Did my… did my grandmother know?
“Your grandmother is afraid,” Ceto says gently. “She has always been afraid. She suspects that the Sea King might have played a hand in it, just as she suspects that Manannán’s death might have been more complicated than was presented to her. But she doesn’t ask too many questions, or seek to know too much. It is safer for her that way.”
Stop talking. I can’t listen any more. My hope breaks inside me, blistering, setting me on flame. I am bent double with the grief, my body heaving with silent sobs. My mother is dead and at the hands of my father. My mother, and everything she sacrificed for us. My mother, who only wanted to protect us. She came back for my birthday. She came back for me. And my father told us she didn’t love us. He said that she was a bad mother, that she abandoned us. He let us believe that we were easy to abandon, because that kept us small. Scared. Easy to control. Something hardens inside me, and I allow it to happen. Nay, I welcome it. I will be hard. I will be made of ice. He allowed us to believe that it was our fault. I raise my head, and meet the Sea Witch’s gaze.
I am angry, Ceto. I have never felt so much anger. Are you happy now?
“Tick tock, little mermaid,” she says. “Time is running out.” She takes my hands in hers. “Like all women, you have the power within you, no matter what your father has led you to believe. Do you trust that power, Gaia?”
I have never had autonomy before. Besides going to the Sea Witch, I have always just done what I was told to do. It seemed easier that way. Safer. Maybe I was like my grandmother, looking away to remain comfortable.
“You will be safe with us,” Ceto says, “Join us, I implore you. Join the true sisterhood in your mother’s name. You can help us achieve peace, once and for all, by ridding the kingdom of your father and his army of rapacious mer-men. We can show the women how to reclaim their powers. They’re still there, in every one of them, just buried so deep that they think they are lost for ever. But we can teach them. That can be your legacy, Gaia.”
If I join the Salkas, what does that mean? I am Muirgen, daughter of the Sea King. I am Gaia, the mermaid who wanted so much and who looked up and who fell in love with a boy. And I am Grace, the girl dancing on shattered toes, smiling through the pain as if it was nothing.
Who am I now?
“Who are you?” Ceto repeats my thoughts. “I would wager the more important question is – who will you be? Who are you free to be now?” She sniffs the air, her head snapping up. She smiles. “Right on time.”
What? I look up too, as I have always done, but I don’t know what I am searching for now.
“A storm is brewing,” she says. “Are you ready to sing, little mermaid?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The blazing sky bounces off the flat sea, rolling it purple. It is beautiful, this world. Why did I never fully acknowledge just how beautiful it was? I was so anxious to make Oliver fall in love with me so that my “real” life could begin, I forgot to stay still and appreciate what was around me. Just for a second, I breathe in the burning air, tasting the hint of coming sunshine on my tongue. I can hear my sisters talking amongst themselves.
“Where is she?”
“There is little time left.”
“I told you that she wouldn’t be able to do it.”
“Do be quiet, Cosima.”
“Don’t tell me to be quiet, Talia.”
“Sisters, please. This is not the time nor the place for these petty arguments.”
I smile, despite myself. They never change, my sisters. Will they continue to fight in such a manner as the years pass? When Nia marries Marlin and the rest are sold off to the highest bidders? After their mer-babies are born, children I will never meet? Children that I will never bear. Maybe becoming a mother would have made up for being motherless. Maybe it would have made me happy. But, in the end, I can only wish that my sisters will be happy in my stead.
I wish for them only sons.
I close my eyes and I think of my mother. How she tried to save us, she came back for us, and was killed for her efforts. And I think of my father.
He waited for her by the rocks that are closest to the human world, slippy with seamoss and mussels, the Sea Witch told me. My mother had tried to conceal her fright when she saw him. I was just going for a swim before Gaia’s birthday, she told him.
I know what you did, he replied, and he kept saying it until she admitted the truth.
But I can change, she said, I’ve learned my lesson. My mother would have started to beg then, for mercy. For her children. It’s too late, the Sea King said as he took his trident. And he broke her spine with it.
I can hear screaming now, my sisters’ voices reaming the air apart. The shrieking obscures any semblance of intelligible sentences, it is but a jumble of words, made up of no and please and sorry and don’t hurt us. And Father. Father. Father.
The Sea King has come for us. That man does not deserve the name of Father, he who fastened strings into our hands, made us dance like marionettes. He murdered our mother and made us believe that she chose to leave us behind.
“What is the meaning of this insubordination?” the Sea King asks, and even now, the sound of his voice causes me to cast my eyes down, crouch my shoulders inwards, trying to show him that I am not a threat.
No more. I force myself to stand up straight. I will not cower before this man for a moment longer.
“We’re sorry—”
“We didn’t mean to—”
“But we just thought that maybe if—”
“Silence,” the Sea King roars from the water. “What kind of maids are you, to disobey your father in such a way? Have you no loyalty? No gratitude for all that I have done for you?”
My sisters whimper in response. Someone is weeping hysterically, Cosima, I do believe, and I hear the sound of flesh meeting flesh, a savage clap, and a cry. How dare he hurt another one of us? “I told you to be quiet,” he says. “Don’t say that I didn’t warn you.”
I creep closer, making sure that I am still hidden from sight. I sit at the edge of the boat’s hatch deck where the Captain brought me earlier, peeking around the wooden bow. My father is there, with my sisters, and he looks smaller than I remembered somehow, his tail submerged in the water, his hair more grey than I have ever seen it.
“What have you done to yourselves?” he says, rapping his knuckles against Talia’s bald head. She recoils, then that learned blankness paints her face, stripping away any fear or hurt. Making her pretty again, the way our father prefers. “Where is your hair? Is this some sort of joke?”
“We wanted to save Gaia—”
“Do not call her by that name. It is cursed,” he says. “That’s what your mother wanted to call her. And look how she ended up.”
I watch them, each face in turn, and I see reflected in them what I know to be true in myself. They try and hide it, but I can see it in their eyes. If my mother didn’t love me, they wonder, then is there something wrong with me? I am broken. My fault. My fault.
We blamed ourselves. We hated our mother. And none of it was true.
“All I’ve ever asked from you is that you look pretty,” my father says, “and you smile when asked to. Is that so hard? Is it? Why must you all be so useless?”
Leave them alone, I think, my hands curling into fists. I am spoiling for a fight.
“What was that?” the Sea King says, turning around to look at the boat. “Who said that?”
Leave. My. Sisters. Alone, I think again and the words are seeping out of me, booming, reverberating in the wood of this yacht and soaring into the morning air. It is my voice.
“Muirgen,” my father says, looking around to find me. “Muirgen, where are you?”
I do not move, my fingers at my throat. My voice has come back to me. My feet don’t hurt any more either, I realize. Has Ceto cast another spell, unbeknownst to me?