Page 23 of The Merman's Kiss
I accepted their invitation graciously, and it was with cautious hope that Lorn and I traveled across the country via train half a year later. We arrived in a city called Golden Laurel and crossed through a large rail station to board another train for a short ride to the district my uncle had directed me to, called the Upper District. The station we arrived at was much smaller, but decidedly opulent if the stonework floor and marble columns were anything to go by.
My uncle greeted us there with his wife and a stone golem. “Hello, Lord Varsalos,” I greeted him shyly, using his formal title and setting our luggage beside us. Lorn had insisted on taking this trip without his wheelchair and he didn’t really need a cane anymore, but I still wasn’t ready to let him carry a bag yet.
“Sadira, I’m so pleased to meet you finally,” he said formally, but with a familiarity that I hadn’t expected. Lord Varsalos was a little above average height for an elven man and looked remarkably like my mother, with the same aristocratic features, though his dark elven skin was a little warmer in hue than ours. His long white hair had golden chains hanging in it that were laden with tiny amulets, and he wore a black button-up shirt with grey slacks and black leather boots. His wife was about my height, and a dainty thing with pale skin and dark hair. Her features were far more human than elven, and her ears wererounded instead of pointed. She wore a classy, tea-length, high-necked dress in navy blue and nude-colored pumps. “This is my wife, Elish,” Varsalos introduced, gesturing to her.
“Oh, it’s so nice to meet you!” she crooned, stepping forward. “Are you a hugger? My Elara is a hugger, but I know some people aren’t.” She held her arms out slightly in invitation, and her expression was hopeful but cautious.
“Sure,” I said shyly, and stepped into her arms as she embraced me tightly. My parents didn’t hug at all, so I’d only ever hugged my friends. The contrast was a little jarring. But welcome.
“I can’t get over how beautiful you are,” she said sweetly, stepping back to look at me. “And who is this?” she said, turning to Lorn.
“My apologies,” I said, feeling overwhelmed. “This is my husband, Lorn.”
I took his hand, but immediately had to release it so he could shake Varsalos and Elish’s hands.
“Your husband!” she exclaimed, bringing her hands to her cheeks. “Oh, I had no idea you were married! It’s so lovely to meet you, Lorn. Welcome. Let’s get you two back to the house and settled in. I can’t visit for terribly long tonight because I have to be present outside to help make sure everything is being set up properly, but I made some honey cakes in case you’re hungry…” She chattered along happily as her husband picked up our bags and passed them to the golem, who was apparently their porter. It was shorter than me, but had a squat build made of stone, a combination of several different pieces held together with magic so it could move. Rather than a head, a polished crystal hovered in between some rock that had been carved into the shape of a crescent.
“What is—?” Lorn started to say, but didn’t know how to finish his question as he stared at the golem.
“This is Ryo, our butler,” Varsalos explained. “It’s a construct made of stone and magic. It mostly just helps us around the house.”
He was being modest. Golems wereexorbitantlyexpensive, especially one of this size.
“I’ve heard they can be hard to procure,” I hedged, stepping wide of the construct to give it space to turn. I’d only ever seen them in government institutions or somewhere like museums.
“That is mostly correct,” he answered with a single nod as we left the station. “But I made this one myself.” We followed him to something on the street I’d never seen before. “Another construct,” he explained, gesturing to the machine of metal, stone, and shining glass. “This is our transport.” Doors on the sides of the transport opened, showing the interior lined with four seats facing each other like a carriage, but they were made of leather and looked much more comfortable. Ryo set our bags inside and moved out of the way to take its place at the front of the construct, stepping into a well that had been shaped specifically for it.
Elish climbed inside easily, and we followed, taking our seats and watching as Varsalos entered last to sit beside his wife. He pulled the doors shut behind him and showed Lorn and me how to buckle our safety harnesses, then knocked on the door twice to signal to the driver that we were ready to depart. But there was no driver and no animal to pull it. It simply levitated off of the ground and began to slowly drift along the paved street. Lorn marveled politely at the construct.
Varsalos smiled in the elvish way—a barely there tilt of his lips while his eyes crinkled in the corners—and told him, “I create technology for the defense department of the government, and I often get to keep the prototypes I make. This is one of those.”
