As for Carole, she was, with one part of her mind at least, not surprised to see mermaids waiting for her instead of her mother. Though she had felt compelled to investigate the song, she told herself she was more curious than anything and was not as completely taken in by the charm of the music as a mermaid’s usual audience was supposed to be.
The sirens, on the other hand, seemed astounded to see her.
They lolled in the shallows just offshore where the river widened into the sea.
“Why, Cordelia, look!” the green-haired one cried, pointing from her seat atop one hump of a half-submerged, silver-spotted sea serpent. “It’s a little split-tailed child!”
“And a girl child at that.” Her friend, whose hair was light purple, sounded disappointed.
Since the mermaids had stopped singing, Carole was able to swim to shore and greet them while standing on her own two feet. She didn’t think they’d drown her, after what Father had told her, but one never knew.
The first mermaid who’d spoken looked just like the one described in Dad’s song, as a matter of fact. “Hello,” Carole said, not knowing what else to say. “Are there lots of green-haired mermaids or are you Lorelei, the one my father knows?”
“Who’s your father?” the purple-haired one asked. “I told you we never should have let that ship go, sister,” she added to her green-haired companion. “Those men are carrying tales to their children about how easily duped you were, and now here’s one of the little eels come to take advantage of our good nature.”
“What do you mean, come to take advantage?” Carole asked. “I was just minding my own business and you called me, sounding like my mother. I knew it was you because my mother’s in Queenston and Dad tells all about how you sound like other people in the song he sings about him and Mama rescuing the Queen from the wizard.”
“Why, great starfish! Cordelia! Can you believe it? This is Colin Songsmith’s little girl! You can stop puffing up like a blowfish. She’s practically one of us. Why, I’ll bet she came down to the river and told the fish to let us know she was there just so we’d fetch her, didn’t you, sweeting? Let’s look at you. Hmm, quite the young siren, except for your poor split tail and that dingy colored hair. Have you schooled yet? And how is your dear papa?”
“Dad’s fine. And he’s taught me music and Argonian history, and Mum teaches me magical ethics. Princess Pegeen taught me runing and calligraphy when I was just a child.”
“But have you schooled yet? Oh dear, Cordelia, I don’t believe she has.”
“Just like these half-breeds to neglect their children’s education and then set them loose on us so we’ll feel obliged to correct matters. I’ve a good mind to drown her.”
“Don’t be such a jellyfish,” Lorelei snapped, and dived off the sea serpent to swim protectively in front of Carole. “You saw her swim down the river. Any child of Colin’s is mer enough to swim far too well for the likes of us to drown.” Carole was very relieved to hear that. Neither of her parents had ever seemed sure how much she had inherited from each of them. Though Dad liked water very much, Mother’s aversion to it stemmed from a fear that witches could be melted by too much contact with it, as had once happened to an early Brown ancestress. If Lorelei thought Carole could swim well enough to protect herself against mermaids, then that was good enough for Carole. She walked a little closer to the edge of the shore and sat down cross-legged. Lorelei seemed to be the friendliest, so it was of her Carole asked, “I thought you could only sing ships onto the rocks in the ocean? Why did you sing up the river?”
Lorelei laughed a sparkling laugh and shook back her green hair, then looked up at Carole very closely, the way Great-Granny Brown had started doing after her eyes began to fail. “The fish told us, silly! You surely didn’t think you could sing fish out of the river this close to our sea and not have us hear about it?”
“I whistled, actually,” Carole said. Lorelei was so pretty. Her eyes were very big and green, even if they might be a little nearsighted, and Carole wished her own hair was that interesting chartreuse color and thick and straight instead of just plain brown and curly. “Would—would you like to hear?”
“Certainly not!” Cordelia said, slapping her tail against the side of the sea serpent. She wasn’t as beautiful as Lorelei. Her lavender hair didn’t go as well with her fish-belly pale skin and her eyes looked smaller and her mouth tighter. Lorelei didn’t wear anything above her shining tail except strategic locks of hair, but Cordelia wrapped a fishnet dripping with seaweed tightly about her shoulders. “We can’t have all of our fish committing suicide just so you can show off!”
“I wasn’t going to do that one,” Carole protested. “I know lots of others.”
Lorelei flipped a spray of water back at her colleague. “Go ahead, small fry, don’t mind Cordelia. She’s just mad because there haven’t been any fishing boats around to play with since Brazoria started sending them all to the war. And she’s such an old clam I can’t talk her into swimming down to the Gulf where all the fun is. I’d love to hear your song. Whistle me something, do.”
“Lorelei!” Cordelia snapped.
