Knives

Seanan McGuire

There’s always another side to the story.

The Little Mermaid is playing at the corner theatre again. Children throng the box office, practically begging for admission. They want to be “part of her world,” dream of being mermaids and go home humming songs their parents have already learned to hate. I envy them a little. They can look at the sea without tears, and even after all these years, it still hurts when I cry.

Crying isn’t all that hurts. Walking is only a numb pain — I’ve learned to live with it — but running is agony and dancing is torture. I’ve always been good at hurting myself. That’s why I go dancing every Friday night, why I hold the hands of strangers and look into unfamiliar eyes, tracing the tidal rise and fall of lust as I try to remind myself what I’m doing here, why I came, and why I stayed. That I came for love, not for pain.

Walt Disney was a clever bastard, and the people who carry on his name and traditions are no different. They tell the same sort of sugar-sweet stories, bleaching the blood from the legends until they’re cookie-cutter flawless, with happy endings for everyone. I’d kill for a happy ending, but there aren’t happy endings here: just children queuing to steal glances at a make-believe kingdom under the sea, and strange men with sweaty palms who step on my feet while telling me what a great dancer I am. That’s what you get here, outside the happy ever afters.

I went to the movies last night, foregoing the usual round of nightclubs and bars for a rarer kind of pain. Just me and The Little Mermaid, alone in a theatre full of crowing children and harried parents. The man at the box office gave me an odd look when I bought my ticket; I guess they don’t trust lone adults attending children’s movies. I don’t care that much. This was my confessional in Technicolor surround-sound, and I’d be damned before I let them tell me no.

Maybe I’m damned already. If you have no soul, where do you go when you die? Back to sea foam and waves, I suppose. Sounds peaceful, if you’re asking me.

Movie theatre floors are sticky ten seconds after they’re installed, waiting to entrap the feet of the unwary. My feet tried to mire me in a miasma of sour soda and fresh pain as I made my way to the front, securing a seat so close to the screen that I had the row to myself. I’d be able to see the whole thing; I had to. It was my gift to her.

Happy anniversary, sweetheart.

The sea king’s daughter wasn’t named Ariel, and her hair was dolphin-gray, not fire-red, but she’d been my idol and my best friend for a long time before the story started. I remember her voice cutting through the waves, and the look in her eyes on the day she sang to her father’s court for the last time, telling them she’d leave the sea forever if it was the only way she’d find love. I’ve never forgiven her for leaving me the way that she did. If she couldn’t find love where she was, she wasn’t really looking … but then, if she’d ever seen what was in front of her, there wouldn’t be a story, just a king’s daughter swimming forever in the open seas, and where’s the tragedy in that? The world needs tragedy. She provided it.

They’ve painted my mother as the villain of the piece. She’d laugh if she knew; maybe she’s laughing now. She may be the one who brought the story out of the sea, handing it to a man who loved fairy tales and telling him that once upon a time, there was a princess in the waves. Mother was always good at hiding herself, at hiding the pain of feet meeting soil, at hiding her anger and fear, even when you tried to confront her with it. Disney tried to make her a monster, but she was only a parent; their sea witch might be evil, but my mother never was. She only gave you what you asked for, even if it wasn’t really what you wanted.

You have to admire Disney for their artistry. The sea-country I remember was nothing like this one; we had no palaces or crab conductors, no seashell brassieres or seahorse courtiers. We lived in an ocean, not an animated dream. Even so, the watery deeps their animators created were close enough to hurt my heart, and the sentiments the denizens of sea whispered as they tried to keep their princess home were ones I wish someone had thought to share with me. “The seaweed is always greener… “ Isn’t that the truth.

I left before the end of the movie. I didn’t want to see them kill my mother’s false double, or see the happy ending they’d fabricated for the mermaid and her prince — does anyone remember his name? Does anyone need to? — as they sailed into the sunset. The real princess didn’t get a happy ending. She got betrayal, and pain, and a death without a grave.

That was all a long, long time ago, and I have no way of knowing if anything remains of the world where I grew up. The rules were always firm. You took one trip to the surface world — just one — on the day you turned a hundred. That’s when you were allowed to rise past the waves into the air and see the things you were denied; the things that we were never meant to need. The sky and the mountains, the ships that floated on the water, and the surface people when they were still alive and unbroken.

