Princess of Mermaids Read online

  Collette stepped away from the wall and gave a graceful curtsy. Marquis Corbeau glared at her, but Gustave gestured for her to continue. Collette approached the merchant and smiled gently.

  “What was your name, sir?”

  “Dale, Your Highness. Dale Mercer of Eldria.”

  “Mr. Mercer, I’m sure your daughters will simply be happy that you are alive. Why don’t I show you the castle gardens? We have lovely roses, and you can choose whatever you like to bring back for them.”

  Her offer shook Dale out of his misery. He took the hand she held out and looked at her like she was an angel of mercy.

  “Truly? Thank you, Your Highness! You are most gracious.”

  Collette took the merchant’s elbow and guided him out of the throne room, pausing only to wink at her brother on her way out. As soon as the door shut, Gustave nodded to the guard.

  “Are there any more audience requests today?”

  “No, Your Majesty.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  The guard smirked, and Gustave realized he had spoken aloud.

  Blast.

  He didn’t mean to be callous, but the chaos of rebuilding Montaigne’s harbor and sorting through the damage caused by kraken attacks was taking a toll. Being king was hard enough without magical creatures wreaking havoc on land and sea.

  Gustave removed the crown and massaged his aching head. Maybe now he could have a few moments of peace and quiet.

  Someone cleared his throat, shattering that hope. Gustave sighed and turned to the source of the sound.

  “Would you like to request an audience, Marquis Corbeau?”

  “Most humorous, Your Majesty. You know I cannot leave until the audiences are officially closed.”

  Gustave’s headache intensified. The crown had pressed into his bruised skin, making it throb from the pressure.

  “The audiences are obviously over.”

  “Not until the proper procedures have been observed.”

  “Very well. I make a motion to close the royal audience time. Do you second it, Marquis?”

  “No, there is something we must discuss.”

  “But you said- Never mind. What do you wish to discuss?”

  Gustave stayed slumped in his throne. Partly to annoy the marquis, partly because this was a rare moment where he didn’t have to look like a king to impress anyone, and partly because he didn’t have the energy to sit upright and be proper any longer.

  “Your Majesty, if Princess Collette is going to adopt every stray that wanders through our doors, you must have the council approve the expense.”

  Gustave rubbed his pounding head. The last thing he wanted was an additional budget meeting with the council. Once a month was more than enough.

  “Surely Princess Collette can help whomever she pleases without council approval. A flower from our gardens costs nothing.”

  “Perhaps not. But what about when she inevitably invites him to spend a night in the castle while she finds him passage on a ship home? As she has done for every other distressed foreigner to come through that door?”

  “She is right to help where she can, Marquis Corbeau. We have plenty of empty rooms for her guests. If you truly object, we can deduct the expense from her pocket money.”

  Which Gustave would then need to find a way to pay back to her. Collette wouldn’t mind, but it wasn’t fair to have her shoulder the expense of their shared scheme to help those affected by the attacks.

  Marquis Corbeau shook his head.

  “If Your Majesty was fully king, you would have more control of the budget and could approve such spending without oversight. But as it is, you must make a motion before the council for the expense. I cannot allow this activity to continue any longer without the council’s approval.”

  Gustave glared at the ceiling. As much as he wanted to order Marquis Corbeau out of the room, the man was right. Gustave was not permitted to make any budget decisions on his own until he married and assumed the full kingship.

  A fact that Marquis Corbeau reminded him of many times each day.

  “Perhaps we should reconsider hosting a Princess Test,” Marquis Corbeau said. “It is a time-honored way for kings to find brides.”

  Gustave’s eyes narrowed.

  “You mean you don’t enjoy having the power to approve all my decisions?”

  “It creates a lot of extra paperwork, Your Majesty.”

  Gustave couldn’t tell if the marquis was joking or not. Probably not. His council members weren’t known for their senses of humor.