The green-haired siren surface dived and came up facing her. “We have to know what she can do, don’t we?”
“Do we?” Cordelia asked in a tone full of ennui, but she waved her hand that they could continue.
Carole was rather out of the mood to start with, but with Lorelei’s smiling encouragement, soon had a wonderful sand castle constructed by whistling the grains of sand into shape. Of course, she had to concentrate fairly hard to keep the doorways from collapsing or the merlons from drying out and falling over the side of the towers, but out of the corner of her eye she could see the sea serpent undulating gently to her tune and even Cordelia seemed impressed.
“I could put sea shell siding on it too,” Carole said, “But I guess that would be showing off.”
“Oh, no, small fry. We need you to show off. As I was telling my dear sister, we have to know what you can do if we’re to school you with us. It’s going to be hard enough for you with that awful split-tailed birth defect of yours to become a decent siren, but if your other talents are up to it, who knows what—” Suddenly the sea serpent dumped Cordelia unceremoniously into the water and flashed a loop of itself past Carole, up the river channel.
A very familiar scream, cursing in a male voice in a guttural foreign language, and Bronwyn’s voice was crying “By the Rowan!” her family battle cry, were followed by the returning of the no-longer-empty loop of sea monster.
“Don’t worry, Carole!” Bronwyn cried, “We’ll save you!” Which was nonsense since the monster had looped himself twice, so that an extra coil pinned Jack and Bronwyn together with arms at their sides and Bronwyn couldn’t even get her sword free.
“Make him let them go,” Carole begged Lorelei. “They’re friends of mine.”
But Lorelei had dived under when the huge bit of monster lashed past. Nor was Cordelia in sight. Carole whistled sharply and about a league out to sea, the monster’s head snapped up. She began the sand castle song again, easing it into a sedate, relaxed line dance, that caused the beast to uncoil himself and lie out in a line, releasing Jack, Bronwyn, and the boat.
Dragging them ashore, Carole felt unaccountably annoyed. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Saving you,” Bronwyn said.
“I don’t want to be saved. I was just showing my friend Lorelei my magic. She seems to think I could be a pretty good mermaid.”
Offshore, the sea serpent wiggled back into its customary up and down conformation and both mermaids resurfaced, Cordelia resuming her seat on the monster’s back with a little scolding pat of her tail against its sides, while Lorelei did a double flip, dived under and surfaced at Carole’s feet. “That was wonderful, small fry, the way you made Ollie do what you wanted.” She peered with her wide, green stare at Jack and Bronwyn, and with less curiosity at Anastasia, who fluttered down beside them. “What are these?” the mermaid asked. Then, before Carole could answer, pointed at Bronwyn. “That looks familiar.”
“Lorelei,” Carole said with some pride, though she couldn’t have said whether it tickled her more to introduce her cousin the Princess to her new friend the mermaid, or vice versa. “I’d like you to meet Her Highness, Princess Bronwyn Rowan, Crown Princess of Argonia and—er—Jack. The swan is a princess too.”
“Yes, sweeting,” Lorelei barely acknowledged the last introduction with a bored flip of her hand, whose fingers were delicately webbed. “Aren’t they all? Which of you minnows is which, again? You all look alike to me.
“We are,” Bronwyn said. “Exactly alike.”
“Er—what she means is we have a common problem,” Carole explained. “It’s really Bronwyn’s problem, but you see, it’s a patriotic matter.”
“Does she have a father too?” Lorelei asked suddenly, studying Bronwyn more closely. “Bigger, but with coral hair?”
Bronwyn looked pleased. “No, actually I’m the first girl in Argonia to be born of a union between a woman and a cinnamon bear.”
“Never mind her, Lorelei,” Carole practically screamed over her tale-telling cousin. “That’s part of this problem she has. She’s cursed, and Jack and Anastasia the Alluring and I have pledged to help her.”
“Isn’t that cute?” Lorelei said, but she didn’t sound very interested.
“I’d say these rather wreck your plan to school her, don’t they, sister dear?” Cordelia asked, indicating the new arrivals with a wave of her hair comb and a voice suspiciously sweet. “They won’t survive long at sea.”
“No. I suppose not. You wouldn’t mind if we drown them, would you, small fry? It’ll be quicker and more merciful that way. They’ll never feel a thing, but we’ll enjoy it enormously.”
“I should say not!” Carole said. “I told you they’re my friends.”
“But if you’re to school—oh dear, what are we to do with you? We can’t drown you, and we can’t just keep letting mortals go all the time. Cordelia is already furious with me about—” She looked up at Bronwyn again. “About that coral-haired giant and that eel of a wizard.”
