“Go!” Flounder said, recovering himself.
With a few quick leaps Ariel porpoised herself into much shallower water. Using all her strength she forced herself upright so she was standing on her tail. Then she waved the trident and became a human.
That was it.
That was all.
Her father could have done it years ago. Long before all the terrible things began.
Before she had even met Eric.
He could have turned her into a human for a day, or several days, and let her explore life on land until she tired of it, or became scared, or grew lonely, or missed him.
Once she had met Eric, Triton could have saved her the trouble of selling her voice and her life—and then his life—for the chance to fall in love with the boy. She would have been able to walk on her own two legs, and say things with her own voice, like “I’m the mermaid who saved you. Yep, I know that song, because I wrote it. Let me sing it for you.”
And she could have sung. And they could have fallen in love.
She and her father could have worked out a deal like the Old Gods: Proserpine and Hades and Ceres. She could spend some of her days on land, the rest of her life in the sea. And then everyone would have been—well, if not deliriously happy, then at least satisfied that it was the best they could all work out.
But…the slightly older Ariel added…who knows what really would have happened? The trident’s power rose and fell with the sea and the moon. She could have stayed human for only a few days a month; a week, maybe two at best. Would that have been enough to sustain a relationship?
Would it have turned out that human princes were just as boring as merprinces?
Ariel dismissed the old familiar thoughts and focused on the matter at hand. She scooped the human clothes out of her bag and dragged them on as best she could. They were thick and coarse, and her now-human skin was tenderer than the scales of a mermaid tail. The shoes, crusted with old barnacles she had to scrape off, would have to wait until they had dried out on land for a while. She shook the trident and it changed, shrinking. Its surface glittered even more golden, as though the metal became more refined the more tightly together it was pushed. Finally it was in the palm of her hand and shaped like a comb. Countless tines replaced the initial three, each with a tiny spike on its tip that minutely replicated the barbs. She admired it for half a moment and then slipped it into her hair, above her right ear, wedging it in place among her intricate braids.
Keeping one eye out for the guards and her hands close to the ground in case she slipped, Ariel clumsily made her way through the shallows to a sheltered part of the lagoon. It was like the first walk of a baby sea turtle in reverse: tentative claws in the sand, a burst of warmth from the sun on her face after incubating in the earth for so long. The dragging, terrified walk to the water. The land and sky full of danger and death, the ocean full of safety and warmth. All this was the same; she was just doing it backward.
It was hard thinking things and keeping track of her feet at the same time. Sand felt. Pressure on the skin of her feet felt. The breeze kept whipping away her breaths in little gasps. Salt, which surrounded her normally, dried in white patches on her skin and stung her lips like acid.
She stumbled, pitching forward.
With the will of a queen, she forced, she ordered her left foot out to stop the fall. Tail muscles recently converted to thighs screamed at the strangeness of the motions.
She paused, taking a breath, knowing her body would recover. It wasn’t as if she were walking on iron blades that cut deep into her soles with every step—though that’s what it felt like for a moment. This was beach sand, always described by humans as soft and inviting. If she fell, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
The noise of gulls and guards drifted on the wind to her.
“Stupid bird…”
“Get offa me!”
“RUN!”
But as she rounded the edge of the escarpment that began the sheltered area, everything shut off like a spell: the wind, the sting of the wind on her face, the noise of the guards, the constant feel of the air pushing against her skin. Without realizing it consciously, Ariel wound up in the lagoon with the rounded rock that stuck out of the sea where she had first brought Eric, where the water was warm and slow and shallow.
And it was silent.
Ariel slumped down into the sand and let out a sigh that was almost a sob. She took several deep breaths now that she didn’t have to fight the breeze for them. She closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the sun. Years ago her desire to win Eric had been so strong that she had forgotten all the other reasons she wanted to walk on the land: to feel the sand and the warmth of Helios directly on her skin.