Chapter Text
Morning comes too quickly. Eric wakes up disoriented, not remembering drifting off. He blinks the sleep from his eyes. Yesterday returns to him in fits and starts. Ariel.
He feels the weight and the warmth of her at his side before he’s turned his head to see her. When he does it wakes him at once.
“I love you,” he whispers.
She’s still asleep, curled on her side with her face half-hidden against her arm. The morning light lifts all the warm tones from her hair, gold and amber and fire-red spilling across his pillows. He dares brush a piece of it out of her face, behind her ear, careful not to wake her. He’s never done that to someone before.
“I love you,” he tells her again. Now that he’s said it aloud he can’t stop saying it, reveling in the weight of it on his tongue. “I’m so in love with you.”
He must look mad. He might be mad. But he can’t find it in himself to care, too stunned by the miracle of it all, too unbelievably, deliriously happy.
Eventually the morning sun creeps further into the room, and Ariel begins to stir when it finds her face. Her eyes flutter open. She looks around dazedly, lost in this new room until she turns her cheek and sees Eric. Then she breaks into a slow, sleepy smile.
“Hi,” he whispers.
She mumbles something that might’ve been good morning, her eyes already drifting shut again. But then all at once they snap back open and it all seems to hit her, and she sits straight up in bed and throws back the covers, gaze roving down herself with such eagerness it’s nearly desperation. Her legs, Eric realizes. Her feet.
He can’t help but laugh at the smile that swells over her face, the happy wriggle of her heels against the mattress. “Still there?”
She looks down at him, grinning. All the grogginess seems shaken out of her, but she slips back down into bed beside him anyway, tugging the covers back up to her waist. Then he feels her foot against his ankle, her knee hooking round his own. She lays her arm over his waist and her head against his chest, and Eric wraps his own arms around her back to pull her into him, so easy it might have been instinctual. He breathes in the scent of her sleepy body with a deep relief. She fits against him just right.
“I nearly forgot,” she murmurs.
“About your legs?”
“About all of it.”
She traces her fingers in circles over his chest, sparking against his skin through the fabric of his shirt. “I dreamt I was underwater.”
He’s not sure what to say. There’s a spark of fear at the back of his brain as he remembers the look on her face last night, when she’d turned her back on the ocean for good — that longing, that loss. As steadily as he can he replies, “Oh, yeah?”
“Mm. I used to have dreams about being on land all the time. But never about being in the sea.” She turns her head, her cheek to his chest. “I guess, when you live there, you can’t really dream it.”
“Was it a bad dream?”
“No. I don’t know. Just a dream.”
Eric hums and strokes his fingers down her spine. A dull ache of discomfort has settled in his gut, and it takes him a moment to identify it as guilt. The ocean was her home, her life, the only world she’s ever known. How long before she realizes just what she’s given up to be here with him? How long before she changes her mind?
“We can go out to the beach today, if you’d like,” he says. It sounds flimsy to his own ears, as if that’s anything the same as going home.
“Maybe. But I want to see the rest of the island first. And the palace — I only saw a little of it before, just your study, really, and I want to know everything—”
“Okay,” says Eric, laughing despite himself, “all right. Whatever you want. We’ve got all the time in the world. Right?”
“Right.” Ariel picks at the worn linen of his shirt over his ribs. “I just have this feeling…”
“What?”
She shakes her head. “Never mind.”
Eric’s about to press, but she lifts her head from his chest and tips up her chin to graze her mouth over his own. His whole heart flutters. He skims his hand up her spine and slips his fingers into her hair, steadying her against him and kissing her properly.
It’s all still clumsy, still new. His jaw is rough with stubble; he feels the drag of it against her mouth. Her breath is awful, and so, probably, is his. But none of it matters. She’s here. She’s Ariel, all of her, morning breath and pillow creases and salt-stained skin, warm and alive beneath his hands. He’d been so taken by the dream of her before that he’d scarcely imagined how it would be to have her real in his arms.
Then she slips her hands through the opening of his shirt, tracing her fingers over his chest, and he forgets all of that entirely. His skin burns under her touch. “Ariel,” he hears himself breathe out against her mouth. All their chaste kisses yesterday had been nothing at all like this.
Ariel draws away to look down at him. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, a bit stupidly, “brilliant,” and then she’s grinning and nosing at his jaw. She starts to feather kisses down the side of his neck, closes her mouth over the thundering pulse beneath his ear. A pathetic little gasp escapes him. He’s sure he’d have gone red with embarrassment if he wasn’t already flushed down to the collar of his shirt. He’s entranced by the whole thing, spellbound — the weight of her atop him, the graze of her teeth over the delicate skin, her tongue rolling wet over the sting. He feels nerve endings he’s never felt before prickling alight beneath his skin. He feels a whole new part of himself, something deep inside his chest, opening up and blossoming.
