Part of Your World (Twisted Tales)(19)
There were other people, too. Richly clad men and women walked in slow, carefully paced pairs and trios, talking in low voices, checking fancy pocket watches, smiling to other pairs and trios they passed with smiles that disappeared immediately after. Men in poufy shirts with questionable expressions, dour and shifty. Women in bustles and long-flowing gowns that trailed behind them like jellyfish tendrils, looking at each other shyly from behind fans or boldly from under giant hats.
Someone almost crashed into Ariel, pushing a small wagon with an open trunk loaded up on it. Laid carefully over sawdust and packing on the top were—guns. She remembered seeing the castle guards carry them, present them, occasionally shoot them. Muskets with cruel bayonets, shining and black and freshly oiled.
While she was staring, Ariel was knocked from behind by a self-important man with florid cheeks and weak eyes. He strode past her without apologizing and was followed by a servant carrying what looked very much like a small chest of gold.
What is going on here?
Tirulia was a sleepy little kingdom, and this seaside castle was the unofficial capital of its most carefree, bucolic quarter. Eric had no real duties. His parents were still alive and actively ruling—at least they had been the last time she was here. He had no particular desire to take over as king. He had a real desire to sail. He was young, he was enthusiastic, he loved music and the sea and wind in his hair. Everything that she loved, too, but flipped to its Dry World version.
This castle no longer felt like him. It felt…foreign.
Confused, Ariel tried to reorient herself and keep walking, undistracted by what was apparently the new normal.
When a washerwoman walked by, unable to see directly in front of her because of the pile of freshly dried linens blossoming like an anemone out of the basket she carried, Ariel swiped a couple from the top. She carried them in front of her as importantly as if they were a chest of gold, and no one even glanced at her.
I’m becoming as tricky as a human. So quickly! She thought with light irony as she marched into the next room…
…and then immediately hid behind a cabinet.
Standing there stiffly, giving a footman the sort of quiet, gentle-but-severe dressing down that could be done only by the Bretlanders, was Grimsby—Eric’s manservant and closest confidant.
Much like a mermaid, he hadn’t aged at all since the last time she had seen him. But perhaps that was because he had already been old when they first met and didn’t have that many more changes to make before his final transmogrification. His light blue eyes did seem a little wearier—also like her own.
He finished with the footman, sending him off red-faced and chagrined, then headed with slow, solid steps down the hall. The energy of this new castle swirled around him; servants, visiting nobles’ servants, the visiting nobles themselves, the men and women with the money…and though he was a true Bretlandian butler who rarely let his feelings show, Ariel watched him trying not to disapprove of it all with his clear and tired eyes. He moved like a shepherd of comb jellies, trying to urge them through a foreign school of quick-swimming minnows, neither affected nor scared by them, only vaguely concerned.
Ariel found herself holding the skirts of her dress tightly, almost like a timid girl.
She wished she could go to him. In his own way, Grimsby had been extraordinarily kind to her in her short time on land. Gently guiding when she did the wrong thing, leading silently by example rather than chastising aloud.
She wanted to grab him, to pull him aside and find out what was wrong. Why did he seem upset? What had changed? Did it have to do with all the activity in the castle?
But…even if she did manage to get him alone…they couldn’t talk.
She couldn’t talk.
And she highly doubted he could understand a sign language based on an ancient and, to him, foreign language.
She watched Grimsby go, his exit immediately camouflaged by skirts and jackets, scurrying and bustling, and felt something tighten within her. They could have meant something to each other, had things worked out differently.
She took a deep breath, willing the knot in her heart to go away.
The Queen of the Sea had a mission. She had come to find her father. Anything else she would deal with later, if at all. For now, she had to figure out where her father was being kept.
Think logically, she reminded herself. The gulls had told her that they’d seen Ursula getting dressed, primping, while talking with Triton. With a feeling of nausea she faced the obvious: as Vanessa, the sea witch was married to Eric. The two would either be sharing the same room or adjoining apartments in the royal tower. Ariel knew where that was.
She straightened up, held her linens out, and marched forward, trying to set her face into the blank stare of a maid. It was easier than it would have been the first time she had come on land, when she had no cause to do anything aside from stare around with wide eyes, drinking in the strange world and its goings-on. She had never even considered trying to blend in before; there was no strange or different in the world of the mer. It never occurred to her that people would notice or not like her if she stuck out and acted odd.
She brushed aside this slow-moving slipper shell of a thought to another corner of her mind, and wondered if there was a possibility of catching another glimpse of Eric.
The stairs were a little tricky—“up” was a strange movement for her still-new legs and feet—and she made it as far as the first hallway before she was discovered.