The silence that follows a great violence is heavy. It has a weight to it, a physical density that presses against the eardrums like the crushing depth of the trench itself.
The girl was gone. The contract was signed. The voice, that pulsating pearl of auditory assault, sat on my vanity in its wax-sealed bottle humming a tune that made me want to give it back and cancel the contract.
I stood in the center of the Trench, my arms hanging uselessly at my sides. My chest heaved, the gills along my ribs flaring wide, desperate to pull oxygen from the stagnant water.
Biomancy is not free. That is the first rule of the Old Science. Magic is something you spend.
To tear a voice from a throat without damaging the vocal cords requires a surgical precision that burns calories like a furnace. To split a massive, muscular limb designed to propel a hundred pounds of flesh through the water at speed, and reknit it into two functioning pillars of bone and meat? That requires an offering of energy that nearly stripped the marrow from my own bones.
The adrenaline that had sustained me through the confrontation. The fire that carried me through the negotiation. The rage of being called Uncle in my own home, finally evaporated.
The crash hit me like a falling anchor.
My tentacles gave out. I sank, my limbs losing their grip on the floor, sliding through the silt until I hit the substrate. A wet sound of pure exhaustion tore itself from my throat.
My hands were shaking. I held them up to the dim light of the bioluminescent moss. They were pale, the blue undertones of my skin washed out to a sickly gray. The suckers on my tentacles were twitching spasmodically, independent of my will, searching for something to grip, something to crush. They needed to anchor.
“Uncle,” I whispered. The word tasted like bile.
It was more than the insult. I have been called worse things by better fish. It was the weaponization of it. It was the way her eyes, Carlotta’s eyes, godsdammit, had gone flat and cold. She used it as a shiv. She knew exactly where the armor plating of my ego was thinnest, and she had driven the knife in up to the hilt.
She was willing to die to get what she wanted. She was willing to cut her own throat just to frame me for the murder.
I laughed, a rasping sound that turned into a cough.
“A monster,” I murmured to the empty room. “She is a monster. And she is going to do wonderfully on the surface.”
I needed sustenance. The spell had drained my glucose reserves. My vision was swimming, the edges of the room blurring into a haze.
I dragged myself toward the larder, crawling across the floor. My tentacles pulled me, heavy and sluggish. I reached into the barrel of salted sea-meat and grabbed a slab. I tore into it with my teeth, swallowing chunks whole, not tasting the salt or the fat, just needing the fuel.
After the third piece, the shaking in my hands began to subside. The gray tinge in my skin flushed back to a bruised blue. The headache that had been drilling behind my eyes receded to a dull throb.
I wiped the grease from my mouth with the back of my hand and pulled myself up. I leaned against the heavy slate table of my vanity, staring at the bottle.
“Six days,” I told the horrific voice. “You have six days, you little sociopath. And then you belong to me.”
I picked up the glowing bottle. It was warm to the touch. I could feel the vibration of the voice inside, buzzing like a trapped hornet. I placed it carefully in the highest niche of the coral shelf, behind a jar of pickled eyes.
“Stay there,” I hissed. “And shut up.”
I turned away. The Trench felt too small. The water felt thick with the memory of her presence, with the metallic scent of her blood that still lingered in the currents.
I needed to swim.
I moved toward the back of the cavern, past the ribcage archway, toward the garden of barnacles.
The Court calls it my graveyard. They say I keep the souls of the damned as trophies, writhing in eternal torment to feed my vanity. They tell their children that if they swim too deep, the Sea Witch will turn them into a bottom feeder and plant them in her garden to suffer forever.
Propaganda is a powerful thing. It requires no proof, only repetition.
I glided through the archway and looked down at my harvest. There were hundreds of them. They looked like sea grapes, like sad little thumbs of flesh adhered to the bone wall. They had eyes, frightened, blinking eyes.
To the untrained eye, it was a scene of horror. To me, it was a hospice. I swam low, my tentacles brushing the silt, moving between the rows of writhing souls. I stopped near a cluster of new arrivals, a family of crustaceans who had bet their shells on a venture that failed. They came to me begging for a way to pay their debts to the loan sharks of the reef. I offered them a solution of safety. Here, the sharks could not reach them. They were fed. They were together.
The price was their mobility. The price was their form. But they were alive.
“Hush now,” I murmured, reaching out to stroke the back of a particularly agitated barnacle. It flinched at my touch, its single eye widening in terror.
