Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [49]
Visions flickered before her eyes, all of them blurring together: Thilla’s silver arms, the prince’s heart beating under her own, the snow melting as it hit the water, the dark sky strewn with bits of starry fire, the human girl’s skin turning to jewels under her own hand. All the visions she’d seen, the emotions she’d felt, every second of her life coiled into the great pain that was consuming her, searing up and down her body.
And just when she thought it was more than she could bear, the world, mercifully and suddenly, turned dark.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Princess
OVER THE NEXT DAYS, THE ARMY ASSEMBLED. ALL THE warrior nobles who’d stayed home during the last months, waiting, tending to their estates, knowing the king was preparing to call them to arms, began heading to the castle. Roads throughout the kingdom became thick with travelers. Pigeons flew overhead carrying coded messages. More and more nobles gathered in the castle while their servants crowded the fields around the city walls and messengers raced between estates. An entire tented city rose from the lands surrounding the castle in a matter of days. There was excitement everywhere, a feeling that something new, something better, was about to come into being.
Margrethe paced her room, crazy with frustration. She heard the whispers going through the castle: that the Southern prince had enchanted the young princess, used the black arts to put her under his spell.
She hated to be thought of as a fool. And, further, to know that anything she said—talk of mermaids, enemy princes with open hearts, suffering peasants, and the possibility for peace, real peace—would convince them all the more. She tried to keep to her room as much as possible, sitting alone with the pinecone fire blazing. But every night she went to the great hall, which became more crowded and rowdy with each passing day. New tables were set out, not only in the great hall but in the smaller one next to it, which was emptied of its usual furnishings. Her ladies were mad with excitement, and she relieved them of their duties to her so that they could flirt with the handsome young soldiers bravely offering themselves to their king.
And so that she could be alone, to think.
Over and over she saw the same images: the sick children, the figure in the dirt, the devastated villages, and the mermaid offering up to her the enemy prince.
Save him. You, come now.
There had to be something she could do. Some meaning to everything that had happened.
Save him.
Her father was going to war, there was nothing she could do to sway him, and he was using what had happened to rally the strongest men in the kingdom. She knew how they spoke of her, imagined how close to danger she’d been, the beautiful princess upon whom all their fates rested, dressed in a novice’s robes, while the treacherous enemy prince stalked the convent, a gleaming sword at his side. It was too seductive a story for anyone to care about the truth.
This was not her fate. Not this.
Whenever she shut her eyes, he was there. His curving shoulders, his eyes the color of weeds, the way he’d stood in the garden, waiting for her. The first time she’d seen him: splayed out on the beach, nearly drowned, with the mermaid leaning over him, her lips on his forehead. Her wet hair that snaked over her bare arms and breasts and belly. These images haunted Margrethe’s dreams, made her wake with the sheets twisted around her, aching, unable to slip back to sleep.
One night,