A roar of sound woke Syrena, and she opened her eyes to a current so strong she could see it, the movement of the water rushing toward her, scooping her up and carrying her away in its rocketing velocity. For a mile or so the mermaid fought the water, tumbling and scratching in a manner alien to her species. Syrena had lived in the ocean for hundreds of years, and rarely had she felt out of sorts within its waters. It was more like her skin than her home, and she knew all its secrets. It felt like a rogue wave was building on the surface above.
At last Syrena was able to swim out from the current, and she turned back toward her charge, her great tail slamming the waters. Schools of fish divided themselves at the sight of her, giving her space to speed through. She finally came upon the girl hunched over by a bed of giant clams, retching. A pile of half-digested periwinkles sat in the mud by her feet, picked at by small, scavenging fish.
“Gross,” Sophie mumbled, turning away from her mess. When she saw Syrena, she waved her hands wildly through the water. “Did you see all that?”
Syrena shook her head. “No, but a terrible current woke me.”
“You slept through that? You slept through me becoming a shark and biting my grandmother’s head off?” Sophie cracked up, disturbing the mermaid with her cackle. She sounded mad. Syrena surveyed the reef.
“I see nothing,” she said. “Just strange girl and upchucked sea snail. You eat bad mollusk, have bad dreams?”
“Oh yeah, it was a bad dream all right.” Sophie kicked sand onto the periwinkle pile, scattering the tiny fishes. “The worst. I wound up trapped inside a giant fake oyster with my grandmother, who was smoking this endless cigarette, and the oyster was, like, this thing that was trying to steal my talisman so I’d drown, and so I became a shark and bit her head off, and then got freaked out and then she was this, like, sea monster and her whisker hit me, and look—” Sophie turned her cheek to the mermaid. She didn’t know what it looked like, but the throb of it was hot and constant upon her face. Syrena peered at the wound.
“Look like jellyfish sting,” she said. “I see worse.”
“Yeah, well, it was the whiskers of this water dragon or whatever my grandmother was. And it hurt so bad I let out a zawolanie I wasn’t even expecting, and all my shark teeth blew out of my mouth and now my jaw totally hurts. Do I have all my teeth?” She opened her mouth wide for the mermaid.
“Not get too close,” the mermaid put her hands up to stop Sophie’s advance. “Smell pukey, can smell from here. You dream you puke shark teeth, wake up to upchuck?”
“God, Syrena, it was Kishka! You know how crazy and powerful she is. You know she’s out to get me. She was trying to kill me.”
“I know, I know. Shhhhhhhhh.” Syrena made a low hissing noise and reached out and petted Sophie’s head. Sophie was immediately comforted, lulled by the noise and the gentle, electric touch of the mermaid’s fingers on her scalp. The tension that had clenched her body into one too-tight, girl-sized muscle began to relax, but her body was still vibrating with the shock of her zawolanie, her face still stung from her beastly grandmother, and her jaw ached with the effort of shifting from girl teeth to shark teeth to exploded teeth, and then back to girl.
Sophie closed her eyes. “You’re putting me to sleep,” she murmured, drifting in the water like a sea fan.
“You in bit of shock. Too much for you, all of it. My sound good, relaxing sound. Good tones.”
“Mermaid magic,” Sophie said. Syrena laughed.
“Magic just science. Just science not discovered by men in silly jackets yet.”
“No,” Sophie insisted gently. “Mermaids are magic.”
“Humans think so, but stupid. You find new lemur in jungle, you think magic lemur? No. Just a hiding lemur. Mermaids hiding creatures. Natural, like you or lemur, or dolphin. We just secret animal.”
“But you talk about magic, mermaid magic—”
“Ya, but not like you think. All creatures have their magic. Again, is science.”
“So, magic isn’t magic, it’s science?” A conversation that at any other time would have frustrated and confused Sophie was turned into a sweet riddle by the humming of the mermaid and the feel of her head massage.
“Ya, just another thing, like sound, like gravity.”
“Okay,” Sophie said.
“Don’t be so—how to say—bummed out. Magic still what it is, no matter what.”
