She sighs again but I am rewarded by this one. She is playing now, enjoying our needling once more; something I have said has pulled her back from wherever it is she goes and now we will shout and swear and maybe even throw things. She brushes past me as she leaves, the whisper of her snake-scale dress raising the hairs on my arms.
‘It is nothing I have not seen before,’ she says. I shiver. I do not understand why.
My dressing takes much of the morning. The ritual bathing is lengthened by the care of the occasion and my mother wishes me to try on many robes and dresses, beaded overlays made of differing stones, silver coronets twisted in a variety of shapes. I can feel Ceto sulking just outside the door as I am turned this way and that. Eventually I am dressed in white again, my least favourite, but the colour my parents prefer on me. Clean and contrasting the dark of my skin, which shows through the places where the linen is cut: at my ribs revealing my waist, below my neck revealing the plunge between my breasts, up the sides of my legs. My beaded overlay alternates lapis lazuli, coral and pearl. The shape of the outfit reveals my bounty, the cut imitates Ceto’s but is tighter, more restrictive, keeping me upright,back straight. I see what my mother has done.The virgin Wife of the Sea.
‘For the women of our family, mylittle queen, even jewellery is political.’ My mother adds the silver to my hair and neck and wrists and feet as I step into my sandals. I feel heavier than I have on any other birthday, but this is not just my birthday. It is the day of a perfect flood, and our people must believe me blessed and highly favoured.
My mother and attendants leave me, returning to their own preparations for the day ahead. I am not far behind them, longing to take advantage of the quiet before the festivities begin. I emerge from my room meeting the disdainful gaze of my reluctant companion. Her face darkens in distaste, and I roll my eyes.
‘You look ridiculous.’
‘When you wear something other than your own moult I shall listen to your opinion.’
I stride past her, trying to ignore the way her insult burrows beneath my skin, taking up residence between my stomach and chest. I march through the eastern court, empty, for once, of my mother’s companions. They are all, no doubt, readying themselves, seeing to their own daughters. Today will be a day of many proposals and betrothals, many girls will make good matches and be sent away from their families. They will marry young men with boy’s voices and old men with long grey beards. They will marry men who will hit them and men who will rape them and, if they are lucky, men who will ignore them.
And if they are blessed, very blessed, they will marry men who are kind to them, who will love them, even. Though I have seen so little of this love that I have begun to suspect itis a story, sung as a lullaby by nurses to soothe shrieking girls to sleep. For the briefest of seconds, I wonder which of these I might marry and then I remember that my days of wondering are over. I will not marry a man at all.
I watch the boys of the court bob and weave between the legs of preparations. The youngest punch and shield and wrestle, wave wooden swords and small spears they have been given as gifts to mark the feast day. They have been told of war and conquest, and so they will become conquerors, desperate for a mortal’s immortality.And how shall I live forever?For a moment I sway with it. It is easy, too easy, to lose myself in the rhythm of my days. Lessons and parties and fights with Ceto. The practised prayer of thanks to Artemis for another day stayed, another week, another month. The limbo of my almost-engagement has begun to feel comforting, and this is foolish. It will not last.
‘Is it what you would choose for yourself?’ She is by my side once more and her eyes search mine. Her face is bemused and bored as usual, but I see the teeter, the moment between flint and fathom. My answer will determine the day; we will wound each other deliciously or she will retreat and refuse to play.
‘Is what?’ I am deflecting, stalling for time; I do not want to get it wrong. She gestures at me. I blink at her guilelessly. ‘Am I what I would choose for myself? Yes, I’d say so.’
It was not what she meant but she pounces on it.
‘Would you? Would you say so? Have you even thought about it?’
‘Thought about what?’
She sighs, as I am being deliberately obtuse. ‘Thoughtabout who you could be if you were nother, the princess, the ruler of men, theirlittle queen, whatever?’
I don’t want to answer that I haven’t. It reveals something about me that I have avoided looking too closely at, an elected passivity, an avoidance – a cowardice, even. I do not wish to inspect it here, in front of her. ‘Have you? Have you thought about who you’d be if—’
‘Of course,’ she interrupts. ‘Though I do not think I would differ much. I would still shift, still take bites out of those who are deserving.’
‘Who could possibly deserve that?’
‘You have not seen much of the ways of men, mylittle queen.’
I think ofthosemen andthatnight, and an image comes to my mind. Their flesh, split and spilling and pulpy around large, sharp fangs. It exhilarates me and I wish I had not asked. ‘So if you had more options, you would choose your life as it is?’ I prod, hoping to keep her attention away from me.
She knows what I am doing but indulges me momentarily.
‘No,’ she admits, ‘not exactly as it is. But I am honest about what I am – I can own that I would not serve if I had the choice. I would swim and see the world. Taste all its waters.’ She pauses then adds quietly, ‘I would call all the seas my home. I would know no fixed point to return to.’
We have reached the banks now. I step out of my sandals, carefully lifting my dress so the tassels that skim my ankles do not catch in the mud. I sink my feet into it, delicious, cool, wet between my toes.
‘What about your sisters? Your mother and father?’ I still know so little of her home, her life in the Coral Kingdom. She never speaks of it – she is too busy baiting me to temper.
‘My mother and father bother only with each other and very little with us.’
I try to imagine this. It is so anathema to how I understand mothers and fathers to be. The only examples I see are marital unions entirely focused on the potential of their progeny.
‘They … love each other?’ The words are clumsy, awkward in my mouth.
‘Yes,’ she answers simply.
‘And your sisters? You would not miss them if you did not share their home?’