They were the biggest mystery of all. Every child had seen the people of the land long before we were grown; their bodies tangled in our kelp beds and littered the ocean floor like shells every time there was a storm. It mystified us. When one of us dies we dissolve into sea-foam and air, leaving nothing but memories behind. Given enough time, even memory fades, and then there’s nothing left at all — but the land people left their bodies behind, like they might change their minds and come back.

Some understood why: the wise ones and sages, the witches of the waves, like my mother. She explained when I was very young, and she told my princess too, because there was no other way. Where one of us went, so did the other; what one of us learned, both had to know.

The children of the sea have immortality if we’re careful, she said; we’re born, we grow up, and there we stay, as constant as the tides, unless some misfortune takes our lives. The surface people are more brittle. They age, and die. But they have souls, and we don’t. It was hard for us to understand what she meant, but we tried. It’s taken me centuries to really understand. That’s why she was the sea witch, I suppose, while I was always just her daughter. It comes to this:

When a human dies he leaves behind a shell, like a two-legged hermit crab, and moves on to something greater. We just dissolve into foam; after all, the immortal have no need for souls, or heavens. Not unless we want to trade our immortality on earth for the chance at having something more; not unless we think our voices are the proper price to pay for our hearts. Not unless we make a bargain.

The way she did.

The princess and I were born within a tide of one another, almost of an age, and some people used to say the sea king was my father too; that he’d come over the wall of my mother’s garden one night and had his way with her. I know she vanished into darker waters for a year, and then came to court with a woven basket of spells on one arm and my infant self cradled in the other. If I had the sea king’s eyes, no one ever said it to his face, and if I was his, he never told me.

I lived beneath the waves for a hundred years and never heard him admit or deny a word; he just kept his sea-born queen a little closer and held his argent-haired heir up for the court to cheer. But he didn’t cast my mother out, or banish her for allowing such gossip to go on. He let her stay and peddle her potions, trading people their dreams for whatever she felt they could afford. Every ruler needs his holy woman, and she was his, bastard babe and all.

The princess was an only child; her sisters are inventions of the land folks. They needed a villain, and my mother was the wisest choice, a dark witch that could bend the power of evil to her will. With mother cast in that role, how could she have a daughter that loved the princess first and best and most of all? I didn’t fit the fairy tale, and so I was left on the cutting room floor, along with my mother’s true motives and the sea king’s bride, replaced by six faceless maids whose only value was the length of their hair. Her story didn’t need me. I won’t pretend not to be bitter; I gave up that kind of pretense about the time I took up dancing.

Everyone knows the story: the journey to the surface world, the shipwreck, the human prince, the rescue. Everyone knows how the sea king’s youngest daughter lost her heart to a man who didn’t know her name and declared her hopeless, forbidden love to her father’s court before begging the sea witch to make her human. Everyone knows. But they don’t know that I was there, hiding in the shadows and listening as my best friend sang to my mother of the things that she desired. They left me out, and so they don’t know that I was with her all along.

Mother couldn’t deny her. That was the sea’s price for the things she could do; she could deny nothing, no matter how cruel, if the person was willing to meet her fee. She set the costs impossibly high, but it never worked. I don’t know why she thought it would work on my princess, who’d never been told no, not even by me. Maybe that’s what killed her. She was so used to getting her own way that even when mother said the transformation would cost her voice — a proclamation so unbelievable that I bit on my knuckles until I tasted blood in the water — she couldn’t believe that maybe, just once, it would be better not to get her way.

The voice is just a tool to the land folk, but beneath the sea, it’s everything. It defines your identity. It’s your beacon to guide you home at night, your means of admission to the coral cities, your one way of identifying friend and foe. She had the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard. I would have followed her over the edge of the world if she’d promised to keep singing as we fell. But she took the bargain, willing to trade all the songs she hadn’t sung for the hope of love.

My mother mixed a potion that was one part poison and two parts passion, singing the terms of the bargain. I wanted to swim until I couldn’t hear anything more, but I was too terrified to move, and her words cut through the fear, telling me what was to come. My best friend was leaving me. She would have legs, human legs, and walk the world like a human girl — but she wouldn’t be human. Not until she made her body a crab’s shell rather than a captive formation of sea-foam.