He’s so swept up in it all that it’s too late by the time he hears the footsteps.
Lashana, maybe, he thinks dimly, coming to scold him down to breakfast. But his brain is sluggish with want, and he doesn’t quite recognize the click of the heels, the rustle of her skirts, the stern rap of the knuckles against his door.
“Eric,” says his mother, “are you up?”
He scrambles away from Ariel so quickly that he nearly goes dizzy with it. Confusion flashes over her face as he pushes her back, fumbling with the shirt buttons she’s just undone, and calls, “Yeah, Mum, just a second—”
Ariel’s mouth parts with understanding. But his mother, of course, doesn’t listen, and before Ariel can move a muscle the queen is throwing open the door as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “Good mo—”
Then she freezes in the doorway. “Ah.”
“Hi, mum,” he tells her weakly.
“Hello,” she says, addressing the girl in his bed.
Ariel throws off the blankets and rushes to her feet (her feet!), smoothing the hem of Eric’s shirt down over her thighs. His mother’s gaze hardens a little — whether at the state of her undress or at the shirt she must recognize as his, he can’t say — and she lifts an eyebrow, silent, glancing toward her son.
“It’s not what—” he tries hastily, “there wasn’t a room made up, or clothes—”
“Your Majesty.” Ariel holds out her hand, determined. “My name’s Ariel. It’s an honor to finally meet you.”
His mother looks back at her for a long moment. She’s perfectly still, perfectly composed, with that unreadable expression on her face that’s driven Eric mad since it was first fixed on him as a child. Finally she takes Ariel’s outstretched hand. Shakes it. “Ariel,” she repeats, and Ariel beams.
Eric’s chest gives a little leap of pride for her. She’s so clever, so brave, so charming, standing half-naked in his bedroom on feet she’s had for twelve hours and shaking his royal mother’s hand, with that wide, radiant smile that he thinks could enchant anybody lucky enough to receive it. It had certainly enchanted him. That siren smile, he nearly thinks, but somehow he knows it’s just Ariel.
“I’ve heard quite a lot about you, young lady.” His mother’s gaze flicks down her bare legs. “Though I presume I’ve missed something?”
Ariel rises up on her tiptoes and back down again, pleased. “It’s new.”
“I see.”
“Mum,” says Eric. He shifts his eyes toward the door. “Please?”
His mother considers him for a moment, lip twitching, and Eric is certain he’s in for a reprimand. But then she only claps her hands together and backs toward the door.
“Right, well. I see I’ve interrupted something, though I hope it isn’t what I think it is,” she says, knowing full well what it is, and Eric becomes fascinated by a loose thread on the blanket. “I would be obliged to see you both at breakfast. And Ariel — do find yourself some clothes.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
His mother pauses in the doorway, fingers on the handle, looking back at Ariel like she’s making up her mind. Finally she says, “It’s good to meet you.”
It’s the first time he sees Ariel’s confidence waver. “Thank you.”
When the door has clicked shut she whirls on her heel, bounds back to the bed to land half on top of him. “Did she like me?”
Eric twists his face into the pillow out of the range of her hair, swinging as she leans over him. “It was like twenty seconds.”
“Yeah, but did she like me.”
The sovereign monarch or his mother. He’s not sure which is more daunting. He catches Ariel’s face in his hands, smooths his thumbs over the curves of her cheekbones. “It’s impossible not to like you.”
She rolls her eyes at him for that, but she leans down after to kiss him anyway. Her fingers slide into his hair again, nails scratching featherlight over his scalp, and he has to bite back the purr of contentment building in his throat as he tugs her flush against him. Again it unfurls in his chest, golden and glowing: he loves her.
He doesn’t realize he’s grinning against her lips until she pulls back and whispers, “Quit smiling, I’m trying to kiss you.”
“Sorry,” he says, not sorry at all, and drags her back down.
He’d have been content to laze about with her all day, trading idle kisses and easy conversation, but then Ariel’s stomach groans against his own. They’d had nothing to eat last night; she must be starving. It’s this more than his mother’s instructions that reminds him they have elsewhere to be than in this bed.
Still, it’s a torment to pull away. “Breakfast,” he whispers half-heartedly.
“Must we?”
“Come on.”
He gets to his feet and extends a hand, trying at what he hopes his a gentlemanly gesture. Instead Ariel leans back on her hands, biting her lip into her smile, all lean thighs and brown skin beneath his shirt. “I don’t have anything to wear, Eric.”
He drops his hand. “Right. Right, um, I’ll send for somebody.”
Her half-nakedness had been one thing beneath his blankets, but to see her in the clear morning light is quite another. He tears his eyes away before they can drift to places they shouldn’t, and turns to ring for Rosa.