“It’s alright,” I said, my voice dropping to vibrate through the water.
“The current is warm today. The nutrient flow is strong. You are safe.” The barnacle shivered, then leaned into my hand. It was a reflex.
Even in this state, the instinct to seek comfort remained.
I moved on. I checked the soil acidity near the older plantings. I cleared a patch of choking algae from the face of a mermaid who had come to me fifty years ago. She wanted to be beautiful. She wanted to be the most beautiful creature in the ocean.
I gave her a potion that made her skin glow like starlight. For a year, she was the toast of Oceanica. But beauty is a currency that devalues with inflation. When the glow faded, when the wrinkles returned, she couldn’t handle the obscurity. She came back, begging for permanence.
“Make me timeless,” she had wept. “Make it so I never age. Make it so I never have to look in a mirror and see a hag.”
So I planted her. She is timeless now. She hasn’t aged a day. She is a wrinkled, brown stump of flesh with terrified eyes, but she is alive, and she is safe from the mirror.
“Be careful what you wish for,” I whispered, brushing the silt from her brow. “The fine print is always a bitch.”
How could I hate them? They were just like me. They were the ones who didn’t fit. The ones who wanted more than the lot they were cast. The ones who were told they were too loud, too ugly, too poor, too wrong. Too much themselves.
Lir throws his mistakes into the dungeon or banishes them to the wastelands. I keep mine. I keep them close.
I reached the far end of the garden, where the darkness is absolute.
Here, the thermal vents provide no light, only heat.
There was an empty patch of soil here. A hole I had dug years ago and never filled.
It was reserved.
I hovered over it, staring into the black abyss of the dirt.
“Lir, your table is ready,” I said softly. “If I ruled the sea, this is where he would be.”
I imagined the great King of the Sea here as a bottom feeding lump.
A silent stump in the dark.
I thought of that wretched girl and her mangled singing. She would be in this spot if she failed. She gave her life for love. A part of me, the part that still remembered holding her when she was a tadpole, before the exile, before the hatred, recoiled at the thought. To reduce that much energy over such a painful experience seemed... wasteful.
But the other part of me, the part that touched the scar on my side where the Spear had grazed me on the day her mother died, the part that remembered the sound of the word Uncle, felt satisfaction.
It would be justice. It would be a lesson. And it would break Lir.
If I possessed his favorite daughter, if I held her soul in my garden... he would have to negotiate. He would have to treat me as an equal. He would have to open the gates of Oceanica and let me in.
I would finally see Carlotta’s grave.
I turned away from the empty hole. The thought of my sister brought the familiar ache to my chest, the tightness that no amount of magic could dissolve.
“Mistress.”
Dot and Speckle were waiting by the archway. They were bulbous, their bodies undulating in the current, their eyes glowing with a predatory red hue. They looked tired. The swim to the surface and back is a long haul, especially for octopi carrying the dead weight of ocean trash.
“You’re back,” I said. “Report.”
“She is delivered,” Dot said, his voice a raspy whisper.
“She is beached,” Speckle added.
“Alive,” they said together.
I nodded. “And the transition? The legs?”
“She looked like bait,” Speckle laughed.
“Ugly,” Dot hissed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.
“Bloody,” Speckle agreed. “She screamed. She flopped.”
I smirked. “Good. The transition from mer to human is never graceful. It is a violence. The bones have to break to reshape. The lungs have to inflate for the first time, burning like fire. I warned her.”
I swam toward them. “Did she drown?”
“Nearly,” Dot said. “The surf was rough.”
“She swallowed water,” Speckle said. “She sank.”
“But she fought,” Dot noted, a hint of grudging respect in his tone. “She kicked.”
“She scratched the sand.”
“She dragged herself onto the dry.”
“Of course she did,” I muttered. “She is a cockroach. You can’t kill a cockroach with a little salt water.”
“Come,” I said. “I need to see.”
I moved to the circular portal set into the stone floor of the central chamber. It was a pool of hyper-saline water, chemically treated with the bioluminescence of the Abyssal Anglerfish. It acted as a lens, capturing the light refracted from the surface and projecting it into the depths.
It was my window. My surveillance saline.
I waved my hand over the pool.
“Visio,” I muttered. “Show me the brat.”
The water in the pool churned, then settled. The milky white cloudiness cleared, revealing a sharp, technicolor image of the surface world.
