Yet she was choosing something else. How many of us can choose to leave one self, one world, behind and embrace another, better one?
She clutched the sand on either side of her, let it sift through her fingers. It was gritty, unlike the sand on the ocean floor. She liked the feel of it.
I choose this, she thought.
She took one more look at the sea. Quiet now, all of its secrets hidden. And then she sat up, carefully picked up the potion, and uncapped it.
Smoke streamed from the bottle, sharp and pungent. She coughed.
Please, love me, she breathed into air.
And then she took a deep breath, exhaled, and drank.
It was like drinking fire. Worse than the amber liquid she’d found in the shipwreck. Worse than anything she’d ever consumed or felt, even the pain of her tongue being sliced out of her mouth. The potion burned down her throat, through her body, and down the length of her tail.
She screamed, but no sound came from her.
She felt a terrible burning from her tail, and then a ripping that seared through her. It was so fast! She clutched down, grabbed hold of her tail as it was rent apart. Under her palms, she could feel her body splitting. It was the most horrible pain she’d ever felt. She could not possibly feel more pain than this, she thought. Her scales were crackling, dissolving, her tail being split in half. She cried and writhed on the earth. And then, all over her body, her skin began to come apart. There was nothing she could do, no position she could twist into to lessen the pain, and all she could think was that Sybil had tricked her, the potion was poison, punishment, that this was as close as she would get to the earth, and she was sure that, among the sounds of tearing and ripping, she could hear her heart breaking, every hope she’d had crumbling to dust and foam.
Visions flickered before her eyes, all of them blurring together: Thilla’s silver arms, the prince’s heart beating under her own, the snow melting as it hit the water, the dark sky strewn with bits of starry fire, the human girl’s skin turning to jewels under her own hand. All the visions she’d seen, the emotions she’d felt, every second of her life coiled into the great pain that was consuming her, searing up and down her body.
And just when she thought it was more than she could bear, the world, mercifully and suddenly, turned dark.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Princess
OVER THE NEXT DAYS, THE ARMY ASSEMBLED. ALL THE warrior nobles who’d stayed home during the last months, waiting, tending to their estates, knowing the king was preparing to call them to arms, began heading to the castle. Roads throughout the kingdom became thick with travelers. Pigeons flew overhead carrying coded messages. More and more nobles gathered in the castle while their servants crowded the fields around the city walls and messengers raced between estates. An entire tented city rose from the lands surrounding the castle in a matter of days. There was excitement everywhere, a feeling that something new, something better, was about to come into being.
Margrethe paced her room, crazy with frustration. She heard the whispers going through the castle: that the Southern prince had enchanted the young princess, used the black arts to put her under his spell.
She hated to be thought of as a fool. And, further, to know that anything she said—talk of mermaids, enemy princes with open hearts, suffering peasants, and the possibility for peace, real peace—would convince them all the more. She tried to keep to her room as much as possible, sitting alone with the pinecone fire blazing. But every night she went to the great hall, which became more crowded and rowdy with each passing day. New tables were set out, not only in the great hall but in the smaller one next to it, which was emptied of its usual furnishings. Her ladies were mad with excitement, and she relieved them of their duties to her so that they could flirt with the handsome young soldiers bravely offering themselves to their king.
And so that she could be alone, to think.
Over and over she saw the same images: the sick children, the figure in the dirt, the devastated villages, and the mermaid offering up to her the enemy prince.
Save him. You, come now.
There had to be something she could do. Some meaning to everything that had happened.
Save him.
Her father was going to war, there was nothing she could do to sway him, and he was using what had happened to rally the strongest men in the kingdom. She knew how they spoke of her, imagined how close to danger she’d been, the beautiful princess upon whom all their fates rested, dressed in a novice’s robes, while the treacherous enemy prince stalked the convent, a gleaming sword at his side. It was too seductive a story for anyone to care about the truth.
This was not her fate. Not this.
Whenever she shut her eyes, he was there. His curving shoulders, his eyes the color of weeds, the way he’d stood in the garden, waiting for her. The first time she’d seen him: splayed out on the beach, nearly drowned, with the mermaid leaning over him, her lips on his forehead. Her wet hair that snaked over her bare arms and breasts and belly. These images haunted Margrethe’s dreams, made her wake with the sheets twisted around her, aching, unable to slip back to sleep.
One night, a week after arriving back at the castle, she woke up with the feel of the prince’s lips on her own. It was so real she had to look about the room to make sure he hadn’t slipped from her dream and into the bed next to her. She was shaking, her whole body flushed and loose. What was wrong with her? She tossed in the bed and then, frustrated, threw off the furs and went to sit by the waning fire.
She was staring into the flames when it came to her that she knew what to do. It was the only thing she could do as a woman, even as the daughter of the king.
Marry him.
THE NEXT MORNING she sent a message to Gregor, asking him to meet her in the library that afternoon, while the king and a group of soldiers went out to hunt.
She washed in the basin by the fire and dressed carefully, Laura lacing her into one of her finest gowns. Then she hurried to the library.
