Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [97]
“You’ve come back to us,” she said. Her face was so beautiful, her huge eyes as close to human tears as they could ever be, brimming with relief and love. Her hair gone only made her face more striking, her shimmering skin …
“Come back?”
Bolette’s face appeared next to Thilla’s, and then Regitta’s, and Nadine’s.
In the distance, she could hear the castle coming to life.
Lenia sat up. She looked in wonder at her own skin, shimmering and hard, all the pain in it gone. Her powerful tail, curving onto the sand. Her tail.
For a moment, one moment, she felt everything there is to feel, all at once. The most intense euphoria coupled with the most searing grief. In a moment, she had lost everything, and gained everything back.
Or had she dreamed it all?
The world smelled different, tasted different.
And then she saw Margrethe lying on the ground just a few feet away from her, passed out. Edele fretting over her, ripping apart her own dress to stanch the wound.
She looked around for Christina, saw Vela sitting on the beach and holding the baby in her arms. Christina was staring up at her aunt, smiling.
In confusion, Lenia looked back to Thilla.
“She will be all right, Sister,” she said. “Your friend. She hurt herself for you.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What happened?”
His soul is my soul. His blood is my blood.
She looked more closely at Margrethe, her hurt leg, the blood on the sand under her.
“They will be coming now. The guards up there.” Thilla pointed. “They are getting another human to take care of her. They heard her cries. We must go now.”
“Go?”
“It is time for us to go, Sister,” repeated Vela. “They will all be all right.”
And then Lenia understood. Margrethe had saved her, but now she had to return to her own world.
The guards were running down to the water. The prince’s new bride was missing. She was here by the water, wounded. The castle would be in an uproar.
There was no choice.
Lenia saw that things would be all right. That they would heal Margrethe, and Margrethe would care for Christina, and Christina would grow up beautiful and beloved in this castle by the sea. Would she look out at the water and sense something? Would she feel pulled to it? Maybe later in life, one day, when she was old enough to understand, Lenia could see her again. Maybe by then Thilla would be queen, and Lenia would be mated to one of her own kind, to Falke if he would still have her, and they would be surrounded by merchildren, and she could tell her own children stories about their half sister, who lived in the upper world with her human father, under the stars.
She looked back at Margrethe, whose eyes fluttered open and focused on hers.
There was so much Lenia wanted to say to her, but the sun was in the sky, the guards were approaching, and the court physician, the prince—they were all running to the water, and she had to think of her own people now, her sisters, who were slipping back in the water, waiting for her to return home.
She turned then to Vela, who held out her daughter to her. “Say good-bye to her,” her sister whispered. “She will be safe here. She will live well.”
Lenia cried out as she took her daughter, holding her close to her breast, inhaling her. It would be her last scent, one she would never forget. As Christina stared up at her, as her heart split open, Lenia realized she had been wrong before. She could feel more pain than she’d felt when Sybil cut out her tongue, when the potion ripped her body in two. There was this, now.
“Good-bye, my love,” she whispered, willing the words into her daughter’s heart, her soul, the web of light inside her tiny body that would keep this memory alive, even after death. Then Lenia spoke to Margrethe. “Please,” she said. “Keep her safe.”
Margrethe nodded.
Edele walked to Lenia then, nervously looking over her shoulder at the approaching men. “You need to go,” she said gently. “I can take her.”
Lenia nodded to her, this flame-haired girl, and carefully handed Christina over, making sure her blanket was tucked around