The outline blurred, as if it knew it wasn’t needed anymore.
“AHA!”
The prince couldn’t help calling out in triumph when he whipped his head back, “catching” it.
What was once a tin of stupid Bretlandian cosmetics was now a glass bottle with a cork stuck in the top. There was a little gravel in the bottom and it was filled the rest of the way with cloudy seawater. Sucking at the sides was a hideous thing: oozing and pulpy, with what looked like soft claws and human eyeballs. Yellow, but sentient. Barely.
It blinked at him forlornly.
Eric resisted the urge to throw the thing away from him.
He looked beyond it, back at the vanity. As if the spell had given up entirely, at least half of the cosmetic jars were now similar bottles full of similar slimy things. Emptied of beer or rum or wine, full of seawater and sadness. No two were alike: they were all shades of black and green with four, three, or no appendages. Some had suckers; some had horrid tendrils that they couldn’t seem to control. All had eyes. Some had heads so heavy even the buoyancy of the salt water they were in wasn’t enough to support them, and their faces looked up awkwardly at the prince from their prone positions.
Eric swallowed the bile rising in his stomach.
There were at least a dozen…all prisoners? Transformed merfolk?
It was like her own personal prison. Or a medieval torture chamber.
The prince crouched down to get a better look at the feeble creatures. They turned to follow him with their eyes.
“All right,” he said, clearing his throat. Whatever they looked like, whatever they were, now or before, they were prisoners of an evil witch and he was a good prince. There was protocol. “I promise you, each and every one of you, I will help free you. I’m not sure how to go about doing that right now, I admit. I don’t suppose I could just put you all back…in the ocean?”
There was a flurry of slow but desperate head shakes that was sickening to watch. Some let off little clouds of what he hoped was like squid ink, darkening the water around them.
“All right, all right. Find the king, set him free, defeat the sea witch, then turn you back. Nothing until then,” Eric said with a sigh. “So which one of you is King Triton?”
The large eyes looked at him unblinkingly.
“Any of you? Raise a…flap? A fin? Anyone?” Eric asked.
The one he had first picked up shook its head dolefully and made what looked very much like a shrugging motion with its appendages.
Slowly the rest copied it, shrugging and shaking.
“Oh, boy,” Eric said with a grimace. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”
If a person had been watching, she wouldn’t have seen the obvious transformation of a human to a mermaid. She wouldn’t have been able to believe her eyes, or explain what had happened so quickly in the dusky half light of early evening. It could have been a trick of the light, a curious seal, a strangely shaped piece of driftwood; anything but what it actually was.
Ariel did a couple of rolls and then floated on her back, looking up at the mixed sky of clouds and stars. Everything was quiet. She felt her hair loosen from its braids, yearning to float free in the water as it once did. She took the comb out, and it was a trident once again in her hand—but the braids remained firmly wound.
Half in and half out, she thought, then rolled and submerged herself into the depths. It was slightly slower going this time, what with the burlap sack of apples she dragged along.
Flounder appeared surprisingly quickly; he must have had every undersea eye and electroreceptor keeping watch for her.
“Ariel! You’re back! Do you have him? Is that him—uh, in the sack?”
“No, I failed. Those are apples. But I am back, for a little while.”
Flounder bumped his head against her hand—a safe gesture because no one was around. He didn’t need the world to see that he still enjoyed being petted.
But he wasn’t young anymore, and didn’t miss the meaning below her words.
“You’re going back with the full moon, aren’t you? When the trident is back at its peak power?” he asked, full of disappointment.
“Flounder, I didn’t find him. I need to go back,” she said gently. “But I have a clear path now.”
“Clear path?” he said with a snort. “I can’t wait to hear you say that to Sebastian.”
Ariel smiled. Flounder was one of the very few people who could use that tone with her. He was dead right. Now that she could speak again, she was already using words like a trickster. Clear path. What did that even mean? She had allies, she had a goal. That was all. It wasn’t like a parrotfish had just chomped through a snarled lump of dead coral, revealing a beautiful cave of treasure beyond.