She had decided to tell him everything and prayed that he would help her. She knew her father was planning an invasion soon. Pieter rarely left his side, and they were often joined by the kingdom’s greatest warriors—preparing for battle.
Gregor was waiting for her at the table where they’d met for her studies, behind a shelf of precious manuscripts.
“Marte,” he said, standing. “How are you?”
“I am well, friend,” she said, smiling warmly at him. She remembered the countless hours she’d spent right here, bent over manuscripts of Greek and Latin, old tales of traveling warriors and angry gods, young girls turning to trees and doves and spiders.
“I understand that your talk with your father did not go as you had wished. I was sorry to hear it.”
“Thank you,” she said, nodding. She leaned forward. “Is it safe to speak openly here, Gregor?”
His face became serious, and he got up and locked the door. “We will say we are having a lesson,” he said, “to refresh your Greek, if anyone asks.”
“Yes, good,” she said. “I need your help.”
“Of course.”
“First … I have to tell you, there is something else, something that I have not told anyone. That I can’t tell anyone, not even Edele. I know her too well, and she could not keep this to herself. You are the only one I trust with this information.”
“What is it, Marte?”
“The prince, he did not just wash up to shore. He was brought there. I saw it. I was standing in the garden, looking out over the sea, when I saw a creature from myth. A mermaid. Carrying him in her arms.”
“A mermaid?” he repeated.
“Yes. She saved him when his ship was caught in a terrible storm. He was unconscious, nearly drowned. I’d never …” She choked up with feeling, and tears came to her eyes. “It was the most beautiful thing. Standing there, on a cliff, everything ice and gray and empty, and then she appeared, with him in her arms. I had no idea w
ho he was. You should have seen her face, the way she looked at him. It was rapture. That is how I know he was not there to hurt me. She brought him to me. To me. For a reason.”
To her surprise, he wasn’t laughing at her; her words seemed to be moving him. “A mermaid,” he whispered. “Astonishing.”
“Yes. This is why I am so sure that my father is wrong. But I could never tell him this. I can’t tell anyone but you.”
“You’re right,” he said. “We have lost these beliefs. Your father will find you mad.”
“And you?”
Her face betrayed how much she needed his affirmation, needed him to believe that what she was saying was true.
Suddenly his face seemed to cave in, and he brought his hands to his eyes, covering them.
“Gregor? What is it?” She jumped up with alarm. Never, in all these years, had she seen the old man like this. “Gregor!”
He pulled his hands away from his face. He, too, had tears in his eyes. They were red and watering, his mouth was open, and for a moment she thought he was having some kind of an attack. “Please sit down,” he said, his voice hoarse, strange. “It’s just … Fate, my dear, is a very funny thing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me tell you a story,” he said. He took a long breath and waited for her to sit again. And then he spoke slowly, remembering. “When I was a very small child, my parents took me to the ocean for the first time. Down south, just a few years before the old king died and our kingdom split in two. I wandered off by myself, out of my mother’s sight, collecting shells. My mother was not paying attention. I walked into the water, lured by the sight of a jellyfish. The tide was coming in more heavily, and I slipped somehow, and the sea pulled me into itself. I fell into the water. I could not swim. I would have drowned but for the woman who came to me then. She appeared from nowhere and carried me in her arms, singing to me all the while. Later, my parents found me soaked through to my bones but sleeping peaceably on the beach, curled into a snug formation of rock, protected from the bite of the wind. I think of it more and more often as I get older. It was the most extraordinary moment of my life.”
“She was a mermaid?”
He nodded. “Later, I found out that there had been many mermaid sightings in that area. The locals told stories about her, this beautiful woman with pink hair who emerged from the sea. But she never, as far as I know, saved anyone else the way she saved me. No one ever even claimed to see her up close, the way I did.”
“Did she … did she mark you in any way?” she asked.
“It has always made me feel like I had a special purpose,” he said. “Always. The way you feel now.”
“I mean, on your skin. Like this.”
She lifted the sleeve of her dress and held her forearm up to catch the light. As she twisted her wrist back and forth, her arm shimmered—though more faintly now, she thought, than before.
He smiled, his face open, his eyes bright. “Yes! Of course. For a long time, yes, my skin had this sheen to it, where she had held me. It is in the old lore, that the touch of the mermaid changes us. Not everyone can see it, you know.”
She nodded excitedly. “I thought that. My ladies, they could not see. He had the shimmer on him, too, Gregor. The prince. The three of us, we have all been touched.”
Her old tutor was watching her as if he hadn’t quite seen her before. Margrethe had never seen the expression on his face that was there now, as if he were years younger, full of childlike wonder and awe. He looked from her face to her arm, then reached up and traced the skin Lenia had touched.
“I know she brought him to me for a reason, Gregor. I know she’s not an angel, but I felt that God was working through her. I did not know who the man was, I had no idea he was Prince Christopher, and he did not know who I was, I promise you. He said he was forever in my debt, for saving him. He believes I am the one who carried him to shore.”