  “And then there is the matter of your birthday gala,” Corbeau said. “We may not have enough rooms for the invited guests if Princess Collette keeps offering the castle’s hospitality to strangers.”

  “How many guests are we expecting?”

  “I have lost track, Your Majesty. Your grandmother recently added additional people to the guest list.”

  Gustave sat up in the throne.

  “She can’t! We’ve already finalized the list!”

  “She can amend it with council approval, which she received this morning.”

  Gustave stared at his advisor. Was this the marquis’s way of getting revenge for what had happened in Santelle? Or had his grandmother bullied the council until she got her way?

  Either was possible.

  “I make a motion to close the royal audience time,” Gustave said. “Apparently I need to speak with my grandmother.”

  “I second the motion, Your Majesty. And I will add Princess Collette’s hospitality budget to our next meeting’s agenda.”

  Blast it all.

  Gustave bowed to Marquis Corbeau and hurried from the throne room. His grandmother taking an interest in his birthday gala was a problem of kraken-esque proportions. He needed to make a plan.

  5

  Fiora swam until she reached the gardens on the outskirts of the city. She hadn’t found a shipwreck to explore yet, but she needed a moment to catch her breath before she continued. She slowed her pace and circled over the gardens.

  Mermaid gardens weren’t anything like the ones humans made with plants lined into neat rows in the ground. They were more like enormous mosaics. Merfolk arranged beautiful shells and things that fell into the sea into intricate patterns on the ocean floor. Most gardens centered around a theme, and every mermaid had a different style of arranging the items.

  Fiora drifted over a garden filled with mirrors arranged in a spiral pattern similar to the inside of a shell. The glass glistened like gems in the shifting underwater sunlight and reflected hundreds of versions of her as she swam.

  She studied the reflections. From the outside, her mixed heritage wasn’t obvious. She was a little smaller than the other mermaids. Her fins didn’t spread quite as wide. But she looked like she belonged.

  The water brushed her brilliant red hair over her shoulders, and Fiora sighed. The mermaid in the mirrors looked beautiful and serene and whole.

  But the reflections were a lie.

  She turned away from the mirrors and continued her swim. The next garden was one she remembered well from her childhood, and Fiora smiled when she saw it.

  This garden was filled with statues that had fallen from ships. Fiora had visited it every summer when she was a young mermaid, floating around the stone carvings and pretending they were her human family.

  The merfolk had added new statues in her absence, and the garden seemed to have escaped the kraken attacks mostly unscathed. A few statues had fallen to their sides, and some of them were covered in sand, but none were broken.

  Fiora swam down to the garden. There was one statue in particular that she wanted to visit.

  “What are you doing here, Fiora?”

  Fiora twisted around and saw Leander. He swam towards the garden carrying a statue of an older man with long, flowing hair.

  The craftsmanship was incredible. The artist had captured each strand of hair in the stone, and it seemed to move as Leander pulled it through the water
.

  This statue was made more recently than the others. None of the edges had eroded, and the man’s clothes didn’t look old fashioned. It must have fallen overboard during the recent attacks. He would make a fine addition to the garden.

  “I asked you a question,” Leander said, interrupting Fiora’s musings.

  “I’m practicing for the ceremony tonight.”

  Fiora’s voice was defensive, and currents stirred around her when she spoke, lifting her hair towards the surface. She pulled her hair down to cover her body and reminded herself again that none of the merfolk cared that she was naked.

  “Practicing? Here? Why aren’t you singing with Zoe?”

  Leander hummed a tune. Water swirled around the statue, lifting it from his hands and placing it in the garden. It also pulled his black hair away from his face, sweeping it neatly behind him.

  “What are you doing here?” Fiora asked. “Shouldn’t you be preparing for the ceremony tonight?”

  “I don’t have a singing role. Those are reserved for members of the royal family.”

  The scorn in his tone said she shouldn’t have a singing role either. That he would do a much better job if given the chance.