She looked imploringly back to Cordelia, who sighed, adjusted her shawl, and dived off the side of the sea serpent to swim over and have a closer look.
“Oh well,” Cordelia said, after her inspection. “She is talented and there aren’t many new ones being hatched. Of course, she’ll have to learn to do things properly. But I suppose since we have Ollie, we can let her keep these as pets. We can moor them at the atoll, though I doubt they’ll like it.”
“You are too charming,” Jack said, with a sweeping bow to both mermaids, “But as the Lady Carole has mentioned, we have a mission to perform on behalf of Her Highness. We could not possibly be persuaded from it…”
But Cordelia had already instructed the sea serpent to return to shore, where it caught Bronwyn up in a coil. Lorelei was smiling at Carole and holding out her hand, singing a little song under her breath. It was such a lovely song. And they were both so beautiful. Somehow she knew from that song that schooling was something marvelous, and she felt she must learn what the mermaids wanted her to know. After all, they were part of her lineage just like witches and she already knew witching. She must school. She had to. Just for a little while. Bronwyn’s curse had waited all her life. It surely could wait a while longer. Slipping dreamily into the waves, she swam towards Lorelei.
* * *
The mermaids’ atoll wouldn’t have been such a bad place to spend time if not for the weather. There was nowhere for any of the humans to shelter from the squalls that gusted across the barren rock and whipped the gray sea whose pounding waters provided the only scenery from horizon to horizon. Anastasia fared a little better, since the crags of the atoll protectively ringed a central blue pool in which the swan could swim, as she did, gliding relentlessly back and forth, back and forth, every morning as soon as her head was out from under her wing. Her chariot, which she had dragged behind her while she rode the sea serpent to the atoll, was moored on one side of the pool. Bronwyn thought it strange that after so many years of being bound to the chariot the swan didn’t gladly abandon it when she had the chance, but she supposed the familiarity coupled with the fact that the boat was now the only thing the swan possessed enhanced Anastasia’s proprietary feelings. But chariot or no chariot, the transformed princess was no happier about being stuck on the atoll than Jack or Bronwyn. Though the pool contained fresh water rather than salt unless inadvertently mingled with unusually high waves, it grew none of the plants of which Anastasia was fond, and she was obliged, as were the rest of them, to subsist on seaweed salad.
Carole felt the cold and wet less than the other humans. All she had to do was mimic the mermaids and submerge to feel comfortable. Cordelia and Lorelei made sure she was submerged a good deal of the time, often with her feet lashed together to teach her, they said, to swim properly instead of kicking. When she’d tried to talk to Bronwyn and Jack, Cordelia had scolded her. “Split-tails haven’t the sense of a piece of driftwood about what’s important. You have a great deal to learn to overcome your handicap and be considered even a freakish kind of mermaid. You really must concentrate on your lessons instead of chattering with these others.”
Carole had looked for a moment as woebegone as Bronwyn and Jack felt, and Bronwyn had hoped that she would start thinking of some plan to get them off the atoll. Maybe Anastasia would mend enough, in a few days, to fly them to land, one at a time, while the mermaids were showing Carole how to scout for ships or taking her on tours of their past conquests, wrecks sunk far beneath the waves.
But that night the weather was fair and when Carole climbed up on the rocks to be with her friends, the mermaids joined them and Lorelei sang to them all and braided pearls in Carole’s hair and the sappy look on her cousin’s face told Bronwyn that if she and Jack left now, Carole wouldn’t accompany them. Not that Bronwyn cared, the way the stupid little witch was acting, but Aunt Maggie wouldn’t like it, and it would be a shame to go through all these perilous adventures and live only to get killed by one’s own aunt when one got home.
But as little as Carole seemed to care about her friends’ welfare, the mermaids resented them anyway. On another of the nights they spent on the atoll, Lorelei asked teasingly, “Won’t you let me drown just the boy? Just to keep my hand in? It’s been ever so long since a ship has come along.”
Carole had jerked away from Lorelei’s comb, giggling, as if she thought the mermaid was joking. “No, silly,” she said, using one of Lorelei’s pet expressions. “Of course you can’t drown him.”
Cordelia, stringing pearls onto her fishnet shawl, tapped her tail impatiently against the rock. “There’s no of course we can’t do anything, small fry. This is our territory and you’re our guest, and I’ll thank you to mind your manners. I’ve a good mind to drown him myself just to teach you a lesson.”
Jack, all the air gone out of him after his first day of seaweed salad and soaking, could only look miserable.
“You do and I won’t let you ever catch any ships again!” Carole said. “I’ll warn them all away, I swear I will!”
