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One living sea legend, Moran, was enough for her. Desdemona came to the surface with difficulty. It was like a counterweight had been attached to her tail. Some force was pulling her down.
Being a mermaid is good and pleasant only as long as you feel weightless in the water. Then the waves carry you forward like a grain of sand. Desdemona tried to regain the feeling of lightness and swam a little. The sea was getting stormier and stormier. It darkened rapidly. Soon it would be night, and she was alone on the open sea, with a scaly tail instead of legs. She wondered if the mermaid packs would mistake her for a tribeswoman if they saw her. So far there were no other mermaids or newts around. Desdemona came upon a log bobbing on the waves and was stunned. It was the same carved figure from the bow of the ship that the magic mirror had shown her that morning.
Up close, the wooden queen appeared beautiful and sinister. The empty eyes seemed cunning for some reason, as did the wooden lips curved in a sneer. Desdemona felt as if she had stumbled upon the corpse of a drowned woman, or worse, a sleeping magical creature. Moran had said something about oceanids being able to harden themselves to escape persecution.
“Are you alive or wooden?” Desdemona touched the exquisitely carved face. Every wooden curl, every prong of the crown was carved so skillfully that the figure seemed asleep. Curious as to which of the queens of Aquilania it was made in honor of? It was not Lilophea. She never became queen of Aquilania because she went to the sea kingdom. Could this wooden queen be a copy of her mother?
“Swim back! To me!”
Desdemona missed the last call. It could have been just an illusion created by the howling of the storm wind.
Suddenly, something pulled her harder to the bottom. Her tail seemed to split. The scales on her chest began to disappear. Desdemona gasped as she realized she was drowning. What a bad time to be a girl again. It would only take her five minutes to swim back to shore.
She tried to grasp the wooden queen, but her fingers only slid across its surface. She seemed to have picked up a splinter. It didn’t matter! Another wave hit her head.
“The Queen is drowning!” squeaked the suddenly awakened ring.
How belatedly it had awakened! All it took was to turn back into a girl to rouse its vigilance.
Something like an octopus limb wrapped around Desdemona’s ankle and pulled her down. And the storm was getting worse. This is the end! Desdemona prepared to drown before her fateful nineteenth birthday, when suddenly someone incredibly strong grabbed her around the waist. He swam up suddenly, just surfaced from the stormy wave and embraced her.
“Hold on!” It was Moran’s voice. It was sweeter than heavenly music in the stormy sea.
How long did it take Moran to swim to her? Was it a minute? How long had it been since the ring had given voice?
Something like a huge kraken was pulling her to the bottom, but as soon as Moran tugged her toward him, the something receded.
“There’s a wooden queen floating in the water,” Desdemona whispered, eagerly snuggling into Moran’s cold chest. “Do you think she called me here?”
“It is surely not her!” Moran turned to the wreck of the ship, which the waves had already carried far away. It’s a wonder it hasn’t sunk yet.
“I just turned into a mermaid! Do you believe me?”
Obviously, no one could believe such a thing, because there was no answer.
As it turned out, Moran didn’t need his hands to swim. He held Desdemona tightly. Only his octopus-like limbs were shoveling water. In a fraction of a minute he reached the shore, but he did not enter the usual way through doors or loggias, but climbed straight up the wall to the window of the king’s bedroom. It seemed to Desdemona that they both flew.
Livia and Bersaba instantly realized they needed to light the fireplace and heat the wine. Moran laid a shivering Desdemona on the bed. She felt light kisses on her neck and lips. They were sweet, but they sent a chill through her.
“Ariana’s warming elixirs have run out today,” Moran whispered, pulling away, “but tomorrow she will fly in and bring new ones. In the meantime, sleep!”
The pearl on the ring mumbled something unhappily, but Desdemona did not listen to it. Her consciousness sank into sleep as into a dark swamp.
