“You would drown under the sea.”
“I’m drowning up here. I’ve been drowning. For years. Under water, it felt like. Now that I’m waking up, of course it makes sense that you would come. And…end it.”
Ariel had a brief flash of where some of his thoughts were heading: to sirens who sang their lovers to their deaths, the human men and women still ecstatic even as their lungs filled with salt water.
“Ah, no,” she said. “That’s a little…morbid. I’m not—it’s not like that.”
They were both silent for a moment.
Suddenly Eric was touching the back of his head again in awkwardness and embarrassment. But there was a lightness to his movements now, an energy that seemed new. A youthfulness.
“I’m sorry, yes, that was Mad Prince Eric speaking,” he said with a laugh. “The Melancholy Prince. It’s a bit of a role, I’m afraid. To keep me as sane as I am. This is all very strange. I can’t believe it’s real. That my opera was real…but I knew it was real, somehow. But…was it exactly like I recalled? Did it all really…happen exactly that way?”
“I didn’t actually see the performance myself. I heard about it secondhand, from a seagull who saw it.”
“A seagull?” Eric asked, startled. “Like—a seagull. Like one of those birds flying around up above us right now? One of those…many…birds…”
He frowned. There were at least a half dozen of them circling silently directly overhead. Eerily.
“They’re keeping an eye on me,” Ariel explained. “Making sure I’m all right.”
“Of course they are,” Eric said, nodding absently. “Protective seagulls. Why not. So—wait.” He turned back to her. “Is this the story? Because this is how it goes in my opera: You really are a mermaid. You really did trade your voice to come up on land. And it was because you had…you had fallen in love with me?”
He said the words carefully, trying to sound like an adult while sounding more like a child terrified of being disappointed.
Ariel closed her eyes. When put that way, it sounded really epic, the stuff of legends—or painfully stupid. Not just the folly of youth.
“I…always wanted to go on land, to see what it was like to be human.” She reached out and touched the Dry World planks of the wrecked boat, the whispery traces left by human hands on its shape, the nails made of iron forged in fires that glowed without the help of undersea lava. “I collected things that I found, that had fallen to the bottom of the sea from ships. I really…I really had quite the collection. I was fascinated with all these things—some of which I still have no name for, the things you people make. And then, one day, I found you.
“There was a storm, and a ship. I think most of the crew died. But I managed to save you and take you to shore. You were so…handsome and strange.”
“Strange?” he asked in surprise.
She laughed softly. “You had two legs, silly. And no fins. Strange.”
“Right. Of course. Strange from a mermaid’s perspective,” he said quickly.
“‘From a mermaid’s perspective…’ Yes. Anyway, I’ll skip the more complicated parts, about my father, and other things that happened. Suffice it to say I made a bargain with Ursula the sea witch that if I couldn’t make you fall in love with me in three days, she would keep my voice forever—and me, as her prisoner.”
“Three days? That seems rather short. To make someone fall in love with you, I mean.”
“I’m a mermaid,” Ariel reminded him. “For thousands of years you people have been falling in love with us at first sight, immediately and forever upon hearing our songs. I didn’t think it would be a problem.”
“But you weren’t a mermaid. You were a human.”
“Yes, and I had no voice, which made things even harder than I imagined,” she said bitterly. “But, I suppose, just as hard as Ursula hoped. I also suspect she had her hand in little incidents that went wrong along the way.”
“So I was looking for the beautiful mermaid who sang me awake,” Eric mused, thinking back on the time. “And all the while she was right there before me.”
“YES.”
Ariel said it a little louder, a little more fiercely than she had meant. Her eyes blazed.
Eric looked at her, surprised.
“You had legs,” he pointed out.
“I had the same face and hair, Eric,” she said, using his name for the first time.