“Hmph,” Cordelia said. “Not much chance of that. No ship can resist a siren’s song. You know that.”
“They can if they can’t hear it and they’ll be so busy dancing to my tune I promise you they won’t hear a thing.”
To demonstrate she puckered up and whistled a jig that made the mermaids first pat their hands and slap their tails against the rocks, then dive into the sea and frolic like porpoises, who were diving and frolicking a little further out. Fortunately, the sea serpent was off on some business of his own or he would have been trying to dance too, which would have drenched the island with his waves, making their water too salty to drink.
Jack and Bronwyn shuffled about on the rocks, twirling each other, kicking up gravel and bruising their feet on the stones until one of Bronwyn’s feet happened to bump against her shield. Touching it released her from the spell long enough that she could reach down and grab the shield and Jack at the same time. Relief flooded through her as she and Jack collapsed together on the rocks, glad not to have died dancing.
Lorelei surfaced, her cheeks pink with exertion. Both mermaids managed to hoist themselves onto the rocks, though they were still hand-patting and tail-bobbing most alarmingly, while molting iridescent scales onto the rocks as they writhed rhythmically against them.
“Oh, stop,” Lorelei panted. “Cordelia, puff, do make her stop. I shall drown of all this air if I must do this any longer.”
Cordelia was forced to capitulate and after that, for a time, the mermaids ignored Bronwyn and Jack, though they were rather more severe than before with Carole, insisting that she sing instead of whistle, if she were to be a proper mermaid, and endeavor to learn the bubbling language in which the mermaids spoke to Ollie and the other sea creatures, and master particular songs of calling in those languages.
One day Lorelei undertook to give Carole jiggling lessons. This segment of the witch’s education afforded Jack in particular considerable diversion, since Lorelei felt compelled to do a lot of demonstrating. Carole couldn’t seem to get the hang of it, which was no wonder, since she was not only too young to have the wherewithal to perform the task properly, but was also too strictly brought up to remove her shift, whatever the mermaids did, and so spoiled any small effect she might have been creating. Not even the wet and cold could keep them all from laughing, and that evening dinner was made merrier by the absence of Cordelia.
A moray eel had brought a message that sounded most urgent from a herd of seals, Lorelei explained when she brought the humans their seafood salads, and dear Cordelia had simply had to respond in person. “I know she’s an awful old jellyfish at times, but she’s very conscientious about her stewardship of these waters.”
“Stewardship?” Jack asked, pushing a slimy green strand of seaweed around on the slab of rock in front of him with his dagger. “When you wreck all the boats? That’s an odd term for it.”
Anastasia stopped gliding in the pool to reprimand him. “I am surprised that even a young hooligan such as yourself would lower himself to speak to these—these…”
But Bronwyn, who was glad for a chance to have a general sort of conversation going after almost a week of the swan’s silent belligerent swimming, Jack’s morbid silence, and the mermaids and Carole addressing each other exclusively, encouraged Lorelei to continue. “I suppose you do have a great chore, knowing which ships are the best ones to sink and keeping the waters clear of the wreckage they so inconsiderately leave behind and so on.”
“You’re very smart to see that,” Lorelei said, pleased. “Most mortals just get stuffy about the drowning, and don’t think of the services we perform, livening up the sailors’ dreary lives with a little romantic adventure, keeping navies from getting too large, giving the fish a fair chance to fight back—”
“I suppose it’s being brought up a Princess,” Bronwyn said chattily. “It gives one a larger scope on things.”
“Maybe so,” Lorelei said. “But I swear, no one would believe the things that go on in these waters unless they swam in them every day. You think Ollie’s a monster? You should see some of the abominations that have been growing off the coast of Frostingdung these last few years since the selkies were driven away.”
“I’m sure they’re no scarier than the beasts I’ve routinely faced during my many brave exploits,” Bronwyn began, but Carole swiftly cut in, as she was annoyingly in the habit of doing.
“Do tell us, Lorelei.”
“Some say the seas began to change when Loefwin slew all magic, others say it was not until he brought his Lily Pearl with her mother, Belburga of the pointed teeth and her sister—”
“Belburga?” Anastasia suddenly thrust her head forward. “But how can that be? Surely you are wrong, for there can hardly be two—no, no, not with daughters and pointed teeth. But how confusing! First she is in Little Darlingham selling to my old master the curse which has so cruelly undone Princess Bronwyn, and now you say she is in Frostingdung?”
Bronwyn agreed with the swan. “It’s hard to see how she could have moved without consulting you, when you were only under that glacier for a moment.”
The swan flipped her head, as if shaking off water, and preened in a quick and finicky fashion.
