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At the very least I could find Edonia and make her reverse the spell. If she didn’t, I was prepared to kill her. Oh, I imagined killing her many times over the last ten years, especially after a row with Aerik, when I felt helpless and trampled by my own bad decisions. I imagined what it would be like to have claws and razor-sharp teeth again, to sink them into her jugular and tear out her pretty throat, the water filling with blood.
“Are ye all right, Princess?” Daphne asks as she peers at me. “Ye look a little flushed. Hard to say in such a dim room,” she adds with a grumble.
“I’m fine.” I clear my throat and focus on my face in the mirror, finally allowing myself to take a look at my reflection. I hate mirrors, hate the emptiness I always see in my eyes. When I was a Syren, I would often admire my reflection in broken mirrors and glass my sisters would salvage from shipwrecks, but I don’t look a thing like I once did. My eyes used to be a bright blue that would change from the pale turquoise of shallow shoals to the luminous color of glowing plankton, all depending on my mood.
Now they’re just the shade of the endless sea, and the woman who stares back at me is someone I don’t recognize, especially not with my hair pinned up in various curls at the top of my head. It’s the look of the moment among all the ladies, but I would rather my hair be down and loose, like waves of ink, would rather the stiff stays at my waist be loosened. Feels utterly wrong to have them made from whalebone, animals I considered friends.
The only thing that remains from my old self are the faded imprints of my gills, three faint lines on either side of my neck, so faint that you can only see them under certain light. A symbol of my life underwater, before I traded it away.
“Well, don’t ye look lovely, anyway?” Daphne murmurs as she adjusts a few strands of hair on my head. “A sweet sight for yer last night on land. I have no doubt the princes will miss each other when we set sail again.”
My stomach twists at the thought. Aerik will miss Ferdinand, a kindred spirit in debauchery, and perhaps more. He’ll miss the freedom that the ship has given him. He’s been kinder to me for most of the journey, less violent and critical. He’s only happy when he’s exploring, when he’s far away from his family’s watchful eye, and I worry what returning home will do to his mood.
Throw yourself off the ship, I tell myself.Let the seas claim you. Better to drown and die than live with that man and the man he’ll become again.
I swallow hard and rub the shark tooth between my fingers. “Daphne,” I say quietly. “When you were younger, did you ever do something so ill-informed that you’ve regretted it ever since?”
Daphne blinks at me in the mirror’s reflection. She’s been my lady-in-waiting ever since I married the prince, and she’s been there through thick and thin, keeping the darkest secrets close to her chest. To protect the prince more than me, I’m sure, since they would only reveal him in a bad light, but she’s still the closest person to me. And yet there’s distance between us, a friendship that can never really deepen because of my standing as a royal figure, and a life built on lies.
“Oh, that seems to me a tough question,” she says, humming to a tune in her head for a moment. “I may have to think about this a bit. Perhaps when I was a child, I may have stolen some candy,lakrid, from my brother at Christmas. I never told him.” She places her hand at her chest. “Please don’t think poorly of me.”
I give her a quick smile. “I never shall, Daphne.” I should have figured it would be something so minor. She would never understand. I don’t think anyone on this earth would.
“And, if I’m not being too bold, may I ask the same of ye?” she says.
I stiffen.
“I have my regrets about many things,” I tell her carefully. Since Daphne has seen the way my marriage has crumbled, she doesn’t have to think hard about what I might regret. “It’s hard to live a life without wonderingwhat if,isn’t it?”
A life that’s a lie. My entire backstory is a lie, one I’ve told myself and others so many times that I’ve almost come to believe it. Ten years ago, I woke up washed upon the shore of the very beach that Aerik had been staying on. His manservant Hodges found me completely nude, bloodied and unable to speak, not just from the fact that my tongue had been cut out and I was still choking on my own blood, but from the trauma of it all. Being on land, having legs, breathing air in underused lungs—I knew within seconds of waking that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.
Which is probably why I’ve tried so hard to make my mistake worthwhile, even though it’s come at so many costs.
But I digress. In reality, Aerik saw me carried in Hodges arms and, because of Edonia’s spell, I was able to charm Aerik despite not being able to talk. Or perhaps it wasn’t the spell or my charm that won him over, but the fact that I was beautiful, nude, and silent. Something he could both show off to the world and manipulate to suit his whims.
It wasn’t until much later that I was able to understand English and learned how to write it that I was able to tell Aerik and the others my story, one I had spent a long time creating in my head. I had been kidnapped from a faraway land called Limonos by pirates, who had cut out my tongue and threw me overboard, leaving me for dead. With pirates already terrorizing the seas and shipping routes at that time, my story was wholly believable, and most of the world contained faraway lands that no one had ever heard of. What else could have explained it? From what I had gathered, Syrens were called mermaids and were stuff of myths and legends, things that only the crusty old sailors seemed to believe. They would have labeled me insane had I told them the truth about where I’d come from.
Turns out, I’d soon push my luck within the realms of what’s possible. Within a year of being unable to talk, my tongue started to grow back. It slowly regenerated, just as a Syren’s tail would if it got sliced off, until one day I was able to speak again. By the time we reached the continent, Aerik’s doctor considered me a miracle, and I was able to slip into the royal family with nary a blemish to me. Edonia may have taken my voice for her own, but she didn’t prevent mine from coming back.
“All that wondering won’t do much for ye except bring ye sorrow, I say,” Daphne laments. “Better to accept the lot that god gave ye.” She pauses and gives me a pitying smile that fills her round red cheeks. “No matter the hardships.”
And yet all I’ve done for the last decade is accept it. I don’t want to accept it anymore. I want to fight back, fight my way to freedom. But this world above the seas is cruel to women, no matter their rank, and it’s a world that isn’t my own. I will never fit in here among the humans because, at the heart of me, I’m not one.
Yet I’m not a Syren either. I just exist in this space between the worlds with nowhere to belong to. My soul is adrift.
All because I believed Edonia’s lies.
Suddenly the door behind us swings open and in the mirror’s reflection I see Aerik stumbling into the room.
“There you are,” he says to me, his words slurring, his black periwig askew. Obviously drunk. My pulse starts to race, thrumming in my veins, my hand going over Nill’s tooth and clasping it tightly. “My split-tongued she-snake,” he says with a snort. He eyes Daphne with a disdainful jerk of his head. “Go along now, I need a word with my slippery wife.”
Please don’t leave me, I think, my heart sinking as I watch Daphne scuttle out of the room. I already can’t breathe.
“You’re late,” he says, stopping a few feet away and peering at me in the mirror. “Ferdinand and I have already been through a bottle, waiting for you. Food is getting cold.”
Oh, damn it.
“I was told the dinner was at seven,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady and calm, but submissive. I give him the softest smile that I can and relax my gaze so I don’t seem like I’m challenging him.
