Page 4 of The Merman's Kiss
I’d snuck out of the cottage before she’d found me this morning.
The wind still felt cool outside, but the scent of salt air and the whisper of gentle waves rolling onto the nearby beach felt like a welcome. I spotted some of the tiny blue flowers with yellow centers that grew along the sandy path and plucked a handful of them on my way down to the beach. Their scent was pungentand my hands would smell like them all day, but they were pretty in a delicate way.
Once I reached the beach, I immediately kicked my shoes off and splashed into the shallows with my little bouquet. I sat in the surf and hoped that the sun would come out eventually and warm things up, but the chill of the water wasn’t unpleasant. I didn’t fully submerge myself this time, but sat just deep enough to feel the ebbing of sand beneath me as the waves rolled in and pulled out, and the frothy bubbles swirled around my lap in little eddies.
While sorting my flowers into a neater stack, I sang my nursery tune to myself—well, maybe alittlelouder than I would sing if I wereonlysinging to myself—and then began braiding the stems into a little chain, pausing occasionally to sift through the sand beside me for broken seashells to hang on it. I lost track of time, stopping and starting my song as I remembered to, and was absorbed in my project instead of watching for the boy in the ocean like I meant to be. It wasn’t until I looked up that I finally spotted him peeking at me from around the jetty.
“Hello!” I called, and waved to him happily, expecting him to join me but he disappeared under the water as soon as I spotted him. I wondered briefly if my nursery song was magic. It was just a simple, childish song about our two moons and the dance they did in the sky each night, but maybe singing this special combination of notes was a spell that made this strange and beautiful boy materialized out of nothing. The silly thought made me smile, but he didn’t approach this time like he normally did. He surfaced again near the jetty and simply floated out there in the waves with his eyes peeking over the water at me. I beckoned to him with my hands, but he didn’t respond, so after a few minutes, I decided to return to weaving my flower chain, adding my broken shells to it as I went.
A quiet splash in front of me a few moments later startled me slightly as the boy surfaced close by in the shallows, his head and shoulders breaking through the water and his long blond hair floating around him in the waves. He squinted at the sky where the sun was hiding behind the clouds, and then at the flowers I was weaving together before glancing up at me with a question on his face. “It’s a flower chain,” I told him, holding it up for him to see. He leaned in close to inspect the flowers, examining them from mere inches away, looking at the petals and the way I’d woven the stems together to form the chain, studying the shells I’d hung from it. Then he disappeared under the water for a few minutes, staying in the shallows where I could still see the scales of his tail shimmering in the sunlight. His movements seemed oddly stilted this time, noticeably less fluid than I remembered them being before, and he moved through the water much slower, too, I thought. But then he resurfaced in front of me with a handful of broken shells and dropped them on the pile I had collected. I smiled at him and he answered with a small smile of his own before settling down into the sand in front of me to watch me work, propping his head on his hands and paying close attention to the way I wrapped the ends of the flowers into the chain.
“These aren’t my favorites,” I told him absently. “I prefer the little jump-ups that grow around here most,” I said, gesturing to the wooded area behind me, “but I didn’t see any of those today.” I looked up to find him studying my face as I spoke. “These are pretty, but I don’t care as much for the way they smell,” I explained, plucking one of the small-petaled flowers from the little bundle in my lap and giving it a sniff. I wrinkled my nose at the scent—spicy with a cloyingly sweet undertone—and offered it to him, curious to see what he thought.
He took it hesitantly and held it to his nose the way I had, but didn’t sniff, glancing at me as if unsure of what to do with it.Quickly pressing the petals to his bottom lip instead, and then pulling it away again in revulsion, he placed it back in my bundle with a grimace. He scrubbed at his mouth with seawater and the back of his wrist. I chuckled at his reaction, guessing they tasted similar to the way they smelled.
He watched my hands work for a few more minutes before heaving himself into deeper water and splashing away beneath the surface once more, disappearing entirely for a bit, and then returning to lie sprawled out on his belly again in the surf near me. He propped himself up on his elbows once more and handed me what he’d retrieved. I turned it over to examine it—a little salt shaker made of cream colored ceramic that had clearly been submerged for a while if the barnacles and dusting of brown algae growing on it were any indication, but it was in good shape other than that.
“It’s a salt shaker,” I explained, returning it to his waiting hands. He watched my mouth as I talked, his eyes flicking back and forth between the ceramic he clutched and my face. “We take salt from the ocean and put it on our food.” I mimed a shaking motion with my hand, showing him how we would use it, and he copied me a few times with a small frown on his face, shaking the little vessel upside down as I had shown him. How do you explain salting food to someone who lives in salt? The concept was probably very confusing. I gave my head a small shake and chuckled again. “It’s a beautiful shaker,” I told him.