He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he leaves. She’s made a right mess of his hair, curls puffy and wild and journeying off in a dozen different directions. He spends about two seconds trying to tame it back down, then decides he’s hardly bothered. Proud of it, even. Let everyone see.
The girl named Rosa shows up with a tub of hot water and a dress folded over her arm. Ariel knows her: she’d helped dress her that first day, playing right hand to the housekeeper who had brought her upstairs and bathed her. “Hello,” she says coolly as Ariel lets her in. “Here to see to you.”
Ariel waits for the inevitable sneer, for the wince of revulsion she’d seen on Rosa’s face at the engagement party when her fins had emerged from beneath her dress. A trusted maid of the queen’s, sent to tend to some sea creature — she’d hardly blame her for being wary.
But Rosa says nothing of the sort. Instead she takes Eric’s shirt from her once she’s stripped it off and smirks. “Busy night?”
Ariel’s cheeks redden. “That’s private.”
“Nothing’s private in this palace, love. Best get used to that.”
“That’s hardly fair.”
“Nope,” says Rosa cheerfully, and nudges her between the shoulderblades to the steaming bathtub.
The normalcy of it unsettles her. But that’s what she’d wanted, isn’t it? To live here like she belongs?
“I can bathe myself,” she insists, though of course she wouldn’t know where to start. What she really means is that she wants to bathe herself.
So Rosa shrugs, tells her to suit herself, and leaves her to it behind the solitude of the folding screen. Ariel’s second bath is less efficient than the first — she doesn’t know her way around a bar of soap, much less where to use it on all of her new skin — but by the end of it at least she doesn’t stink.
Once she’s toweled off Rosa begins to hoist her into the endless line of layers humans wear. By the time the corset is settled around her waist, she’s begun sweating all over again.
“Where’d my sandals go?” she asks as Rosa begins lacing it up. There’s a pair of ribboned heels waiting for her by the dresser, and her new feet ache again at just the sight of them. She wonders if there’s any part of human dress that isn’t designed specifically for discomfort.
“Can’t wear sandals on royal business,” Rosa informs her.
“Well, yeah, but surely it doesn’t have to be those things.”
“Depends,” she says. “I reckoned you’d want to make a good impression on your future mother-in-law.”
Ariel blames the tightening corset for the cough that sputters out of her. “Excuse me?”
Rosa grins, crooked. “Only messing.”
She has to squeeze into the heels before Rosa pulls the dress over her head, on account of the hem sweeping over the floor. It’s a pale yellow thing, the waist cinched with a sash, the skirt floating around her ankles, the collar and the sleeves embroidered with whorls of tiny flowers. Ariel runs her fingers over them, mapping the delicate shapes of the thread. Humans make such lovely things.
“This is pretty,” she says, more to herself in the mirror than to anyone else. But behind her Rosa shakes her head, tutting, eyes downcast in their reflection as she does up the laces.
“The color looks odd with your hair,” she mutters. For a moment Ariel thinks it’s mean-spirited, but Rosa’s face is earnest, brow pursed in candid concentration. “The red and the yellow—”
“I like the yellow.”
“Well, sure. But you’ve got such pretty hair. You’d be better off in blues and greens and the like. It’s the cool colors that make it pop, see?”
“Right,” says Ariel, as if she’s ever given this so much as a moment of consideration.
“Something purple, maybe. Or that blue one again…”
“Oh. That one’s done for, I think.”
“Pity,” sighs Rosa. “It was my nicest.”
“Your…? That was yours?”
She can see at once that Rosa hadn’t meant to say this, ducking her head uneasily in the mirror and busying herself with the back of the bodice. She’s produced a needle and thread; the seam of the collar is fraying. “Well, yes.”
“Why’d you give it to me, then?”
“I didn’t really — I don’t know. Lashana told me to.”
Lashana — the housekeeper, Ariel recalls, the woman who’d bathed her and helped her dress that first morning. How strange, all these people in the palace who knew her in such intimate ways before they ever even knew her name.
“Oh,” she says, unease creeping over her skin. “Thank you.”
“And,” adds Rosa, a bit suddenly as if she’s pushing it off her chest, “I thought you might’ve been the girl.”
“What girl?”
“Eric’s.”
Ariel raises her eyebrows. “You didn’t.”
“I dunno. I’ve known him a long time. His face when he saw you…”
“But he didn’t recognize me then.”
Rosa hums, thoughtful, a pin between her lips. When she pulls it free she says, “Hardly matters, anyway. He likes you so much. So yeah, I let you take the dress.”
“He means something to you,” Ariel realizes.
Rosa scowls. “Don’t tell him I said so.”
