For SmylinG's contest based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. All comments appreciated, but especially looking for thoughts on pace and tone towards the end!
~~~
Ed collects broken things.
He combs the beach with Juliet at sunset, leaving all the perfect shells behind, picking up the ones that have been trampled underfoot, shattered by the sheer force of saltwater. Stones with half skeletons inside, bottlenecks with no body, splinters of driftwood. The things that have no place in this world, Prince Edmund takes for himself. Juliet watches her fiancé, amused and intrigued and entirely besotted by this tenderness.
Juliet’s sister-in-law Rella giggles at this practice but Juliet doesn’t know why. Her twin brother, Rella’s husband Charming, is a dreamer and Juliet loves him for it. She just smiles and tells Rella that Edmund is simply a different type of dreamer, and she doesn’t mind marrying a dreamer even if the decision is not hers. She will marry Edmund and come to live here in the fortress that they call a palace (though Juliet is from the south and knows that real palaces glitter and gleam).The only thing she regrets is the way Charming got to choose his lovely bride for himself, and Juliet’s future has always been carefully mapped.
One night, a storm shakes her existence. A ship’s hull torn into two, crashing charcoal waves, thunder resounding in Juliet’s belly. She stands barefoot at the window in her nightdress, fingering her midnight coloured plait endlessly in a sort of prayer.
When he returns, Ed is quiet as always, but there is something else in those eyes that were once like a summer sky, they are darker, stranger. They still comb the beach and steal those private moments, and Ed admits his head is filled with another woman, a voice and thin arms around him.
“A voice like what?” Juliet asks.
“Music. Just pure music.”
The next broken thing he brings home, as she sits with the rest of the southern party at breakfast, is a mute girl.
Juliet is a patient woman, but at this latest development, with Rella’s and Charming’s eyes locked on her, she suddenly has the urge to thump the table, to scream. Ed is strange and lovely and everyone sees it as a good match. But first the voice and now a girl with no voice and it’s all very nearly too much. She dabs at her mouth with her napkin and surveys the mute girl. Of course she’s beautiful, hair like spun gold, roses in her cheeks like the first suggestion of dawn, huge eyes as blue and fathomless as the sea itself.
“Do you have a name?” Juliet asks.
“She can’t say,” Ed reminds her. “I’ve been calling her Blue.”
A nickname. Here everybody has them- Rella, Ed, Charming… but she is still Juliet, still an outsider. Sometimes she wishes they would call her “Jules” as she’s heard common girls who share her name be called. “Jewels,” like the precious bargaining chip she is. Well-trained, intelligent, polite, as charming as her brother.
Of course any man in his right mind would prefer the mystery of a girl with no voice and no history.
“Are you going to stay with us at the palace then, Blue?” she asks, focusing on her food. The girl nods and watches Ed with those innocent eyes, clearly in love with the prince and his strange ways. Juliet hates her from that moment on.
That night, Ed brings Blue to the beach with them. She finds the cracked open egg of a seabird and Ed delights in it. Juliet picks her way through the pebbles behind them, like a chaperone. Blue’s steps are delicate, strangely so, she hops from toe to toe as if every step pains her.
Days trickle past and every time the sun goes down, Ed is a little more deeply in love. It’s just a pity it’s with the wrong girl, Juliet thinks bitterly.
The Queen speaks to her one day when they’re in the parlour. Tells her that many royal and noble men take mistresses and it can be hard, but she shouldn’t let it affect her feelings for Edmund. Juliet smiles nervously but it feels as if the Queen has just lodged a knife in her heart. Just as she feels every time she sees Ed and Blue together, sees the way he watches her with those eyes that seem to echo hers. Juliet listens to anecdotes from old ladies, plays croquet with the king, and every night moves to the parlour allocated to the southerners and lets out all her rage.
“How can he do this to me?” she demands of her brother one windy night.
“Sometimes love just happens,” Charming says in his own dreamy way, clearly thinking of that crystalline winter night when he and Rella first danced together. Juliet is pacing, one moment into the warmth of the fire, then out of it once more.
“Yes, Charles," she says and his head shoots up at this use of his real name- that Juliet only ever utters when she is truly angry, "it happens to people like you who are free to choose. Don’t you see? I have given everything up for this arrangement to work. I was never asked. Mama and Papa had this planned before we could even walk, you know that!”
“Then maybe he will free you from the betrothal,” Charming suggests hopefully from where he is bent over in his seat, olive green eyes cast into the flames.
They both know it isn’t his decision any more than it is Juliet’s. She lies between the freezing sheets of her bed that night and imagines what life would be like if she had a choice.
Wise words echo in her ear-from her tutor, or her fairy godmother perhaps: there is always choice.
She attempts to pull Ed back to her in the castle’s dark corners. He refuses, moves away, says something vague about ‘waiting’ every time. On the beach, his focus is entirely on his broken and downtrodden treasure. Juliet wonders manically if she should break herself to make him love her as he loves Blue.
Then there is the girl herself, the girl with no words. She speaks in gazes and cold stares. Juliet genially invites her on a walk, but the whole time the girl acts as if Juliet has just slapped her in the face. She has no decorum, that’s for sure. Perhaps that’s what Ed really wants- a peasant and not a princess. The closest Juliet can come is wearing her black hair down that night at dinner. Ed does not notice. He does not even greet her.
