…came a voice…
Her voice.
In the trailing end of a song.
“…up on the land, where my lover walks. But I can only pine from the foamy waves…”
Her voice.
She hadn’t heard her own voice in years.
The day when Ursula first took her payment, it had felt like Ariel’s very soul had been sucked out of her body. The young, silly merthing she was then hadn’t even realized it. Like a ghost she went on with her quest, her desires, intent on her prize, not even realizing she was already dead to the world.
Okay, perhaps it wasn’t quite that dramatic, Queen Ariel corrected herself gently.
But seeing Vanessa wed Eric, and her father killed, and realizing she would never get either man—or her voice—back…a part of her had truly died that day.
And now that witch was using her voice to sing in the bath.
Ariel wouldn’t let the rage that was coursing through her veins control her. She wouldn’t. She was a queen, and queens didn’t lose control. Not for sweat, not for rage.
It was no easy task; like sweat, this kind of anger was a new experience.
She had been sad. She had been melancholy. She had cursed her fate as a voiceless monarch, railing against her lot quietly. Once in a while she had a burst of temper when she wanted to be heard and no one would listen, when people were shouting over her and ignoring her hands, as if because she had no voice she had nothing to say.
This was like nothing she had experienced before. It was like lava, burning through her skin and threatening to consume her whole.
Without thinking she moved toward the direction of the sound.
“…heartless witch of the sea…ha ha!…heartless, heartless indeed, ensorcelling me…”
The air grew moister, but not with the accompanying clouds of steam one expected from a luxuriously royal bath.
“Oh, let him see me for who I am, for without a voice, my face alone must speak for me…”
This was a pretty, wistful aria, but Vanessa let the last note quaver just a little too long, seeing how long she could keep the vibrato going. Then she broke into a peal of laughter that, despite being in Ariel’s voice, sounded nothing like the mermaid.
Ariel pushed the far door open a crack. Some previous king or queen had designed the royal bath to look as dramatic as possible, almost like a stage, perhaps so he or she could soak while members of state gathered around asking for decisions. There was even a sort of viewing balcony or mezzanine that the hall led to, above the bath; this held a few cabinets to store bath-related bric-a-brac and a privacy screen for robing and disrobing—although despite the plentiful storage, Vanessa’s morning clothes were thrown carelessly over a chair. Wide and ostentatious spiral stairs led down to the bathtub itself.
“If I could dance with him but once, I know he would love me…One waltz in the sand; I would be free… I don’t know, it’s really not so great. Not much to write home about. The sand, I mean. It gets positively everywhere and feels nasty in your foldy bits.”
When Vanessa stopped singing and lapsed into her own editorial comments, the cognitive dissonance was almost overwhelming. Ariel’s voice was higher than the sea witch’s and lacked the burrs and tremolos the cecaelia was fond of throwing in when she was being dramatic. Yet still the tone and nuance was all Ursula.
Ariel edged silently out onto the mezzanine and peeped over the side.
Vanessa was clearly enjoying the bath. Her brown hair flowed around her in slippery wet ringlets that very much brought to mind the arms and legs of a squid. Great quantities of bubbles and foam towered over the top of the tub and spilled out onto the floor, slowly dripping down like the slimy egg sac of a moon snail.
Vanessa was splashing and talking to herself and playing in the bath almost like a child. Ariel remembered, with heat, when she had been in that bath, and was introduced to the wonders of foam that wasn’t the just the leavings of dead merfolk. The whole experience had been marvelous and strange. Imagine the humans, kings of the Dry World, keeping bubbles of water around to bathe and play in. There was no equivalent under the sea; no one made “air pools” for fun and cleanliness.
For just a moment—so quickly that Ariel could have dismissed it as a shadow or a trick of the light and bubbles if she didn’t know better—a tentacle snaked out of the water, then quickly back in, like it had forgotten itself for a moment.
Unthinking, Ariel reached for the comb hidden in her hair. True, the trident’s power wouldn’t work on dry land. But she didn’t need its power. With barely a thought to nudge it in the right direction, the comb melted into fluid gold and reformed into something with heft: a three-pronged dagger, deadly and sharp.