Ariel meets her gaze in the mirror, presses her lips pointedly together. Rosa has a bluntness about her that she finds herself liking. Most humans seem to speak around what they really mean to say; Rosa, at least, is honest.
She lets it go and returns to examining the dress. “Is this one yours too?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s lovely.”
“It’s odd on you,” she insists, not unkindly. “I’ll try to find you something that suits you better.”
Ariel’s mind drifts to her tail, violet and bottle-green and blue as the starfish that had wandered the shallows. Those colors had suited her. The monotony of her human body had startled her at first — the endless stretch of skin where she’d once shimmered with scales, brown all the way to her toes. No wonder humans clothe themselves in color.
Then as quickly as it came the thought of her old body begins to smart, like a cut reopened. Ariel pushes it from her mind and instead smoothes her palms down the yellow folds of the dress. “I don’t think this looks bad.”
“Nothing could look bad on you,” Rosa says blithely, and ties off the knot.
So Ariel goes down to breakfast in the yellow dress.
She finds Eric in the anteroom, fiddling with the buttons on his waistcoat. She hadn’t expected him to be waiting for her, but she’s glad for it, relieved at the prospect of walking in at his side and not alone. He glances up at the click of her footsteps. A grin breaks over his face.
“Hi,” he says. “You’re very pretty.”
“So are you.”
He blushes up to the tops of his ears, and Ariel thrills in it all over again, his unguarded heart and the ease with which she can slip into it.
“So, um,” he says, “about my mother—”
“You don’t have to explain anything.”
“It’s just that she can be sort of harsh.”
“If you’d ever met my dad,” says Ariel, “you wouldn’t be worried.”
“Okay. All right. So…”
He offers her his arm, hesitant, face uncertain. Ariel forces a sure smile onto her own and loops her hand round the crook of his elbow. For the first time since they’ve met she feels the shadow of his rank creeping into the space between them. Eric is not just a boy; Ariel is not just the girl he loves. He’s got a whole life here that she needs to slot into, a whole circuit of royal duties and standards and habits that she has to learn. His mother is just the start of it. Last night, this morning, the delicate thing blossoming between them belonged only to them. Now it will be everyone’s.
Well, there’s nothing else for it. She tugs him along through the doors and onto the dining terrace.
Somehow she’d expected a private audience with the queen this morning. But breakfast is a busy affair. Not at the dining table, which hosts only the queen and that old man Grimsby, but with the flock of staff milling about around it: the footmen at the doors, the waitstaff topping off the coffee, the servants stationed along the walls and tugging at the great drapes of cloth fastened to the ceiling, sending a breeze adrift through the room. And, of course, Max, who leaps up from his spot at the queen’s feet and comes bounding over to them as if he hasn’t seen them in years. Eric unlinks their arms to crouch before him, letting him pounce up halfway into his lap.
“Hello, fella,” he murmurs as Max licks up the side of his throat, and Ariel resolves not to kiss him there again until she’s seen him wash.
“But we must be careful not to overextend the labor with winter on the way,” the queen is saying. She has a stack of papers unrolled beside her breakfast plate, pinned down on one end by her coffee cup and a fruit basket on the other. She looks up at the sound of her son’s voice, and says, “Ah, there you are.”
Sir Grimsby gives Ariel a broad smile as they step to the table, eyes crinkling round the corners, and offers her his hand. “Miss Ariel. You can’t imagine how pleased we are to have you back.”
“Oh,” says Ariel, taking it, “well, I’m pleased to be here.”
She’d expected a handshake, but instead he dips down and sweeps a kiss over her knuckles.
“Have we interrupted something?” says Eric. “We’re happy to do breakfast another time—”
“Nonsense.” The queen pushes the fruit basket aside, the papers springing up into a roll, and slides a plate of pastries towards her. With the other hand she gestures to the empty chairs on either side of the table, two places set. “The prime minister and I were just having a chat.”
Ariel feels her cheek flush at that. She’d assumed that Sir Grimsby was, for all intents and purposes, Eric’s babysitter, the way Sebastian was hers. But here he is, the legislative lead of a small country, kissing the back of her her hand.
Eric, gentleman that he is, pulls out her chair for her. She expects him to take the seat across from her, where the second plate is laid out, but instead he levels his mother with a defiant gaze and sits down at Ariel’s side. Queen Selina rolls her eyes. Grimsby, at her right hand, collects Eric’s abandoned plate and sets it delicately down in front him. The whole thing unfolds so swiftly that Ariel thinks this sort of cheek from Eric must be a common occurrence.
“What was the chat?” says Eric. He plucks a pastry from the platter. “Chocolate, Ariel?”
She’d had a bit of it that day at the market with Eric. The bitterness of it had traveled right up her nose and come out a sneeze, but Eric had laughed and shown her how to let it melt on her tongue, and that had made it all the sweeter. “Sure, okay.”
