Chapter 11 of Princess of the Sea

Corwin marched into the throne room. "My dear and esteemed mother."

Wintress dismissed everyone else with a wave. Once they were gone, she dismounted from the throne and came down to him. "I'm sorry, my son. I should have let you speak to her. Was she angry?"

Corwin shrugged, not really angry, but resentful. "She coped well, as always. I'm sick of apologizing to her for leaving her alone, depriving her of my oh-so-wonderful presence. She probably doesn't even care."

"She does," Wintress said. "I know how well you two know each other. How you care for each other--though you don't love her."

"I do love her!" Colin snapped, then recovered. "I, um...Sorry. I love her, but I'm not in love with her. You know who it is I love."

Wintress looked thoughtful. "I wish I did. If we could only find that girl...I wondered at first if Silent was the girl, but I asked the matron, Lady Audrey, at the banquet, and she said not."

Corwin nodded. "She and Silira are mixed in my mind. That's why I care for her so much. Silira, not the other girl." He smacked his forehead. "You know, it seem unfair of me to say I love Silira just because she's so much like the girl I'm in love with."

Wintress nodded. "She has her own worth."

"Exactly." Corwin coughed, looking slightly uncomfortable. "Now can we stop talking about feelings? I can feel my masculinity wasting away. What, dear mother, have you summoned me to speak of?"

Wintress smiled, trying to put the same mystery into it that Silent did. "Ah...that. I asked Lady Audrey a few more questions, and...I sent a message to Aeryn, requesting that they send Princess Serena..."

"What?!"

"I know! I know! Not here, not to Eleschi, but to take her out of school and send her back to Aeryn. And I said I would send you as soon as I received their reply. Which I have."

She held up the letter she had received that very morning, two weeks after Corwin's birthday, from a courier. "And they are sending her. The king writes that the girl will be in Caer Ebon two months from now. She is being fetched back from a cathedral--actually, the one you were found at after the wreck. He asks that we send you there with all speed. Please don't be angry, for I do not command you to marry her. I'm not saying to forget your dreams. I'm saying God may take them and remake them into something better, but still you. I have to send you there because, well, Aeryn could help against Astrakhan and they've been throwing Serena at your head for years now. I can't help it. I am sorry."

Colin frowned. "Politics are annoying. I suppose I wouldn't mind going to Aeryn...I really don't have to marry this girl?"

"You'll really be shutting them up on the subject of you marrying her. You can visit your friends, see another part of the world. This truly is worth doing, Corwin. This truly will help."

Colin was quiet for a moment. "If I take Silent, will that send an unmistakable message that she is not, in fact, romantically involved with me? For she will be here for years, Mother, maybe even part of our court. We really need to find out where she hails from. I mean, if she comes along to help me find someone else, won't people finally realize she's not..."

"I believe so." Wintress paused. "Unless they think she's your mistress."

"Anyone says that to either of us and I'll strike him in the mouth."

The queen smiled. "Brilliant. I'll send a few other courtiers as well to take the focus off you two. May your sails fly with all speed, and all that."

Silira could barely breathe. The water was moving so fast. She felt things moving past her in the dark, but it was impossible to tell whether they were alive. A rock scraped her hand, and she cried out, suddenly able to hear her own voice. She was out, out into shadows and a hot, maddening stink of dead fish and bones and rottenness and a strong current still pulling her forward.

"One down," she muttered. What lay beyond the whirlpool was not common knowledge. There was speculation, pretty stories, but nothing like this.

A dark, boiling bog of green glop lay ahead of her. Bubbles rose from it and burst, spraying acidic green stench everywhere. Nothing lived near it, for obvious reasons. A strong current pulled her toward it, and she thought it had pulled the bones across it, but to what she couldn't see. Nothing was visible across from it. All the light down here came from the boiling green glop. Puke, she thought, and kicked with all her might. When she was half over it, she found it was too hot, and she panicked. She had to get out, and she had to get out NOW NOW NOWNOWNOW--She was over it, standing on a rock, turning and looking at the disgusting stuff she'd just made her way over. She turned. Two down.