  Fiora had no doubt that was true, but family was important to merfolk. They stayed loyal to each other.

  She had taken that for granted when she accepted her father’s invitation to join him on land. She had assumed that human families felt the same loyalty and her half-sisters would welcome her as one of them. That had been a mistake.

  “You’re a captain of the guards. Surely you have some sort of responsibility tonight.”

  “Yes. Guarding. But for now I’m rebuilding gardens. Some of us know our roles well enough that we don’t need to practice.”

  Fiora scowled at the merman. Leander met her gaze with anger in his hazel eyes.

  “Go practice somewhere else, Fiora. I have work to do.”

  “I could help.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Something rumbled through the ocean floor. The statues trembled as if caught in an earthquake, but it almost sounded like laughter.

  It stopped as suddenly as it began. Fiora looked at Leander, but the merman didn’t seem concerned.

  “I have work to do, and you’re interfering, Fiora.”

  Leander sang. His voice crescendoed through the ocean, and an enormous whirlpool built in the center of the garden. It swept sand off the statues and pushed Fiora away. She tumbled through the water, catching glimpses of statues and her reflection in the mirrors.

  Leander kept singing. Kept pushing her away until she was so far out in the open water that she no longer saw him, the gardens, or the mermaid city.

  And she was covered in sand.

  Fiora brushed herself off. Her hair was hopelessly tangled from the whirlpool. Maybe she should borrow a fork from Madame Isla to brush it out.

  Something golden on the ocean floor caught her eye. Leander’s song had swept more than Fiora away.

  Maybe she’d be lucky and find a comb.

  She swam to the ocean floor and pulled the gold object out of the sand.

  It was a ball.

  Fiora turned it over in her hands. What was this thing for? Gold seemed an impractical material for a toy.

  She tossed it up in the water as if she were a child playing catch with herself. The ball drifted slowly up then sank towards the ocean floor. It slipped out of Fiora’s hands when she tried to catch it.

  She followed it down, trying and failing to grip the smooth metal. Finally, she swam under the golden ball and caught it against her chest.

  The ocean around her dissolved in a flash of white as a strange vision overcame her senses.

  Fiora saw herself floating in the ocean. Her hair was hopelessly tangled from the whirlpool. She held a golden ball and tossed it into the air.

  The vision faded, and Fiora blinked at the shifting light of the open ocean. What had just happened? She had experienced mermaid magic many times and human magic a few times in Kell, but this was something else entirely.

  Was it meant to be some kind of mirror? Why had it showed her a vision of herself?

  Fiora bit her lip and stared at the distorted reflection of her face in the gold sphere. It was dangerous to play with magic you didn’t understand. She should probably put the ball back on the ocean floor and let the sand swallow it.

  Instead, she pulled it to her chest. The ocean once again flashed white.

  “It is so nice to meet you all. My name is Kathelin.”

  Fiora hovered in midair, slowing bobbing up and down. Kathelin floated in a bay near the shore, talking to humans who sat on land.

  Humans that Fiora recognized. Princess Carina of Santelle and King Gustave of Montaigne sat on a blanket. They looked like they were having a romantic picnic by the sea. Fiora wouldn’t have pictured them as a couple. But then again, Carina had been her nemesis at many Princess Tests and Gustave had ruined her chances with Prince Alaric by providing testimony to support Lina. Both had sabotaged her in Aeonia.

  Maybe they were a good match after all.

  A frog sat near Carina on the picnic blanket. Some kind of pet?

  “Be careful,” the frog said. “Don’t get too close.”

  A talking frog? Or a transformed human? If what she was seeing was real, Fiora needed to search the library and find the transformation charms Madame Isla had mentioned. She tried to get a closer look at the frog, but the vision pulled her attention back to the mermaid.

  Kathelin smiled and winked.

  “I mean you no harm,” she said. “I want to help you.”

  “By stealing ships?” Carina asked.

