“Your father says a lot of things.” Her expression is unreadable.
“I need to know the truth.” I am pleading with her now. “I have always needed to know.”
“You will find no answers up there, little mermaid.” Ceto’s shoulders sag. “None that you want to hear, anyway.”
“You don’t understand,” I say, fighting the urge to scream at her.
“You seem to be under the illusion that I understand very little,” she says. She fishes a small bone from the floor and feeds it to the snake on her lap. “That is a mistake, I can assure you.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, swimming back so I am out of her reach. “But I can’t stay there, I can’t be bonded to Zale, I just can’t. He, he…” I gag on the acid-burn words that could explain what he does to me at night, what he’s promised to do once I turn sixteen. Only two months left. “I’m begging you,” I whisper. “Please help me. I don’t know what I will be forced to do if you don’t help me.”
The Sea Witch softens. “I am sorry that it has come to this for you.” Her gaze falls in the middle-distance, as if deciding something. She sighs. “But very well. I shall brew a potion that will slice your tail in two, casing each part with human flesh.” She says it as if it’s easy, mundane. “I will give you legs. That is what you desire, is it not?”
“Thank you, Ceto.” The relief is swift, and sure, as if I didn’t realize how tense I was until she said those words. You will have legs. “Thank you so much.”
“There is no need to thank me just yet. Your legs will be admired by all who see them, as will your unusually graceful movements, but there will be a price. There always is. A sacrifice, and one that you will remember for the rest of your life.” She purses her lips. “You will be unable to forget, I’m afraid.”
“Why not?” I ask, my palms starting to oil. Somehow, I know that I’m not going to like her answer.
“Every step you take shall be one of torture,” she explains. “As if a blade of sharpest metal has shorn through the soles of your foot and broken the bones of your thighs, twisting into your stomach and chafing your organs. I wish I could make it otherwise, but it is a penalty that the laws of magic demand and as such, it is beyond my control. Are you ready for that?”
I don’t reply. I am too afraid, or perhaps, simply, I do not know what can even be said to something so horrifying.
“And, of course, once you have taken the potion there is no turning back,” she says, an uncanny echo of Cosima’s words to me last night. “The kingdom will be lost to you for ever; your sisters, your beloved grandmother. You will never see them again.”
“I knew as much,” I say, determined not to think of my grandmother, how she will feel when she discovers she has lost another girl to the human world. “I am not a fool.”
“My most sincere apologies, Princess Muirgen; I would hate to make you feel like a fool. Did you also know that the potion will only last for a month? Did you know that if this Oliver does not profess his undying love for you by the time the sun begins to rise on that morning after the next full moon – well…”
“What?” I ask. “What will happen then?”
“You will not see your sixteenth year,” she says, looking at me with something akin to sympathy. “Your heart will shatter, cutting your lungs to shreds, carving your brain to pieces. And your body will disintegrate, the waves taking you for their own. It is Sea Law. There is no return.”
The Sea Witch doesn’t understand that if I do not see Oliver again, my heart will crack in half anyway. I will live my broken life with my broken heart, never knowing what became of my mother; forced to smile while I sing upon my father’s request; becoming a respectable wife for Zale. Any fate is better than that.
“And if Oliver does fall in love with me?” I ask, pretending to be unconcerned about any other eventuality.
“You will live happily ever after,” she says.
“And the pain?” I ask. “Will that go away?”
“Oh no,” she replies. “But women are meant to suffer. And you will have a husband and a child and a kitchen to call your own. Isn’t that what every little maid wants?”
“Yes. That is what I want,” I say, and the Sea Witch looks away from me, as though disappointed. “I am prepared to take the risk,” I add. Oliver will love me; I know he will.
He has to.
“Very well,” she says, sighing. “There is more, though. That is the price that must be paid according to Sea Law. But I must extract my own.”
“What?”
The Sea Witch narrows her eyes. “You thought such a potion would come for free? This is powerful magic,” she says. “And not something that can be undertaken lightly. I will have to use my own blood to create the potion. You must see that I need a sacrifice in return?”
“What kind of sacrifice?”
The Sea Witch pushes herself up from the chair, the snakes shedding from her and wriggling through holes in the uneven floorboards. She moves towards me, her skin as luminous as a pearl. She touches my cheek, her fingers silk-smooth, tracing them down my throat.
“We have heard tell of your gift here in the Shadowlands,” she says. “My Salkas inform me that yours is the loveliest voice in all the kingdom.” She presses harder on my neck, and I cough. “In order to make this magic work, I would require your most important asset in exchange.”
“You want my voice?”
“Why so surprised?” she asks. “Did you presume that I would ask for your face or that magnificent mane of hair? No, it is your voice that I value. You should not underestimate its worth, little mermaid.” She swims back from me. “I shall give you legs and you shall give me your tongue.”
“How?” I ask, pressing my lips together, as if afraid she will reach her hand into my mouth and pluck it out with her fingers.
“I shall cut it out, my dear. Don’t worry.” The Sea Witch smiles when I recoil. “It won’t take long.”
“But, but…” I imagine the pain of such an act, the violence. “Won’t that hurt?”
“Love is supposed to hurt. I thought you would have realized that by now,” she says. She means my mother, of course. That void in the centre of me which her disappearance has scraped clean, widening into an abyss with every new day.
“But without my voice, what do I have left?” I ask her. “How will I make Oliver fall in love with me before the next full moon?”
The Sea Witch shrugs, her hair floating up in the water and exposing her generous breasts. “You will still have your form, won’t you? Men have always been told that slimness is the most important attribute a woman can possess; more important than intelligence or wit or ambition, apparently. Although nowhere near as useful, if you ask me.”
“But if I can’t talk—”
“What has your father told you, since you were a hatchling?” she says. “Men don’t like women who talk too much, do they? Better to be silent.”
Viola wasn’t silent. Viola was loud and demanding, dismissing her brother with an imperious toss of her head, and Oliver looked at her as if she was mesmerizing, as if he could have spent the rest of his life listening to her voice and never tire of it.
“So,” she says to me. “A decision must be made, little mermaid. What is it to be?”
“Yes?” I say, the doubt turning the word into a question, but what else can I say? Either I am silent above the surface, or I spend the rest of my life screaming for mercy down here, the water muffling my cries. “My answer is yes. I am ready, Ceto.”
“I thought it might be,” she says, shaking her head. “But so be it.”