Page 16 of Whispers Beneath the Deep
“He was a wanted criminal, Maisie. And you are supposed to pretend to be the princess. I am not sure how you got out of these rooms undetected, but I vowed I would keep you safe. That is something I cannot do if you are panting after a criminal like a dogfish.”
My words were cruel, I knew it the moment I said them. But I hadn’t expected that look on her face. The hurt. The way her expression crumpled as if I’d struck her.
There was a long moment of seething silence. Had my point gotten across? I’d hoped so.
But then she spoke, “Is it truly me you care about, Captain? Or yourself?” Before I could inquire as to what she meant by that, she was taking a stroke forward. “See, I don’t think you care about me at all. I could die right now, and I’m sure you wouldn’t even bat an eye.” She took another stroke. “The one mer you truly care about is yourself.” Another stroke until we were almost touching. “You are upset with yourself because you couldn’t keep Princess Odele safe, so you want to blamemefor it. That’s why you hate me so much. You failed your duty to her. You are a failure as a guard and you think you can lock me up, put bars on these windows, have a trail of your sentinels follow me, put my friend at the gallows…” Another stroke forward and our chests bumped together. “But no matter what you do to keep me here, it won’t change the fact thatyourimpudence is what may have killed your precious princess in the first place.”
I grabbed her arms and shook her once, twice, and held her at arm’s length. Fury shot through my every crevice, electrified my every nerve. I wanted to shake her, to scream that it was not true. But every word had pierced my heart, leaving me open and vulnerable, naked before her.
It wasn’t true. Itwasn’t.
My breathing had grown heavy. Hers mirrored my own. She did not look into my eyes with fear at my outburst. Her gaze was challenging. And I would fold.
“Get out,” she demanded. “I don’t want to see you ever again.”
For a moment, as she said those words, my mind betrayed me. For a moment, I didn’t see Maisie in front of me, but Princess Odele, and something inside me broke because of it.
I released her arms, and took a stroke back, putting distance between us. My back bumped against the door.
“I do not want you as my guard.”
I closed my eyes, willing those words to go away. Maybe when I opened them, things would be different, and she would change her mind. When I did, she was still glaring, but her expression was laced with something else. Disappointment.
“Get out.”
My heart cracked in two, but I did not give Maisie a chance to tell me a third time.
I turned, and fled from the room.
Chapter Eleven
Maisie
The doors slammed closed behind the captain’s tail. I could only stare at it numbly at first, before it all gave way to a boiling anger inside my chest. Ever since I’d met the captain, my life had been a riptide wave of chaos. He had tried giving me the illusion of free will when we met, but I realized now that he wouldn’t have let me stay behind. He would have doneanythingfor Princess Odele, even if it meant sacrificing me in her stead. The only reason he’d chased after me in the arena was because the merpeople believed me to be her. Because he wanted to protect her reputation.
Ever since I’d gotten to the palace, he’d been controlling and judging everything I did. I understood why, but he was harsher than most, harsher sometimes than even the queen. They never ceased to remind me who I was and where I came from. That I’d never measure up to the inerrant princess I pretended to be.
And for the first time since I’d come here, I’d found a friend in Elias. Despite everything, my heart knew he was that. We were close. Two poor mer, trying to survive under the tyranny of Thalassar. Two outcasts. Two selected. In a way, I had been selected too.
Then Captain Saber had tried to take away the one friend I had in the whole of Eramaea. Like he wanted me to be miserable. And maybe the princess had been miserable too. Maybe he’d been as controlling and as protective with her as he was being with me. Maybe her parents were just as cruel, too. Maybe that had given her the courage to flee. Someone out there was already trying to kill her, so what was leaving everything behind and starting a new life in the grand scheme of things?
I still had so many secrets to discover.
But first, a nap.
I swam over to the mirror by the rose quartz wall and looked at myself, wincing. I looked like I’d been dragged through the streets of Eramaea. My dress was torn at the hem and covered with speckles of mud and silt. My hair had tangles through it, and it floated in disarray above my head. There were shadows under my wide, red eyes.
Well, silt.
I stripped the clothes off and tossed them by the door. I wasn’t the princess, but I knew that if she came back, she wouldn’t want to set sights on that outfit again. I certainly didn’t want to. I’d lost the crown in that arena of death, and wore no other jewelry, so when I was naked, I swam into the bathing room.
The claw-footed shipwrecked tub looked so inviting. Back at home, I hadn’t had the luxury of one. Back in Lagoona, most of the mer lacked tubs. To bathe, we dumped sand in buckets and scooped out handfuls to scrub our skin and scales with. It was a nice change, to finally experience this lavish life. But at what cost?
I went over to the sea fan shelves and pulled off a couple of jars of pink sand from the shores of two-legger territory. Turning, I uncapped one and bent over to dump the contents into the tub. The grains fell to the bottom. I put down the jars on the floor, and knew that the servants would later refill them. There was a lava seam in the room, located just below the tub, and a lever to release small quantities of heat to warm the contents inside. I pulled it and waited. Once it heated, I accommodated the lever again and then swam into it.
Sinking myself into the sand, I let out a pleasurable sigh, my tail burying beneath the grains. The color was light and warm against my dirty scales. It felt good, not having to scrub off grime and slime from my tail with Lagoona mud. I hadn’t been able to afford anything like this from the market on Finsday, so I’d have to dig up clean mud from the cattail forest that surrounded my home.
Out of every horrible thing the palace had to offer, I had to admit that this was the least horrible of them all.
