“Are you kidding me?” Luke snapped, his voice traveling across the water from the trees with great clarity and greater annoyance. “I did what you wanted. We came out, you got half drowned. Now you want to stay here and get all the way drowned? The mermaids don’t want to talk! The mermaids want to drown you!”
Elliot waved him off and, disinclined though he felt to do it, ducked his head beneath the water again. The mermaid had not gone. She was under the water, lurking, her pale weed-green eyes watchful. Her eyes widened at being watched back. Elliot made the gesture again, then had to break the surface of the water and breathe.
He was drawing another gulp of air into his smarting throat and burning lungs when he saw something else break the surface of the water. At first it only looked like a nest of debris, a tangle of weeds, but then it rose, and he saw bared to the open air her bone-pale face, her water-cool eyes, her rows of glittering sharp teeth. The mermaid.
Elliot smiled.
In a voice that was soft but sounded jagged, like something broken and made into a new shape it was never meant to form, she spoke. “Human,” she said. “Do you know what you were saying?”
“This?” Elliot made the gesture again. “Mermaids were—doing that, with their hands, in a lot of the sketches with mermaids that I could find. I figured it was something that people say to each other all the time—like hello or good-bye or how are you.”
“It means,” she said, and her voice was almost dry, “‘Do you want to drown him or shall I?’ Except less polite than that.”
“Oh,” said Elliot, and laughed. “Of course. It’s something that you say to each other all the time, when in the presence of humans. Oh my God. A million scholarly works on mermaids are full of pictures of mermaids giving humans the finger. Well. The finger of death.”
“Your friend on the shore is right,” the mermaid whispered, then she was on him again. He was flat on his back in the water, her cold merciless weight on top of him, and her strangling-tight fingers were in his hair, pulling him down under the surface as she murmured in his ear: “Your kind can drown in an inch of water. You think I can’t kill you because of a rope?”
The harpoon landed in the water, inches away from them. The mermaid stiffened: Elliot put a hand on her arm.
“Wait,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I only want to talk.”
“But harm him and I will hurt you,” Serene’s voice called from the trees.
The mermaid’s head turned, the moon picking out silver in the dark drowned green of her hair. “Elf!”
“Yes, elf,” said Serene. “Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle. And that should tell you that I missed you on purpose. Try to harm my friend again, and I will not miss.”
The mermaid’s head swung from side to side. She was poised to run or to attack. Elliot did not think she could see very well, outside the water.
“Don’t go,” Elliot said urgently. “She won’t hurt you unless you drown me.”
“You think I can’t? You’re in my element. You think you’re safe?”
“Not completely,” said Elliot. “But I thought it was worth a little risk. Don’t go and don’t drown me. Aren’t you the least bit curious about what I have to say? I’m curious about you.”
The mermaid shrugged. “We had to do it,” she said. “We had to get those people away from our lake. We have eggs to be raised here, and they have been fouling it for the space of fifteen moons.”
Fifteen moons.
“But . . . then those people who were fouling your lake, they were bandits,” said Elliot rapidly. “Not villagers interested in farming and trade. The bandits weren’t planning to stay, so they could leave as much of a mess as they wanted, but these people won’t. Didn’t you notice they were different?”
“You all look the same to me.”
Elliot smiled and said, “That’s because you’re not looking closely enough.”
They looked, and spoke, all night long. She seemed interested in looking closer, Elliot thought, as she held her hand up against his. Her fingers were cool against his, and webbed at the bases.
“I haven’t seen a human before,” the mermaid confided to him. “Not for long. Once they are drowned, your kind’s skin turns to—I think your word is—soap in the water.”
She laughed and Elliot laughed back, marveling, though he could hear Luke on the bank muttering that he did not think it was funny.
“That’s so true,” he told the mermaid.
He only wanted to look at her, and see her looking at him. Her skin felt different than human skin, looked different: her very eyes looked different, lucent in her skull. Those are pearls that were her eyes, Elliot thought, but her eyes had been pearls all along. She was a story made flesh.
“You keep turning up your mouth at the corners.”
“That’s a smile,” said Elliot. “My kind do it before laughing, sometimes. Do your kind not do it?”
“No. My kind just laugh, and sing, and . . .” The mermaid looked at him, wondrous and wondering, and then leaned forward. Elliot experienced a thrilling shock like a cold ripple in the water, as he felt her cool mouth on his, felt the press of her sharp teeth beneath her flesh. She leaned away. “Do your kind do that?”
Elliot could not help laughing. “Yes. My kind do.”
“I don’t believe this!” Luke yelled.
“I can’t believe you’re so annoying! Sorry about him,” Elliot told the mermaid. “So, can I tell the villagers we have a deal?”
“Are you sorry to be parted from the mermaid?” Serene asked sympathetically. “I know you listen to my and Luke’s romantic troubles, and I would be hap—”
“About that, I don’t want to listen to those, please stop.”
Since she returned, Serene had been talking endlessly about Golden not refusing her permission to write to him while she was at the wars. Which meant that Serene had permission. Except that Golden never wrote back, unless you counted the letter of Serene’s Golden had returned with DRIVEL written over it in violet ink.
Elliot had been forced to read one of Serene’s epistles, which were 100% about her valor. He had dictated a letter asking Golden about his hobbies and interests: so far no luck, but it had to be less boring for the poor boy.
Elliot sighed and stared out at the sea. “Not exactly sorry. A bird might love a fish, but where would they live? Not to mention the other anatomical difficulties . . .”
Serene looked sad about having a gentleman discussing intimate details and wandered off to persuade the captain to let her steer.
Luke jumped out of the rigging and landed on the deck near Elliot.
“Nobody should’ve been able to make that jump without breaking a leg,” said a sailor. “That’s absurd.”
“I know!” said Elliot. “I know, right? I’ve been saying it for years. Be my best friend.”
The sailor’s eyes glowed. “He’s amazing.”
“Get away from me, never speak to me again,” said Elliot, and moved to what he thought was starboard.
“I’m sorry about him,” said Luke behind him. “He’s always been like this. It’s terrible.”
Elliot wondered if he felt ill because of this, or the way the boat was lurching in the rising wind. The boat actually seemed to be skipping like an expertly thrown stone from one crest of a wave to the other, and as it lurched again Elliot made a grab for the rail, and missed.