“My name is Nerit.”
He stared at me for such a long time that I thought maybe he had forgotten there were ocean and stars and sand at all. Maybe he had forgotten all the world but for me. It was the first time anyone had looked at me like that.
Samuel eased himself down into the sand and smiled his warm, dimpled smile. Then he asked me to tell him all about the world beneath the sea.
I came to the same beach every night after that, and always Samuel was waiting for me. We were both shy at first, nervous and bumbling. But soon talking to Samuel became as natural as swimming through the salt-heavy waters. We would stretch out beside each other and I would be hypnotized by the cadences of his voice. I loved to listen to him. I loved how he hardened his consonants and drawled his vowels. I loved the stories he told. Tales of sailors lost at sea who came back telling of merfolk and Sirens.
He told me of the townspeople who laughed at them and those who believed.
He told me of wars fought in distant lands, and gods who were loved and gods who were feared, and how his favorite sound was church bells on Sunday afternoons and how his favorite food was something called bread coated with sweet butter and sticky marmalade. My mouth watered when he tried to describe them, though I couldn’t begin to imagine these foreign flavors.
He told me how he had once had a sweetheart, but she had married a man who wasn’t poor like he was, and how he had spent the last three years of his life trying to be happy for her.
Weeks passed before Samuel dared to touch me. A brush of fingers through the tips of my drying hair. Then a knuckle against my shoulder. He never touched my tail, though he often stared at it with mystified awe.
“You must be beloved,” he said one night, a month after our first meeting. “You must be admired and doted upon by all your brethren in the sea.”
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. Samuel cocked his head and furrowed his brow in a way that was adorably human.
I considered lying. I was pleased by the idea that Samuel saw me that way—beloved—and I didn’t want to destroy such a perception. But I couldn’t lie to him, not after he had told me so many truths.
“No, Samuel. I am . . . not well liked by my kind.”
Samuel frowned. “How can that be?”
“They think I’m strange. My whole life I’ve been shunned, mocked for my talents, and pushed away . . .” I swallowed hard and forced my tongue to still, worried I’d said too much. Would Samuel begin searching for the reason now? Would he, too, begin to see whatever horrible traits the others saw in me?
A hand pressed into my lower back, just above where skin met scales. I sucked in a surprised breath and dared to raise my eyes. Samuel was closer now, his eyes full of sympathy and kindness. It was baffling to me that I had ever looked at him and not thought him handsome. Now I was certain he was the most beautiful creature in this world.
“They are jealous,” he whispered. “They are blind fools who cannot see the treasure before them.”
He kissed me. His lips were gentle, but the kiss was roughened by the salt on my mouth.
He pulled away with a sigh. “You are the sea,” he murmured.
“I love you,” I murmured back.
Fear quickly tightened around my chest and I wished that I could pull the words back into my mouth, but Samuel’s grin widened.
He took my hands into his. “My lovely Nerit, I must go away.”
The dread that struck me at these words was immediate and painful. I had been too rash. I had ruined everything.
But he continued, “But I will return on the night of the next full moon. I want to find a way for you and me to be together. Some means that will allow you to be by my side forever, so we may never again be parted. I . . . I hope this is what you want also?”
Weak, tenuous joy trembled in my chest. “Yes,” I said. “I want this also.”
“Then I will find a way, my darling. Will you promise to be here when I return?”
My heart was pounding, my pulse running as hot as if I had his human blood in my veins. I nodded and did not shy away when he kissed me again.
I returned to my cave for the first time in weeks. It was just as I had left it, all destruction and mayhem, but no longer did the sight fill me with agony. No—now there was only willful determination.
Two weeks.
I had two weeks before I saw Samuel again, and I knew what I would do.
I loved him for his optimism, for his belief that he might be able to find a way for us to be together, but I knew he would never find such a way, not unless his human witches had magic like we had beneath the sea. No—if we were to be together, it would be my doing.
I began to search for the book. Digging through the scattered bones and skulls. Shoving aside piles of lobster claws and abalone shells. Pulling curtains of kelp and seaweed away from the dark basins where hot air erupted up from the earth below.
I found the book beneath a crush of broken bottles and sea glass, half sunken in sand. As I wiped the mud off the giant clamshell pages, it became clear that some of the spells were missing. I flipped through them hurriedly.
Ah—the love potion. Of course.
No matter. I no longer wanted the love of Prince Lorindel. I no longer needed to trick anyone into loving me at all.
My heart raced as I searched for the spell that I did need. The shells clacked as I turned through them again, skimming through the book once, then twice—
There. A spell carved into the pearlescent pages by some sorceress of ages ago. The spell that would turn my fish’s tail into a pair of human legs.
I read through the ingredients. The skins and organs of water snakes. The spinal cord of a sea otter. Fish eyes and squid tentacles and a single black pearl. Blood given willingly from a merfolk’s chest.
All ingredients that could be harvested easily enough.
Then I began to read through the warnings—for where there was magic, there was danger.
Upon drinking the elixir, it will be as if a sword were cutting through the merfolk’s stomach. Once transformed, the merfolk will maintain all manner of grace, though each step taken upon these legs will be as an abomination walks, and it will be as though daggers were being thrust into the soles of these human feet.
Let it forthwith also be known that if a merfolk sacrifices their natural life in pursuit of a land-dweller’s love, then only through marriage may they obtain an immortal soul and a share of man’s happiness. If that human should rather choose to marry another, then at the sun’s first light following the marital vows, the merfolk will perish and become naught but foam on the crest of the ocean’s waves.