Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [89]
A mermaid. She knew it, down to her bones.
She waded into the water, searching for another sign, walking slowly along the shoreline, until she came to a small group of trees and caught sight of something. A glittering stone. Not anything anyone else would notice, but she recognized that bit of shimmer, and what it meant. She picked up the stone in her hand, and decided to keep it as a talisman. Somewhere she had the oyster shell, too, didn’t she? The one Lenia had left on the rocks after saving the prince.
Margrethe smiled, squeezing the stone for luck.
It was only late that night, as she went to her window for the hundredth time, searching again for the mermaid, that she realized, finally, who Astrid was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Mermaid
FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING, LENIA SPRINKLED THE powder on her dinner, which the servants brought to her room. It was a warm broth filled with soft vegetables and meat. She watched the powder disappear into the liquid, like snow on the ocean’s surface, and then she held the bowl to her mouth and drank.
Over the next days, Lenia dreamed again and again of her eighteenth birthday. She’d wake in the middle of the night clutching the air, afraid that she’d pulled Christopher underwater. If she’d just lost focus for a few minutes, let his mouth slip under the surface and water fill his lungs, he would have died right there in her arms, the way she’d watched the other men do. She would thrash about on the bed, searching desperately for his body, panicking, feeling the waves lapping over her, and then she would remember. Her own belly. The baby she was carrying now, trying to bring it to shore.
She stayed in bed for four days. Each night she roused herself from sleep and dreams and forced herself to eat the soup she was brought, sprinkled over with powder.
On the fourth night, a terrible cramping clutched at her insides.
When a servant came in to clear away the dishes, she took one look at Lenia and screamed, dropping the wineglass she was holding.
“Something is wrong!” she cried, running out of the room. “Fetch Agnes!”
Lenia was covered in sweat, clutching at the sheets. The pain ripping through her body had blotted out everything else.
This thing in her body, this baby. It was moving through her, making its way out, and she wanted to die, wished she could barrel through time, turn to foam at that instant. It would be a relief to die now, never again to feel like knives and swords were cutting through her, like her body was being ripped open from the inside and out at all times.
Just let this baby live, she prayed.
Soon she was surrounded by servants and women, all in a deep red blur of pain and longing.
“Push, breathe, take my hand …” Instructions came from all sides.
Her body opened and closed, opened and closed, and the thing inside of it pressed forward, and she was expanding, and all she could think was Let my baby live. This body, she realized, this frail human thing that could expire at any second, that was susceptible to cold and disease, to knives and sea, was stronger than she had ever imagined, to create this thing inside of it, to turn itself into a vessel through which a human child could come splashing into the world, whole and alive.
A miracle, if it could happen that way, for her.
Hours passed, and she moved in and out of consciousness. Through the haze of pain and voices she heard a name, her name.
“Lenia.”
She was dreaming, she thought, back in the sea with her sisters around her. Vela was there holding one of the pulsing sea creatures she loved to collect, Regitta was there with her son shimmying beside her, his tiny tail a bright green by now, and her twin, Bolette, was beside her, and there was Thilla looking back at her through the water and, behind her, Nadine.
“Lenia! It is you!”
A terrible sound then, a deep scream that wasn’t a scream, coming from her own body.
Her body ripping, the baby coming out of her, the cries and wails, and