Part of Your World (Twisted Tales)(81)

Well, as a girl. Not as queen, not where anyone could have seen her.

Eric smiled. “I think my character would have a song about how he’s been caught by a siren and is under her spell.”

Ariel made a face. “I’m not a siren. Trust me. I have cousins…distant cousins…We don’t get along. But what were you saying? About Ursula?”

“Just that everything she did to you and your father didn’t keep you down. You popped up, older, stronger, more powerful than ever. She realizes she didn’t beat you enough last time. Now she wants complete victory, which involves wiping out your home.”

“If she wants complete victory, why not kill my father outright?”

“Well, that’s the thousand-gold-piece question, isn’t it?” Eric said with a frown. “Why bother pretending to ship him off to Ibria—why bother keeping him here at all?”

“She’s up to something,” Ariel agreed. “Something involving him. I feel like I started some sort of chain of events in her mind when I reminded her of my existence.”

“Well, maybe this has something to do with it,” the prince said, pulling out the piece of vellum Vareet had drawn on.

“Oh,” Ariel said, taking it. “What a cute…um…walrus.”

“It’s a bunny,” Eric corrected with great dignity. “You’ve never seen one. Anyway, it’s what’s on the back that’s important. Ursula’s maid risked a lot by letting me ‘discover’ this….”

Ursula’s maid again. Ariel’s heart broke a little when she thought of the girl, remaining silent so the mermaid could sneak out with the necklace unseen. Despite her life being in danger now, she still chose to help Ariel.

The pictures on the back of the strange-feeling vellum were far more disturbing than the weird Dry World creature on the front. There were lines and shapes that looked like they could be runes but shuddered when she tried to look at them too closely. Curves somehow didn’t bend properly on the paper, and constellations of dots made her sick when she studied them, suggesting terrible things.

Ariel shook her head at the blasphemous sigils. “I don’t know what these say for certain. They aren’t mer runes; they’re like a twisted, upside-down version of them. If I had to guess I would say they’re black runes of the Deep Ones. Forbidden, evil…the whole deal.”

“Can you read them at all?”

“This is just a noise, I think,” she said, pointing. “Like ?i ?i. No idea what ‘phtaqn’ means. This here I think refers to a circuex, a powerful spell that is capable of disrupting—or joining—worlds. This looks like the mer word for ‘blood,’ and that looks like a determinative for ‘god.’ Or possibly ‘great’ or ‘lots.’”

“So…”

“So she needs blood, the blood of a god.” Ariel bit her lip, seeing where it was all leading. “Ancient blood flows through my father’s veins….That would explain why she’s keeping him around. She needs him for something, something involving magic. But for what exactly I can’t tell.”

Ariel felt sick as she said the words. She pushed the paper back at him.

“Here, please take this. I don’t enjoy the feel of dead human skin.”

“Dead…? Human…?” Eric took it back, aghast.

Ariel closed her eyes and rubbed her knuckles into her forehead. “This is all…so…frustrating! We do one thing, and she does another to block it. We think we know what her plans are; it turns out she has something even bigger and sicker in mind. She always has an answer, always has a countermove. And she knows what my weaknesses are—and yours, too. If I didn’t care about my father, if you didn’t care about Grimsby or your people, this would all be over in a flash.”

“Back to your old ‘children playing a game of koralli,’” Eric said with a wry smile. “But if we were human kids playing chess, at least, an adult could come over and put an end to everything eventually.”

An interesting point, but how relevant? If it were her and Eric against Ursula, who was the adult in the scenario? Her father? An Elder God? Or…

Something was just at the edge of her mind, like a playful eel nosing in and out of the sunlight at the edge of the shore. Slippery, sparkling, and just out of her grasp.

“I think if adults—if everyone just knew what she was really like,” she said slowly, “who she really was, they would do something. But how do we convince anyone she’s an evil tentacled sea witch?”

“I don’t know. Even if you just managed to show one person…there’s no way to prove it to anyone else, much less everyone else. Enough people to do something about it,” Eric said.

Ariel thought of poor terrified Vareet, who had seen her mistress change in the tub. She was the only one in the entire castle who knew the truth of the matter—very viscerally—besides Grimsby and Carlotta.

“But don’t worry, we’ll figure it out,” he added, seeing the look on her face. He took her hand and squeezed it. “We have to, and soon. So she doesn’t have a chance to do that ritual or whatever.”

But Ariel didn’t feel as much faith in them as Eric did. Somehow, despite being a rapidly aging human, he had managed to keep some of his youthful optimism, while she had lost some of hers. It was kind of adorable.