“I feel like you’re sort of taking the fun out of it,” Sophie said.
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Syrena sounded another tone.
It’s her zawolanie, Sophie thought. Mermaid magic is all zawolanie, they’re zawolanie creatures, hurting and healing with sound.
“I think you maybe traumatized.” Syrena curled her tail around the girl in a rare gesture of sympathy. “And your pretty face hurt now.”
“I think I almost died!” A surge of feeling came up inside her, and Sophie burst into unexpected tears. “She almost took this.” She clutched her talisman, the blue glowing out from between her fingers. “I would have drowned.”
The mermaid considered the talisman, petting her own. “I can breathe fine without talisman.”
“Well, you’re a mermaid.”
“Ya, but you part Odmieńce. You become shark, you can figure to breathe underwater.”
“Don’t ask me,” Syrena shrugged. “But you command the waters, ya? You have them carry you? They do what you ask. Ask them for oxygen.”
“Oh, hey, water, can you give me some oxygen?” Sophie called out into the deep. She paused, yawned. “Hmmm, don’t really see any oxygen coming my way.”
“I believe you do it,” Syrena said simply. “You be brat, fine. But I believe you take oxygen from the water. Is your magic, your science, what you wish to call it.”
And with that, Syrena removed the comfort of her tail from the girl and beat it gently in the waters. “Come now. We must visit Swilkie. We not on—what you call—vacation down here.”
“Yeah, trust me, I know,” Sophie said, already missing Syrena’s soothing touch. “Almost getting murdered by my grandmother in a disgusting oyster shell is not exactly a trip to Disney.”
“What is ‘Disney’?” Syrena asked.
“Oh, god, it’s—it’s too much to explain. It’s like a big fun park kids go on vacation to. Plus they make movies and stuff. Actually, they have a movie about a mermaid—” Sophie stopped talking as some of Syrena’s words about Griet floated through her head. “Oh geez,” she said out loud in a sickened voice.
“Oh, what, they make bad mermaid movie, ya?” Syrena saw the answer in Sophie’s downturned face. “Let me guess,” she said in a hard voice. “They make movie about my sister?”
Sophie nodded. Syrena sighed, releasing a column of shimmering air bubbles, but Sophie could see her face behind it, the sadness visible in her eyes, the lines around her mouth. “Griet even more famous mermaid than me. Griet most famous. The small mermaid, they call her. But Griet not even very little! Griet normal mermaid size. Oh well. That is life. Stories get confused, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by mistake. I know truth of Griet. And I tell the truth to you. So as long as you and me alive, Griet’s truth alive, ya?”
“I guess so,” Sophie said, but at that moment, at the bottom of the sea, still shell-shocked from the run-in with her grandmother, it didn’t seem like enough. To be charged with keeping someone’s story seemed like a big responsibility. And if Sophie couldn’t even handle one person’s story, how was she going to handle saving the world?
“Come on,” Syrena said, jolting Sophie from her worries. “I see my calming spell already going away, your face look like this”—the mermaid arranged her face in a parody of Sophie’s, all bulging eyes and chewed lip. “This whole trip taking too long. You must understand, longer I am away from river, longer the Boginki have chance to destroy it. More mess for me to clean when I return. Not to mention, longer we down here, less time you have in castle, to train.”
“Can’t you train me down here?” Sophie asked. “While we’re swimming?”
The mermaid looked deeply at her charge. “I am training you. I train you in ways you don’t even know. I train your heart. Now, command the waters, and I will continue my story.”
SYRENA AND GRIET held their hands so tightly they thought perhaps they would meld together into an entirely new sea creature. Swimming in unison, each beat of their tails in perfect sync, Griet thought how wonderful it would be if she and her sister did become one, how much stronger they would be in this treacherous sea! Too grown to be eaten by sunfish, they were still at the mercy of sharks and some of the bigger seals. Griet imagined herself and Syrena as a two-headed sea beast, double the tail to smack and swim with and sporting starfish appendages that dropped away when trapped. She shared her dreams with her sister, who laughed, but there was a tinge of sadness to her happiness. They were cut off from their village, alone, and still so young. Their gratitude for each other was tangled up with loneliness for the other mermaids.
