The Surface Breaks(22)

“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.”