When the King dismisses them, she runs up the stairs, bolts the door of her bedchamber and throws herself down on the feather pillows, not intending ever to get up. It is a quiet, clear night for once and the only sounds are her own muffled sobs. When she has used up all her tears and lies there, feeling her heart beat, that’s when the song comes. Her feet find the floor; she trails across to the window, looks out on the royal family’s private cove (such a dark, hostile place compared to the soft gold sand of their beaches at home). Blue is standing in the shallows, a ghost in a white dress. Around her are five girls- no, Juliet thinks, frowning, looking closer.
Not quite girls.
Mermaids at home are a children’s story of something that happens far away. Here, she knows they are real, only mysterious, hidden. They are rumours, but the people of this cold little island believe every word of the rumours to be true. Now Juliet does as well. And she believes something else.
Blue is more than just a little broken.
Juliet puts a cloak round her shoulders, tells the guards on the door she is going for some salt air. She meets Blue on the worn stone steps that lead down to the cove. She is a head taller than the wispy mer-girl.
“I know what you are,” Juliet says darkly. “And what you have done to yourself. It’s an abomination in both our worlds, is it not? Who were those others? Your sisters?”
Blue, of course, doesn’t say anything. She is holding something behind her back. “What have they given you? Let me see!” Juliet demands. She is a princess, and used to giving demands.
Blue reluctantly shows her. It is a silver knife, almost blinding white in the moonlight, edges so sharp they seem to disappear.
“What’s that for?” Juliet asks, but Blue shakes her head. The beautiful knife clatters to the ground and she puts her hands over her face.
For a moment, Juliet nearly feels sorry for her. But after all the heartache this girl without a voice has caused Juliet, she is not about to forgive her in an instant. Still, she finds her arm reaching out, putting itself over Blue’s narrow shoulders. “It’s alright,” she murmurs. “Whatever problems you’re having. I don’t suppose you can go home, can you?”
Blue shakes her head.
“Is it all about Ed?” Juliet asks quietly. She is trying to be neither kind nor cruel. She only wants the answer.
Blue shrugs, a trial under the weight of Juliet’s arm.
“He’s mine, you know,” Juliet begins, without really meaning to. The words fall out of her mouth. “He’s always been mine, whether the two of us like it or not. If you take him, you’re not just taking him, you’re ruining my entire life. The lives of two kingdoms. Could you live with that?”
Blue’s eyes open wider than ever, her mouth too. Then she shakes her head, ducks it, implies, I never meant to hurt anybody.
Juliet almost believes her.
“Come on. Let’s go for a walk to clear your head,” she says, shutting her eyes tight. Still with her arm round Blue’s shoulder, she leads her up the steps and around the headland, hugging close to the cliffs.
“I live close to the sea at home as well,” she says to fill in the silence that is all Blue can supply. “I won’t mind living here. It’s just the cold. But I suppose I’ll get used to that.”
Blue nods. They are standing at the top of the cliffs. Juliet disregards all advice given to her and looks down to where the heads of waves are glinting in the starlight, inhales the salt. Blue stands beside her bare arms, hugging herself. Juliet should help.
She takes off her own cloak. “Here,” she says softly, putting it over Blue’s shoulders. “Once we work things out, we’re going to be friends. I truly believe that.”
Blue turns to face her so that Juliet can fasten the pin at the throat of her cloak. She concentrates for a moment on the cold metal and the rough wool.
Then, with barely any thought at all, she pushes Blue over the edge.
~~~
She runs back to the palace without a cloak, without the brooch that fastened it. Charming had given her that brooch, a present for their thirteenth birthday. She does not speak to the guards, only slips into the sheets that are now mercifully warm.
Juliet cannot believe what she has done, yet she feels no remorse for it. In those private moments of dark, she even smiles about how easy it was, how light and birdlike Blue was when she pushed her.
The mute girl just vanishes. The court breathes a sigh of relief. The Queen immediately calls for dress fittings. Juliet summons her bridesmaids, Princess Charlotte, the eldest of the twelve princesses in the west, Lady Rapunzel, Rella’s hideous stepsister who will ruin the tableau but at least is goodhearted.
Ed is even quieter than usual. He holds Juliet’s hand on the beach. He kisses her in corners and they act like the stupidly in love young couple they should be. She points out the shattered shells on the beach, a dead crab with only one claw. One night, a mermaid’s purse, ripped up one side.
She never mentions what she saw that night, nor what she did, but she knows he thinks about it. He will recall Blue suddenly, a taste on the wind or a glint of gold amongst the rocks. Juliet always knows when he is thinking of Blue. Then he will shake his head, smile at Juliet.
The smile never reaches his eyes. They are tired and sad, and every time Juliet sees them she cannot help but see the mermaid’s eyes that mirrored them. They are only one half of a soul, something that cannot be fixed.
There are always things that cannot be repaired, though. Ed is a broken thing now, a thing with no place in this world.
And Juliet is going to take him for herself.
Awesomely done!! I really hope you win the contest, looks like you're gonna 
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