Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [88]
“Thank you,” Lenia mouthed, taking the packet from Agnes’s hands.
After the old healer left, Lenia sat down on the bed, holding the powder with one hand and stroking her belly with the other.
Please, she thought, and then she made the thought a prayer and released it. Please be safe, and whole.
She closed her eyes and imagined: a child, her own child, with arms and legs and hair, soft human skin, a voice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Princess
THE CASTLE WAS IN AN UPROAR AS EVERY SERVANT AND every courtier prepared for the wedding of Prince Christopher to Princess Margrethe, and the arrival of King Erik and his court. Everyone seemed thrilled by the upcoming wedding—everyone, that is, except the bride herself.
Margrethe could not help but feel heavy of heart, even knowing that she had prevented enormous bloodshed and sorrow, even knowing that this was only the beginning of what she might be able to do in the world. She was more romantic than she’d realized she was, and she blamed Gregor and his stories. All those old Latin stories. If only he had limited her to the Greeks, she thought, she would have been far better off. But she wasn’t: she wanted the prince to love her, passionately and truly. Not just marry her because he had no choice. Not marry her while being in love with someone else.
But she was ashamed of her selfishness. She was the future queen, after all, not a silly girl, and there was too much at stake to waste time mooning about.
She did not even let herself take private satisfaction in being able to prevent Astrid, the girl she’d come to think of as her nemesis—though such a designation was not entirely fair, she realized—from marrying the prince. It was an empty triumph, at best. Instead she forced herself, several times a day, to remember the boy who’d drawn a mermaid in the dirt, all the suffering of her people that she would prevent, now and in the future. If only she could make her heart understand that its own wants did not matter, not when there was an entire kingdom to take care of.
Edele had recovered quickly from the assassination attempt and had immediately occupied herself with Margrethe’s wedding as well as the altering of her own entire wardrobe. The only real sign of what she’d been through was her newly svelte figure, a result of being unable to eat for days. For that, she confided to Margrethe one morning, it had nearly been worth it, especially with Rainer set to arrive at any moment to attend Margrethe and Christopher’s wedding, just as he’d promised.
“I will remember that,” Margrethe said, “the next time you complain about putting on a few pounds.”
TWO DAYS BEFORE her wedding, Margrethe took a walk down to the water. It was so different here from the North. It was beautiful, of course, with its bright blue waters and gleaming golden sand, the scattered trees along the shore, the slew of boats tethered to the wooden docks, but she missed the gloomy beauty of the Northern sea. That endless expanse of rock and ice and silver sky. That sense of being at the end of the world.
As she walked along the shore, she thought about Lenia. What had it felt like for her? Saving the prince, carrying him through that storm—how far had she taken him? I knew I should save him, she’d said. I couldn’t let him die. To think that there was such rich life under the sea. That a creature like that could come to earth, could be curious about their flatter, duller world.
Margrethe stopped now, knelt on the shoreline. She swept her fingers through the wet sand, watching the lines form behind her fingertips. And then, a moment later, a wave slid over all of it, the sand and her fingers, wiping the lines away.
And then, there. On the water. A fish’s tail shooting out.
She shook her head. Stop it, she told herself. She stood up. Time to go back inside, she thought, before she went crazy altogether. Besides, she had a wedding to prepare for.
She glanced back at the water, and then she saw