Troubadour
Desdemona dreamed that she was lying on her mother’s grave in a quiet, marshy garden near the family crypt. The honeysuckle-covered coffin slab is cracked, and something is swarming underneath it, as if some monster were tearing its way out of the earth and mire. Something is pounding with a clawed claw on the other side of the slab, and she lies on her back and cannot move. She’s wearing a wedding dress. But for some reason it’s purple instead of white. Are there any wedding gowns that are red in color? Or has the dress turned purple from the blood? Her head hurts like hell. That’s because there are many red roses in her hair. These roses are supposed to be jewelry because they blend so well with her blue-black curls, but the flowers have such sharp thorns! These roses were definitely brought by Dodger. Somehow she knows that. If only she could pluck them out of her hair and feel the reassurance that the thorns are gone, but she can’t move an arm or a leg. It’s as if she’s paralyzed by some magical force. And someone standing over the grave had already swung a sickle at her. The smell of roses became suffocating. Desdemona had time to think only that the gilded sickle looked like a month glittering in the sky. And then the sickle sliced her neck. The head, adorned with roses, flew away and rolled across her mother’s grave.
Desdemona awoke in horror and touched her neck. The head seemed to be in place. In the dream, the sensation of being beheaded was painfully real.
Moran wasn’t in her bedroom. Apparently he had left during the night. Desdemona vaguely heard, as she fell asleep, some voices calling for him from the water. It was a whole chorus. Or had she just dreamed it?
Life had turned in such a fantastic way that soon she wouldn’t be able to distinguish dreams from reality, or fairy tales from reality. Moran promised he’d get a visit from a real sea fairy. She wondered what she looks like and what she can do? Desdemona had only read about fairies in fairy tales, but she could guess that seeing a fairy would definitely be much more pleasant than running into a Copycat in the corridors pretending to be someone from her late family.
In the old days the bonfires were blazing even during the day. But this precaution was a thing of the past. Now the king himself was half morgen.
How easily the feud between humans and Morgens was resolved! All it took was to marry a sea king to an Earth princess. Or was it not that simple at all?
The combined offspring of Lilophea and the waterman were more sea than earth. With Moran’s arrival, Aquilania might become merely a colony of his father’s maritime domain.
Desdemona looked out to sea through the opened door of the balcony and shuddered. Was there another bonfire by the shore? She squinted. No, it was a flap of bright red cloth fluttering in the wind, resembling a dancing flame. And the cloth is a shapeless cape over the narrow shoulders of some troubadour composing songs right on the shore. There was something familiar about him. Desdemona listened to his voice and recognized Dodger.
He sat on a boulder at the edge of the surf and sang in all sorts of songs:
“She’s as fresh as a rose,
Like a lily of the valley
Like a pearl of white,
But she loved the beast of the sea.”
The rhyme was lacking, but the meaning was clear. Desdemona sharply slammed the glass doors leading to the balcony. She was queen now and would not let anyone tease her. The crown, by the way, was pressing hard on her forehead, even though it was elegant. She wanted to take it off, but she couldn’t. The crown is a symbol of her power, however flimsy. All major power is in Moran’s hands, or rather in his tentacles. All the lives of the people of Aquilania are now in his hands.
“It took a king to crawl out of the sea to strike fear into the hearts of the people of his state, didn’t it?” Dodger was already here. He easily climbed to the balcony, swung over the railing and silently opened the shutters. A lute dangled from his belt at his shoulder. On one broken string was a live rose.
“This is for you!” The guest caught up, pulled out a flower, and held it out to Desdemona. She did not dare to take it.
“That for the queen just one rose is too modest a gift?” He said sarcastically. “I hear you adore roses.”
“Were you spying on me with Moran?”
It was the kind of conversation he could only overhear under their bedroom. When playing sea chess with Moran, she confessed to him that roses were her favorite flowers.
Dodger didn’t clarify where or what he heard. Maybe his hearing is so sharp that he can pick up all the whispers of the people in the palace from the sea.
