Sea Swept

1

She rose from the sea, so graceful and fair,

Bursting from sea foam, wrapped in her own hair,

Her voice rose in song, so sweet and so clear,

And that was what caught the young prince’s ear.

—­draft notes from the journals of the court minstrel of serema

The plan was for the prince to find me on the beach, wrapped in seaweed and singing the song that had drawn him from the city to look for me. Then he would tell me where Meribel was and take me to see her, and I would yell at her for scaring me, after which I would return to my true form and slide right back under the waves.

It didn’t work out that way.

First of all, seaweed doesn’t wrap. Well, maybe it does when it’s wet. But the seaweed on the beach was dry, and when I tried to wind it around myself, it crumbled into crackly chunks between my fingers.

The seaweed also, out in the dry air of the surface, stank. Everything up here smelled bad—­everything except the breeze from the sea—­but even in all that stench, the seaweed really made its presence known.

I spent a long time trying to work with the seaweed, even after these problems became clear. It seemed ungrateful not to. Arabella had spent hours retrieving it for me and arranging it into piles. Besides, she had warned me about a zillion times not to deviate from the plan.

I had every intention of deviating from the plan. (Which Arabella probably knew; hence, the zillion warnings.) But I hadn’t planned to start doing it quite this early.

So much for intentions. It all fell apart from the beginning—­the plan, the seaweed (literally), and the whole idea that finding my sister was going to be easy.

So it hardly mattered that Prince Roderig never showed up at the beach. Instead, a human boy with messy hair came wandering from the direction of the castle. He stopped short and stared at me like he had never seen a mermaid before.

I decided to tell him the truth. I explained, from behind a small wall of beach rocks (luckily, the one thing that had not fallen apart), that I was a mermaid, I was here to see my sister, and also, I needed clothes.

“Your sister?” he repeated. He looked about my age, with sun-­browned skin and dark curls.

“Yes,” I said. “The girl with the beautiful voice who’s going to marry the prince? Long red hair that she likes to fling around all the time? That’s my sister. I need to talk to her.”

He stood barefoot in the pebbly sand, his pants rolled up to his knees, blinking at me.

“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he said. There was something odd about his voice—­a faint lilt, like an accent I had heard before and couldn’t quite remember. “But why do you want Princess Meribel?”

Princess Meribel? Seriously? I caught myself before I corrected him. If Meribel was claiming to be a princess, maybe she had a good reason.

Though probably not. It wasn’t like she had done anything lately to make me trust her judgment.

I hoped I wasn’t getting her in trouble. Then again, she was clearly in trouble already. Her note, scratched on a piece of driftwood, had been simple but clear: Help me.

So, whatever trouble she was in, I hoped I wasn’t making it worse.

“I’m here to talk to her,” I said. “But I haven’t seen her for two days, so I think she’s stuck in the castle. If she can’t come out to me, can you bring me to her?”

The boy ran one finger along his hair, then scratched behind his ear. “You don’t look mer.”

I had no idea what to say to that. “Well, my hair is usually green.”

Note to self: When you have no idea what to say, don’t say anything.

The boy continued to look doubtful. I couldn’t blame him. Most mer didn’t look human even with legs—­we had scales, or fins, or too-­round eyes. But all I had was moss-­green hair, which Arabella had rather gleefully dyed black so I could pass as human if I had to.

I sighed. “Do I have to prove to you who I am?”

“Yes,” he said. “You do, actually. Show me the tip of your tail.”

“I don’t have a tail right now.” I almost choked on the words. I hated, hated not having a tail. It made me want to claw the skin off these ridiculous legs. But the faster I rescued Meribel from whatever mess she was in, the faster I could regain my true form. “I drank a potion to give me legs. Temporary legs. But if you come closer and look at the roots of my hair . . .”

He stepped back.

“I said closer.” Just my luck that the first human who found me would be a lackwit.

“Why?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Are you trying to drown me?”

“Why would I want to drown you?”

He frowned, then seemed to accept this. “Okay, let’s say you are mer—­”

“I am!” I took a deep breath. “Look. Get me clothes, and I’ll take you with me to the castle and make sure you’re richly rewarded. Lots of pearls and clams and all that other stuff you humans like. My sister will reward you, too, once she’s queen. With gold and jewels and . . . um . . . buttons.”

He gave me an odd look. “You really haven’t heard?”

That was the moment when I knew Meribel was in serious trouble. There was something in his tone, something that made me want to run across the beach and throw myself back into the sea. I probably would have, if my new legs hadn’t started sending little quivers up from their stubby soles, making me so unsteady that I grabbed the rocks to keep myself upright.

“I haven’t heard what?” I said.

“No one up here has seen Princess Meribel for the last two days, either. People are saying she abandoned the prince and returned to her palace beneath the sea.”

I closed my eyes, listening to the waves crash on the shore, wishing that what he was saying was true. Then I would still be under those waves, and not up here on the sand.

The first evening that Meribel had missed our nightly meeting at the beach, I had been worried enough to tell Arabella, who had mobilized an army of creatures to search the sea. After several hours, she had assured me that my sister was still on land. Probably stuck at a boring party or something.

But the next evening, there had still been no Meribel. Instead I’d found the piece of driftwood wedged beneath the rocks where we usually met, with a message scratched onto the damp wood in Meribel’s distinctive, curved handwriting:

Help me.

So here I was, the very next morning. On the dry land I’d never wanted to step on, wearing the human form I’d sworn never to put on. All to save my sister from the results of her own foolish meddling with humanity.

“She’s not in the sea,” I said. After I had brought Arabella that note, she had organized a second search, more thorough and exhaustive than the first. She had questioned all the sea creatures who watched Serema’s shores and sent octopuses and dolphins with messages that echoed across the deep. If Meribel was in the water, we would have found her. “She’s in your city.”