The mermaid gazed at Bronwyn with new interest. “This curse. It’s been mentioned before. What is it?”
“Boils,” Bronwyn said, recalling the Lord Chamberlain’s affliction, the evolution and resolution of which she used to watch with a sort of nauseated fascination. “I break out in horrible boils whenever anyone lays violent hands on me. Hurts like the dickens, and of course they’re contagious as all get out. Big puffy red ones with white cores that go pop and…”
“Ye—ess,” Lorelei said, her cheeks almost as green as her eyes and hair. “I can see where that might be a disadvantage.”
“It’s not just the pain, oh no,” Bronwyn said, warming to her subject. “I’m terribly stoic, so though the pain is excruciating, it is nothing compared with the political disadvantage.” She waited for Lorelei to ask what that might be, but the mermaid wasn’t rising to the bait, so Bronwyn proceeded to enlighten her anyway. “I mean, you can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to build a reputation as a warrior princess, and the first opponent one joins in hand-to-hand combat immediately joins one in breaking out in big sore spots. Naturally, I can hardly find sparring partners any longer. So I simply must get this curse removed as quickly as possible.”
Lorelei touched Carole’s arm urgently. “Come along, minnow. I think we should take a midnight dive. I’ll show you the mer harp, if you wish, and then maybe we might swim out and greet Cordelia coming home. What do you say?”
Carole cast an apologetic look at her friends and turned to dive in after the mermaid.
Jack was shaking with laughter. “Boils! Oh, Princess, that was wonderful! They will not dare try to drown you now. Maybe since we know that it is to Frostingdung we must go to release you from your curse, the fish women will take us there instead, as soon as Lady Carole tires of her swimming lessons.”
The swan let out a long hiss. “Not very likely. Did you not hear what she said about monsters in the waters? I cannot imagine monsters those hussies would fear, but I would not care to face them. We must find some other way to reach Belburga and lift the curse. I feel I am almost healed enough to draw the two of you in the chariot, but the mer creatures can always send their monster to fetch us, and even if they do not and we reach the shores of Frostingdung, there will be those monsters with which to contend. And, pardon me, but it is I who will have my underside exposed to the water. I thank you, no. You must try to find some less dangerous way to alleviate your curse, dear Bronwyn.”
“How about the shield?” Jack asked. “Why don’t you get it to take the curse off? It protected you from the mermaid magic and let us stop dancing while Carole was still jigging the mermaids about.”
“Ah, yes,” Bronwyn said, “But those were big spells, not petty little curses like flaws in my personal integrity. My shield wouldn’t waste its power considering such a trifle.”
Anastasia added, “Besides, a shield would protect one from outer danger, and it seems to me that your curse is very like mine, a part of yourself from which that designed for your exterior protection cannot defend you.”
Bronwyn only sighed.
Though she’d hinted repeatedly at how interested she was in seeing the underwater instruments that had first called to her on the river, Carole was too distracted now to pay close attention to them. Really, this business of being caught in the middle of two sets of friends who disliked one another was getting extremely taxing, more so because the accommodations were not at all what Mother would consider up to par. Though Carole herself found diving deep into the sea, dancing among bright fish, prying into the cargoes of barnacle-encrusted wrecks, and singing and conversing with sea creatures diverting enough to make up for sleeping on jagged rocks and eating nothing but seaweed, she had come to realize that neither Jack nor Bronwyn was able to appreciate the adventure’s educational qualities.
She’d tried to share. Jack had said something about treasure and once she had persuaded Lorelei to let her bring some to the surface to show him, but he had simply held it while asking her if there weren’t some way she could persuade the mermaids to allow them to leave. When she said there wasn’t, he asked if she could kill and deliver a fish or two on the sly, when the mermaids weren’t watching. But by then she had learned to speak fish and was more than a little horrified at his suggestion. Killing river fish had been different. They were stupid and not nearly so attractive as the varicolored species around the atoll.
“Now I suppose you are wondering how we play these without the strings losing their tone in the water,” Lorelei was saying, holding a pearl-encrusted gold harp with her own image carved on the body.
