• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I do not know, Your Highness. She was acting strange. She left the child with me. She seemed upset. She seemed to want me to take care of the child.”

“Where is she?”

“She left. She seemed in a hurry to leave. I don’t know when she is coming back.”

Panic swept through Margrethe. “And you did not tell anyone?” Her voice was shrill and too loud.

“This baby has been crying, she will not stop crying. I did not …” The woman was struggling, the child squirming in her arms. She was nearly in tears.

“Do not worry,” Margrethe said, making her voice soft. “Take care of the child. I will find her. Everything will be fine.”

Margrethe left, wracking her brain. What if Lenia had hurt herself?

She ran down the stone steps, past the great hall, searching frantically through the hush of the castle at night. The castle was so wide and empty, the cavernous corridors of marble and stone. It was like running through a graveyard. The busts of ancestors all around. The people who had lived once and were no more.

The queen’s chapel was empty.

She turned and raced to the great doors that led to the sea. Two soldiers stood at the doors, immediately bowed to her.

“Have you seen Astrid?” she asked.

“She was here earlier. She is often out here at night—”

Margrethe took off running before the guard could finish, out the gate and down the pathway. The sea spread in front of her, shining like oil.

She arrived at the docks. The ocean was like a living thing, breathing in and out. Lenia was nowhere in sight.

Away from the docks, farther from the castle, there was the clutch of trees where she’d found the glimmering stone. Just past it, she saw a faint figure sitting, farther down the beach. Her blond hair was bright under the moon. The relief was so intense Margrethe almost passed out.

Silently, she made her way down to Lenia, careful to remain out of view, to let the trees shield her. As Margrethe approached, she saw that her friend was in a light shift, her hair blowing in the soft breeze. By the water like this, she looked almost as she had that morning, all those months ago, holding the prince. She was gazing out over the water, gesturing as if someone were there with her.

And then, as she moved closer, Margrethe gasped.

There, in the water, were mermaids. Five mermaids, all together, near the shoreline. Their bald heads glittering, as if coated in diamonds. They had gathered around Lenia, looking up to her, speaking to her, and Lenia was kneeling before them.

Margrethe had never seen anything so beautiful.

Tears came to Margrethe’s eyes and ran down her cheeks. She could feel herself trembling. For a moment, she forgot everything else. Only this: the mermaids glittering in the sea, under the starry sky.

Her feet were bare on the rocks. She crept closer. They were speaking. Even the faint sounds of their voices—she could not yet hear them—sounded like music. She remembered the poem she’d recently reread, telling of Odysseus lashed to the mast so that he would not die from listening to the Sirens’ song.

As she moved closer, she could hear their voices, and they sounded like angels. She could see, then, that Lenia was crying.

“Lenia, you must do it. We are here to save you, Sister. Please let us save you.”

Lenia shook her head, tears running down her face.

Margrethe watched, mesmerized. The mermaids’ voices shivered through her whole body.

“We have been watching you. He is married now, Sister, and at dawn you are to turn to foam. That was the deal you made. Sybil told us everything. It is only a few hours now. We begged her to save you. She said there was one way to save you, and for payment she took our hair.”

One of the mermaids pulled a knife from the water. A shining silver sliver, like the moon. “If you spill his blood, Sister, cut through his skin and let his blood spill on your legs, your legs will become a tail again, the spell will reverse, and you can return to us. That is the only way. You must spill his blood.”

Lenia was frantically shaking