“Exactly. Then she wins the bet, you lose your voice, she gets your dad, she becomes princess, you swim sadly back down to the bottom of the sea…But then you resurface in her life, and you’re Queen of the Sea. You manage to get your voice back. You control storms and the heart of the man she is married to…”
“I do?” Ariel asked with delight.
“I’m just telling a story here. But yes, obviously. You’ve become a queen, a woman with a complicated personality. You have hidden depths and a wisdom and intelligence that all went unnoticed before by an idiot prince whose heart couldn’t listen to anything his ears couldn’t hear.”
Ariel felt a little giddy. “I control storms and the heart of a prince. I like that.” If she were in the sea she would have been swooning, thrashing her tail and spinning in circles until she was dizzy.
Well, as a girl. Not as queen, not where anyone could have seen her.
Eric smiled. “I think my character would have a song about how he’s been caught by a siren and is under her spell.”
Ariel made a face. “I’m not a siren. Trust me. I have cousins…distant cousins…We don’t get along. But what were you saying? About Ursula?”
“Just that everything she did to you and your father didn’t keep you down. You popped up, older, stronger, more powerful than ever. She realizes she didn’t beat you enough last time. Now she wants complete victory, which involves wiping out your home.”
“If she wants complete victory, why not kill my father outright?”
“Well, that’s the thousand-gold-piece question, isn’t it?” Eric said with a frown. “Why bother pretending to ship him off to Ibria—why bother keeping him here at all?”
“She’s up to something,” Ariel agreed. “Something involving him. I feel like I started some sort of chain of events in her mind when I reminded her of my existence.”
“Well, maybe this has something to do with it,” the prince said, pulling out the piece of vellum Vareet had drawn on.
“Oh,” Ariel said, taking it. “What a cute…um…walrus.”
“It’s a bunny,” Eric corrected with great dignity. “You’ve never seen one. Anyway, it’s what’s on the back that’s important. Ursula’s maid risked a lot by letting me ‘discover’ this…”
Ursula’s maid again. Ariel’s heart broke a little when she thought of the girl, remaining silent so the mermaid could sneak out with the necklace unseen. Despite her life being in danger now, she still chose to help Ariel.
The pictures on the back of the strange-feeling vellum were far more disturbing than the weird Dry World creature on the front. There were lines and shapes that looked like they could be runes but shuddered when she tried to look at them too closely. Curves somehow didn’t bend properly on the paper, and constellations of dots made her sick when she studied them, suggesting terrible things.
Ariel shook her head at the blasphemous sigils. “I don’t know what these say for certain. They aren’t mer runes; they’re like a twisted, upside-down version of them. If I had to guess I would say they’re black runes of the Deep Ones. Forbidden, evil…the whole deal.”
“Can you read them at all?”
“This is just a noise, I think,” she said, pointing. “Like ?i ?i. No idea what ‘phtaqn’ means. This here I think refers to a circuex, a powerful spell that is capable of disrupting—or joining—worlds. This looks like the mer word for ‘blood,’ and that looks like a determinative for ‘god.’ Or possibly ‘great’ or ‘lots.’”
“So…”
“So she needs blood, the blood of a god.” Ariel bit her lip, seeing where it was all leading. “Ancient blood flows through my father’s veins…That would explain why she’s keeping him around. She needs him for something, something involving magic. But for what exactly I can’t tell.”
Ariel felt sick as she said the words. She pushed the paper back at him.
“Here, please take this. I don’t enjoy the feel of dead human skin.”
“Dead…？ Human…？” Eric took it back, aghast.
Ariel closed her eyes and rubbed her knuckles into her forehead. “This is all…so…frustrating! We do one thing, and she does another to block it. We think we know what her plans are; it turns out she has something even bigger and sicker in mind. She always has an answer, always has a countermove. And she knows what my weaknesses are—and yours, too. If I didn’t care about my father, if you didn’t care about Grimsby or your people, this would all be over in a flash.”