If her love married her, she’d get part of his soul. Her feet would touch the ground without pain and her tears would be her own, and when she died, she’d go wherever it is the land folks go. She’d move on, like an invisible hermit crab in a sea I couldn’t touch. Until then, every step she took would feel like she was walking on knives — I didn’t know what a knife was then, but I could imagine the pain — and every tear she shed would burn. My mother kept using that word, over and over: tears. I’d never heard it before. The sea folk don’t cry.

There were no guarantees. If he refused her, it would be over. She would never gain a soul, and her body would break up into sea-foam and mist. Worst of all, there was no going back. If she left, she could never return. Change your mind, my mother begged. My princess said nothing. She only held out her hand.

And my mother closed her eyes, offering her a green glass bottle — green as kelp, green as my eyes — filled with a darkwater potion.

And the sea king’s daughter took it.

And she drank.

We may not have souls, but the people of the sea have hearts. If her willingness to gamble her life for love wasn’t proof enough, the feeling in my chest was. I felt like my body would shatter then and there, drifting away with the currents. No one would ever see what became of me, but mother would know. I was a romantic back then, I guess, in a world where romance went out with the evening tide.

I’ve given up on romance these days; there’s more staying power in practicality, while romance boils down to another nervous boy with sweaty hands who can’t see that the grace in my steps is really pain. Walking on knives teaches you to step lightly. I’ve given up on romance, but I’ve never forgotten her eyes, or the way the light went out of them as she drank.

Her fingers twitched at the end, and she moaned, the last sound she ever made. There was no going back; she was bound for her new sea, even if it drowned her.

I jackknifed into the open as I saw her begin a slow descent towards the ocean floor, scales already smoothing into pale, human skin. Mother turned to look at me, hands dangling useless by her sides; she’d known I was there the whole time. I could see it in her eyes. She couldn’t stop my princess, and so she let me listen, hoping I would understand, and forgive her.

But I couldn’t — not yet, not then. I forgave her years ago, crying acid tears into my pillow and wishing she could hold me, but I couldn’t forgive her then. I was young and foolish and afraid, and I was watching my heart slip through my fingers. I turned from her pleading stare and swam as fast as I could, leaving them behind. I still don’t know how mother got her to the surface before she drowned; at the time, I didn’t care. My love was passing from my world into that of her precious mortal prince, and if she wasn’t mine I couldn’t bear to watch her go.

I swam until my fins ached as much as my heart did. Bruised and heartbroken, I wedged myself into a kelp bed and slept, shivering with pain and confusion and a loss I didn’t have a name for. I stayed there three days, until my bruises were almost healed, even though my heart was still bleeding.

Then the ocean began to sing with tales of treachery. The sea king had caught my mother, the one who destroyed his only daughter; she’d be tried for her crimes, and then she’d be killed. How could I have stayed away? No matter what she had done, she was still my mother. So I swam against the tide and came to the sea king’s court, fins flared for battle, ready to fight if I had to.

She was bound to a rock with ropes of braided seaweed, and the king and his court swam around her, murder in their eyes. They’d beaten her. For all their claims of nobility and righteousness, they still used her like a common whore, whipping her until they had to chase the sharks away. She had stopped singing, stopped screaming, stopped doing anything but watching them and waiting to die.

It’s funny now, at a distance. I’ve seen people — men and women alike — looking death in the face. I saw my best friend’s tears just before the dawn wind carried her away. But I’ve never seen anyone face death with the sort of peace mother did. She just watched the sea king, patient through the bloody water, and waited to die. She forgave him. I wish I had her capacity for forgiveness. She treated every action as a manifestation of a person’s nature, and she let it be. Me, I lash out for every slight, real or imagined. That’s what brought me here, to this arid land where souls are bought and sold on every corner and the deaths of princesses become fantasies for children.

I wasn’t thinking of forgiveness that day. I swam into court, demanding her release. I was never much of a singer, but I sang for freedom, and mercy, and love. And the court fell on me as well, pinning me to the sand. Mother just looked at me and shook her head, not singing a note. There was nothing she could do for either of us, or for my poor princess, walking soulless and songless on the shore. We would live or die at the sea king’s command.

