All Of Her Choices

The best people for spreading lies are the pretty ones. The majestic and regal ones. The ones who charm the birds from the trees, sing the storm to sleep. They are the best at turning the tables, tilting the lights. If you look upon me and see only darkness, it is their doing. If I am the thing that creeps in the shadows, it is because she made me this way. I had done nothing to the king’s daughter. Nothing she did not ask.

I knew her before she explained who she was. Everyone within the sea knew the king’s strange daughter. The one with a propensity for throwing herself at the shore, for dragging herself onto the beach, for crusting her scales with sand, for the sake of watching the people on the rocks. She was grossly anxious when she swam into my home. Her hair amassed around her, uncut. The king’s daughters never cut their hair until marriage. Through it, I could see her lovely face, beautiful like the patterns of sunlight on water.

Her spine was rigid. A new tension crept into her shoulders when she entered my home. She was the kind of creature bred to fear the space outside of her territory. The shadow of a passing, overlarge fish might look to her as threatening as a bilious cloud of blood. It is always hard for the sheltered to discern true threat, since they have never been threatened.

I gestured her in. She did not see me the first time, until the gentle movement of my fingers became an aggressive movement of hands and elbows. She flinched and approached slowly. I am not comely or gilded like the folk of the court. I was raised among algae and pebble and coral. My hair and skin and eyes are the colour of the dirt from which I come. It never bothered me, until she appeared. And even then, it only bothered me very little.

I was not a vain thing.

“Are you a witch?” the king’s daughter asked. I could not recall her name. Her forehead was smooth and unlined, except when she raised her brows. She had never had a worry in her life before now, and her skin was unused to the effects of it. She clasped her hands in front of me in an artificial sort of gesture.

“A magician,” I said. We share with humans a certain dislike for the word witch. In those times, being a witch and living at the same time was not likely.

“What is your name? I would like to trust you if, if I only knew your name.”

I shrugged this aside. Names were not necessary. I said, “I’m help. That is all.”

She smiled. It was a hopeful smile. This was the first terrible thing love had done to her. I knew it as soon as I saw it upon her face. The thing about love was that it was not only poison, but a poison that one thought could be remedied by further doses of it. If she were smart, she would have asked me for an antidote. She would have asked me to make it impossible for her to love him. “I don’t know if you can help. If you can bring us together. I did not mean to love someone from the shore, but I do. My father would never allow us to live together. I just want a choice.”

This, I liked. I believed in choices. I said, “I cannot make him one of us. But I can make you a human.”

Suspicion and joy warred upon the king’s daughter’s face. Her face had clearly been used poorly. It was unprepared for so much confusion. I ignored the look she gave me, as though she could see all the way around me, and inside of me, and was still suspicious. “In exchange for what?”

At least the king’s daughter was not entirely stupid. Just a victim. I had sympathy for her; no one had ever told her she would need those skills her royal father had never taught her. Here was the world, and no one had told her she would have to face it. “Your voice. I can give you legs, but I need something of yours in return. It could be your eyes, but I assume you want to see the one you love.”

She was apprehensive, as people are when they’re about to amputate a part of themselves. “But how will I speak? How will I communicate with him? He does love to hear me sing.”

“He will have to love some other part of you,” I said. “I am sure there is much to love. But not if you waste away down here for the rest of your life, pining. There are other ways to communicate.”

Wasting away didn’t sound appealing to her. She gestured, to indicate that she did not know how to give me her voice. I told her I would be gentle, but when I approached her she had to hold herself still, as though I were a barracuda or a hungry tigerhead.

I coaxed it from her throat. The voice lived in many parts of the body, but the place it could mostly be found was the throat. My finger brushed her throat when I took it, and she nearly flinched. Her voice was a soft, fluttering thing between my palms, but I could see that it was beautiful. Of course he would have loved to hear her sing.

I pointed at her tail. Not a tail much longer. She would have to find her way to the surface.

Surprise and delight lit her lovely features.

“Don’t thank me,” I said. Her tail was beginning to split. I helped her reach the surface first.

It was less than two months when I next saw the king’s daughter. In that time, the kingdom had fallen into disrepair while the king searched the chasms and sandbars for his daughter. I was silent and unintrusive. I had not seen the king’s daughter. Perhaps she could be described to me? But they had no time for it. The king’s daughter coaxed me to the ocean’s surface. Even voiceless, she could force the sea to listen to her. I came when called and found her on the beach, unaccompanied, scandalous by the people’s standards.

