The Surface Breaks(65)

What do you—

Wait. Wait.

My father, his spear finding the nearest fish. Watching as it squirmed to death on a splinter-point. Do you know what I do to little mermaids who fall in love with humans?

“Yes,” Ceto says, as I curl into the foetal position on the floor. I don’t want this to be true, and yet somehow, deep within me, I think I had always known this was the case but I couldn’t admit it. It was too dangerous to do so. “Your father is a proud man.” Ceto says. “He would have rather seen her dead than in love with someone else.”

Did my… did my grandmother know?

“Your grandmother is afraid,” Ceto says gently. “She has always been afraid. She suspects that the Sea King might have played a hand in it, just as she suspects that Manannán’s death might have been more complicated than was presented to her. But she doesn’t ask too many questions, or seek to know too much. It is safer for her that way.”

Stop talking. I can’t listen any more. My hope breaks inside me, blistering, setting me on flame. I am bent double with the grief, my body heaving with silent sobs. My mother is dead and at the hands of my father. My mother, and everything she sacrificed for us. My mother, who only wanted to protect us. She came back for my birthday. She came back for me. And my father told us she didn’t love us. He said that she was a bad mother, that she abandoned us. He let us believe that we were easy to abandon, because that kept us small. Scared. Easy to control. Something hardens inside me, and I allow it to happen. Nay, I welcome it. I will be hard. I will be made of ice. He allowed us to believe that it was our fault. I raise my head, and meet the Sea Witch’s gaze.

I am angry, Ceto. I have never felt so much anger. Are you happy now?

“Tick tock, little mermaid,” she says. “Time is running out.” She takes my hands in hers. “Like all women, you have the power within you, no matter what your father has led you to believe. Do you trust that power, Gaia?”

I have never had autonomy before. Besides going to the Sea Witch, I have always just done what I was told to do. It seemed easier that way. Safer. Maybe I was like my grandmother, looking away to remain comfortable.

“You will be safe with us,” Ceto says, “Join us, I implore you. Join the true sisterhood in your mother’s name. You can help us achieve peace, once and for all, by ridding the kingdom of your father and his army of rapacious mer-men. We can show the women how to reclaim their powers. They’re still there, in every one of them, just buried so deep that they think they are lost for ever. But we can teach them. That can be your legacy, Gaia.”

If I join the Salkas, what does that mean? I am Muirgen, daughter of the Sea King. I am Gaia, the mermaid who wanted so much and who looked up and who fell in love with a boy. And I am Grace, the girl dancing on shattered toes, smiling through the pain as if it was nothing.

Who am I now?

“Who are you?” Ceto repeats my thoughts. “I would wager the more important question is – who will you be? Who are you free to be now?” She sniffs the air, her head snapping up. She smiles. “Right on time.”

What? I look up too, as I have always done, but I don’t know what I am searching for now.

“A storm is brewing,” she says. “Are you ready to sing, little mermaid?”





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The blazing sky bounces off the flat sea, rolling it purple. It is beautiful, this world. Why did I never fully acknowledge just how beautiful it was? I was so anxious to make Oliver fall in love with me so that my “real” life could begin, I forgot to stay still and appreciate what was around me. Just for a second, I breathe in the burning air, tasting the hint of coming sunshine on my tongue. I can hear my sisters talking amongst themselves.

“Where is she?”

“There is little time left.”

“I told you that she wouldn’t be able to do it.”

“Do be quiet, Cosima.”

“Don’t tell me to be quiet, Talia.”

“Sisters, please. This is not the time nor the place for these petty arguments.”

I smile, despite myself. They never change, my sisters. Will they continue to fight in such a manner as the years pass? When Nia marries Marlin and the rest are sold off to the highest bidders? After their mer-babies are born, children I will never meet? Children that I will never bear. Maybe becoming a mother would have made up for being motherless. Maybe it would have made me happy. But, in the end, I can only wish that my sisters will be happy in my stead.

I wish for them only sons.

I close my eyes and I think of my mother. How she tried to save us, she came back for us, and was killed for her efforts. And I think of my father.

He waited for her by the rocks that are closest to the human world, slippy with seamoss and mussels, the Sea Witch told me. My mother had tried to conceal her fright when she saw him. I was just going for a swim before Gaia’s birthday, she told him.

I know what you did, he replied, and he kept saying it until she admitted the truth.

But I can change, she said, I’ve learned my lesson. My mother would have started to beg then, for mercy. For her children. It’s too late, the Sea King said as he took his trident. And he broke her spine with it.

I can hear screaming now, my sisters’ voices reaming the air apart. The shrieking obscures any semblance of intelligible sentences, it is but a jumble of words, made up of no and please and sorry and don’t hurt us. And Father. Father. Father.