Waking Storms (27 page)

“I’m glad it’s you Luce loves, I suppose,” Nausicaa said abruptly. “If she must...” But, Luce saw, her friend’s face was grim and sad as she torqued herself and swam away.

Then Luce was finally alone with Dorian in the star-streaked darkness. The rivulets of snow outlining all the roots above seemed to glow with a vehement diamond shine, blue-white and somehow terribly alert, as if all the world was watching them.

“Oh my God, Luce!” Dorian whispered. “There’s all this serious shit happening, and I
need
to tell you about it, but it’s been ... it’s just been such a crazy night.”

Luce was already in his arms. His hands slid over her body, sensation moved in her skin like breath, and her tail began to thrash. For the first time he reached to pull the band of seaweed away from her breasts, and Luce writhed to press herself against his fingers. The kiss took her like a wave as warm as blood, and she felt as if she were tumbling inside it. Dorian fell back onto the beach, pulling her partway on top of him, and kissed her until her mouth filled with a strange, almost shivering heat.

Whatever it was he had to tell her, Luce didn’t want to know. Not just now.

Dana was awake. She and Violet sat on the floor, their tails coiled around them, eating the mussels that one of the smallest mermaids had thrown through a porthole. The room was entirely dark but they could still see each other. Dana looked moody and didn’t seem to feel like talking. The tide swelled around them, and Violet could hear the skeleton’s head gently knocking on the carpeted floor.

“Do you think—” Violet began, and then stopped abruptly. She was afraid her idea would sound stupid.

Dana had managed to keep up her optimism so well that Violet was shocked to see the desolation in her huge brown eyes. “What now, Vi?”

This didn’t exactly make Violet feel any less self-conscious. “If Luce was in here with us ... I was thinking ... maybe she could control the water well enough to push that bolt up? Even from this side of the door?”

Dana’s lovely face went hard. “I don’t want to talk about
Luce,
Violet.” She glowered off into empty space. “We’re on our own. What’s the point of pretending that anybody’s going to help us?”

Violet was overwhelmed with embarrassment. Her idea was obviously idiotic. It was childish, even pathetic, for her to pretend any escape was possible. She should just keep quiet. “But ... I mean, I know
I’m
a terrible singer and everything...” Violet didn’t know what force was making her keep blathering on this way.
Shut up shut up shut up, Violet.
Now the voice in her head was screaming, and it wasn’t even hers but her stepfather’s. He’d had his own kind of dark magic; that was clear. Violet’s mother had been too enchanted to do anything to protect her children.
Shut up, you little moron, or I swear you’re next!

Dana sighed loudly, and Violet cringed as if Dana might be about to hit her. “What are you going
on
about, Violet? If you actually have some kind of plan, you might want to come out and tell me already.”

“Maybe...” Violet whispered. Why couldn’t she
control
herself? All she was doing was annoying Dana. “You’re such a great singer, Dana. Maybe you could sing the way Luce does? Like, move the water? And if you got good at it...” Violet didn’t finish the sentence, but suddenly to her own amazement she didn’t feel nearly as ashamed of herself. She felt the same awareness of unexpected courage that she’d experienced when she’d stolen the knife for Luce.

Violet looked expectantly at Dana, ready now to argue with her if she refused to try. It wasn’t a stupid idea at
all.
For a few seconds Dana looked impatient, even angry, then Violet watched something shift in the older mermaid’s face. Dana’s eyes got wider, and her full mouth narrowed with concentration.

“Luce
did
say one time that she thought I could do it, too!” Dana exclaimed. She sat up higher, and her eyes flashed with golden intensity. “She said I could learn! I thought she was just embarrassed about being the only one, but maybe ... but she’s not even here to teach us, Violet.” Dana’s excitement was already collapsing. “I don’t know, actually. It’s nice to think it would be possible, but Luce—she doesn’t want to admit it, but probably she just has powers the rest of us don’t.”

“But Dana...” Violet had never felt so strong before. She was even smiling secretly to herself. “Do you remember how Luce sounds? When she sings that way?”

“Pretty much, I guess. It’s kind of a weird sound. It’s really different from her other singing.”

“Try it.”