“Umm hmm,” Carole replied automatically. Though the grotto containing the harp and the myriad other valuables the mermaids had acquired during their “salvage operations” was the most splendid place Carole had ever seen, with the water-diffused moonlight shivering mysteriously through it, she only stayed to avoid hurting Lorelei’s feelings. Cordelia knew more important mer lore, and she had explained that mers ruled the sea because they were the original inhabitants of the world and mortal people a dried-out afterthought, an aberration. Since fishermen and serpent hunters killed sea creatures, mers redressed the balance by killing the killers. Logical as that sounded, Carole didn’t like it. She’d fancied a siren’s functions as mainly consisting of swimming, singing, hair-combing and looking fetching. Drowning people had not figured in her plans, but then she had never actually seen Cordelia or Lorelei drown anyone, much less done it herself. She imagined the talk of drowning was just that—talk—the kind of thing people liked to tell to show how fierce and powerful they or their ancestors had been, like Mother going on about Grandma Elspat eating children who came to eat her gingerbread house. Lorelei and Cordelia had surely just been trying to impress her and scare Bronwyn and Jack into behaving. Well, she’d impressed them right back and let them know what she thought of them aiming such shenanigans at her friends. She was pretty sure the stories told about mermaids by other people were nothing but jealous lies because the sirens were so beautiful and fascinating. Of course, there were all those skeletons at the base of the atoll and the wrecks, but ‘then too, these were stormy waters and the atoll was in an awkward place if one happened to be a ship caught out in a storm.
“Minnow, you’re not paying attention to me.” Lorelei pouted. “Cordelia will be cross if I don’t teach you anything today. I thought you’d want to know about the instruments! A girl can expand her range with them so. We called you with them at first to get your attention, so you’d hear our song.” She set the harp down next to a lute made of seashell, a conch horn, and pan pipes made of what looked like the bones of a human hand. The sand swirled up from the bottom when the harp sank into it.
“Lorelei, do you really drown people?” Carole asked, giving the little upward thrust of her shoulders and chest Lorelei and Cordelia had taught her to use to surface instead of kicking her feet, as she’d used to. Lorelei surfaced with her.
“If you’d only be sensible about the boy, I’d be glad to show you, sweeting,” Lorelei said in a worried voice. “I’m sorry about the ships but…”
Carole was about to protest that it was quite all right and not to bother on her account when a wave of the eastern sea roiled slightly higher than the rest, then appreciably higher, until she could make out the undulating loops of Ollie wriggling toward them, gray on a lighter gray sky. She heard him calling before she actually saw him, but he was still half a league away before she could make out his message, and then only imperfectly, since she hadn’t learned all the sea serpent language yet.
But Lorelei did a delighted backflip and splashed back down again. “Oh, goody! How timely! You see how things work out? Just when we most needed a ship, Cordelia’s sighted one.” Her green eyes sparkled in the moonlight as a fond expression crossed her face. “There, didn’t I tell you Cordelia isn’t as hard as she sounds? Instead of wrecking it all by herself, she’s saved it for us. Quickly now, we’re to follow Ollie.”
They met Cordelia just before dawn, the leagues between her and them having been easily spanned by the rhythmic swimming stroke in which the mermaids had tutored Carole.
“I think we’ll send Ollie away for this one and wreck the ship on the atoll, just to give your pets a chance to prove their worth, minnow,” Cordelia said slyly, and dismissed the serpent with one of the ululations one used to speak to him. Carole didn’t know what Cordelia had in mind that Bronwyn and Jack were supposed to do to prove worthy, but somehow she didn’t feel it had anything to do with nursing survivors back to health.
While the ship was still a tiny dot in the distance, the mermaids began casting a mist ahead of them. Carole watched with admiration as they sent it skipping across the waves to ensnare the ship. Mist-making was something she hadn’t been able to do any better than jiggling, and now she could see why Cordelia had been so put out with her failure. The mist was a disguise for both sirens and for the rocks or sea serpent with which they would wreck the ship.
The sirens sang, and Carole rather reluctantly tried the song with them, but she hadn’t yet mastered all of the suggestive intonations that made each listener hear his own particular favorite loved one, so she sort of hummed along with the chorus.
The ship didn’t take much persuasion. It was scarcely enveloped by the mist before it was skating back out again, straight for them, its sails billowing against the lightening sky, its hull winking, bigger and bigger, through the fog, until it loomed over them. A beacon shone from the starboard bow, the side facing them, and floating on the mist Carole could see a black and white flag flying from the mast. As the ship drew nearer still, by lying flat and pushing backwards she could make out the design on the banner, and thought it a funny, gruesome sort of thing to put on a flag, a skull and couple of old bones. Wasn’t that the sign Great-Granny-Brown used to mark the concoctions she made that were poisonous?
