Ariel tried not to look impatient.
“…I’m just a senior house maid, I know!” Carlotta said, seeing her face. “I don’t know about politics and wars and international policy. All I know is that Garhaggio was burned to the ground. By us. By Tirulia! So no more cheese. And there is a conscription for able-bodied boys here. So, I suppose, we can burn down more cheese-making villages that won’t bend the knee to Tirulia. And yet we’re friends with Ibria now? We’ve been on uneasy terms with them for over two hundred years!
“Strange, sneaky-looking men and women roam the castle, and they all have Vanessa’s ear. And yet the princess also thinks everyone is after her. So everyone thinks everyone else is a spy and hopes for a reward by turning his neighbor in. Vanessa is turning the kingdom upside down, and no one trusts anyone else, and we’re nearly at war with everyone around us.
“And you’re back,” Carlotta finished with conviction.
Ariel looked at her sideways. She couldn’t figure out where the maid’s look of satisfaction came from as Carlotta resolutely crossed her arms and nodded like she understood.
The Queen of the Sea started to tilt her head. Yes. I’m back. And…？
“And you’re here to set everything right, aren’t you?”
The mermaid blinked her large aquamarine eyes.
“With Vanessa and Eric and all. You’re going to make things like they were,” Carlotta said, somehow perfectly mixing the utter belief of a five-year-old with the stern voice of an adult who knew Ariel would do the right thing. “You’re going to defeat her, or make Eric fall in love with you, or something. Maybe you’ll make him forget that you and Vanessa ever existed…I don’t know or care about the details, although you did seem like a nice enough girl at one time.”
Ariel put her hands up and started to shake her head.
“Don’t you start with that,” Carlotta said, putting her hand up. “I may not be a scholar or a wisewoman, but it wasn’t until after you showed up the first time that all of this happened. Whatever your role, you had some hand in this, in the destruction of Tirulia and our way of life—and Eric.”
Ariel’s queenliness faltered for a moment at his name. Everything else was just supposition, theory, people who had nothing to do with her. But Eric, that sad, aging sailor on his lonely boat…
Carlotta was right. He was an utterly defeated man.
And despite Ariel’s mix of bitterness and wistfulness about the realm of humans and her misadventures in the Dry World, none of what happened afterward would have happened at all without her interference.
Not that she would take any blame for the chaos Ursula had wrought: the Queen of the Sea would not be held responsible for the evil sea witch’s doings. But the truth was that Ursula would not be there, causing havoc, if it weren’t for Ariel.
The world, both wet and dry, spun for a moment as Ariel thought about this. Although the humans had complete dominance on the planet, although they controlled all land and nature and everything around them, she, a little mermaid, had introduced a foreign element that threatened to utterly destroy the kingdom of Tirulia. Like a single pathogen infecting a coral reef. She wondered how far it would spread if she simply…found her father and left. Would Ursula stop with this one kingdom, or would her mad quest for power and glory continue until she took over all human lands?
Ariel’s plan was to find her father, restore the trident to him, and leave.
Perhaps her plans had to be amended somehow.
She nodded slightly.
Carlotta sighed. “Thank you.”
Somehow the maid intuited the squall that had just risen and dispersed in Ariel’s mind, and seen through her large eyes to a calm decision made underneath.
“And now, were you trying to sneak in the castle for the reasons of this mission?”
Ariel nodded, again, feeling somehow foolish.
Carlotta laughed.
“And did you think doing it in the dress of a long-drowned princess, a visitor to Davy Jones’s locker, would somehow fool us?”
Ariel looked down at her outfit. She now saw the worn shades of blue that striped and stippled the garment in uneven strengths. The strangely frayed hems, threads dried in all positions, used to the freedom of the sea and not to hanging in proper ragged fringes, straight down. The circles and whorls of salt she had thought sparkled so prettily under the sun. Her shoes, decorated with dead barnacles, which had a sad elegance about them.
“You’re seeing it now,” the maid said with a sigh. “And your hair, of course.”