The Surface Breaks(8)

My mother sacrificed herself to ensure that this door would remain locked for ever. But my mother is gone.

“Muirgen,” Father says. “You may leave.” Neither he nor Zale check to see if I obey his command. There is no need.

For I am the daughter of the Sea King and I will do as I am told.


I knock on the open door of my sisters’ room, waiting until they grant me permission to enter. Each of my sisters is lying alone, bodies made shadow by the white gauze wrapped around their beds. They are awake, and yet none of them speak to me, not even Sophia. They always end up resenting me on my birthday.

“Muirgen,” Grandmother says. “Come in.”

I did not see her there, tucked into the corner of the room behind Cosima’s bed, sitting in front of a mirror bordered with crystals cut into the shape of stars. It is the largest mirror in the kingdom, falling during the Great Storm which cracked the sky open and tore the sea apart. I had wanted it for the tower but Cosima had refused. “No,” she had said, folding her arms. “I found it first. It’s mine. You can’t have everything you want.” We both knew she wasn’t talking about the mirror.

“Sit with me, child,” Grandmother says. She is sitting on a cockle-shell seat, and I align my body with hers, my dark green scales a stark contrast to her silver tail. She runs her fingers through my hair, unpicking the braid. It should be my mother who is doing this. My mother would be thirty-seven now, still relatively young. Would she have allowed the betrothal to Zale to occur, if she knew how revolted I was by him? Would she have been the only one who could stand up to the Sea King, or would care enough to do so? I stare at my grandmother and myself in the mirror, our faces fine-boned and sharp of angles. I can see the foreshadow of what is to come as the years pass and my beauty fades, my skin folding in on itself, my hair shedding its vibrant colour. Is this what my mother would have looked like one day, when she reached her hundredth year?

“You’re bleeding, Grandmother,” I say, looking down at her tail. The pearls are twisting, the weight pulling down, plucking tendrils of flesh away. There is a gap between the gemstones and her tail, open wounds filling with bubbles of blood. “Are you in pain?” I ask. “Shall I call the healer?”

“No,” she says, reaching to unscrew another pearl, wheezing as it comes away in her hands. “Ah, but I am too old for such finery. No one cares for the pitiable attempts of an old woman to retain her youth.”

“Then why do you wear them?”

“Your father desires that all women be properly adorned at court. And I am the mermaid of the highest birth since…” Since your mother left.

“But—”

“The Sea King has willed it, Muirgen,” she says. “And that is that.”

I let it go, nestling against her as she strokes my hair. “There, there, my salt-heart,” she says. And for a second, I pretend that she is someone else, another woman who dreamed too much. Another woman who looked up.

“Grandmother,” I say. “Tell me the story of the first time you went up.”

She groans, but she cannot refuse me today.

“It was my fifteenth birthday,” she begins, and I mouth the words along with her. I have heard this story so many times before. It was the lullaby that rocked me asleep when I was a baby, the soothing croon that calmed me after a fight with one of my sisters.

My grandmother was fifteen and she looked up, following the sun to the surface. “And I felt heat for the very first time,” she says now, as she always does. “A heat so intense that I had to dive back under; it seemed as if my skin might be peeled from my bones.” She broke the water’s skin again, seeing fish that flew in the air (Birds, my child, they call them birds up there) and ships (What are they like, you ask? Well, they are like giant whales made of wooden planks, I suppose) floating past in the distance. Grandmother Thalassa stayed there until the sun fell beneath the waves and she dropped deep into the sea’s chest to search for it, to hold that scalding gold between her fingers; but it had disappeared.

“It was beautiful,” she says now. “But not as beautiful as the Sea Kingdom.”

My sisters whisper their agreement, their voices closer than expected. I blink to find them in a semicircle at our tails, gazing at our grandmother, rapt in her story. When she is done, they tell their own. The dawn of their fifteenth birthdays, a whole new world to be found. A dazzle of stars strewn across a midnight sky or wild swans dashing through crimson clouds with a loud battle cry. Icebergs glittering in a glacial sea, impaled by a sudden spike of lightning and sheared in two. Human children (They looked so innocent, Sophia said. They had not yet turned bad, Cosima replied. Give them time.) splashing in shallow water, a barking animal at their side (a dog, my grandmother explained). The children were somehow able to swim though they had no tails; it was most peculiar, they said. The clatter of people living in coastal towns, from whom my sisters kept a safe distance. The roar of engines, the soaring church spires reaching for heaven’s graze.

“Beautiful,” each of my sisters says now. “But not as beautiful as the Sea Kingdom.”

For the last five years, I have watched my sisters rise out of the water, one by one, wishing I could go with them. And for the last five years, I have watched as my father has awaited their return. “Well?” he asked each of them, his teeth clenched. “It was fine, Father,” they all replied. “But I have no desire to go back.” It is strange. The Sea King could simply ban these expeditions, forbid us from travelling to the realm that claimed our mother and took her life. But he does not. Perhaps he wants to gauge the depths of our loyalty. Perhaps it is a test to see if we are showing signs of turning, like our mother did before us.