Part of Your World (Twisted Tales)(48)

Eric continued to look around for whomever he was supposed to meet. He put a hand to the back of his head and scratched there, pushing up the edge of his cap.

It was this gesture, this boyish, unprincely, unrehearsed gesture, that made Ariel step out from behind the boat.

“Eric?” she called.

The reaction that overcame him was not the one that she expected: his face fell into a snarl of impatience, exhaustion, and disgust.

“Vanessa, how many times have I told you that I need these walks—”

But when he turned and saw her, really saw her, he fell silent.

Ariel smiled. Then she carefully took off her headscarf so he could better see her hair.

“You…It’s you…” he whispered.

“It’s me.”

He started to open his mouth, but she interrupted.

“Before you say anything else, this is my voice. Vanessa stole it. Which you should know…I hear you wrote an opera about it….”

Eric’s hands fell to his sides, useless. His fingers fluttered as if there were something he wanted to do with them, some sign, some gesture, but he couldn’t think of what.

That’s oddly familiar, Ariel thought.

“It’s all true…the opera…” He didn’t blink as he stared at her. She could almost feel his gaze on her hair, the braids, her eyes, her dress, her feet, her arms.

He rushed forward—then stopped. His eyes were as clear and blue as the hot summer sky. His skin was not as peachy-dewy as when they first met; it was tauter, drawn more over his cheekbones, his brow, his nose. It was darker and drier, too, but no less handsome. Just different. She lifted a finger, overcome with the urge to feel it.

Eric caught her hand in his before she could finish the motion, and took her other hand in it as well.

“You’re a…mermaid?”

“Yes.”

“And you can talk now?”

“Yes.”

“And you came back for me?”

His eyes shone with open emotion: hope and wonder after a long period of darkness, the beautiful look of a child who, having passed through the gloom of puberty, is suddenly shown that unicorns and fairies are real after all.

Ariel was taken aback. She hadn’t expected this, not exactly. She hoped for his joy, she expected his confusion. But this was…too much. She wanted to disappoint him about as much as she wanted to put a spike into her own heart.

“I came back for my father,” she made herself say. The Queen of the Sea had little difficulty stating the truth out loud; a younger Ariel would have stuttered. “I received word he might still be alive, as a prisoner of Ursula.”

“Oh,” Eric blinked. “Your father. Of course.”

“That’s the main reason I have returned. We had thought he was dead all these years. I’m here to rescue him.”

“I just thought…I mean…I had hoped…you came back to take me away from all of this. To go live happily ever after somewhere. Under the sea, maybe.”

“You would drown under the sea.”

“I’m drowning up here. I’ve been drowning. For years. Under water, it felt like. Now that I’m waking up, of course it makes sense that you would come. And…end it.”

Ariel had a brief flash of where some of his thoughts were heading: to sirens who sang their lovers to their deaths, the human men and women still ecstatic even as their lungs filled with salt water.

“Ah, no,” she said. “That’s a little…morbid. I’m not—it’s not like that.”

They were both silent for a moment.

Suddenly Eric was touching the back of his head again in awkwardness and embarrassment. But there was a lightness to his movements now, an energy that seemed new. A youthfulness.

“I’m sorry, yes, that was Mad Prince Eric speaking,” he said with a laugh. “The Melancholy Prince. It’s a bit of a role, I’m afraid. To keep me as sane as I am. This is all very strange. I can’t believe it’s real. That my opera was real…but I knew it was real, somehow. But…was it exactly like I recalled? Did it all really…happen exactly that way?”

“I didn’t actually see the performance myself. I heard about it secondhand, from a seagull who saw it.”

“A seagull?” Eric asked, startled. “Like—a seagull. Like one of those birds flying around up above us right now? One of those…many…birds…”

He frowned. There were at least a half dozen of them circling silently directly overhead. Eerily.

“They’re keeping an eye on me,” Ariel explained. “Making sure I’m all right.”

“Of course they are,” Eric said, nodding absently. “Protective seagulls. Why not. So—wait.” He turned back to her. “Is this the story? Because this is how it goes in my opera: You really are a mermaid. You really did trade your voice to come up on land. And it was because you had…you had fallen in love with me?”

He said the words carefully, trying to sound like an adult while sounding more like a child terrified of being disappointed.

Ariel closed her eyes. When put that way, it sounded really epic, the stuff of legends—or painfully stupid. Not just the folly of youth.

“I…always wanted to go on land, to see what it was like to be human.” She reached out and touched the Dry World planks of the wrecked boat, the whispery traces left by human hands on its shape, the nails made of iron forged in fires that glowed without the help of undersea lava. “I collected things that I found, that had fallen to the bottom of the sea from ships. I really…I really had quite the collection. I was fascinated with all these things—some of which I still have no name for, the things you people make. And then, one day, I found you.