This ship was not responding quite the way Cordelia said they did. It was sliding much too eagerly toward them, too quickly and too close. The idea was that the crew would drop everything as soon as they heard the first strains of the song and listen, neglecting to sail their ship and so leaving it prey to the perils the sirens had in store for them. When drawing a ship to a specific peril, one sang for a while to get everyone’s attention, stopped long enough to give the crew a chance to head towards one, then sang again, just so they wouldn’t become rational enough to realize the ship was off course. This ship cut through the water as if it knew exactly where it was going. Carole had been back-treading, wallowing in the waves near the stern while Lorelei and Cordelia continued their song and watched the ship’s quick progress with self-congratulatory smiles. They seemed to be looking forward to whatever happened next too much to notice what Carole saw as inconsistency between the theory and practice of ship beguilement.
With the vessel alongside the sirens, the deck suddenly swarmed with activity. Something was dropped over the railing. It fanned out, dipped down and scooped up the mermaids.
“EEEK!” Lorelei screamed.
“Ollie!” Cordelia cried more coherently, but by now the sea serpent’s leagues-long body would have covered a distance too vast to be spanned by even a siren’s unaided voice.
A chorus of laughter rang from the ship and the mist broke, as if dispelled by the laughter.
A net full of white skin, silvery fishtail, and lavender and green hair all tangled together was hauled up. The mermaids shrieked and rough laughter from on deck answered them. The men tugging the net leaned over the railing, and Carole saw their wicked leering faces. One especially evil-looking specimen wore a ragged black eye patch, which doubled rather than halved the nastiness of his leer. He laughed and hooted louder than all the others.
Carole dived, so they wouldn’t see her, and surfaced near enough to the hull to get a splinter in her knee while she tried to hear what was being said on board. All she heard was the sound of scuffling, the smack of what sounded like heavy fish against wood and once, with an accompanying yelp, against flesh.
Whether or not turnabout was fair play, in this case it just didn’t seem sporting. There were a great many sailors, and rather dreadful ones at that, to judge from the face of the villain she’d seen. For some reason, too, they seemed to have resisted the siren spell. It occurred to Carole that perhaps they were deaf, though who’d be fool enough to hire a shipload of deaf sailors she was too weary to imagine. It wouldn’t hurt to test anyway. She whistled a bit of a reel and listened. Feet scuffled back and forth in a non-musical, routine way, the mermaids continued to shriek apparently unheeded except for the odd guffaw here and there. Otherwise it was just slapping waves, creaking timbers and flapping sails. But though she didn’t seem to be making much of an impression on the sailors, a rope dangling just over her head was going crazy, whisking back and forth like the tail of a cow during peak fly season in time with her tune. Which gave her an idea.
She dove, surfacing far enough away that she could see the whole ship. The net containing Lorelei and Cordelia now bobbed silently from the prow. The mermaids had stopped shrieking and Carole wondered for a moment if they were dead. An isolated sob persuaded her that they were more likely just too demoralized to maintain a vigorous resistance.
Dawn was breaking by now. In spite of the vast and seemingly unmarked sea around her, Carole thought she could find her way back to the atoll. Though many of the mermaids’ best treasures were kept in the grotto at the foot of the atoll, Lorelei and Cordelia were indifferent housekeepers—little caches of jewels and coins, rotting furniture and the wrecks of great ships, were scattered all over the ocean floor like dirty flagons after a party. By diving periodically, she should be able to use these as, well, not landmarks, but points of reference at least. She didn’t want to wreck the ship as the mermaids had planned—now that they were in the net and she was in the sea, she found she didn’t want to do quite a few of the things they’d discussed, like living the rest of her life in the ocean. Not that she knew exactly what it was she did want to do, but she and the others could figure that out once they’d decided what to do with this stupid ship. If a giant sword-wielding princess complete with curse, a giant black swan with a royal background, a chubby junior gypsy, and a mer-witch in training couldn’t extricate themselves and their hostesses from the present situation, perhaps a sea serpent could. If Ollie wasn’t already at the atoll, surely one of the underwater instruments would fetch him in short order.
So she sang to the ship, rather than to the crew. But when the vessel tried to take charge of itself, in response to her spell, the helmsman caught on quickly and struggled for control. His flesh and blood hands were stronger than her little song, at this distance, and the ship was a very big piece of material to try to control. It was smaller than Ollie, of course, but then, Ollie was a living creature.
Very well, if they were taking over the rudder, she could find other material aboard that could use some exercise. Spotting a coil of rope, she trilled a loud, but sinuously serpentine measure at it and it responded as Ollie had done to an almost identical song, uncoiling itself and slinking toward the feet of the nearest man.
Another line, likewise responding to her recreational tone, whipped enthusiastically around the helmsman, who squawked, unheeded by his fellows, and fell down. After that, she could once more do as she liked with the ship, and led it like a stray dog back to the atoll.