He plops the pastry onto Ariel’s plate, golden and crisp. She’s so famished that she might as well have been a real shipwreck survivor. She tears into it, the top layer flaking away and the insides soft and spongy, the bars of chocolate half-melted and seeping out the ends. Ariel’s never had anything so delightful in her life. It’s buttery and rich and the chocolate clings sticky-sweet to her tongue, and when she’s finished ravaging she licks her fingers clean.
Eric’s next to her, chin in his hand, smile beaming behind his fingers.
“What?” says Ariel.
He bites his lip. “Absolutely nothing.”
“We were just discussing the workers’ revolt, sire,” says Grimsby, who seems to have calculated his volume to puncture the giddy little bubble that has expanded around them both. “Whether we ought to undertake certain measures or simply let it run its course.”
Eric leans over and swipes the crumbs from her chin with his thumb. “Ah, the old certain measures.”
“Revolt?” Ariel wipes a smudge of chocolate from her fingers. “Like with pitchforks?”
“Goodness, they’re not children,” says Grimsby. “No, they’re simply refusing to work. Striking, as it were.”
“Oh. Why are they striking?”
He clears his throat. “Well, they’re unhappy with their, ah… situation.”
“What a lovely choice of words,” Eric says brightly.
“Don’t be pedantic, Eric,” his mother chides, in a tone that says Don’t be a brat.
Eric makes an indignant little noise, and for a flash of a moment Ariel can see them as they must always have been: mother and son, loving and beloved, one’s patience running thin and the other cheeky with the privilege of being the only child. She thinks the queen must really love Eric to have plucked him from the ocean and raised him as her own as she did. And Eric, Ariel can see in the toothless banter and well-trodden quarrels, really loves his mother.
“They have certain demands,” Grimsby tells Ariel. “More land, more food, higher wages—”
“Well,” says Ariel, “why don’t you just give it to them?”
Eric’s eyes flick to his mother. The queen’s gaze on Ariel is hard as marble. She smiles, thin. “It’s hardly so simple.”
“Why not? There’s plenty of land, I’ve seen it.” She glances down at their breakfast spread, the toast going limp, the fruit nearly overripe. “Plenty of food, too.”
“Ariel,” Eric says softly.
“It just doesn’t seem fair is all. Under the sea we—”
Then Eric’s hand lands on her thigh beneath the table and grips hard, fingers digging in to the new flesh. She shuts up.
“I know it isn’t fair,” says the queen. “But these things are delicate. The trouble is we have nothing to give. How can we take more from our land without destroying it? How can we give our people more, without producing more people than it can house?”
“If you left the land alone,” says Ariel, working to hold the strength in her voice, “it would grow back in its own time.”
“Precisely,” Grimsby says gently. “If we left the land alone. We’re stretched too thin as it is.”
The queen sips at her coffee, giving Ariel another tight little smile over the lip of her cup. “That’s the problem on an island. We’ve nowhere left to expand. It’s all a matter of balancing, you see.”
“You talk about balancing like it’s a closed loop.” Eric leans back in his seat, crosses his arms over his chest. “If you’d only open the ports to overseas trade—”
“Eric, not this again.”
“I’m just saying, there’s answers to these problems—”
The queen’s gaze slices across the table to her son’s, and suddenly Ariel sees that she has stumbled on terrain that is still rough between Eric and his mother. This isn’t one of their squabbles; this is fresh, volatile. The queen is simply so composed that she hadn’t realized she’d crossed a line until it was too late.
And the last thing she’d meant to do was kindle an argument, the very last thing, so hastily she says, “It’s okay, I understand now, I think.”
“Perhaps if you’d take your studies more seriously,” the queen tells Eric, who replies with a magnificent roll of his eyes.
The rest of breakfast is equally tense. A handmaid pours Ariel her first cup of coffee; she finds it revolting. But the queen and Grimsby and even Eric are sipping easily at theirs, so Ariel chokes it back, scalding and bitter down her throat. Mostly she sits with muscles tensed and waits for breakfast to be over. How was it only an hour ago that she was in that sunlit bed with Eric, laughing and kissing and trading giddy whispers?
Finally the servants clear the plates, sweep the crumbs from the tablecloth, and the conversation fizzles out. It’s done, she thinks, it’s over, let’s go—
“So, Ariel,” says the queen. She pats her napkin primly against her mouth, then folds it down beside her cup. “You’re a mermaid.”
“Mother,” Eric says sharply.
Ariel deflates. “It’s all right,” she cuts in quickly, “I know it’s a lot to wrap your heads around…”
“Quite right there.”
Eric lays his hand over hers. “We don’t have to talk about this now if you don’t want to.”
