Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [32]
She was crying now. She ached to be in the sea. Almost as if that ancient part of her longed to return home. She knew now that everything the mermaid had said was true. She had been part of the water once, a creature of the sea.
She reached the shore, stumbled over the rocks to the sea. Knelt down, put her fingers in the water.
“Lenia!”
If she went back—to the castle, to more war—would she ever again see magic? The magic of this place where mermaids washed up from the sea and told her stories, left shimmer on her skin. The peace of the nuns who whispered and prayed.
It was like the world before, the world from myth, where bliss was possible. The stories she had read out loud, in Greek and Latin, as her beloved teacher, Gregor, listened. She waited, inhaled the faint scent of the water, the cold, let the wind ravage her body.
“Lenia!”
But the mermaid did not appear.
And then he was holding her, his face buried in her hair, his arms around her waist, and it was all over.
“Lenia!” she screamed once more, and just as Pieter turned her from the sea to the cliff, she was sure that she saw a face looking out to her from the water, that beautiful moon hair and shimmering skin, the deep blue eyes, and then he was pulling her up, up the stairs, and she could not see anything else for the tears blinding her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Mermaid
THE SKY SHIFTED COLOR, FROM BLUE TO GRAY TO A BRIGHT silver, as massive clouds scattered across it, assembling into elaborate shapes and collapsing back again. The sun shot through from behind them, dull and steady. In the distance, the cliff seemed to rise straight from the water. In front of it lay a thin strip of beach, vanishing into waves.
A few miles out, Lenia waited. It was more familiar now, all of this, but she could not imagine ever being unmoved by the beauty of the upper world. Her tail stretched behind her, skimming the water. Her eyes kept moving from the clouds to the cliff in the distance, the convent sitting upon it, the bare-branched trees swaying over it, and the rocky shore beneath. But they were not there. No one had been there for days, and she could feel it, somehow she knew: he was not coming back. But where was the girl? What had happened to her?
She looked to the sky. She remembered stories about the ancient mermaids who could read their own fates in the clouds, back when it was acceptable to visit the upper world. All the legends of the first humans visiting the sea, the merpeople slipping into the upper world. It had taken a long time for the separation that existed now to come to pass.
Only Lenia seemed to feel an emptiness inside her, a sense that she’d lost something she could not get back. Why was she the only one who felt it? None of her sisters did. They were all content to find their mates, lay their eggs, and prepare for family life. They were happy with the riches of the sea, the delights of the palace, all the abundance they had been born into. Even her grandmother, who loved these old tales more than any of them, had never had any desire to visit the upper world after her eighteenth birthday.
Now that she, the youngest of the queen’s daughters and the only one who had yet to find a mate, had reached her nineteenth year, they all expected it from her, too—that she would find her own mate and start her own family. Her behavior of late—singing songs full of longing as they dined on tentacles and seaweed and sea urchins—had only increased their expectations. It was natural that her mother and sisters would notice, and that they would all come to the same conclusion: Lenia had fallen in love. And she had fallen in love, and it made her voice bigger than it had ever been before, as huge as the empty spaces inside her.
They’d watched her when she was not looking, whispered about her when she was out of earshot, and they were all brimming with it: the excitement of watching a new love take shape, seeing their youngest sister find the same gift they had all found when their