The Sea King's Daughter (8 page)

I raised my chin. "I do so talk."

"So you do. My apologies, little one." He grinned at me and touched my shoulder.

He was just as handsome as I remembered from the night of the storm. But what made my heart beat harder was the way he smiled, the joy lighting up his indigo eyes, and how he looked at me as if I were the center of his world.

"Sit down, Lysander, and let her eat," Corinna said.

I wanted to bask in Lysander's attention forever, but he obeyed his mother. The slaves brought in platters and bowls of strange new foods. As I filled my plate, I noted the design with an unexpected twinge of homesickness. Herakles wrestled with a tentacle-
legged triton in the center of the clay disk. In the outer circle, sea nymphs joined hands and danced.

I tasted plump black fruits -- called olives, I later learned -- along with bread smeared with goat cheese and tunny flavored with herbs. The fish tasted smoky and spoiled. I wrinkled my nose and forced myself to swallow it. I preferred my meat raw, fresh, and bloody.

"Eating without me, I see." I turned at the sound of the booming male voice. The man who'd entered the room was short and rather plump, red-faced, with a smile full of false joviality. He looked me over. "This is the girl?"

"Isn't she a lovely little thing?" Corinna asked. She smiled at me. "Nyx, this is Lysander's father."

"Good day, sir," I said, inclining my head just a fraction of an inch.

He studied me with narrowed eyes. "Tell me about yourself," he said. "Where do you come from? Who are your parents, girl?"

His tone was not kind, and I flinched under the hail of questions. "I -- I can't -- I mean --"

"Philemon, please! Don't interrogate the girl." Corinna frowned at her husband. " I told you she doesn't remember."

"I'm not sure I believe her."

I started at his blunt accusation. It was true, but my throat narrowed and my breath came in gasps when I even thought of telling the truth. I kept my lips pressed tight together.

Lysander jumped in to defend me. "Father, what does it matter who she is? She's here with us now."

"That's my point." Philemon paused to gnaw at a wedge of cheese. "We're not responsible for this child. She's not of our blood. I suggest we turn her over to the authorities."

Lysander shot up from his couch, his hands clenched into fists. "Father, how dare you -- "

"Sit down," his mother said. "I'll handle this. Philemon, how can you say such a thing?"

He shrugged. "This is my house. If I say I'm not sure we should take in a stranger, someone we know nothing about -- don't I have that right?"

I held my breath. If Lysander's father turned me out, I'd have nowhere to go.

"For shame, Philemon," Corinna said. "Of course we welcome Nyx into our home. Not a month ago, the sea cast our own son up onto a strange beach. What if the people of that village hadn't taken him in? When I think of what might have happened, how we might have lost our only child. . . ." Her eyes shone with unshed tears.

Philemon sighed. "Very well. She stays, for now. But you'll tell me the moment her memory 'returns.' If it has indeed gone somewhere."

I bit into a dark-skinned fig and rolled its grainy flesh around in my mouth. I'd never tasted anything like it. The sweetness exploded on my tongue as I made a mental note to myself. I'd have to watch out for Lysander's father.

"Here, hold it like this," Corinna said. She adjusted the wooden instrument on my knee and showed me how to roll the wool across the surface.

"Like this?" I asked as I imitated her with fingers that felt fat and clumsy. On land, I'd become awkward and blundering. Moving about in the upper world felt different from
moving in the water. When I'd pushed against the sea, the sea pushed back. Now, in the air, I moved too abruptly and often fell.

Still, I spent more time out of bed now. The pain in my legs had receded to a dull ache. Bored, I'd asked Corinna if I could help with her weaving.

"You've nearly got it now." Corinna took my hands and guided them over the instrument. "Goodness, Nyx, your hands are small as a child's, and so oddly made." She touched the flap between my thumb and first finger.

I compared my mermaid hands with Corinna's human ones. The webbing between my fingers had once helped me swim. I balled my fists and thrust them down between my thighs, where she couldn't look at them. "It's nothing. They've always been like that."

Corinna laughed, but kindly. "Don't fret, Nyx. We all have our little differences."

I relaxed. Corinna didn't seem to suspect that I was anything other than human. I just wanted the people of Theros -- especially Lysander -- to accept me. I didn't want to feel different.

Corinna and I worked through our piles of wool, then laid the finished skeins of thread aside for the slave girls to weave into cloth.

"Have you remembered anything more?" Corinna asked. "About your past, your family?"

I bit my lower lip and shook my head. I pretended to attend to the hank of wool in my lap. My fingers felt stiff from spinning and greasy from the lanolin on the tangled fleece.

Corinna laid her hand against my cheek. She smiled. "Don't worry, dear. You have a place here with us as long as you want it. I only ask because, somewhere out there, I wonder if there is a mother weeping for you."

I longed to tell her there was not, but I couldn't say the words.  I shook my head again. Corinna let it drop.

Though I couldn't speak of them, I dreamt about my family every night. How sad they were in my dreams, even Grandmother! I wished I could tell them I was all right. I would wake in the night with my head aching and my jaw sore from grinding my teeth. Then I would lie awake for hours.

Father and Thetis would think me dead by now. I wished I could speak with them one more time, just long enough to make them understand my decision. I had so many questions for them about the things that happened before my birth, and about my mother's death. But I didn't regret my decision to become human. There was too much to do on land -- too many new things to try.

I gloried in tasting new foods, marveling at land animals, and learning the names of human things. Sometimes their customs baffled me, but I learned fast.

It wasn't always easy. One afternoon I sat out on the patio too long, because I loved feeling the sun in my face, and my face reddened and stung. "What's wrong with me?" I asked Corinna as she dabbed at my skin with a cool cloth that night.

"Haven't you ever been sunburnt before?"

