he smiles.
And he pulls his fist back, driving it into her face until I can hear her nose break with a sickening crack. I don’t like girls who lie, my father says.
I blink, and I am again on the beach by Oliver’s home and it is the night sky above me, still, and I must stay awake, I must, but I am dragged under by the knife-burn cutting through my body, my tail hewing apart, and I watch as my scales shatter. I never knew I was quite so brittle. The gushing blood seeps into the sand beneath me, and I—
And then I am falling into the relentless dark. Zale is painting stripes across his torso and over his shaved head. The time has come, he yells. He is standing on the balcony in the court room, countless mer-men staring up at him, their faces striped for war as well. We cannot allow the Sea Witch and the Salkas the freedom they have been afforded up until this point. These “women” must be controlled, and soon. I demand revenge for the loss of my maid. I will have revenge. I will have it. I will have my—
Gaia, a voice says, so soft. A woman suspended in the air, waves of red hair floating above her. Her body pale, two legs instead of a tail, and yet somehow I know that she is a mermaid rather than a Salka; that she has been born of the sea like me. Gaia, she says again. Gaia, my darling. I tried to save you. I tried to take you all with me, but I couldn’t win, not against him. I’m sorry, Gaia. I am so sorry.
“There. Over there!” a voice shouts. A man. “I definitely saw something.”
“What?” another man says, laughing. “I can’t see anything.”
“Yeah, I can’t see anything either,” a third voice says. “You’ve had too much to drink, mate. Let’s just head back to the estate.”
“No,” the first man says, and there is an expectancy there that his companions will listen and do as he says. Only men speak like that, I have found. “Look. Over there by the steps to the beach. Can’t you see?”
Footsteps and curses and: “My god, what is that?”
“It’s a girl,” the man says.
CHAPTER TEN
The three men have surrounded me, each wearing similar material on their bodies. Navy jackets crusted with sand, large gold circles running down the centre, their white shirts cut low and showing chest hair. “Fuck,” a man says. “Fuck.” Their faces are dissolving before me but I stay awake. I fight the darkness.