  “Those incidents have been beyond my control,” Kathelin said. “The kraken are restless. Far more so than usual.”

  The frog hopped onto Carina’s shoulder and whispered something. Carina nodded.

  “You claim the kraken aren’t under your control, but the one that attacked last night was summoned.”

  Kathelin sighed.

  “Yes, Leander is brash sometimes. He called the kraken to help him escape, and I apologize that it also took your ship.”

  Fiora’s consciousness returned to the ocean in a flash of white. She blinked, disoriented by the longer vision.

  Was it real? Or had the ball shown her some kind of daydream?

  If it wasn’t real, it was oddly specific.

  And if it was real, that meant Leander and Kathelin had interacted directly with humans in their quest to retrieve the Kraken Heart.

  With Carina, Gustave, and a talking frog.

  Fiora tried to sort it out, but the vision remained a tangle. She knew that Kathelin, Leander, and Althea had retrieved the Kraken Heart from Santelle, but she didn’t know how. She had assumed they had stolen the gem without being discovered.

  In the end, their method for obtaining the gem didn’t matter. They had succeeded, and the kraken were sleeping again.

  What mattered to Fiora was the frog. He was proof that the transformation magic Madame Isla had mentioned was possible. Fiora’s ring was useless, but that didn’t matter if there were other ways to transform.

  She looked at the dull pearl and sighed.

  Did Carina and Gustave realize how lucky they were to be fully human? To sit and have a picnic on the grass as if it were the most natural thing in the world? To not worry about being banished to the ocean if they failed to measure up?

  Fiora blinked back tears. Crying underwater was a strange experience. Your tears simply floated away.

  Maybe real mermaids didn’t cry. Maybe that was another part of her human heritage.

  Fiora had felt hollow and out of place since she returned to the ocean. Of course, she had often felt the same way when she was on land.

  When you were part of two worlds, neither felt like home.

  She brushed her tears into the ocean and swam up to the surface. It didn’t take long. She must be close to shore.

  Yes, she was. A stri
p of land was just visible on the horizon.

  Blast it all, Leander had pushed her farther than she thought. It would take a long time to swim back to the city.

  Fiora turned to the open ocean, then turned back to look at the land. The dedication ceremony would take place at sundown, and the sun was still high in the sky. She had time.

  And she suddenly wanted very much to see humans.

  Fiora dove under the water and swam towards the shore. She hummed as she went, creating a current that helped her swim faster. Soon the surface of the water was dotted with the shadows of ships. She must be near a city with a bustling port.

  Fiora didn’t dare look above the surface with so many ships around. She swam along the coast until she found a quiet cove. When she peeked into the air, she found a castle looming above her.

  That must be the royal castle of Montaigne. Fiora had never visited that kingdom. As a human, she had only traveled away from Kell for Princess Tests, and Montaigne hadn’t hosted one in her lifetime. She studied the castle with a critical eye.

  There wasn’t much to criticize. Montaigne had a reputation for making beautiful things, and it seemed that reputation was well deserved. The castle emerged from the hillside in an elegant wave of marble spires and balconies. The silvery stone sparkled against the mountains and pine forests behind it.

  It was surrounded by human gardens filled with flowers and shrubs. From what Fiora could see, pathways led from the castle through the gardens to the ocean. Sandy beaches stretched on either side of the estate. They were empty, unlike the bustling port. Maybe they were part of the castle grounds.

  Instead of making her feel better, seeing the castle made her even more homesick for land. Fiora ducked under the water and glared at the golden ball. This was all its fault. The vision of human life had reminded her of all that she had lost.

  She lifted it towards her chest, then shook her head and pulled it away. Whatever else it could show her, she didn’t want to see. It was simply a painful reminder that she was trapped under the ocean.

  As the dull pearl was a constant reminder that she had failed. Even her father found her useless as a human. So she would have to make the best of her life as a mermaid.