Oh, vomit. The bog wasn't all.

The bones had not sunk in the bog. The current had taken them all across, and their bodies rotted away. Stark white bones were grasped by thousands of tiny arms growing out from a diabolical forest of huge coral polyps, preserved by something in the water, maybe the bog fumes. There were bones of humans there, taken from whatever shipwrecks the sharks didn't get to and given an honorable burial, skeletons of merpeople, bones of stray fish, even a few land animals.

The forest was alive. And it was hungry. And there was a path through it, straight and narrow, with just enough room for someone to swim forward at top speed...

Forever with You, Lord. And I do not refer to Corwin.

She rolled her eyes, tied her hair up, left her veil and the flowers behind, crossed her arms over her chest, and pressed on. She was moving at top speed, driven on by fear and love. For five minutes she went on, tail up, tail down, avoid that arm, duck under that skull, ignore the fish, see the...see the skeleton. There were a thousand there, but that one was thinner, lighter, and with a glimmer of blue scales nearby. A long tail, and the skeleton of a mermaid. She remembered a long blue tail in a family portrait done when she was tiny, and her mother's face above it. She had been up in a storm, against the law of the sea, and a bolt of lightning had struck the sea near her...an arm made of millions of greedy polyps snatched at her, and she stroked with all her might. Three more strokes, and she was out of the forest of skeletons.

She floated in a cave, huge snails crawling on the floor and walls and ceiling. A house made of bones stood in the middle, small and rickety and interspersed with whatever flotsam and jetsam the forest hadn't grabbed. An oldish mermaid, grey all over, sat in front of it, petting a big ocean toad. "Hello," she said, in a croaking, gravelly voice, not unlike a toad herself.

Silira came closer, hoping she wouldn't get killed straight off.

"You came at the right time," the old mermaid said, wiggling her fingers mysteriously. "If you had come after sunset, it would not have been in my power to help you before another year."

Silira frowned, wondering why.

"I'm lying. So!" The Sea Witch clapped her hands and rubbed them together. "What is your dolorous travail? What was bad enough to bring you down here?"

The house was small and dark, lit by pots of the glowing green goop. Odd things and dead animals hung from the rafters, and there was no furniture, only a big iron cauldron. "Interesting what falls off wrecked ships. You never really know what will come through the forest of bone." The witch stopped and turned back to Silira. "Oh, and I'll need a price. Your voice is supposed to be wonderful. The best in the sea. You'll have to give it up."

How could she give the witch her voice? Silira wished this crazy old cuttlefish would get to the point.

"Not that I can actually start sounding like you. Seriously, those big blue eyes and that hair and that voice? All put together? God hates me."

Silira shook her head, still too tired to speak. God didn't hate the witch.

"Whatever. I hate you. Which is why I'll cut your tongue out and put it in the potion. I have to give you something you can take later, because I can't change you from a distance. I'll need something from you anyhow. Part of the drinker and part of the maker, that's how it knows to change you and that's how it lets me make it." She scratched her chest and let a little blood flow into the cauldron, then threw in some other things from the rafters.

Silira was disgusted. She started to back away. She would do a lot, but give up her tongue? Never sing again? But the Sea Witch came at Silira, and Silira fought back, slapping her with her tail. She had taken a few classes on self-defense, but nothing had prepared her for this. She did well for a civilian, and actually gave the witch a black eye, but she only lasted a few minutes. The witch punched Silira in the face, and she blacked out.

When she came to, five minutes later, the witch was standing over her, she was lying on the floor, and there was a stabbing pain in her mouth. She grabbed at her mouth, grimacing. "I healed it a little so the skin is smooth where it used to be," the witch said. "You'll still be able to eat, and I dulled the pain, but no sound will issue from your lips. Not even humming."

Silira turned to leave, then stopped. She couldn't go through this. But was it worth it? Three hundred years and then...nothing?

She turned back and made a ring with one hand and put it on a finger of the other, meaning, "What about the prince?"

The witch cackled. "You can charm the prince with your eyes and your smile and...then, then, is the real prize. You...you can have your precious soul." She could hardly speak for laughing. "And...do you know what else you are fighting for? Not only the prince, not only the land, but the souls of all your people.

