Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [95]
“But, Lenia, you will die otherwise.”
“Please, Sister!”
They were all talking at once now, crying, pleading, and Lenia was on the shore wracked with sobs. Margrethe could barely even think of Christopher now, though she knew somewhere inside her that he was in mortal danger. There was a part of her that would sacrifice him, herself, everything for this right now.
One of the sisters approached, the knife gleaming in her hands. She pushed up to the water’s edge. As she moved, her tail slowly came into view, flashing in the moonlight.
Margrethe lost her breath then, remembering how she’d felt when she saw Lenia on the shore that first time. Nothing had been the same since that moment. The pure love and hope she had felt then. The unbearable beauty of it.
Lenia took the knife and turned. She reached back and tossed it in the air, past the trees. It landed in the sand, near Margrethe. Winking and glinting.
“No!” one of the sisters cried. “Lenia! He is only a man! He will die soon anyway. Think of all the years you have left to live.”
“He did not love you, Sister. He is not our kind. Come back to us!”
As quietly as she could, Margrethe slipped across the sand and picked up the knife. It was heavy, so heavy she almost dropped it, and it burned to the touch.
Then she sank back down in the sand, to watch.
The sisters all floated in the water now, reaching for the shore, their arms long and shining. “Lenia, you cannot die for him,” one of them said. “Please, it is nearly dawn.”
Margrethe watched Lenia as she reached for her sisters’ hands. She could tell by their faces—sad and beautiful in the starlight—that they all knew Lenia would never do what they were asking.
Suddenly, Margrethe snapped out of the trancelike state she was in, herself almost hypnotized by the sirens’ voices. Dawn, the mermaid sister had said. The sun would come up soon, and the sisters were waiting now, all of them, for Lenia to turn to foam.
She had refused to kill Christopher to save her own life. Christina would stay behind, motherless, in the castle, bastard child of the prince.
It came to Margrethe, right then, what she had to do, and she turned back toward the castle and started to run.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Mermaid
THE SKY WAS A DEEP, BRILLIANT BLUE, MELTING INTO THE dark ocean, which was calm now, nearly still. The stars pulsed and shimmered, an orchestra of light. In the distance, the barest hint of color played on the horizon. The promise of a new day.
Now, sitting on the beach, Lenia remembered the first sunrise she saw, swimming toward land with the prince in her arms. The miracle of all of it—his warm skin, his beating heart, and the sky opening, splitting into colors she’d never before seen or imagined. How new and wonderful it had all been. By now, she had watched many sunrises in the upper world. All those mornings, just before dawn, when she’d wrapped herself in a robe and left the prince’s bed as he was sleeping next to her, when she’d walked slowly through the sleeping castle to the gallery windows overlooking the sea. Standing there, still feeling his mouth and hands on her skin, smelling the perfume of the flowers, feeling the salt breeze that swept up from the sea.
She smiled, remembering.
Now there was nothing left to do but wait. Grief sparked in every bit of her body, every cell, but she savored it, that love and pain, the ache in her body to hold her daughter, because in moments it would vanish from the earth forever, and she with it. But right now, for this minute, she was alive.
In front of her, in the water, her sisters were quiet, too, waiting for the sun to rise. She knew they had sacrificed much in order to save her, but it had been her decision to come to this world, and she could not punish the prince for it.
Behind Lenia, the castle rose into the sky, and inside, she knew her baby was safe. She understood now that it was Christina she had felt when the prince kissed her and moved his body inside of hers. It was not the prince’s soul that had entered