“You have to stop dreaming,” Syrena chastised Griet. “We need to find you a weapon, too.”
Syrena had spotted the narwhal horn lodged in the seafloor, its tip driven deep into the sand, the hilt of it unmistakable. Her heart had leapt in her chest. Narwhal horns were rare, and only the bravest of the warrior mermaids carried one. They came to the most powerful mermaids, the ones destined to be leaders of their kind. The narwhal had not swum in the mermaids’ waters for centuries, and so to find a horn was unlikely, a sign that the mermaid was meant for great things.
“Do you know what this means?” Syrena asked her sister breathlessly. Together they studied the hollow, spiraling tusk. It was too long, unwieldy and awkward, but Syrena would master it, she was sure she would. The narwhal tusk was hers, just as surely as if someone had given it to her or left it there, at the tip of Skagerrak Strait, for her and only her to find. The horn was sharp as a sword and almost as long as her tail. Syrena experimented with different ways of clutching it. She swirled around the waters, jabbing and slashing at an imaginary foe. Using her own and Griet’s hair, Syrena wove a long sheath to carry the weapon and slung it across her back. Before the day’s end she had used it to spear a shark that had menaced the mermaids, bringing it down in a bloody heap on the seafloor, its monstrous mouth agape.
Syrena rubbed the edge of a shell on a rock until it was so sharp the edge was nearly translucent. “Do you see?” Syrena showed Griet, who touched the knife gently and still brought away a finger beaded with blood. Syrena butchered the shark, bringing thick cuts of meat back, and the girls had a feast. Afterward Syrena cut a fearsome tooth from the shark’s mouth and wound it into her hair. It flashed there in the ocean’s dark light, both an ornament and a warning.
“I can’t do what you do,” Griet said, still shaken by what she’d seen. How evil the shark had looked, with its small, focused eyes and a mouth so wide the mermaid could have swum right into it. She shuddered. If it hadn’t been for Syrena and her narwhal tusk, Griet knew she’d be lying in the beast’s belly right now. Instead, it was lying in hers. The whole experience had left her queasy.
When she lived in the village, Griet hadn’t needed to be everything. No single mermaid had: each could do what came to her naturally, braiding or singing or helping build houses. Griet didn’t like to fight or hunt, and though she was elegant with the instruments the mermaids built from fish bones and seashells and seal leather and coral, she was not elegant with a weapon. She was clumsy. In the village, it hadn’t mattered. Whatever she couldn’t do, another mermaid could, and they all worked together to have what they required. But here, alone with her sister, the ocean required her to be everything—hunter and butcher and explorer and builder. She looked at her sister with hurt and amazement. “Even if I had a narwhal horn I couldn’t do what you do, Syrena.”
“Well, you can do something,” Syrena insisted. “And you’ve got to have something to defend yourself with. Here.” Syrena handed her sister the knife she’d just fashioned.
Griet handled it gingerly, as if it were not an object but a living thing, an unpredictable eel likely to strike out at her. “I’ll probably only hurt myself with it,” she mumbled, shakily bringing the blade to her long tangles and cutting into one. With nimble fingers she pulled apart the knot, then went to work weaving the strands into a holster to carry it. The knife was so sharp she had to weave it thicker and thicker, as it kept cutting through her knitwork. Griet tied the knife to her waist and looked sheepishly at her sister.
“Great!” Syrena said proudly, and Griet allowed herself a smile. Scavengers had come and surrounded the dead shark in a flickering cloud. It was time for them to move on.
“That was relaxing,” Syrena said, sliding her horn back into its sheath.
“Relaxing!” Griet burst into laughter at her sister. “Only you would find it relaxing to slay a shark!”
Syrena shrugged. “We’re mermaids. We do what needs to be done.”
The pair continued their swim, not quite sure what they were looking for. Were they meant to find a hiding place and remain there, alone? Would the elders come for them when the war was over? How would they know when it was safe to return home? They coasted through the strait, dining on cod so plentiful all they needed was to stretch out their hands and grab them.