He looked at us, and the waters were silent. All he had to do was give the order and we’d be gone, cast back into sea foam forever. He never gave it. He turned instead and swam away, becoming old before my eyes. The court followed. If he didn’t cast the first stone, neither would they; only he had the right to kill.

Mother used the fins on her forearms to saw through the ropes, and she took my hand, leading me through the dark water towards home. I never saw the sea king again.

Whoever my father was, I never knew. But I think my mother loved him; you could see it in her eyes. Maybe it was because of that love that the king of the ocean looked down at the woman who took his daughter and didn’t kill her; maybe the gossips were right when they sang of his coming over my mother’s garden wall on a night when the tides were low and the moon was strange, and maybe once, long and long ago, he loved her, too. She knew love. How could she deny me the same? She knew what my decision would be, and she brewed the potion a full turn of the tides before I came to her and begged for my own banishment.

The cost was less for me, because the risks were higher; to become human, I’d have to win my love and take part of her soul. But the one I followed had no soul unless she won her prince, and if she had him, she’d want no part of me. I paid not with my voice but with the knowledge that I couldn’t win. One way or the other, I would die on land, and that would be the end. My legs were bought with the dearest coin of all. Hope.

Mother pressed the green glass bottle into my left hand and a knife into my right. I looked at her, confused, and she sang me my one chance to come home. If I were to seduce a mortal man — any mortal man — lie with him, kill him, and bathe in his blood, my feet and legs would grow together. If I would swim just once in a darker sea, I could take up my fins again, sadder and wounded, but free. All I had to was murder love. It wasn’t a choice she was allowed to offer, but sometimes the bonds of blood are stronger than the demands of duty, and sometimes even sea witches have to break the rules. She gave me what I thought I wanted, and she gave me a way to come home again, if I had the stomach for it.

I looked at the potion. I looked into my mother’s eyes. And I thought of the girl I loved, even though I still didn’t realize ‘love’ was the word I wanted, alone and voiceless in the world above. And I drank.

The pain of walking, dancing, crying, it’s all nothing. Real pain is having your body split in half as your natural order is undone and replaced with something new and strange. Real pain is when the water in your lungs starts choking you, and your mother takes the bottle from your hand, kisses your lips, and drags you towards the distant surface. I blacked out before we got there.

I woke alone on the shore, my new legs bent at a painful angle underneath me. I sat up, brushing the hair away from my face, and just stared at myself for a while. Even though I’d done it of my own free will, what I saw was almost impossible to accept. I’d done it. I’d traded my scales and my immortality for legs…and for her.

The knife was still clutched in my right hand. The edge looked deadly in the morning light, sharp enough to cleave a tail in two and scrape away the scales without leaving a mark; sharp enough to pierce a heart. The green glass bottle was next to me, but it no longer glowed; empty, it was just another bauble fallen from the surface world — my world — into the sea.

Sitting in the sand, I started to laugh. There was no going back; I was still too innocent to believe that I could ever use the blade mother had given me. No. I made my choice and would live and die with it, mortal, on mortal shores. That was all; it was that simple. I had followed my love to her stranger sea, and I intended to drown there.

Finding her was easy, once I’d adjusted to the pain of walking and the sharp staccato of human speech. Both came naturally, gifted by my mother’s potion; they came with the legs and the inability to breathe underwater. It wasn’t a fair trade. The people of that land took me at face value; when I described my love, the gray-haired woman with no voice, they told me where she was. The prince had taken her to his castle less than a day’s journey away. She was there still.

My green glass bottle was traded for a homespun dress and enough bread to feed me until I reached her; I kept the knife, to keep the village boys from getting any bright ideas, and I went to find my dear one.

The bread was eaten long ago and I lost the dress in some forgotten river, but I’ve never forgotten the bottle. The windowsills in my apartment are covered in green glass bottles just like it. It’s the only material thing I’ve ever regretted losing.

