Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [45]
Slowly, she floated through the palace and the palace gardens and watched each of her sisters as they slept. She touched the eggs in which Thilla’s children were developing, glittering things hidden among the rocks and plants, and she whispered advice to them, for when they were grown, for when they left their shells and entered the sea.
THE NEXT DAY, at the palace feast, Lenia sang for her family and the court. Her voice echoed through the waves until every kind of creature appeared. The most wondrous fish, like nothing that could be imagined in the world above. Her sisters watched her, mesmerized, not one of them suspecting what was in her heart, that this would be the last time they would hear the voice that made them feel things they would never have felt otherwise, see the necklace they had found for her sparkling on her neck. Her beautiful sisters with their shining faces, like blooming flowers. Pearls fell from the ceilings, the mussel shells flapped open and shut, and the glow of a thousand ocean creatures glimmered from beyond the amber walls.
Her last hours seemed unbearable. Already she was seeing everything through the haze of time. As if she was already married to the prince, there was a web of light pulsing inside of her, and she had long forgotten how to swim and breathe through gills. She thought about how, when she was an old woman in the upper world, she would remember the other world she’d had once—the coral palace and her sisters with their shining skin and beautiful, long hair that spread about them like wild clouds in the water, the gangly, glowing creatures that had never left the very bottom of the sea. The shells and pearls and bones and brambles of sea plants that spread along the caverns and jutting rocks. How wonderful it would all seem then, to her.
AND THEN, FINALLY, she returned to the sea witch. She shot through the water, flexing her tail behind her, trying to ignore the lurching of her heart. Past the leaf statue outside, and into the witch’s cavern. Past the gem-black walls with the red flowers bursting from them, into the room full of twisting plants and vines.
Sybil was waiting. She had a large, smoking cauldron in front of her. When she looked up at Lenia, her face was even more heavy and sad than it had been the day before. Her long lashes drooped down to her cheeks. Her eyes sparkled as if they held tears. “You have made your decision,” she said.
“Yes,” Lenia said, nodding. “I am ready.”
“You do not need to do this today, you know,” Sybil said. “You can take more time. This is not a decision to be made lightly.”
“I know,” Lenia whispered, fear coursing through her. “But I am ready.”
“Very well,” Sybil said, sighing, swimming out from behind the cauldron to where Lenia was floating.
“So what will I do … after?”
“You will go to the southernmost part of the land. There you will find the castle where he lives. You will feel him. Go there, and when you get to land, wait till nighttime, when no one is about. Then leave the water. Be sure that no one sees you. And then, only then, drink this potion. If you grow legs while you are in the water, you will not be able to swim, and you will drown the way a human drowns. As I warned, it will hurt, your tail transforming to legs, but when it is done you will be as they are, and no one will know otherwise.”
Lenia nodded, unable to speak. Inside of her, deep down, there was a faint voice, a tiny niggling feeling that she should