It was bright. Disgustingly bright. The sun was beating down on a stretch of white sand that looked abrasive and hot.
And there she was. She was face down in the wet sand, tangled in a knot of kelp and driftwood.
I watched, horrified, as she tried to move. She heaved. Her body convulsed, her spine arching in a spasm that looked more like a seizure than a stretch. She dragged herself forward using her elbows, her new legs dragging behind her like dead weight.
She looked like a seal that had been mauled by a propeller.
“Gods,” I whispered. “It’s worse than I thought.”
Her eyes were wild, rolling in her head, unable to focus on the horizon. She opened her mouth to scream, but only a guttural grunt came out. Drool, thick and stringy, hung from her lip. She didn’t know how to hold it in her mouth.
Which means, I realized, that everywhere that she has gone under the sea, everywhere that she has sang and everywhere she has cried, is covered in her saliva.
And then, a shadow fell over her.
The Prince.
He stood over her, silhouetted by the harsh sun. There was no lust in his eyes, no love struck wonder. Only revulsion. Like when you see a stray animal covered in feces.
He knelt beside her, careful not to touch the vomit she had just expelled onto the sand.
“I’m Devan,” he said softly. “Are you okay, Miss?”
She made a horrible sound. He reached out to help her up, but she grabbed his hand and placed it on her heart. When his hand touched her breast, he pulled back from her. His face twisted with pity.
“He thinks she’s brain damaged,” I realized aloud. “Look at him. He thinks she’s a shipwreck survivor who took a mast to the skull.”
Avis grasped at his boot, her fingers clawing at the leather. The Prince flinched. He pulled back slightly, a flicker of revulsion crossing his features before his royal training kicked in and he smoothed it into concern.
He signaled to someone in the distance. A servant appeared. They lifted her, not carrying her bridal style, but hoisting her up like a sack of wet flour. Her head lolled back, her mouth hanging open.
“He doesn’t desire her,” I said, the realization hitting me with the force of a tidal wave. “He pities her.”
I waved my hand, dissolving the image. The pool went dark.
I stood up, my mind racing. This was a disaster.
I had assumed her body would carry the day. That once the tail was gone, she would simply be a stunning and silent woman. But I hadn’t accounted for the sheer biological trauma of the shift. It didn’t cross my mind that a mermaid on land is just a fish out of water, gasping and flailing. How was I supposed to know that her beauty was just a trick of the distortion of water? She was suddenly flabby. The pressure of the ocean held her in that tiny frame. Without it, she looked like someone had deflated her.
“He is never going to marry her,” I said, pacing the room. My tentacles slapped against the stone. “Not like that. He might feed her soup. He might give her a blanket. But he isn’t going to fall in love with a drooling invalid.”
“The deal fails?” Dot asked.
“If the deal fails, she comes back here,” I snapped. “And I get a barnacle.”
I looked at the garden. I looked at the empty hole.
“And Lir remains King,” I hissed. “Which means the gates remain closed and I stay in this trench until I rot.” I stopped pacing.
I didn’t want the barnacle. Just another soul to tend after. I wanted leverage. I needed that treaty. That way I could force my brother-in-law to look me in the eye and acknowledge my existence.
The only way that happened was if the two kingdoms were united. The only way I got my life back was if the Sea and the Surface were joined by a marriage that neither side could ignore.
Avis had to succeed.
“She needs help,” I decided. “She needs damage control. If we leave her to her own devices, she’s going to end up in a sanitarium, not a palace.”
I walked back to the vanity. I looked at my reflection in the dark glass of the cauldron. I looked tired. But beneath the exhaustion, the gears were turning.
“We don’t just watch,” I told the redpussies. “We intervene.”
“To stop her?” Speckle hissed.
“To save her,” I corrected, a bitter smile curling my lips. “If that idiot Prince won’t marry her out of attraction, we will have to manufacture a little romance. We have to make him see the beautiful princess beneath the beached porpoise.”
I grabbed a bottle of kelp spirits and uncorked it with my teeth.
“Get some rest,” I told them. “Tomorrow, we go to work. We have six days to turn a convulsing seal into a future queen.”
I took a long drink, the burn settling into my stomach.
I needed them to marry. I needed the union. Because if they didn’t, I was just a witch in a hole. But if they did... I was the architect of a new age. I curled up under my sleeping stones, the image of Avis’s drooling face burning in my mind.
She was going to need a lot more than just legs to pull this off. She was going to need me.