We passed under a long archway of trees lining the street and came out at a massive estate. Rolling hills dotted with treessurrounded a small castle with towers and parapets. Around the outside of the manor, a large iron fence held in a pack of mastiffs like the ones my grandparents had owned, at least twenty strong. There were courtyards and gardens with a great deal of workers in them preparing for the wedding.
“This is the family home, Sadira,” Varsalos told me. “It’s where your grandparents lived before I married Elish, and they let us take over so they could downsize. Your mother was already living in the city for her job by then, if I remember correctly. You and your husband are welcome to come stay here with us anytime.”
I stared at this man who looked so much like my mother and yet was so drastically different from her in every way, fighting the tears that burned behind my eyes. “Thank you,” I managed politely.
Elish reached across to take my hand in hers without comment, giving my fingers a small squeeze of support.
I just couldn’t fathom how Varsalos and my mother had turned out sodifferently. She’d spoken so terribly of him and his family for my entire life, and for what? He was welcoming me and reconnecting me with a family that I thought had cut me out of their lives. Neither he nor his wife had even flinched at my stating that my husband wasn’t elven, other than to sound dismayed that they hadn’t been aware of our marriage to begin with. Could they really be this accepting? “Is Elara really marrying a merman?” I asked, releasing Elish’s hand to wipe at my eyes.
Elish was the one who answered me. “She is! He’s such a lovely boy. You’ll get to meet them tomorrow. I’m sorry they couldn’t be present tonight—they’re just so busy with preparations.” Keeping up with her quick speech was difficult for me, so I could only guess how much Lorn was taking in. I reached over to takehis hand, and he held mine easily, but he definitely appeared a little overwhelmed.
The construct came to a stop in front of a gate in the iron fence, and Varsalos lifted a small lever on the door that caused it to lift open for us to depart. Every dog jumped at the fence, barking loudly until Varsalos gave a short, shrill whistle and they all sat immediately. The silence was profound. “Come this way with me,” he said, opening the gate. “Ryo will bring your bags. Please ignore the dogs for now.”
“Are these from the same line that Grandfather had?” I asked, taking Lorn’s hand to help him stand and keeping close to him as we passed through the sea of dogs.
“They are, yes,” he confirmed. “Lovely dogs. This one is my favorite,” he added, patting one on the head as he passed.
Elish led us to our room as Ryo brought in our luggage and then showed us to the bathroom and the kitchen before heading outside to answer one of the workers’ questions. Varsalos was in the kitchen pulling honey cakes out of the refrigerator when we entered.
“Come, sit down and rest,” he offered, handing us both a tiny cake on a plate. We joined him at a small seating area on the balcony behind the kitchen as he gestured to the stone crypt behind the house, beyond where the workers were setting up cloth-covered pavilions and carrying in armloads of flowers, and told me about our relatives that were laid to rest there and about my grandparent’s lives when they had lived on the property. I watched Lorn out of the corner of my eye as he poked at the cake and took polite but disinterested bites out of it. When Varsalos turned his head to watch a long pike topped with streamers being raised and settled into the ground, I reached over and grabbed Lorn’s cake off his plate, setting it on mine before my uncle noticed. I loved honey cakes. Lorn was much more interested in the plate.
“I was sorry to hear about your parents, Sadira,” my uncle said quietly with a sigh, as I stuffed the last bite of honey cake into my mouth, nearly making me choke.
“What—what do you mean?” I stuttered, coughing politely into my fist. I hadn’t spoken to my parents since my mother had sent a spectral messenger two weeks after the solstice. She’d finished her holiday travels and assumed I would be ready to meet her so we could travel to Othella to stay with the diplomat’s family. As if I hadn’t already told her that I didn’t want that. I told herno, under no uncertain terms this time, and she replied that I was humiliating her for rejecting this match, and was no longer allowed to call myself her daughter, that I should never expect so much as another copper coin from them for anything. Ever. That was the last I’d heard from her—not that we spoke that often to begin with—and I’d never heard back from my father at all after the original message I sent him before leaving school to ask him to intervene for me with my mother. He just simply hadn’t replied. I hadn’t spoken to him since last summer at the cottage.
Varsalos blinked at me, startled.