The look-out in the crow’s nest was the first one to look close enough to the ship’s hull to see Carole—shortly before he looked far enough from it to see the atoll. Whether or not he was deserting his post by leaping overboard might have been debatable in a naval court-martial, but since his fellows couldn’t hear him, it could have been argued that he meant to warn them by example. Two men on the decks below saw him and dove in after him, and two more saw them and followed suit.
Another one flew past Carole’s nose, dousing her as he crashed into the water, and disappeared.
Jack hailed her from the atoll, waving hugely, and Bronwyn drew her sword. “Aha!” the Princess said, “It seems my cousin has been captured by pirates.”
Jack nodded. “What do you suppose she means to do with them?”
Carole was beckoning frantically to them and pointing to the foundering ship, but neither of them had mer blood and they weren’t about to shed any of the kind they did have trying to swim out and board a potentially hostile pirate ship at that distance.
Another party was less reluctant, however. Ollie’s head surfaced from the far side of the atoll, his front-most portion swaying above the fresh water pond only momentarily before he uncoiled himself, from around the rocky base of the island and zigzagged towards the ship. As the serpent passed, Bronwyn boarded him, and Jack, not to be outdone, followed suit. Anastasia flapped and fluttered uncertainly and hissed incomprehensible advice.
As the serpent encircled the ship, Carole joined her friends on his back and said, panting, “I think if we’re ever going to get out of here, we’d better not let Ollie crush this ship. We have to get the crew to surrender—fast.”
“Never fear, cousin,” Bronwyn said, “Bronwyn the Bold has boarded many a pirate ship. Just let me climb up on the floor and in no time I’ll have them all hanging by ropes from those rod things they have strung up there.”
“Have at it. But I’d mind the ropes, if I were you. They may still be crawling around a bit. My songs sometimes have a rather more lasting effect than I mean for them to.”
“Er—pardon me for asking this,” Jack said politely, “But why are the ropes dancing and the sailors swimming?”
“Because the ropes heard my song, but the sailors didn’t. I think the crew is deaf.”
“Like Grandpa Worthyman when he puts wax plugs in his ears to drown out Grandma Xenobia,” Jack nodded sagely.
“Oh, surely not” Bronwyn agreed, pausing in her climb up loops of serpent to grin down at them.
“It’s certainly possible they plugged their ears,” Carole said. “More likely, I guess, than that they’re all deaf. You’d better check on that while you’re capturing the ship.”
“Jolly. What if they choose to kill us while we are so kindly trying to increase their listening pleasure?” he asked.
“Why do I have to think of everything?” Carole complained. “Just do it, before we’re boarding a pile of splinters. I have to loose Cordelia and Lorelei.”
“Must you?” Bronwyn called down, just before climbing over the rail.
“I don’t think Ollie will mind me if I try to keep him from squashing the ship all by myself.”
The two-person boarding party duly boarded with aplomb more dampened, at least on Jack’s part, by nervousness than by the actual soaking they’d received from the sea, but they soon took to their task. Only two of the entire crew remained on board: the one-eyed peg-legged villain Carole had spotted and a woman clad in an olive woolen cloak.
The patch-eyed pirate grinned at Jack and Bronwyn as though he’d like to eat them and growled to the woman, “We seem to be boarded, Mistress Rusty. Whatever ye think of me mission, ye’d best ’elp me resist these ’ere buccaneers or they’ll be ’avin’ the both of us walkin’ the plank.”
But the lady was already down on one knee, her head bowed, her docile pose broken only by one hand, which reached up to jerk on the pirate’s tattered sash. “Nonsense!” she growled back. “If the Princess Bronwyn wants your leaky tub, I suggest you give it to her without further ado. On your knee, my dear scoundrel. Show your future sovereign a little respect.”
Carole meanwhile was having difficulties of her own. Using her pidgin version of the sea creatures’ language, she persuaded Ollie to refrain from squeezing the ship to smithereens while she freed Cordelia and Lorelei. Scrambling up the serpent’s slithery sides, she managed to raise herself to where she was level with the deck and about two arms’ length away from the knot. Lorelei and Cordelia were quiet. Perhaps they had fainted. She hoped prolonged separation from water hadn’t killed them. But it couldn’t have: The waves dashing against the prow could have kept even a fish of the wholly ocean-breathing kind alive.
She wondered how she was going to sing a knot loose, and wished she had remembered to borrow someone’s knife, though both Bronwyn and Jack would be needing theirs to fight pirates, she supposed. Then she saw just above her head an abandoned cutlass and grabbing it up, sliced the knot holding the net to the ship, dumping the mermaids over the side and into the sea, where she gratefully joined them.