She had been weeping, that was evident. Her eyes were puffy and red, and she had to discretely wipe her nose upon the lace cuff of her sleeve before she spoke. The sun had almost sunk below the waves. There was light cast across one of her ankles, peeking out from under her dress. She did not continue to weep when I appeared. She did start, still unnerved by my appearance. Love had taken its toll. Her face was bored by despair. Her forehead settled into familiar lines when she furrowed her brows. She clasped her hands to her chest and wrote in the sand, “Witch. Magician. I did not know if you would come. I did not have your name to call for you. I need your help, as I needed it before. Only your pity can help me.” Her movements were less lovely outside of the water.

This, I doubted. But I swam a little closer to her, until I could prop my elbows upon a rock. She recoiled a little, though not as much as the first time. “And what are you doing here, in tears?” I asked. “I thought you were with your true love. What could mar this for you?”

The king’s daughter looked both pitying and indignant. She wrote, “I gave up my voice for him. And he loves me, but he does not love me as much as another. She can speak. She is from a kingdom on land. How can I make him love me?”

I shrugged. I was not in the business of telling people who to love, orally or magically. Magic worked only so well. If I were to enchant this man, there would be a part of him, deep down, that was aware of the enchantment. That kind of festering poison was almost as bad as love.

The king’s daughter was taking the poison to heart. It had struck an artery. “You must help me,” she wrote. “I will give you anything.”

I knew of only one course of action that would help her, because the poison had dug deep, and there was nothing to do now but abstain from it until the rest drained. “You must give him up. I can give you back your voice now, and you will speak and sing again, but you must return to the water. Your legs will be gone.”

She reeled back and bit her lip. If she had had a voice then, I am sure she would have turned it on me. “No,” she wrote. She wrote it several times, then smoothed out the sand with her hand again. Her fingers fumbled as she wrote. “That is not what I asked for. I must make him love me, but I cannot without my voice. Ask for something else, and give me my voice back.”

There was nothing else to give me but her eyes, and when I told her this, she shook her head and pointed at what she had written already. She did not understand exchange, and I was beginning to curse her father again for her ignorance. And herself. Instead I thought of something new. It was magic of the kind I did not do, but I pitied her.

“If this man kisses you,” I said, “before the setting of the sun, three days from now, you will remain a human forever, and he will love you, with all of his heart.” This was a little bit of a lie- I am not proud of that. “If you do not, then come back to me, and I will return you to the sea, with your voice. That is all I can offer you.” And it was. This was the truth.

The king’s daughter clapped her hands together, delighted again. She looked almost as though she did not mind my terrible appearance, or my presence. Her gaze strayed to the road, to the end of the shore, away, away. “I can ask from him one kiss,” she wrote. “He will have to give it to me. I love him so dearly.”

“I am sure you will fair well,” I said. There was no point in saying anything further. She had made her choice.

I swam a little farther out and watched her walk away along the shore. Her legs must have been aching, but she could not tell. She did not even see it as an option- not loving him. The wind brushed away her words in the sand.

I knew what the problem was before she came to tell me. The sun had long gone, and so she brought a candle to the shore, and warned me back so she had space to write in the sand in front of me. The shadows made sharp all the anxious angles of her face. The lines that would not fade beside her eyes and on her forehead. She was lovely and older, in only a few months. “He did not kiss me,” she wrote. I was not surprised. She was sorrowful, and raging. “You must make me human longer.”

“I cannot,” I told her. She had ceased crying a time ago. She dug her fingers into the sand beside the candle. Wax fell on to the back of her hand. “I warned you that if you could not kiss him, then I could only offer you your place in the sea.”

She recoiled, and this time it was not because of my appearance, but because of my certainty. I had done all I could do for her. Her only option was the return to the sea. The poison had set in too deep. It might not even be allowed to drain. And if it did not, it might fester instead, and transform. “Take this,” I said. I held up my palm. There was a perfect blade on it, something I’d scavenged from a human wreck. Something I had made my own. “Put it deep into his heart, and you will be able to return to the sea with your voice. Otherwise, you will die.” I had done all I could for her.

Her eyes flashed. She snatched the dagger from me. It glanced across my palm; blood welled there. “You tricked me,” she wrote.

I said nothing. I knew what she would choose, in the end. She was more kind than I gave her credit for, because in the end it was not his life that she gave up.

And she did return to the sea. It was the best of the options. Anyway, she had used up all of her choices.

Art by Erin

Text by Lucie MacAulay