He returned my smile with a politely confused one and lifted his free hand toward my flowers, pausing before he touched them and watching my face to see if it was okay.
“Of course,” I told him, dividing the pile and offering him half. “There are plenty more where these came from.” I gestured back toward the path.
He shook his head and only plucked up a small handful. The tiny stems were just the right size to poke down inside the holesof the salt shaker, and before long he held the tiny shaker aloft, beaming with pride at the little blue and yellow flowers that stuck out of the top like a well-used pin cushion.
“Oh, you’ve turned it into a vase! That’s lovely,” I told him with a delighted grin.
His answering smile was even wider, and it lit up his entire face, with his bright eyes crinkling at the corners. He didn’t feel the need to hide the tips of his teeth this time.
I slid a few more shells onto my chain of flowers and then knotted the ends together to form it into a crown, before slowly lifting the entire thing onto the boy’s head and watching his reaction as I settled it there. He held very still while I balanced it above his pointed ears and the quill-like projections around them. “It’s a flower crown,” I told him with a grin as he lifted a hand to the crown to touch it. “You can have the first one.”
His smile grew impossibly wider still, his teeth showing pearly white in the diffused sunlight, and he settled down into the water just far enough into the surf to submerge his gills without wetting the crown of flowers and shells, looking like a proper ocean prince, at least in my mind. His shoulders shook slightly as if he were laughing silently.
We sat in companionable silence while I started on a crown for myself, so we could be a matching prince and princess and he poked at the flowers in his little salt shaker vase, until eventually I looked up to find him watching my face again.
“What is it?” I asked with an awkward laugh, scrubbing my face on my dry shoulder and wondering if I had sand on my nose.
He glanced between my face and my neck, and then gestured toward my throat, reaching his hand out without touching me. As he squinted at me quizzically, I thought he might be wondering why I didn’t have gills like him, but then he began to hum my nursery tune the way he did on the first day I met him.
I quietly sang the words along with him as he hummed, but then he was silent and the smile he wore in response was softer this time but so very satisfied that it confused me as much as it made my heart clench. By the time I finished my own crown and placed it on my head, I’d sung him every song I knew and the little satisfied smile had never left his face as he lay beside me in the waves… until Nan calling through the trees for me to come in for lunch made him disappear back into deeper waters.
Chapter 4
Lorn
“Father!”Icalled,findinghim in the quarry below where he was harnessing one of the giant sea snails. I swam down over the edge of the rock face, a school of fish that were sheltering near the edge darting off in every direction as I passed. My tail twinged a bit as I worked to keep my movements as natural as possible so that my father wouldn’t spot how I still favored the wound. It was a fruitless effort. I could see the way he pursed his lips from the far side of the quarry as he watched me approach. Thankfully, the children playing on a nearby snail grabbed his attention, sparing me from whatever he was going to say to me as I approached.
“Amata! Marlen!” he called to the children. “Stay away from the shell openings!”
Marlen’s squeals as he swam up over the snail’s massive shell to get away from the lower opening only caused my father to narrow his eyes at him. The snails were gentle butmassive—their shells alone were taller than a fully grown merman—and the beautiful colors we’d been breeding into them for centuries made them a favorite of every merchild I’d ever known. Weused them for heavy labor, like moving rocks or hauling large cargo, because even though they were slow, they were incredibly strong. When they were startled or felt threatened, however, they could close themselves up in their shells with surprising speed, and anything that was near their opening could get caught—and potentially severed—in the trap door of their shell.
“Give her some algae to keep her in place,” he instructed me, patting the shell of Teeny, the enormous blue and yellow snail he had harnessed before skulking off to give the children further instructions about safe behavior around the livestock.
I retrieved an armful of the string-like algae they preferred from a crevice in the rock face where we stockpiled it nearby and dumped it on the sand in front of Teeny’s face. She’d had another blue and yellow sister named Tiny who had been part of our herd before she passed away a few years ago. Their bright yellow eyes weren’t useful for much more than telling light from shadow, but the stalk-like tentacles that grew from below them sniffed out the pile of food immediately and she was happily munching away by the time my father returned to check the straps on her shell.
“What did you need?” he asked curiously as he worked, glancing over his shoulder to watch that the children were giving treats of seaweed to the magenta-colored snail named Bubbles that was resting behind him instead of climbing on her shell again. Satisfied that they were obeying, he turned his full attention to me.
“Erwin asked me to tell you that they want the net for inspection,” I told him, knowing full well the protest he would give before he even uttered it.