They announced me at the palace as a wanderer from my princess’s country, separated from her in the shipwreck that marooned us. Shipwreck? No. We rode no ships, sailed no oceans to come to this place where lives were the bargaining chips and love was the prize. They brought me to her, saying how wonderful it was that she wasn’t alone, that someone could translate for her and make her wishes understood. They took me for a maid-in-waiting, and in a way, I suppose I was.

The surface world had stolen the certainty from her eyes. She wasn’t a princess here: just a woman without a voice, nothing to worship or obey. She’d never had to deal with a world that didn’t bow to her commands. Her eyes widened when she saw me, and she rushed to my side. My heart leapt, believing she was going to welcome me, until she slapped me across the face. I flinched, realizing what my coming must seem like to her; it had to look like I’d come to take her home or, failing that, to steal her prince for myself. Friendship had no more place in her world. She was nothing but need and fear: need to have her love returned, and fear that it wouldn’t be. The land had gotten through to my princess in a way Mother never could, and she was finally afraid to die. My poor princess. I was probably the only person in the world willing to give her the love she needed so much, and she sent me away.

I bowed, the first tears burning my eyes, and took my leave of that ornate tomb they called a palace. Everything there was dying by inches, and if she wouldn’t have me, I wouldn’t stay. I returned to the village. It wasn’t home, but no place was home, and I’d least I’d be close to her. I’d be there when she changed her mind.

She never did.

The news of the prince’s engagement spread across the land in whispers and shouts. He was marrying the princess of a neighboring country, a studious girl with hair like wheat. The voiceless wraith who haunted his home had made no more impression on his heart than a stone makes on the sea; he would not have her. I should have been there when she heard. I should have held her, and kissed the alien tears from her cheeks, and told her I loved her. I should have offered her a way out; if the knife would work for me, it would work for her. I should have done so many things…but I had already left her, and I wasn’t there. I was in the village, with all the other women of the land, and if anyone remembered that I once had a friend in the palace, they were kind enough not to say.

She came to me on the night of the wedding. The walk from the palace must have been painful beyond words; I was always peasant stock, even in the sea, while she was a princess, unaccustomed to such harsh labor. But she came to me all the same, her feet torn and bleeding, her eyes filled with despair. I was the only person she knew would understand, and so she sought me out at the end of all her dreams.

I offered her the knife. I told her what it would do, that she only needed to kill someone who loved her. And because living on the land had taught me a few things, and I knew now what she was to me, I opened my shirt and placed the tip of the blade just above my heart. Kill me, I said, and you can go home.

She looked at me, and shook her head, and put the knife aside. We walked to the beach hand in hand. She left bloody footprints behind, like a trail of breadcrumbs for the gulls that wheeled overhead. We walked to the edge of the water, and I held her, and when the morning came she melted away like foam, and I was alone.

The fairy tale says she came close to her soul; that she became a spirit of the air, and found salvation. I wish I could believe that. But I saw her eyes as she dissolved, and there was no salvation there.

The years since then have been long. It’s not easy to be ageless in the world of men; I move every ten or fifteen years, severing what ties I’ve made and starting over. I’ve been a dancer and a farmer, a bricklayer and a baker and a hundred other things. I even worked on a fishing boat, where the constant salt spray hid the tears I was shedding for the sea. I guess I hoped that Mother would see me there, and take pity, and offer me another way home. But she never did.

I left Europe and moved to America, where it was easier to hide, easier to be just a little bit outside the norm. Every night I go to the places where single women go, and I smile and flirt and tell myself that it’s just one life. Just one. But the answer is always the same. I came here for love, not death. I came here because I loved her, and because I missed her, and because I wanted to be happy. So I watch, and I wait.

One day, another princess will make the same bargain. One day I’ll hear the news of some voiceless girl cast up on the shore, and I’ll go to her, and I’ll tell her that the sea witch sent me. I’ll press the knife into her hand, and walk away. Let the story play without me; Disney already cut me out, and whether or not she kills her prince is none of my concern. I’ll go down to the shore, walking on knives the whole way, and I’ll walk into the waves, and breathe deeply of the sea that I gave up for an empty-hearted little girl with silver hair and hands that had never done an hour’s honest work. Drowning is supposed to be an easy way to go. I’ll breathe deep.
And I’ll go home.