Something about the way he says this as if it’s explosive chafes at her. She shakes her head, turns her hand beneath his to interlace their fingers. “I was a mermaid. My father turned me human.”
The queen’s face is utterly unreadable. “I see.”
“Your Highness, I know it’s a lot. And I understand if you’re… uneasy, about me.”
“Oh, no, the opposite. You saved my son’s life. We’re very grateful to you for that.”
Her smile is diplomatic, practiced, but even so Ariel can see something stilted lingering beneath it. She’s begun to feel uncomfortably warm and clammy despite the servants keeping the fans going, the inner skirt of Rosa’s dress clinging to her legs. The above world is so much hotter; why must humans insist on wearing all these clothes?
“Oh, well. It was no problem,” she says lamely.
“And when will you be returning?”
“Returning?”
The queen blinks. “Well, yes. Home, that is.”
“Oh. I won’t. I mean, I don’t intend on going… home.”
For a dragging second after that Ariel isn’t sure she’s spoken at all. The queen’s gaze is cool and still and expressionless, not flinching even a twitch at this revelation, as if Ariel’s words have glanced right off the sides of her head. “You’ll be human forever.”
“Yes. And I… I would like to stay. Here, I mean.”
And suddenly she sees the whole thing unfurling in the other woman’s head: her son, besotted or perhaps bewitched, given away to a creature of another world; Ariel, reckless and naked in his arms; a courtship and then a marriage and then her crown falling into the hands of a stranger, her people at the mercy of a woman who is hardly human at all. And Ariel realizes her mistake. The queen hadn’t planned for this. Her son, a mermaid, an heir to the throne — she hadn’t seen it coming. Maybe she’d hoped that Ariel was a passing fancy, or maybe she’d never expected that flighty, moon-eyed boy of hers to settle down so easily. Now Ariel has set the bomb on the breakfast table and detonated it.
“Well.” The queen claps her hands together, and that smile is back, tight and thin like a band stretched too taut. “How wonderful.”
“Your Majesty, I—”
“Delighted to have you. I’ll have Lashana put a room together for you right away. Eric, a word?”
Ariel’s throat fills with reassurances, all sorts of promises to smooth over the rift that has split open across the breakfast table, but the queen is already rising from her chair, and she lets them die unspent. Eric glances over at Ariel, rolling his eyes again, but the squeeze he gives her hand is tender. Then he gets to his feet and follows his mother out to the terrace, out of earshot.
She’s left alone with Grimsby, who gives her a kind little smile. “Miss Ariel.”
“Sir Grimsby,” she says wearily.
“It’s good to have you back.”
He’s old, older than the queen, hair graying and weathered skin creasing. But there’s a spark in his dark eyes, something merry in the creases around them. She thinks again of Sebastian — how much light he’d harbored beneath his hard shell, how much he’d loved her.
The memory tugs uncomfortably at her chest. She shakes it away before it can begin to hurt.
“The queen,” she says quietly. “She doesn’t like me much, does she?”
“Oh, she hardly knows you.”
“She knows enough.”
“You must understand, Ariel,” he says. “Eric was terribly hurt when you left.”
“It wasn’t my choice to leave him.”
“Of course not. But you’re both so young. And the queen — she’s protective of him, that’s all, especially after how much she’s already lost to the ocean. You can hardly blame her for being wary.”
“No,” says Ariel, “given the circumstances, I guess not.”
If this was supposed to console her, it’s backfired spectacularly. She’d hoped, foolishly, that the queen would accept her as she is: a mermaid, yes, but the mermaid her son loves. She knows she’s not a proper human yet, knows she chafes at them and unsettles them in her ignorance of their world — but that is something she can change. She can learn their rules till the queen comes round to her, can dress herself up, can keep her mouth shut, can stay out of Eric’s bed. But her otherness is out of her hands.
Her gaze lands inevitably on Eric then, talking to his mother, and clings there. He glances over, like he can feel the weight of it on his skin. He gives her a hesitant smile, raises his eyebrows. Good?
Ariel nods, and his smile softens. She marvels again at how in tune they are, how much they can tell each other without words.
“He’s very fond of you,” she hears Grimsby say.
Ariel can’t help but bristle. “I’m fond of him.”
“I see that you are,” he says gently. “I only mean to say — it‘s a great responsibility to love someone.”
“You don’t trust me with him, then? Is that it?”
“Oh, I haven’t said that, have I?”
You didn’t need to, she nearly says, but she bites her tongue. She looks back at Eric, the taut line of his brow as he talks to his mother about what must be Ariel, and wonders if they’re right.
“You’ve sacrificed so much for him.” Grimsby gives her a smile, a knowing little thing. “None of us is blind to that, I promise you. I only hope that — well, that it will be worth it.”