"Oh, yes, of course," I said. "I only forgot for a second."

I often found myself lying to cover up my ignorance. It worked -- until one afternoon in the garden, when I nearly gave myself away.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I spent every possible moment with Lysander, trailing through the villa after him as often as I could. On this day, though, he was the one who sought me out. As I sat in the shade of an ancient, twisted olive tree, Lysander collapsed cross-legged into the grass next to me. His expression was sullen. 

"What is it?" I asked. "What's wrong?"

Lysander plucked at a scarlet poppy, dismembering it petal by petal. "My father thinks I'm a child. He's an overcautious old fool."

"What happened?"

Lysander shrugged. "We're going to bargain for wool in Thessaly. I suggested a new route. He won't listen. Says the old ways are better, the ways of his father and his father's father." Lysander nearly spat each word. "Someday, I will inherit my father's business. How can I ever learn to trade if he never lets me make even the smallest decision?"

I nodded and peered solemnly into Lysander's face. "He ought not treat you like such a child," I said, and added, without thinking, "My father --"

My throat closed up. This was forbidden territory. Lysander, however, had already noticed my slip. "Have you remembered something?" he asked. Excitement animated his features, lighting his face from the inside. He'd gone from morose to sunny in the space of an instant.

Quickly, I shook my head, still gasping for breath. "No, I just --"

"You did! You remembered something." He reached out and rested his fingers against my arm. His touch sent pleasant shivers through my body.

"No, I -- perhaps for an instant, but it's gone now. I'm sorry." I dropped my eyes.

"Don't apologize, little one." Lysander grinned at me. I smiled back. His charm seemed to push back the darkness in my heart. When he was with me, I found sadness almost impossible.

He lay back in the grass with his hands behind his head, staring up at the sky. Quickly, to distract him and also from curiosity, I asked him the question on the tip of my tongue. "Your mother says you were in a shipwreck, not long ago, and almost died. What was it like? Where you very frightened?"

Lysander rolled onto his side, propping his head up with his elbow. His eyes were suddenly hooded, his face solemn. "I don't remember much."

"Nothing at all?"

"Only -- only waking up for a moment, and seeing a girl, a girl with the face of a goddess. She smiled at me, and then -- nothing. I don't remember anything after that. Next I knew I was waking up at the physician's house, in that small village, with my lungs sore and my throat aching."

My heart beat a little faster at his words. I was the girl he spoke of. I knew I was. He'd opened his eyes underwater and stared straight at me. I had to grit my teeth to keep from saying this. It was part of the past I could not speak about.

"What did she look like, this girl?" I asked instead, smiling at him in the hopes that my expression might jog his memory.

Lysander shrugged. "It's all such a blur. She had big green eyes -- rather like yours, little one. I can't describe her exactly." He let out a heartfelt sigh. "Maybe she was nothing but an apparition. I know I ought to just forget her."

I choked down a cry of frustration. How could Lysander be so blind? I was the girl from his vision -- me, Nyx -- and I sat just inches away.

"Never mind," Lysander said, smiling fondly. "Who needs dream girls when I've got you to keep me company?" He reached over and brushed a lock of hair out of my face. "Come on, little one. Let's go and see if Mother has our dinner ready, shall we?"

On the sixth day after my recovery, Lysander took me to the village for the first time. Halfway down the path I tripped on a pebble and fell, scraping my knee and the palm of my hand. Lysander helped me up.

My scratches stung, but they were nothing next to the pain in my legs, which had not yet stopped hurting. It felt almost as they were straining to become a tail again. It was like an endless river of pain, sometimes filling my head with its agonizing roar, sometimes retreating to a throbbing ache, but always there. I'd learned to ignore it, or at least push it into the background. I'd convinced myself to accept it willingly, almost gratefully. This was the price I had to pay to be with Lysander.

"Careful, little one," he said, as I stumbled and almost fell a second time. "You walk like you're a newborn puppy, splay-legged and weak. Are you sure you don't want to go back to the house?"

"Of course I'm sure. I can't wait to see the village, all the new people, the donkeys and the children, the birds and trees and wildflowers -- oh, I want to see everything."

Lysander laughed. "You're an odd little creature. You act as if you'd never seen any of those things before."

"Well, no, I --" I bit my tongue and shook my head. "Not these particular birds and trees and flowers."

He smiled down at me like an uncle doting on a favorite niece. I frowned at the sight of this too-familiar expression. I wanted him to look at me with love and desire, not fondness. For the past few days, while I recuperated, he'd treated me like a favorite puppy, petting and spoiling me. But he never kissed me or said the silly, fervent things that lovers say. I knew I could change all that, with a little time.

We walked together down into the village. I leaned on Lysander's arm.  I could smell the rich animal scent of him, under the hot sun, and the perspiration on my body too. There was no seawater around me now to cool me and wash the sweat and dirt away. It was one of those little differences I hadn't anticipated, one more thing to get used to.

I kept my eyes open wide. I wanted to drink everything in. In the market square, humans bartered over jugs of wine and olive oil, wedges of cheese, sacks of wheat and barley, the carcasses of octopii and squid, and blue bream staring out at the world with blind, blank dead eyes. I'd never seen so many humans all together in one place. It was overwhelming, but exciting too.

The children ran wild through the dust, screaming as they chased one another. One little boy tugged at my tunic. I bent down to smile at him and try to understand his garbled
words. "He hopes you'll give him something," Lysander said. He grabbed at the child's shoulder. "Go away, boy, and leave us in peace."

"No, wait, Lysander. Let me buy him something. What would he like?"

Lysander rolled his eyes, but he smiled. He slipped a silver disk into my hand. I stared down at the image of Herakles strangling a snake. "Go ahead," Lysander said. "Buy him some figs from that farmer there."