Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [8]
Save him, she thought.
She reached the shore and pulled him out of the water, onto the rocks.
She had only seconds.
She lay beside him and stroked his face and his hair. His eyes fluttered open and shut as she leaned down and kissed his lips, his eyelids, his forehead. The feel of him under her lips, combined with the sunlight, the air that swept along her bare skin, her wet hair—all of it filled her with a kind of euphoria she’d never before felt. The material of his wet shirt tickling her breasts as she leaned against him. His open mouth and warm tongue.
He was so beautiful. She had never seen anything so beautiful.
But she could feel the life leaving him, and knew that she had done all she could do, that it was time to let other humans take care of him so that he could live. She looked up at the girl on the cliff, standing there watching them, transfixed. Her black hair blowing around her, her pale skin and brown eyes, her furs.
You, she thought again. Come now.
CHAPTER THREE
The Princess
THE MAN WAS SOAKED THROUGH AND SHIVERING WITH cold. His arms and legs were wrapped in seaweed. There was a strange shimmer, Margrethe saw, where the mermaid had touched him, on his face and arms. He had a warrior’s body, though his clothes were those of a civilian. Even sprawled as he was on the beach, half dead, he looked like a soldier about to go into battle.
She knelt beside him, her knees pushing into the rocky beach, and touched his face the way the mermaid had done moments before, running her fingers along the trail of shimmer the mermaid had left on his cheeks and lips. There was no feel to it, no particles that rubbed off onto her fingers. His skin was smooth, like stone, and his light hair had already formed into ice. Just as she poised her hand to touch his eyelids, to trace their curve, he blinked and stared up at her.
His eyes hit her like an open palm. In them, she could see the same glint that was on his skin. She jumped back.
“You,” he said, in a strange accent, his voice like a growl. He grabbed onto her furs, and she saw how weak he was. The rocks around him were stained with blood. She did not know what to do. She thought of her childhood nurse, who had been able to heal with a clove or a piece of bark or a dried herb she’d plucked from the castle garden. But she had never been trained in the healing arts. She was the daughter of a king, she was not made for such things, she had never learned anything useful at all. She was alone, and no one would be able to hear her over this wind. She wanted to cry. Why did she know so little of the world? But she knew enough to see that the man was blue, his teeth clacking, that he would die, and her heart burst open, with grief, with love, and she jumped to her feet.
She winced as she slipped off her furs and placed them over the man, carefully tucking them under his arms and legs. Immediately the wind beat against her. She was wearing only a light wool tunic, as all the young nuns did, with a white robe over it. The thin wimple did little to protect her head from the cold. The man stared up at Margrethe as the cold slipped into her skin, into her blood and bones. “I will be back, with help,” she said, and she spun and raced up the stairs as fast as she could, her body turning to ice, her hair to icicles that clanked together, and finally, after what seemed like days, she reached the garden, the gate, and then she was inside the abbey, gasping for air.
She pushed past the few nuns outside the abbess’s chamber. “Quick! I need help!”
Margrethe pounded on the abbess’s door as the others gathered around her.
The abbess opened the door, startled—then panicked to see the young princess before her, wet and shivering, in a dangerous state of cold.
“Mira!” she cried. “What has happened to you?”
“There is a man, at the beach, by the water. He needs help!”
“Come in here,” the abbess said, pulling Margrethe inside, making her sit by the fire. She called out to the others, “Get blankets