Page 23 of Secrets Among the Tides
“How can you be so sure?” the King cut in. He was looking at me. At my hair, at my eyes. I kept my hands clasped near my stomach to avoid fidgeting.
“We cannot be sure of the future, your Majesty. We can only take measures to prevent scandal and invasion from Kappur.”
Both royals stilled at this, turning to look at one another. They silently communicated using nothing but their eyes. Then finally, the Queen turned. She did not look happy as her gaze found mine. She looked murderous. “Fine,” she conceded hatefully. “Let us try this plan Captain Saber suggests. You will keep our secret, girl, and you will be Princess Odele’s doppelgänger for a brief amount of time. Take heed that you do not ruin this or slip up. For if you do…” She smiled, her fingers curling around the arms of her throne. It chilled me to the bone. “…death will be swift.”
~~
THE GUARDS AT THE THRONE ROOM ENTRANCEescorted me quickly and quietly to Princess Odele’s room. Captain Saber stayed behind, as the Queen wanted to have a word with him.
“Escort her to the Princess’s rooms while I speak to the Captain,” she’d sneered.
I was all too eager to swim out and avoid being part ofthatconversation. The Queen looked like a piece of work. They both did, actually. I could only imagine what the Princess had been like and then winced. I was going to have to pretend to be her, for however long it took them to actuallyfindher. It could be months or even a year.
I tried not to let that dark thought loom over me. However long I had, I’d make the most of it and change as much as I could. I was sure of it.
After they escorted me to her room, I swam in and they closed the doors behind me, ordering me to stay where I was. Captain Saber would fetch me later, they said, as if I was a dogfish. Grumbling, I looked around the room, taking in my surroundings with a gasp.
Princess Odele’s bedroom was bigger than Tides’ Tavern and my dinky little house combined. A glorious expanse of a room, I swam through it, aweing at the lavishness of it. It was definitely a room meant for a Princess, I’d give her that.
Her bed was a massive ivory scallop shell with a cushiony middle and bright fat anemones lining the outside of it. She had a line of white and red coral shelves with expensive decorations from dolls, to glass and diamond figurines aligned along it. The walls were polished rose quartz, with images etched into the walls like a tiny maze of sculptures. Her closet was enormous, practically it’s own room piled with hundreds of dresses, jackets and accessories in materials of silk, velvet, gossamer, pearls and diamonds.
A plush anemone carpet was in the middle of the room, their fat fleshy fingers grabbed at me as I swam past it and towards the double glass doors by her bed. I reached for the pearly handles and tried at them, but the doors were locked. I sighed and leaned my face briefly against the blue and green sea glass to peek out at the balcony. Exotic plants swayed from side to side against the current.
Her washroom was a porcelain wonder, with a long claw-footed shipwrecked tub, shells filled with different colored sands and her very own lava seam to help heat her bath. She had two tellies. One in her wash room and another in her bedroom. They were huge things, the floating bubble in the middle depicting images of Eramaean beauty.
I certainly wasn’t in Lagoona anymore.
A part of me wished I was.
The spacious room felt liketoo much, too soon. The walls would carry out my echoes and bring them back to me in incredible loneliness. Had that been why the Princess had left? Had she been lonely surrounded by all these clothes and things?
I swam over to her shelf along one of the walls and ran my fingers across its smooth edges. Trinkets were aligned on this one. Not expensive, sapphire structures and dolls, but these were simpler…mundane. My fingers ran over them. A seashell the size of my thumbnail, a piece of driftwood the size of my forearm, a shark and alligator tooth. My fingers stopped to finger the alligator tooth before roaming across the rest of her things. A two-legger fish hook and leather bound book—the pages already frayed from being beneath the water—a vial full of purple and pink sea glass and a very old and chipped conch shell.
I wondered if she’d collected these things as a child. They were certainly poorer in comparison to everything else, not as eye catching as the blue dolphin figurine, or the glittering diamond necklace on display.
I tore my hand quickly from the shelf. It felt like a violation, to wander through her room and touch her stuff. Even if this was to be my life for the next few weeks, it felt wrong somehow. To go about wearing discarded clothing, to treat her stuff as my own.
I was gripped with the sudden longing to hold my own bag in my hands. To cradle that obsidian blade in my arms and dream up an image of the Black Blade.
Feeling suddenly overwhelmed, I swam quickly to the bedroom doors and wrenched them open to swim out into the hall. I swam without knowing where I was going, as if my problems were snapping at my tail fin but I wasn’t fast enough.
I swam, blind to where I was going.
And I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop until I turned through various hallways and then ran, smack, into a body of solidity.
I jerked back, fanning my fins out at my sides, only to trip and fall hard onto the polished floor. My face flushed as I looked up and found myself staring into the dark eyes of the most beautiful merman I’d ever seen.
He blinked at me, almost as if he was surprised to see me. He probably was. After all, how many peasant mergirls wandered around the palace like maniacs and ran into royalty?
His eyes were slanted and brown, his black hair long, flowing and beautiful, and he was wearing a bright red kimono that swept over his beautiful tail. It was white with bright orange and black spots, resembling that of a koi fish. The mer fanning his sides had similar tails, but were in different colored kimonos of black and white and they were looking at me with open distaste.
My face heating, I got up quickly and swept into the lowest, most dignified bow I could muster. Because floating before me, was Prince Kai Li of Draconi.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Kai
“PRINCESS.” I BLINKED ONCE, TWICE, JUST TO BE SUREmy eyes were not deceiving me. Unfortunately for me, they weren’t and I was really in front of the Princess of Thalassar. She was the last mer in this palace I’d wanted to see. But what I was looking at was indeed surprising.
