I didn’t say anything. It was too dangerous a thing to admit, especially to Cosima. I just focused on catching my breath, one in (You’ll be fine, Gaia), breathe out (Stay calm, Gaia). “What’s wrong with you, Muirgen?” she said when I remained silent. “It’s not fair to Zale. You are to be bonded in two months and this is how you repay him for that honour? He should be with someone who loves him, who understands him. Someone more suited to the rigours of ruling the kingdom. Someone who…” she trailed off. “Anyway,” she said. “Someone else.”
“I never wanted any of this to happen.” I went to take her hand, but she snatched it back. “Cosima, please. You know this isn’t my fault.”
“What’s not your fault? That you stole Zale from me?”
“I didn’t steal him. You and I were such good friends – we loved each other, didn’t we?” There was a lump caught in my throat. “I miss you.”
“Zale was mine,” she said. “Everything was perfect before. Perhaps if you hadn’t been born then our mother wouldn’t have lost her mind and deserted us.” I drew back as if she had slapped me, but she didn’t stop there. “And you don’t even appreciate Zale. You’re so ungrateful that you fall in love with the first human man you set your eyes on. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you admit it to Grandmother tonight. The humans took our mother, Muirgen.”
“You’re always saying that she abandoned us, now you’re saying it’s the humans’ fault. Make up your mind, Cosima.”
“Don’t get smart. Those creatures murdered her for sport. Have you forgotten that?”
I had taken a deep breath. “We don’t know that for sure, do we?”
“What?” She was astonished at this. She obviously hadn’t heard everything I said to Grandmother tonight. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, we don’t know what happened to her after she was captured. We only know what Father has told us.”
“And that is enough. His word is law, you foolish girl. Have you completely lost your senses?”
“I just want the truth. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“And you’re prepared to do anything to get ‘this truth’?” she snarled, her face fierce.
“Well.” I don’t know. I don’t know. “I think so.”
“It’s going to take more than ‘I think so’ to do what needs to be done, Muirgen. Don’t be pathetic.”
She didn’t think I was brave enough, I realized, and I felt something smouldering inside me. “Don’t talk to me as if I’m a child, Cosima. Yes, I am prepared to do anything to find out what happened to her.”
“Okay,” she said, and her features fell clean, as if she had never known anger in her life. “Okay, Muirgen.” A brief smile. “I understand.”
“You do?” I grabbed her hand again, the relief at finally being heard almost overwhelming. This time she didn’t let go.
“You’ve always been such a curious mermaid, haven’t you, Muirgen?” Cosima was the only one who ever called me that. “Even when we were children.” She shifted closer to me, cuddling into my side. “Do you remember?”
Cosima and I, exploring shipwrecks. I’m tired, she would complain at the end of the day, let’s go back to the palace. I would wave her off, happy to stay by myself. “We used to be such good friends before Zale got in the way,” Cosima continued, wrapping a ringlet of hair around her finger. “I miss you, Muirgen. And I want you to be happy. And you’re not happy down here, are you?”
I thought of my father, lining his daughters up in order of their beauty, his satisfaction in my face and my body. His inevitable disgust when I would begin to age and lose my bloom. Zale, his hands and his tongue, and wanting to scour myself afterwards, excavate my bones to make myself clean again. And then Oliver, and that heat running through me when I remembered his dark eyes, and I wanted to feel like that again and again and again. And I thought of my mother. I will never stop thinking of my mother.
“No,” I whispered to Cosima then. “I’m not happy. I will never be happy under the sea.”
“There is a way,” she whispered back. “A way to escape. To have your questions answered. To walk on land, even. But you must go to the Shadowlands. You must go to her.”
“No, no,” I said, when it dawned on me what she was proposing. “The Sea Witch? Are you crazy? She will kill me if I even cross the whirlpools.”
“You need legs, do you not? If you want this man to reciprocate your feelings?”
“Yes, but—”
“Your birthday is approaching rapidly, sister, and by then it will be too late. How much do you love this human?” she asked, and I could not answer her. There were no words. Maybe there would never be enough words to encapsulate the true love I feel for Oliver. “That much?” she asked. “A human man whom you haven’t even had a conversation with?”
“You don’t understand,” I said, and she smiled again.
“Well, then,” she said. “The Sea Witch has the power to help you. You must go to her.”
“But Father is the only person in the kingdom with powers,” I said, confused.
“Muirgen,” she replied, kissing me on the forehead as if anointing me. “You really are naive sometimes.” She lifted the mirror, capturing our faces in the glass. Her blonde hair against my red, identical blue eyes and rosebud lips. But when I looked at my reflection, all I could see was what Zale had done to me, what I had allowed him to do, and I pushed the mirror away.
“You are beautiful, Muirgen,” my sister said. “Even when you have been crying, it’s quite astonishing.” She tilted the mirror so only her face was shown. “But you have not spent years crying, as I have.”
Cosima left me then, to wait for the palace to fall silent. To wait for my chance to escape.
Now, the whirlpool separating me from the Shadowlands churns before me. After everything I have heard of the Sea Witch, everything that we have been told since birth, the idea of being in her presence is almost unendurable. This is the woman whose Salka warriors killed my uncle, who scored a shadow so deep into my mother’s heart that she handed it over as dowry to a man she could never love. And here I am, come to beg a favour from her. But what other choice do I have?
I think of my mother and I ask the gods for a millimetre of her courage. Mother, mother, I pray as I push my way through the whirlpool. For a moment I am suspended in that in-between space, momentarily held safe in the deafening void. (I wish I could stay there for ever, safe in the nothingness.) However, I make myself keep swimming until I am in the Shadowlands, the Shadowlands and it feels both impossible and somehow inevitable that I am here. Here, the setting for my childhood nightmares, the place that we mer-babies whispered about when the adults were out of earshot.
My mother says the Salkas take bold mer-boys and mer-girls to the Shadowlands and they break their skulls as punishment.
My mother says that the air in the Shadowlands is poison, that only the Sea Witch and her Salkas can breathe there for their lungs are made of electric rays, and can withstand death itself.
No, no! My father says there are traps made of quicksand, so if you cross through the whirlpools, you are sucked into the sea-bed and buried alive and you will never see your family ever again and it’ll be all your own fault because you didn’t do as you were told.
For time immemorial, children have made up games where some of us were the Salkas and others were mer-folk and we fought long battles for control of the kingdom. The mer-folk always won, of course, due to the bravery and genius of the Sea King. Blessed be us who are born in the time of the Sea King. Long live the Sea King, we said when we finished. The kingdom has been made great again.