Eventually the Skagerrak released the mermaids into Kattegat Bay, and slowly the channel began to narrow. With the land closing in, the mermaids became nervous. Were they swimming down a dead end? With land came humans, and mermaids did not like to be so close to their settlements. But the pair had already swum so long and so hard. The thought of turning back was exhausting. And so the sisters pressed forward. Soon the roof of their world, the water’s surface, grew very close. Though perhaps it was deep to humans, the bay was shallow to mermaids, and the sisters lay on their backs, floating, gazing upward. The sun warmed the water of the bay and they felt the chill leaving their skin.
“Perhaps we should peek?” Griet suggested. “Gather where it is we are?”
Syrena nodded. Her narwhal tusk was still lashed to her back, and she placed a hand on it absently, a new habit. With her other hand she reached out for Griet, and with the slightest fluttering of their tails, the mermaids rose until their heads broke the surface.
They were shocked to see how close the land was, and that among the scattered rocks and lush greenery there were tiny, colorful houses. Human houses. Fishing boats bobbed in the distance, their sails puckering in the light wind. Enchantment lit up Griet’s face. She’d never seen a human settlement, and she certainly hadn’t expected it to be so like a mermaid village. The scale of the houses, the way they sat alongside each other—it swelled her heart with longing for her own home. Without thinking, she began to swim toward the rocky shore.
“Griet!” Syrena gasped. “Don’t!”
“Just a little closer. Look at the colors!” A mermaid village was beautiful in its own way, fashioned of the pale shells and bones of sea creatures, furred here and there with a neon burst of algae, but mostly it was a pale and fragile construction. These little houses were boldly colored, red as shark blood and yellow as the sun, blue as the sea! Colors that looked so different outside the waters that it was as if Griet had never seen them before.
Syrena followed her sister with darkness in her heart. It was true that the settlement was charming, but Syrena could not help but be wary of the humans that dwelled there. Humans had rarely shown mermaids kindness. Their once-friendly exchanges had happened so long ago they seemed to Syrena nothing more than fairy stories. It was because of the humans that the sisters were here, lost and alone, bobbing in a bay far from their home sea. Syrena unsheathed her tusk and kept it at the ready as she paddled through the shallow waters, joining Griet at the banks.
Griet clutched at the rocks with her hands, her pearly fingertips shining in the light. Her smile was so wide Syrena couldn’t even see her fangs; they blended in with the rest of her teeth. The tip of her baleen poked out from under her lip.
“Oh, don’t you wish you could go there!” It wasn’t a question, it was pure desire. Griet didn’t even turn to her sister to see what Syrena thought; she tilted her head back to the mild sun, enjoying its rays on her bluish-white skin. Her nose flared as she inhaled the special smell of the place—the salt in the water as it dried upon the rocks, the sea plants lying stiff on the shore, kicked up by the tides. Griet reached as far as she could and plucked one from the land, brought it to her mouth with a crunch.
“Awwwwwwhhf!” She mumbled a loud, happy sound, her mouth full of seaweed. “Taste this!” she thrust it to her sister. “Have you ever tasted something like this before?”
Reluctantly, Syrena took the food. No, she hadn’t ever tasted anything like it before. The heat of the sun and the dryness of the air had transformed the plant to something altogether different than it was underwater. The salt of the bay had crystallized upon it, and it crunched pleasingly between her teeth.
“When we get back to the village, I’m going to make this!” Griet cried, inspired. “We can find a rock and leave the plant in the sun! The others will love it!”
The mention of the village and the thought of feeding the others made both mermaids quiet with sadness. But as Syrena’s thoughts drifted homeward, Griet tipped her head back and continued sniffing the air as if sampling food from a banquet.
“I can smell the pines over there,” she said, pointing toward the cluster of deep green trees far back on the shore. “And the wood the people used for their homes. And the wood they burn, that dark smoke leaving their homes.” She closed her eyes and kept breathing. And that was why she didn’t see the man approaching the shore, why she was so startled to find her sister with her narwhal horn drawn as if to strike.