Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [98]
“Come, Sister,” Thilla called.
And with one last look at her baby, and one last look at her first and only human friend, Lenia turned back to the sea, and pushed her powerful tail behind her.
EPILOGUE
The Princess
THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED THAT DAY WAS WHISPERED through the castle corridors and courtyards and along the benches of the great hall. The guests who were present for the meeting of the two kings, and for the marriage of Princess Margrethe to Prince Christopher, took the story with them, back to their grand estates, back to the snow-covered countryside, and up to what used to be known, in those days, as the Northern kingdom. The old woman who found the mermaid on the sand wearing nothing but a ruby necklace, the lady-in-waiting who took Christina from the mermaid’s arms, the soldiers who saw a glimpse of the mermaid and her sisters as they disappeared into the sea, who claimed to see the mermaid glimmering from the ocean, her blue eyes glowing from the water as she turned back one last time before vanishing from their lives forever—they told what they saw, and the stories were repeated and changed over time.
Margrethe and Christopher raised Christina as their own daughter, and they went on to have children of their own besides, a boy and two girls, who grew up together in the castle by the sea, in the early days of the new kingdom. Eventually everyone forgot that Christina had ever belonged to anyone else. The mermaid had been in the castle for too short a time to have a child, people said—it could not have been more than a few months, after all—and everyone remembered how Margrethe had disappeared into the birthing room for hours and hours, just before the wedding. No wonder the wedding was so rushed, some whispered. No wonder the baby was kept largely out of sight of the court until she was a little moon-haired girl so charming, and with such a pleasing voice, that no one thought anymore about the strange circumstances of her birth.
Margrethe often came upon Christina, in later years, staring out at the sea. Walking along the shore and dipping her feet in the water. Margrethe would wonder then if the girl had any sense of where she had come from, if she felt any pull toward the sea beyond what they all felt, always living in its shadow, always hearing the slapping of water against land and watching the moon and stars and sun reflected in it. But Christina seemed like a regular enough girl, though her skin continued to shimmer until she was an old lady and her voice bewitched everyone who heard it, throughout her life.
How can any of us tell when that thing comes that will make everything different? As she stood in the frozen convent garden at the end of the world, all those centuries before now, Margrethe had no idea that she was about to witness a miracle—the last mermaid to come to land, at the very end of the days when mermaids still longed to return to it. In her later life, Margrethe often thought about how had she not been looking out at the water at that precise minute, back when she was just a girl of eighteen standing at the end of the world, she would have missed the miracle altogether. Even as a very old woman, Margrethe would sometimes look up quickly from her books, the ancient tales she had loved to read since she was a child, afraid that she was missing something magical come to light for just one instant, before disappearing again.
They say that no one from the world of the sea ever came on land again after what happened to the sea queen’s daughter, who suffered so much among humans, although no one knows for sure. And as the story changed and grew and shifted into a legend of a little mermaid who fell in love with a prince and longed for a human soul, no one ever talked about what the mermaid left behind.
As most children do, Christina went on to have children of her own, and those children