He reaches across the table and gives her hand an awkward little pat. Grimsby, Ariel decides, is kind, and she feels a flare of guilt for having been prickly with him earlier. “It will be.”
“She slept in your room,” says his mother.
Eric squares his shoulders. “Yes.”
“In your bed. With you.”
“What, would you rather she’d slept on the carpet?”
“You know that’s unacceptable for someone of your standing, Eric. Against protocol.”
“Protocol—”
“What if it was someone else who’d walked in? Did you even think of that?”
He swallows back a scoff. Protocol, he thinks, for being in love. Is this what it’s come to? Is this what his life will be — rules, and appearances, and palace walls? The thought of it withers inside of him. I didn’t ask for this standing, is what he wants to say, but he can’t bear to break his mother’s heart again so early in the morning.
“Lucky it wasn’t,” he mutters instead.
“You need to take this seriously. Our people have hardly any faith left in us as it is.”
“In me, you mean?” he bites back.
“Your last debacle of an engagement didn’t help matters, no.”
“I don’t understand how my private relationships are anybody else’s business.”
“Because it is not private, Eric,” she chides, her voice thinning with exasperation as if he’s being tedious about it on purpose, which he very well might be. “Nothing we do is private. Everything is for them. Especially if she’s to stay here on a permanent basis.”
“Not everything, Mum.”
“You know very well you’re being reckless.”
“Reckless, how on earth—”
“Because you can’t bring strange girls into this castle and begin parading them around like—”
“Do not,” he says sharply, and his mother huffs out a sigh, her gaze cutting to Ariel across the room like she’s a problem to be solved.
“You know what she is,” says the queen, voice low. “So does everyone else here. You need to be careful, Eric, if not for your own sake then for hers.”
“Have a little more faith.”
“I do. But them?” She flicks her eyes to the servants clearing the table, manning the ceiling fans. “You know how they think. What happens when they find out their prince has been seduced into bed with a siren? What will they think of her then?”
That I love her, he wants to say. “That’s not fair. You can’t possibly believe they’d all think like that.”
“You are the crown prince, for Christ’s sake—”
“I’m sorry,” says Eric, holding up a hand, “is your concern that she’s a mermaid, or that she exists at all?”
His mother opens her mouth, and he can see the rebuke unfurling on her tongue, feels his own jaw tightening as he braces himself — but then something seems to stop her, and instead she shakes her head, gives a defeated little sigh.
“I’m worried about you, Eric,” she tells him frankly. The coldness in her voice wavers a little. “That’s my concern. You haven’t been well since you met her.”
And Eric knows how it looks, knows he’d gone as good as mad when Ariel vanished back into the sea. You’ve got it the wrong way around, he wants to tell his mother, it was losing her that made me sick, but he worries she won’t understand, worries he’ll just give her another reason in a long string of reasons to be wary of Ariel.
“I know you think I’m reckless,” he says instead. “But I’m sure about this. About Ariel. I’m more sure of it than I’ve ever been of anything.”
It sounds ridiculous, to an outsider’s ear: the prince in love with a mermaid-turned-human after hardly three days together. It sounds absurd. But Eric’s never been one for normal, not since he arrived on this island, not since his mother scooped him out of the sea and decided the half-drowned orphan was to be her heir. She must believe him. She must know, somewhere at the back of her mind, that he means it.
“It’s one rule, mum,” he adds quietly. “And I just… I thought I’d never see her again.”
His mother seems to soften then, the hard line of her shoulders wilting. “I know. And darling, I’m happy for you, really. After everything… well.”
She reaches up and cups his cheek. “But I think you’ve bent enough rules for the time being.”
So Ariel has a new bedroom made up for her, and Eric is to be banished back to his own.
He leads her down the hall to the guest quarters that afternoon — Guest, he’d scoffed, like you’re just visiting or something, and the implication of permanence had made Ariel’s heart flutter — with Max roving excitedly around their heels as if he’s the one moving in.
The quarters are mostly bare, the same terracotta tile and blue-painted ceiling she’d had in the first guest room. But this time she also has an adjoining washroom and a little terrace a few square paces wide, and when she pushes open the shutters and ties back the linen curtains she has a glorious view of the ocean. The scent of it drifts up on the breeze, salty, laced with a faint floral smell from the bougainvillea threading the lip of the windowsill. A warmth bubbles behind Ariel’s ribs, up her throat. It takes her a second to name it as longing.
She blinks, startled, and turns back into the room. Eric is standing in the middle of it, fidgeting.
He gives her a shy smile. “Sorry. It isn’t very homey.”
