The Surface Breaks(2)

But I don’t know if she is dead, despite what they tell me. All I know is this: when someone disappears on your first birthday, your entire life becomes a question, a puzzle that needs solving. And so, I look up. I have spent my life looking up, thinking about her.

“She could still be alive,” I say.

“She’s not.”

“But how can you be so sure, Grandmother? All we know is that she was taken. Maybe—”

“Muirgen.” Her voice is serious. I meet her eyes, blue, like mine. Everything is blue down here. “It does not do a woman good to ask too many questions.”

“But I just want—”

“It doesn’t do a woman good to want too much either. Try and remember that.”

Muireann of the Green Sea wanted too much. You’re so like your mother, the old folk tell me (though only when my father is out of earshot. My father will not have talk of my mother at court), the resemblance is… (Freakish? Odd? What?) But they never finish their sentences. Such a pity what happened to her, they say instead. They have all accepted she’s dead, even if we never had a body to bury in the deep sands. They think it’s a shame, but what else could a woman like my mother expect? She had her own needs, her own desires. She wanted to escape, so she looked up too. And she was punished for it.

My grandmother picks up the final pearl now, her tongue sticking out in concentration. My tail must look perfect for the ball this evening. My father is always in a rather exacting mood on this date.

I wait until she is rapt in her work, and I look up again. I look at the dark sea, the crashing waves, straining to see the faint light beyond. That was where my mother went, up there. And that is where I must go to find the answers I need.

Grandmother tugs at my tail but I keep my head tilted back, staring at the surface. For I am fifteen now, and I can do as I please.





CHAPTER TWO

I pause outside my sisters’ bedroom, listening to them argue. Raised voices, squeals of annoyance. Shrill, my father would say if we ever behaved in such a fashion in front of him. Not that we would dare. We are the daughters of the Sea King, and daughters must be good at all times.

“That’s my comb.”

“It’s not, Talia, your comb is black.”

“I have a black comb and a coral comb, and you’re using my coral comb. Give it to me right now.”

“Talia,” Cosima says, as I push the door open. She and Talia are floating in the middle of the room, my other three sisters ignoring them from the safety of their beds. “Not everything belongs to you. It’s my comb.”

It is a huge space; vaulted ceilings lined with seaweed in greens and browns, the floor paved with pearlescent marble. There are two single beds on either side and one double at the head of the room by the window of stained sea-glass, where Talia has slept since we left the nursery eight years ago. “I am the eldest,” she said when she claimed it for her own, ignoring Cosima’s protestations. “I shall have this bed until I leave the palace for the house of my husband,” she said then, with a grand wave of her hand. Talia doesn’t make comments like that any more. We all know that Talia shall be a long time waiting to leave this palace.

I used to have a bed in the dormitory too, falling asleep with my hand stretched out to hold Cosima’s. I had nightmares then, visions of the acute pain the humans might have inflicted upon my mother when they captured her, and Cosima would shake me awake, reassure me that everything was fine. Don’t worry, Gaia, she would say. Cosima was the only one who called me Gaia, because she understood how much it meant to me. But then I celebrated my twelfth birthday, and everything changed.

Cosima, quietly crying herself to sleep at night, each rasping sob a rebuke. It’s not my fault, I wanted to tell her. I didn’t ask him to pick me. I didn’t ask for any of this. In the end, I requested to be moved to the tower at the top of the palace, pretending not to care that none of my sisters objected. “But there’s no ceiling in the tower,” my father had frowned. “Only the sea above you.” I told him I didn’t mind, and I smiled at him the way he liked, like a good little girl. He relented, saying, “Anything for my Muirgen,” and he granted me permission to move my belongings to the high turrets, dragging my bed and my mirror and my comb and my jewels with me. And the statue, of course, although I had to do that when my father wasn’t looking.

The Sea King hates the humans. The only time he is happy to hear of them is when their corpses sink into the kingdom, eyes still open as if searching for something. A loved one? A rescue that will never come? I can’t be sure. Not that it matters to the Sea King. A dead human, my father would say, smiling grimly as a body floated past the dining room window, is the best human. (But can you blame him? my grandmother said. Can you blame him after they took your mother?)

“Give it back,” Talia says now, wrestling the comb out of Cosima’s hands with a triumphant ha!

“Good day, sisters,” I say and they both turn to look at me.

“You’re late,” Talia says, running the comb through her black hair. She is the only one whose hair refuses to curl, no matter how carefully she wraps it around conch shells. We tease her that she must be half-Rusalka; with hair that straight she cannot have pure sea-water running through her veins.

“Have you gone up yet?” Cosima asks.