Dana flashed a skeptical look at Violet, but then she grinned. Some of Dana’s old warmth and hopefulness was coming back, Violet thought, feeling her tail starting to switch a little with enthusiasm. As awful as everything was, Violet suddenly felt a kind of exhilaration that went deeper than mere happiness.

“I guess we’ve got plenty of time on our hands,” Dana admitted. “Okay. Let me get a jolt of that air, and I’ll see if I can get close.” Violet passed Dana the hose and watched her breathe in again and again, a sparkling veil of bubbles racing across her brown eyes. Dana was stalling for time, Violet realized. She was scared of failing, scared of letting them both down.

Finally Dana dropped the hose and sat stiffly with her eyes closed tight. She looked so nervous that Violet glanced around, half imagining a vast and highly critical audience jostling in the corners. Then Dana let out a slow, sustained, velvety note, as soft as summer air.

It was wonderfully beautiful, Violet thought as she listened. So beautiful that her skin shivered and her heart seemed to blossom into flowers with the shapes of castles, with petals curving into high turrets. Dana’s singing was splendid and strange, but the sound she was making was also unmistakably wrong.

Dana opened her eyes, and Violet could see at once that she knew perfectly well how far she’d been from getting the song right. “Not even close,” Dana said sadly, shaking her head. “It’s got to be some kind of magic only Luce has, Violet.”

“But you didn’t—” Violet didn’t want to be rude, but she didn’t want Dana to give up either. “I think Luce sounds a little different than that when she does it. Like, she gets this weird,
smooth
kind of tone...” Violet concentrated on remembering, and Dana stared at her. Violet gestured, a mussel shell still in one hand. “It sounds almost like she’s feeling the water with her voice. Like ... I don’t know how to describe it, but...”

Dana tried again. Her voice was full of rippling magic. It was a living miracle that poured through Violet’s skin, though her mind, dancing with delirious surprise. It just wasn’t the
right
magic. Too bumpy, Violet thought. Pushing too hard. Luce didn’t push; instead she joined her voice to the water,
sympathized
with the water, then coaxed the water to follow the notes as they ran up the scale or leaped skyward. Violet could hear it in her mind so precisely that she almost felt like Luce was there with her after all.

Dana fell silent and flopped back onto the floor, despair plain on her face. “Oh my God, Violet. What if...” Dana didn’t let herself finish the sentence, but still Violet knew what she’d been about to say:
“What if we die here?”

“I think ... I know you’re so much better at singing than I am, and I don’t want to try to tell you, but ... doesn’t Luce sound more like...” Violet let out a tentative note. The timbre was odd and smooth, and Violet could actually feel her voice reaching out to the water, as if her song held the ocean’s hand and they were racing together to a place where no one could ever hurt them again.

Violet wasn’t gripping the mussel shell anymore.

Instead the blue-purple shell was bouncing in place a foot in front of her eyes, supported by a current that definitely hadn’t been there a moment before. The white glow of its mother-of-pearl winked joyfully, and then Dana looked up and saw it, and screamed.

16

Departures

The sea looked very dark around the floating block of milk white ice. The block bobbed and spun with each pulse of the waves, a slick of meltwater gleaming bright blue on its sides. Nausicaa and Luce both stopped to look at it, neither of them speaking. Nausicaa had her usual look of detached curiosity, but Luce felt sick at the sight of the ice, her body buckling at the waist as if she’d just received a blow to the stomach.

It didn’t help that they were at the dining beach and that only one larva, the Inuit one, was still living there. The fairskinned one had vanished the day before and her little blackeyed companion couldn’t seem to stop keening wordlessly as she lay hidden behind a jag of rock. As Luce and Nausicaa arrived at the beach the endless whimpering formed a kind of plaintive harmony running under the sound of the sea. The poor little Inuit larva had probably seen her friend swallowed alive. They’d tried repeatedly to comfort her and brought her oysters, but she refused to eat anything.

Luce and Nausicaa settled in a relatively sheltered spot, leaning back against low crags. Although they’d come there for breakfast Luce didn’t feel like eating, and she got the feeling that Nausicaa didn’t either.