“Strange, isn’t it? The king came to take care of his country only to have it flooded. All the souls of those who waited for him here are in danger. They’re about to migrate to the sea.”
“And what if he is not so cruel?” Desdemona did accept the rose and immediately pricked herself on the thorns until she bled. You should be careful, but when you’re with someone whose face you can’t see, you get nervous.
“Nobility is not in the taste of the morgen,” the Dodger gritted his teeth angrily. “I remember being drowned.”
“You must be from the society of those who survived and didn’t drown. They call you the Chosen Ones.”
“Is it the Chosen?” He chuckled softly.
“Are you amused?” Desdemona took offense. He probably considered himself cursed rather than chosen, given his grim appearance. He’s not handsome and he’s definitely not human. The red cloak most likely hides a body disfigured by sea contagion. Dodger might be a leper.
“You’d better go, Moran could return at any moment.” Desdemona decided to get the annoying admirer out of the bedroom as quickly as possible. How come only monsters were attracted to her?
Only fragments of his face could be seen under the Dodger’s hood, but even that was enough to realize that he was ugly.
“You don’t like the way I look. Yes?” He guessed it.
What can she say to that? Desdemona frowned.
“Look!” Dodger handed her a small oval locket with a man’s portrait on it. “Do you like it?”
The portrait was of a green-eyed brown-haired man with sculpted features.
“He is quite handsome,” Desdemona said. “Did you kill him and keep his portrait as a trophy?”
“Is that all you can think of?”
“Well, the most probable version is that you sank his bride, and she wore the medallion with the portrait of the groom on her breast. And now it’s in the hands of a murderer. Or rather, it is in his tentacles. I can’t get a good look at what’s under your sleeves.”
“You are a silly girl!” Dodger took the medallion from her. “This is not my victim. This is me as I was before the sea touched me.”
“You mean you’re human? Was it in the past?”
“Sebastian de Arigo. I was heir to the earl’s plantations. I was a court dandy and a favorite of the ladies. I was duelist and a bully. Everything changed in an instant, as if a magic water mirror had been held up to my face. There was a tournament on the water, a duel with a morgen drilling the bottom of my gondola to make me drown. He started to drown me, and realized he couldn’t. And all those who were in the clutches of the morgens, but didn’t drown, become like me.”
“They are not drowned! There must be a whole sect of you,” Desdemona remembered the silhouettes in red that had performed the ritual in the rain on the day of the coronation. Were they not the same ones who had not drowned? “But why don’t you drown in water like all men?”
“Even the Morgens don’t know that.”
“So you don’t know anything about your current state?”
“I don’t remember much about the day I changed. I only remember that Morgen clung to me during the water tournament, but for some reason he couldn’t drown me. All he could do was brutalize me and make me (whatever epithet the illiterate common people chose) a chosen one! So this curse, it turns out, is called! In the eyes of ordinary people, we are something like an order of monks. But in fact we are just a community of cripples.
“You are mutants, not cripples,” Desdemona corrected timidly. She was becoming more afraid of Dodger by the minute. His eyes glittered so dangerously and menacingly. God forbid she should do anything to provoke his anger!
“If it weren’t for that, I could woo you, give you roses. I could serenade you without frightening you. I had a picturesque estate with orange plantations. I could propose marriage to you and save you from your stepmother’s cruelty. You wouldn’t be queen, but you’d be happy.”
“What if that’s what all Morgens say when they trick girls into going under?”
“Don’t be deceitful, Queen! You can see I’m not a Morgen.”
What is he, then? Is he a freak who escaped from the circus? Or is he a degenerate of an ancient aristocratic family, where endless marriages of cousins have degenerated?”
“I find it hard to believe you were once more human.”
“We who have not drowned are changing.”
“How does that happen?”
“The body deforms, the mind deforms. I am in anger at people and at the morgen.”