“How wonderful,” he said, “to see your destiny begin to unfold. To see my own unfold, after all these years.”
She smiled, wiping her eyes. She hadn’t realized until now how much she needed to share this with someone, someone who would take her seriously. She felt reconnected, suddenly, to that world of magic, as if it was tangible again, now that she’d shared it with him.
She took a deep breath. “Gregor, I know what my destiny is now. I know what I need to do.”
He nodded, waiting. She could hear her own breathing, her own heart.
“My father is intent on fighting. I know I cannot convince him otherwise. And I know it is wrong. Even though he is my father and my king, he is wrong. This isn’t God’s way, this suffering, this violence.”
Gregor nodded. “I hoped you would be able to convince him, but your father does not care what is true and what is not true. He wants only war. War is how your father exorcises his own demons, his grief. It is how he has always been. It made him a great warrior once.” He paused, became wistful. “You know, there was a time when we all lived in peace together, when we were all brothers and sisters, shared the same blood. But when the old king died …”
“I know,” she said. “It is strange, Gregor. The mermaid … she, too, spoke about how we were all unified once, but she was talking about humans and merpeople. How there was a time when all of us lived in the sea.”
“It is a never-ending dream for everyone, it seems, to find again what was precious and has been lost. There is a group of us who have been arguing for peace for a very, very long time. We even succeeded a few times.” He smiled, yet his face was more grave than she’d ever seen it. “Your father was ready to fight when your mother died, but I was able to reason with him. But the king is less and less willing to listen to those of us who caution him; he listens more and more to Pieter and his men. They’ve been replenishing the army for a long time, Marte, and now there is the excuse they have all been waiting for. Soon we will be back in battle. Maybe even within a fortnight, from the looks of it.”
“Gregor, I know what to do. There is not much I can do in this world, even as daughter of the king. But I can marry. That is what I can do.”
“I do not follow.”
She swallowed. “I want to marry the prince.”
“The prince?”
“I want to marry Prince Christopher.” She watched his surprise, and rushed on. “My father is planning war on the South for a crime they did not commit. The North and South have a peace treaty now. Which the South has honored, yes? Despite all the rumors that they were planning an attack?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding slowly. “Yes. The South is tired of war. Many of us doubt the legitimacy of those rumors that the South was preparing for battle. But even I believed that the prince’s arrival at the convent proved them to be true.”
“They’re not true,” she said. “It will be my father’s excuse, and they’re not true.”
“Yes.”
“But what if I offered to go there? What if I went there and married the prince? My father would have to acknowledge the marriage and agree to maintain peace, or else he would have to forsake me. Right?”
“Yes,” Gregor said once more, staring at her as if antlers were sprouting from her head. “It has even been mentioned before. A marriage alliance, to make our blood one again. But no one has ever dared suggest such a thing in earnest. There is too much hatred. And you are too important, Marte. You are this kingdom’s future.”
“But what do you think my father would do, if I defied him?”
“Your father loves you, more than you even know, and he believes in the prophecy. It is hard for me to think he would abandon you to the South. It is passion and grief that drive him to keep fighting. It may be that his love for you will make him stop.”
She nodded. “He would see it as a great betrayal, but …”
“It would be a great risk, Marte. There is no doubt. Even talking of this, as we are now, is high treason. Your father has put many people to death for less.”
“But it is right. You know that it is right.”
He watched her, refusing to answer. She could see his heart twisting inside of him. To her, it seemed simple. She was one girl. How could she weigh her own life against the lives of all her people? She knew what she meant to Gregor, to all of them, and she loved him for it. But it was this importance she carried, the meaning that was placed upon her at her birth, that made her the only person in the kingdom who could do what she was proposing now.
And beyond all of this, of course, she loved him. Christopher.
“Can we do this, Gregor? Can we send a message to the Southern king? Can you help me? We can make this offer, and, if the South agrees, I will go.”
“You are a brave girl, my dear,” he said, shaking his head. But she knew he agreed with her.
“You would do the same thing if you were me.”
“You realize that your father must approve of this marriage before it takes place. You would have to put yourself under the South’s protection. If your father chose to forsake you, and continue the war, there would be no telling what the Southern king might do to you. You would be in his castle, his ward. I hate to think of what could happen to you if he decided to withdraw that protection. He would have the perfect way to attack your father, through you.”
She shrugged. “That is the risk, Gregor.”
He sighed. “I wish I could turn back time, Marte, back to when your mother was alive, when we were all happy. I wish I could force you to stay here, live the life you were supposed to live. A good marriage to an important man. Children, a home. You and your children heirs to one of the greatest and oldest kingdoms in the world.”
“But if I could choose my own path, thinking only of myself, I would never choose such a life.”
She smiled at him. She loved his old face in this soft light. As vibrant as court life could be, with the music and dancing, the great feasts, her happiest moments had always been with him, learning of all the different ways there were to live in the world. The others at court never seemed to think of anything beyond the castle, building their lives around the whims of the king and his favorites.