Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [11]
She stared at him, breathless, waiting. His eyes grew large as he remembered the terror of the beast.
“I slayed him, Sister, but not before he took every last one of my men. I never saw anything like it.”
He finished his story, smiling. For a moment she just looked at him before smiling back. “You, my lord,” she said, “are a spinner of tales.”
“Oh, my lady,” he said, putting his hand to his heart. “I am only telling you what I saw.”
“And then a mermaid saved you, I suppose,” she said playfully, watching for his reaction. Did he remember? “And left a trail of diamonds across your skin.”
He laughed, delighted. The way he was looking at her—it was like she was a goddess, as if she had emerged from the sea like Aphrodite in the stories Gregor had told her. “Is that what you are? Is that why you wear that habit, to hide your true nature?”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“I will never tell.”
“Where do you come from?” she asked.
“Far from here,” he said, waving his hand. “My men and I have gone to many distant lands. We have seen wonders you would not believe. Men with eyes in their foreheads, women with snakes for hair.”
She shook her head with amusement. “Hmmm, I think I’ve heard of you,” she said. “Did you enter an enemy city inside a horse as well?”
“Yes!” he said, nodding vigorously, “back when we fought a most terrible war. After, an enchantress put me under a spell and kept me on her island for seven years. I lived on nothing but the fruit I shook down from trees. Can you imagine, Sister? And once, in the middle of the ocean, we saw a woman stepping out of a clamshell, right there on the surface of the water.”
“That must have been very awful for you.”
“Yes, more than the most ferocious battle. Seeing a woman, in the middle of a long journey … It almost killed us all from shock.”
She smiled, and then suddenly the whole room seemed to shift. “You … Wait.” A terrible feeling rose in her, a suspicion, and her amusement faded away. She had been too blinded by that mermaid sheen, that beautiful glimmer marking his skin, to notice how sun-drenched he was underneath. His warrior’s body. “Do you … come from the South?”
“I do. From a much warmer land than this.”
“The Southern kingdom?”
“Yes.” He was smiling at her, and then his face changed. “Are you well, Sister? What is it? I am not an enemy to you here, in a house of God.”
Suddenly the door, the hallway, the other nuns—all of it seemed miles away.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Sister? Forgive me. I do not mean to offend.”
“I … have to return to my chores,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm, prevent her hands from shaking, her legs from running, as she went to the door and pushed through.
“Sister!”
She rushed down the hall, to the main part of the convent and back to her cell, where she leaned against the wall, trying to catch her breath, stop the racing of her heart.
She had never met one of her kingdom’s enemies before. The men from the South who had wended their way up to her own land when she was a child, leaving heaps of bodies in their wake.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Mermaid
LENIA’S EYES PEERED BACK AT HER, IN THE GLASS, HER hair swarming around her face and lifting into the water above. She could still feel him in her arms. That warmth, that beating heart. The sensation of wet hair, wet skin, under her palms. As soft as a mussel.
Then behind her, another face appeared. Vela, the next youngest sister to Lenia, her pale face pressing through the water, like a memory, or a ghost.
“You scared me,” Lenia said, turning. “I thought you were in the garden.”
Vela wrapped her long, silvery arms around Lenia’s shoulders. “Did you have a good birthday, Sister?” she asked. “I was worried when you wouldn’t come talk to us. I was afraid you’d been disappointed.”
“By the upper world?”
“The storm. We could feel it down here long after you left.”
Lenia