Vareet’s face was carefully neutral. She showed him her pictures: standard five-legged horses, unrecognizable human-monster things, squiggly grass—all the sorts of figures children normally drew.
What she was drawing on was remarkable, however: strange vellum, whose tactile surface was almost unpleasant to touch. As Eric looked at the pictures and tried to figure out what to say, Vareet impatiently turned them over so he could see the back.
On that side were runes—but not by a child’s hand, as outlandish as they were. It was definitely some sort of written language.
“Oh…are these Vanessa’s?” Eric whispered. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
The little girl said nothing, just quickly gathered up the rest of her drawings and prepared to go.
“I’m just going to hold on to this for a while,” the prince said of the one he still held. He would show it to Ariel, to see if she could make head or tail of the writing. “I really like the way you made the horse’s neck. It almost looks like it’s…really…moving.”
“It’s a bunny,” Vareet snapped. Then she skipped off, exasperated.
The prince gave a wry laugh. Mad Prince Eric, indeed, who had secret friends in butlers and maids—but also in seagulls and little girls, and who could understand neither.
As the tide turned she surfaced on the north side of town, on an isolated beach. Sheltered from the sea by grass and the mainland by sand dunes fringed with scrub, it wasn’t only perfectly hidden from the castle and its spies; it was also the perfect place to raise baby seagulls, and to tend to older ones.
She hadn’t seen Scuttle in a while.
But as soon as the mermaid emerged from the water she saw something strange was up. The gulls were screeching even more loudly than usual, wheeling and crying and diving so furiously she couldn’t understand what they were saying. She shaded her eyes against the sky and scanned the bright edge of the dune for her friend.
“Scuttle?” she called.
“Ariel! Look, everyone, it’s my friend Ariel!”
An inelegant but enthusiastic tumbling mess of a bird thrust his body over the edge of the dune, letting gravity drag him toward her, opening and closing his wings in more of a controlled fall than an actual flight. The sand was soft and Scuttle wasn’t going that fast; Ariel wasn’t too concerned. When he finally came to a stop, she knelt down to stroke his head—pulling her hand back at the last moment when she saw several fish tails sticking out of his beak.
“Sorry,” he said, smacking them back in and down his gullet. “Sorry, Ariel. But they were already dead. But I don’t like you seeing that.”
“Uh, thanks.”
“Jona—she’s a first-rate great-grandgull, that one. She’s been bringing me a feast. Everyone else was just stuffing their own gullets. Not her. She thought of her great-grandfather first.” He preened his chest feathers and wings to remove any lingering fishy oil. “What’s up? You got a lead you need me to check out, or something?”
“No, I just came here to see how you were doing.” She scratched him under his chin, but was distracted by his words.
“Awww, that’s great, Ariel. That’s really nice. I appreciate that.”
“Scuttle, what ‘feast’？ What are the gulls ‘stuffing their gullets’ with? What’s going on?”
“Oh, you don’t know? All the fishing humans are going crazy! Worse than us, if you can believe it! At least that’s what they say. Piles of fish for the taking.”
Ariel took this in, trying to figure out what it meant. Piles of dead fish? That seemed unusual, even for humans. Surely with everything else going on with Ursula, it wasn’t a coincidence.
“What are they—I mean, the humans—doing with the piles?”
“I dunno. Not guarding them very well, I gotta say. You getting any closer to finding your dad? Jona told me all about the carriage and Ursula and everything.”
“Nothing yet,” Ariel said slowly. “I think I want to go see what’s going on before I meet Eric. Where is Jona? I’d like to get her help.”
Scuttle turned over his shoulder and squawked. Someone else squawked back.
“My boy here says he saw her out over the water—away from the docks. I’ll bet she was looking for you.”
“All right—if I miss her and she comes back here, tell her to meet me back in town.”
“Will do, Ariel,” Scuttle said, giving her a salute. She turned to go. “And…Ariel? Thanks for…thanks for just coming to visit. Not just ’cause you’re the Queen of the Sea and all important and everything. I missed you, Ariel. It was hard…those years…when you didn’t come to the surface anymore. I mean, I completely understand why. You had every reason. But…I still missed you.”