“Luce?” Nausicaa’s voice was unusually gentle. “I will be leaving here. Perhaps today.” Heavy snow felted the beach, vibrant blue in the endless twilight, and the snow-laden trees looked like melting blue candles. It was probably ten o’clock in the morning, but time seemed to blur into meaninglessness in this light, as if the old distinctions of days and hours no longer applied. Nausicaa’s billows of midnight hair appeared even darker than usual, and her greenish bronze face was sad and determined.

Don’t leave me!
Luce thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. Nausicaa would know what Luce was feeling without the words being voiced. They stared at each other in silence for a moment. Luce had known this moment might come sooner or later, but she still couldn’t quite believe that Nausicaa would truly abandon her.

“Come with me,” Nausicaa said in reply to Luce’s unspoken words. “Luce, I do not like to beg, but please. Go and gather your tribe, whoever will agree to come with you. We will lead them away from here together. I cannot escape the feeling that some evil is coming to this place.”

You know I can’t leave Dorian,
Luce thought. She deliberately closed her mind to the possibility that the approaching ice might force her to leave him, at least for a while. In any case the ice wouldn’t get that bad for weeks, and there was no reason to worry about it yet.
Nausicaa, don’t make me choose between Dorian and you!

“Your romance will end, Luce.” Nausicaa’s voice was softer than Luce had ever heard it. “It will be so much better for you if you can accept that, and keep Dorian only as a beloved memory. Come with me, and I will help you found a new tribe. We will live by our own
timay,
breaking Proteus’s thrall, and hunt humans no more. You will be queen in a new way, leading your mermaids on journeys never yet imagined. It will be exactly as you’ve dreamed...”

Luce felt such an overpowering rush of longing that she wondered if Nausicaa was enchanting her. But no: the magic was all in Nausicaa’s words. It was in her promise of a new and passionate life, a life in which the mermaids would finally be truly free to create their own future. Luce looked at the soft gold-green shine trembling on Nausicaa’s skin. Luce understood how urgently her friend wanted to make this vision come true. Together they would certainly succeed, Luce knew, and for an instant she pictured herself fervently kissing Dorian goodbye. His lips devoured hers, and the trickling salt of their merged tears flooded her tongue...

No. It was a horrible idea. She and Dorian
needed
each other.

“Nausicaa...” Luce spoke aloud for the first time. The words stung her mouth, clawed at her throat; how could she keep going? “I
can’t.
You’re my best friend ever in my life, and I’d give almost anything to start a tribe with you, but I can’t leave. And I don’t see why you have to, either!”

The larval mermaid’s whimpering got louder. A long, shrill cry spiraled under the wind. The little creature was maddened by loneliness that nothing would ever heal.

“I have to leave, because—” Nausicaa stopped abruptly. “Ah, Luce. You are very dear to me. I would even call Dorian my true friend now, human or not. And I cannot bear to stay and see you destroyed by your love for him. Already yesterday I could sense that things between you two will not last much longer. However this ends—”

“It’s not
going
to end!” Luce insisted, too loudly. Just because Dorian’s brutalized heart was finally healing, did Nausicaa think he wouldn’t need Luce anymore?

Nausicaa didn’t argue, but the look on her face wasn’t calm at all now. A dark fire seemed to lick and needle at the inside of her skin. She gazed at Luce and then away into distances Luce could hardly imagine, as if centuries were scrolling along the far horizon. It was at least a minute before Nausicaa sighed and turned her stare back toward Luce. Luce could feel the gleam of those eyes entering her mind. She wanted to throw her arms around Nausicaa’s neck and stop her from going, but somehow she couldn’t move.

“I hope you will defy more than the gods,” Nausicaa said at last. “Queen Luce.”

Luce wasn’t sure what Nausicaa meant by that, but she didn’t seem to have enough strength to ask her. There was some kind of awful acrid smoke in her throat where her voice should have been. Nausicaa reached out and stroked Luce’s face.

“I hope you will defy, not only Proteus, but everything I know of the world. Everything I’ve seen in my three thousand years. I hope you will be the one who discovers the strength to make a different choice. Then someday, dearest Luce, I will find you again...”

All Luce could see through her tears were bright webs of blue glow. Her cheek was suddenly cold where Nausicaa’s hand had been, and the icy wind buffeted her shoulders, tossed her short hair. She didn’t hear a splash, but even so she knew that Nausicaa was gone, and gone forever.