“Why is it? Captains and merchants have drowned, entire fleets have been wrecked, and you alone have been spared by the sea. You’re the chosen ones who didn’t drown like my brothers!”
“Look at me!” Dodger opened his robe. “And tell me whether it was better to survive or to drown.”
Desdemona recoiled, glimpsing a black, slimy body with many bifurcated tentacles. There were no legs, only tails of some kind, twisting in a tangle. And she thought it was hard to turn into a mermaid! How could such a creature live? Unlike Moran, he was a full-fledged monster. There was nothing human left in him.
“I know all sorcery,” Dodger admitted, pulling up his cloak. At least it made him look more like a court magician who had disfigured himself with his experiments than a man of the mire. “For example, I can make a mermaid a bipedal girl for a day, but I can’t make myself human again. So you’re doing the right thing by avoiding me. Moran is at least half handsome, I’m ugly from top to toe, I mean to the tip of my tail.”
“What are you trying to get out of me? Why are you hitting on me in the first place?”
“It is to flirt with you,” he corrected. “I’ve still got all the sympathy I used to have for pretty ladies when I was a beau to match them.”
“Do you mean to say that you have not yet killed or dragged down a single woman of the earth?”
“I don’t drown pretty women, if that’s what you mean. And I don’t live on the bottom either. Our society has to huddle in the swampy backwaters of human settlements, like the marshes behind the capital’s hot districts. We’re monsters, but we don’t hurt women.”
That’s not what she saw! The gutted corpse of a woman in the rain with a sickle wouldn’t leave her mind. Was the ritual performed by the very society to which Dodger belonged?
“How long have you been like this?” She began to ask cautiously. “Have you learned all the habits of creatures like you? You said you were becoming embittered. Does that imply acts of cruelty?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Dodger stopped the interrogation. “Ever since the king turned his attention to you, all our plans had to change. We couldn’t let him see you, but he did. There was nothing I could do, even though I was hovering nearby. I found you, but he found you too. Unfortunately, he’s stronger than the rest of us. And his power will eventually bring down the whole kingdom.”
“What makes you think that?”
“What do you think? Will the Morgen stay on earth forever?”
“That’s why he came to the country.”
“No, it’s just convenient for you to think that. Because if it turns out he can’t stay on land forever, you’ll be a burden to him. How do you take a wife who can’t breathe underwater to the sea?”
“They say there are remedies that allow you to breathe at depth for a while.”
“It is not for you! Darunon’s chosen victim is unaffected by them. So how are you going to follow the morgen to the bottom?”
There is a remedy! What seemed like a curse to Desdemona suddenly seemed like a blessing. She was able to turn into a mermaid once, so she could do it again.
“Don’t even think about it,” Dodger guessed her thoughts. “The only way you can become a mermaid forever is if you become a priestess of Darunon. If you reject the sea god, you’ll never be a mermaid again.”
“How did you know I could turn into a mermaid?”
Did he spy on her? Then he’s always hiding somewhere in the palace.
“I can see the signs of transformation in your face,” he admitted. “I’m skilled enough in magic to see them. And if I examine your feet, I’m sure there are scaly growths on your feet.”
He’s right about that! Desdemona swallowed hard. The gorgeous golden crown of rubies and emeralds pressed against her forehead. Its heaviness was symbolic. Being queen was proving to be very hard. Even with a monster husband who could solve most problems with force and magic.
Maybe she’d tell him about the Dodger. And then the insolent double-talk would be over. Only Desdemona was not a snitch. She preferred to keep quiet about her strange acquaintance. But he kept prophesying, scaring her to the point of palpitations.
“If you choose Moran, you can never become a mermaid, and if you become a mermaid, you can never be with Moran again.”
“But that amounts to a dead end. Without becoming a mermaid, I won’t be able to live together with Moran. I’d just suffocate underwater.”
“It’s a vicious circle that can be broken, but I don’t know how.”