Once human, you can never be a mermaid again. Also, if the prince marries another, you will die the following morning, of grief and also of the potion, which for your convenience I set to kill you if he marries anyone else. All I need to do is put the tongue in, and it will work on you and only you."

Silira nodded.

Silira woke up, sitting on top of the lighthouse. It was tall and thin, with a huge bonfire soaked in oil on its top, always burning, even in the day, in case of fog. Someone had painted it with strange swirling designs, so it would draw more attention, which is of course what a lighthouse is supposed to do. She had seen it often enough from the sea, on those long swims of hers before the fateful night when she drank the potion. The fishermen would use its light to fish at night, when you got a better catch.

No one was there at the time. The family that lived in the lighthouse were out to lunch, and anyone could climb the stairs on the outside of the tower up to the platform on top. Silira was watching the swans fly away to the south. It was getting colder. She wore a long black coat with wide sleeves and skirt, and her hair billowed around her like the sails of the ever-present ships in the harbor.

She heard quick steps on the stairs behind her and got up, wondering who it would be and leaning on the railing around the platform to alleviate the pain in her feet.

Corwin ran up onto the platform, skirting the pile of oil-soaked driftwood, and came up to Silira. "Silent! I...oh...One second." He bent over with his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. The run up the stairs had sapped his large store of energy.

Silira half-smiled, wondering what had brought him all the way up here. He had probably found out where she was from someone who had seen her leave, riding a horse this time, not in the carriage. Only one road led toward the lighthouse, so it would have been obvious where she was going.

He gasped a particularly large gasp and stood up. "Silent...I'm supposed to meet this princess. In Aeryn. For political purposes. I'm supposed to go there as soon as possible."

She had held back. She had kept it all quiet. What else could she have done? But this was too much. She was going to smack him so hard--

"And I came to ask you to come with me."

Oh, really? Forget smacking. She would snap his neck like a chicken's. She would--

"But I'm not going to marry her."

Oh. All right.

"It's only a matter of form. She's not the girl from the cathedral. I've never met her in my life, and I'm not going to be so stupid as to fall for her, even though she's supposed to be the second most beautiful woman in existence."

Silira nodded. He would be gone for some time, but she supposed she could stand it.

"Will you come with me? Tradition says I have to meet her in her own kingdom. We'll sail in our fastest ship, Silent! I've never been on it, but I've always wanted to sail on it. It's beautiful. And we won't meet in the capital; we'll meet in Caer Ebon, their biggest port. We should be there at the New Year. And the people of Aeryn know how to party. It'll be like my birthday, except for weeks, and you'll be there, and I won't have to be busy with matters of state. By the way, Wintress apologizes for separating us on my birthday." He looked very eager. "Please say you'll come."

She considered. The whole thing should take a few months, and as long as he really didn't fall for Serena...

She nodded. He would have whooped, except for the fact that he was still short of breath. Instead, he collapsed backwards and kept breathing hard. "You have no idea what this means to me."

She could say the same thing.

They sat there for a while, neither able to speak. Finally Corwin sat up, breathing slowly again, and looked at her.

"Silent...if I had to choose, I would choose you."

She smiled, trying not to show what she felt. But you don't have to choose, she thought. How am I supposed to live my whole life with you wishing for that girl? I'm good at staying in the shadows. But if I have to live until I die in them...and all I have to look forward to in the end is turning into a pile of unconscious foam on the floor of the Golden Palace three hundred years from now, or maybe sixty...I don't know if I can stand it. He loves me. And God loves me. That's all I can think. Corwin only cares because of her. If I could speak...no. No. Not going to go there.

"I have to get back to the Golden Palace," he said. "Plenty of planning to be done before the voyage. I'm really sorry to leave you here--"

She shook her head. It didn't matter any more. He nodded and walked down the steps, calling behind him, "I don't care what they say. Once we're on the ship, we're going to be real friends and actually be together for more than five minutes at a time."

All right. Maybe it did matter. She smiled. At least they would be together.