“No,” she tells him quickly, “no, it’s nice. I’ll make it homey. “
“Yeah. I asked Lashana to bring in some of your things, you know, just to make it feel more like yours…”
What things, Ariel wants to say, but then she sees the fire-red crystal she’d broken free from his fossil waiting on the nightstand. And there’s the pink scarf she’d worn in her hair folded on the dresser, the sandals Eric had bought for her at the market lined up at the foot of the bed, and the wicker hat, their hat, is sat atop the bedpost, like a watchman standing guard.
“You kept my stuff?”
“Well,” says Eric, shifting awkwardly on his feet, “yeah.”
“I lost your mermaid.”
“What?”
“The little one you gave me. I lost it, in the sea.”
“Oh, darling, that’s okay. Besides—” He holds out his hands to her, palms turned up, and she steps in close and takes them. “I don’t need her anymore.”
Ariel rolls her eyes, a smile biting at her mouth, and kisses the back of his hand. When she looks up at him again his cheeks are washed pink.
She lets him go to begin making up the bed. She’s not sure exactly how humans keep them, but the cushions and blankets are all piled up in a heap in the center, so she takes one of the pillows and props it against the headboard the way Eric had had them in his.
“Hey,” she says as she pats it into shape, “what did your mother say to you, earlier?”
“Oh,” he says, waving his hand, “just some jabber about how I’m not allowed to sleep in the same bed as you.”
He unfolds the quilt and shakes it out over the bed, tucking the ends of it down beneath the mattress. His tone is light, but she can see the tension in his shoulders, the tight set of his jaw. “I’m sorry,” she tells him. “I didn’t mean to upset her.”
“It’s not you. She’s just frustrated is all.”
“Frustrated?”
“With me, yeah. For making things so difficult with you here.”
She tugs at the edge of the quilt, trying to pull it flat, hoping the discomfort doesn’t show on her face. Difficult. So now she’s difficult. Ariel’s no stranger to that. Wasn’t that why she left the sea in the first place — because she’d been a burden to everyone who’d loved her? Maybe she’d been stupid to think things would be any different up here. Maybe it was naïve to show up in Eric’s life and expect herself to be featherlight, to be anything other than a weight on his shoulders.
“Right,” she says. Her voice sounds pathetic to her own ears. “I’m sorry.”
He must catch the hitch in her breath, because his face falls, and he says, “Oh, no, Ariel, I didn’t mean you.”
“I know,” she lies.
“It’s just that us being together isn’t the simplest thing in the world. Because you’re from the sea. And I’m…” He gestures to the palace walls rising around them, the flick of his wrist weak. “All this.”
“All right,” she says again. She gives up on doing the bed, and instead she sits down on it.
Eric twists his mouth, considering her, and takes a seat at her side. The mattress dips under the weight of him, and again she remembers this morning, curled around each other in his bed, when everything was easy and right.
“Anyway,” he says, “I think she was just cross about the worker thing. She was bothered by what you said, that’s all.”
“She hardly let me say a word.”
“She’s the queen, Ariel. You can’t just — demand she change the way we live just because it’s not how you imagined.”
The comment stings, and Ariel recoils, not used to friction between her and Eric. “I never said that.”
“No, I know, I just mean…”
He blows out a sigh, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. For the first time she sees how weary he is. Has he always been like that? Or is it only since she burst into his life, the inevitable turmoil of trying to love a mermaid?
“Look, this stuff is complicated,” he says. “I’ve been tutored in it my whole life and I barely get any of it. And I know you just want to help, but…”
She’s quiet for a long moment, sorting out her words, trying to thread together what she needs to say to him without upsetting this balance between them. “It’s not that I want to help,” she tells him finally. “It’s that this is my life now.”
He looks up at that, brow pursing with not-quite understanding. She realizes then that they’ve never discussed what her place will be in his world; they’ve been so swept up in the joy of finding one another again that they’ve hardly given a second’s thought to what must come afterward. Now the bubble is bursting, moment by moment, misstep by fumbling misstep. Now is the time for decisions.
She gets to her feet. A restless energy is buzzing to life in her veins; she turns and stands in front of him, her back to the sea in the open window.
“If I’m going to live here,” she goes on, full of conviction now, “I want to be part of it. I can’t sit around and wait for you to come home, for something to happen to me. I want to do what you do. I need to.”
It seems to sink in slowly, a tide seeping over the sand. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I want to know everything. I want to be human for real.”
Eric blinks, slow, his gaze deep and ocean-blue. Ariel gets that feeling again, the one she’s only ever had next to him: like he’s seeing her for exactly who she is, clear as crystal, right through her shell, right to the bone. She knows she’s asking him for something bigger than he can give. To want to belong, to become someone else — it’s hardly so easy. She knows that.
Something in Eric’s face shifts, opening up. Reckless, she thinks he’ll say, this naive obsession of yours. That’s what her father would say. But then Eric is nothing like her father. Eric is just like her.
“All right, then,” he says. “Where do we start?”