Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

I watch until she’s no more than a speck against the watery sky of my kingdom, nothing more than a black dot against the flickering light that drifts down from the above-world. It’s so long since I’ve been there, since I’ve bothered to breathe the salty air instead of wetness. I’m not sure I’d even be able to use nose and lungs in place of gills anymore. Anything you don’t value, don’t use, don’t exercise, will desert you.

Just a dot, now, just a mote, then gone. She’s broken the surface. She’ll head for the beach, if she’s smart, before she opens the bottle and drinks the contents. If she’s stupid she’ll do it in the wrong order, and will likely drown. When the legs come through, they will hurt. She’ll feel cleaved, she’ll panic. When you panic, you drown.

Still, I did warn her.

Didn’t I?

Sometimes I forget the script, the patter; I’m so very tired. I always warn them, but perhaps I omit some of the lines, through boredom or forgetfulness. Sometimes spite. Sometimes these girls are so… haughty. Demanding. Entitled. Mean. An almost unending list of sins, I suppose. Those who look down on me as if I am somehow less, as if refusing to live as they do, where they do, makes me questionable. Refusing to be one with the Mer Queen’s safe, tidy little enclave.

They don’t know—care?—that I was like them once; that, though changed by the things I do, I share their blood. My true history has been lost, I imagine, fallen through the cracks between years as those who knew me have disappeared or died, for we are immortal but not invulnerable and can be killed. Only one remains of my contemporaries and I doubt my name passes her lips too often.

I am made pale, yes, by my acts: bleached as whale bones on a strand. White as if the water has washed much of me away, but whatever I lost of myself was replaced by something stronger, a power and pragmatism that others have envied and feared, sought and bought. I have become a concentration of prices paid, of deals done, of treasures left behind. I am the place where folk come when they have nowhere else to go, when their wants and desires get the better of them.

Like that silly little girl. A granddaughter, no doubt. Or a great-grandchild, perhaps. I can see her bloodline in the cast of her face, the tilt of her head. An echo of my sister’s cheekbones, the pout of the lips. The girl who is gone and will never be again, not as herself. She’ll be something else, something new; something less. The joke is not lost on me.

I recall the object in my hands, clutched as tightly, as greedily as the girl did her amber bottle. Mine is a purple jar, fat as a glutton’s belly, a silver lid firmly holding down the contents, which would otherwise float and flee, perhaps follow its former owner, try to reunite with that little fool. It swirls inside the colored glass, like a fog trying to blow itself out.

Her voice, so lovely, so perfect.

So lightly held.

So unvalued.

So easily bargained away.

Little fool.

All for a man, and not even one who lives beneath, not one of her own kind who swims the ocean. A man who moves by legs alone, who breathes air, whose near-dead face was apparently so beautiful its sight knocked the sense from the girl’s head, put a cloud of idiot desire in her mind and set her heart’s course askew. So that nothing else would inhabit her thoughts, so she’d be haunted by it until, at last, she went and begged.

I wonder how long it took? How many days, weeks, months of pleading and whining until her grandmother’s patience wore out, heart wore through, until it was obvious to the old fish that the girl had one final decision to make, one chance left, one last hope. I can count on five fingers the number of maidens who’ve come to me and, in the end, not gone through with their plan. So few who hesitate, take a moment to think, realize that the price is always too great, that their lives are not over if they do not have this purported heart’s desire, the absence of which has been tearing at them. So few who say “no” when I’ve named the price, who’ve bent their heads and backed away, swum off with nothing more than their gods-given gifts and my grudging respect.

So few, so rare.

But enough. I have matters to which to attend. A twitch of my own tail, I knife through the water, back to the deep cave from which I reign. Make my way to the place where my magic resides.

We have all suffered. We have all lost precious things. We have all been faced with the choice of losing ourselves to gain an idea of love.

My mother made her own such decision. Destined to marry one man to please her father, she went to the Sea Witch of old who then ruled this dark corner of the ocean, and she overthrew everything fate had intended for her. She got the man of her dreams and much good it did her: he was a wastrel, cared not a jot for her heart once she’d brought him the pearly crown, the coral sceptre. She thought, poor fool, that if she could have children, ensure their grasp on the throne with a dynasty, he’d love her again—which presumed he ever loved her in the first place.

But the price she’d paid in return for her heart’s desire was her ability to bear children. She was as barren as a desert is dry. She tried everything she could, enlisted every sorceress and enchantress, but they had no power against such a sacrifice, no way to undo what had willingly been given away. And so back to the Sea Witch at last she went.

There was nothing she could do, the dark queen told her, tail slowly batting back and forth as she sat on the throne of bones and shells and coral and such. But something about the Sea Witch’s smile told Mother that the old woman wasn’t being entirely honest, so she pressed: she’d give anything. Anything.

Anything?

Anything!

I will name my price later, then. Are you prepared for that?

And my idiot mother nodded and agreed to a bargain, the cost of which she did not know.

The Sea Witch gave her two pearls, one milky-white and twisted, the other smooth and black, and instructions to take both but choose only one; swallow only one. She knew enough about my mother from their brief encounters to understand that she would not listen, would not honor their pact.

Mother gave birth to twins, myself and my sister, with little difference in our appearances except our hair—hers was noticeably darker, mine lighter—and we were loved equally. We shared a cradle made from a giant clam, strung with shells and things that shone; together we breathed the same water, learned all the things we might ever need in order to rule when our turns came, shared all our toys, clothes, eventually lovers. She was my sister and my other self, no two could be closer, more loving, more devoted.

Until…

Until one day Mother died, and that loss changed my sister. Where once possessions had been ours , they became mine and yours ; she held all things tighter, lovers included. We fought as we never had, items were snatched from my hands, beaus seduced away, kept at her side by sheer dint of tantrums and bribes. And the kingdom we were meant to rule month about, the throne we were both meant sit upon? She gave it up at the end of her cycle only unwillingly.

Perhaps we’d have come through. Perhaps with time she’d have softened, loosened her grip. Perhaps she’d have come to her senses, apologized, and we’d have been as we were before.

But then the message came from the Sea Witch to say there was a debt owing and we must answer for it. That this was the one true inheritance left to us by our mother.

She’s a beautiful thing that I’ve made, though patched and stitched. Sometimes I close my eyes, run my fingers over the skin just to feel smooth then coarse, the ridges where cuts have joined as if living flesh had healed. All those given-up bits and pieces, all those crimson-colored tithes, all tacked together into a whole of sorts.