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“No, child.” She laughed softly. “They are called ‘birds’.”
“They are extraordinary,” I whispered, knowing I would never tire of watching them.
Indeed, I watched everything, looking and listening until my senses were overwhelmed with the new wonders. Right about that time, Nurse tugged my hand and nodded at the seafloor.
“Oh, must we?” I whined. “I have so much left to see, and?—”
“Look, Princess, at the sky.”
I obeyed at once, eager to delay for as long as she would allow. I saw that the ball of gold dipped lower in the sky and the once-white clouds now shone pink, purple and blue.
“It grows late. If we do not hurry, your family might very well be awake before we return.”
With one last look of longing at all I was leaving behind, I took another breath, inhaling the scent of the earth, hoping to trap it in my throat forever to remember it by. And we dove under the surface together, once more hand in hand. We swam faster than ever before, propelled with purpose through the water.
The ocean was my home. I’d always glided gracefully through it, welcoming every creature in its depths as a brother, admiring every sea flower. But for the first time I could remember, as I swam toward the Sea Palace, I felt my body dragged down by force, sinking like a stone.
CHAPTER 2
Ari
I had only thought I knew despair. After we returned from our visit to the surface, it became my constant companion, following me wherever I went. Another event occurred, causing nearly equal frustration: My father decided that it was time I spend less time with my nurse, and so I began learning all the things a princess must. None of them interested me in the slightest, and I missed her terribly.
In the few private moments allowed us—for my father would never send her away as she had been a part of our family for so long—I begged her to explain the things I had experienced.
“It felt cool on my face, but it was not water,” I remarked.
“Ah. That is called the wind, child.”
“Wind,” I mused, trying the word out. “I liked it.”
She laughed softly. “You say that about everything you saw and experienced. Do you imagine that if an Earth Dweller could come here for a day, they would say the same?”
“If I could visit an Earth Dweller, oh, Nurse, just think of the things I could learn!” I grabbed her hands in my excitement.
She gave me a squeeze and released me. “Yes, well, perhaps you ought to be more interested in your proper studies.”
Nurse had begun to be a bit distant with me since our visit to the surface. That hurt, too, but in my childish ways I pretended it was not happening. It was not until I ran out of questions to ask her that I began to beg once again to be taken up.
She must have suspected it was coming, for her flat refusal was immediate and resolute.
“But Nurse, please! I miss it so much, and I?—”
“Your life is down here, child. You are not applying yourself to your studies. Your teachers say all you do is daydream. Your tutor says?—”
“No one cares what I say about him, so why should I care what he says about me?” I asked petulantly, crossing my arms and ducking my head so that my long red hair fanned out and covered my face like a shield.
But Nurse wouldn’t be deterred. “These are things you must know. As a princess?—”
“I don’t want to be a princess! I don’t want to be here!” I hadn’t meant the words to escape, and certainly not so forcefully, but now that they had, there was no taking them back.
My nurse seized my chin with strong fingers and forced me to look at her.
This had never happened before, and was a shock of such great proportions that I meekly met her gaze.
“What we want is never the most important thing,” she began, her tone quite severe. “You have led a most sheltered, privileged life indeed, Princess.”
I gulped. She only called me that when she was disappointed in me. “I… I know.”
