“I haven’t, and never want to. You’re trying to catch sight of a mermaid—is that why you insist on perching like a pelican upon the rails?”
Deneb’s eyes sparkled, as though Izar’s words were an indication of prophetic perception. “Yes,” he whispered.
“In that case, your loyalties seem troublingly confused. The company for which you work is called Ocean Dominion. The ocean and all its inhabitants are ours to dominate. I recommend you erase your tattoo at once—mermaids won’t exist on earth for much longer anyway.”
“Why not?” Deneb asked in an alarmed voice.
“You’ll see soon enough. Now, please try Zaurak and Serpens again.”
7
Absence
How very unseemly of Ecklon to be late to his own engagement party,” said Sepia Selene.
She waved a small, cushiony hand in an attempt to signal a waiter. The rings that adorned each of her fingers clanged against one another, and the flesh of her arm swayed loosely.
Coralline’s gaze roved over the garden of the Elnath Mansion. Much of it was planted with paddle-grass, the stalks shorter than those of other grasses, the leaves bright green. Scarlet bushes of berry wart cress and crimson stalks of siphoned feather grew in bright columns, interspersed with the dreamy, silvery concentric bands of peacock’s tail. The whole garden was hemmed with sea fans, large, lacy sheets of beige and lilac that swayed like fanning servants. The garden was twice the size of the Costaria home.
People glided about smoothly underneath trellises and cloud-like arches erected intermittently among the grasses. Coralline did not recognize most guests; they were friends of her mother and mother-in-law-to-be—strange acquaintances, acquainted strangers, that was how she thought of them. Her heartbeat rose when she caught a sliver of a silver tail, but when the merman turned, she saw it was not Ecklon. She yearned to tell him about her dismissal from The Irregular Remedy—he would understand her devastation; he would console her. But where was he? She rarely found herself agreeing with her mother’s best friend, Sepia, but it was true: It was unseemly of him to be late to his own engagement party.
“You know,” Sepia continued, giving Coralline and Abalone a conspirational look from beneath raised eyebrows, “I cannot help but notice that Rosette Delesse is missing from the party as well.”
An image floated into Coralline’s mind: Rosette and Ecklon tangled in an embrace, her crimson scales against his silver, her red hair draping his chest, her long neck craned up to his. . . . She shook her head so hard at the thought that a periwinkle shell tumbled out of her fishtail braid.
A waiter arrived, bearing a tray. His breast pocket was inscribed with the word Caulerpa; the most expensive restaurant in Urchin Grove was catering her engagement party, Coralline realized with a measure of surprised alarm. It must have been Ecklon’s idea; it would not have been his mother’s. Even simple suppers of colander kelp or velvet horn at Caulerpa cost no less than a slipper limpet—a hefty five carapace.
“I have all four kinds of wine,” the waiter said, gesturing smoothly to the decanters lining the tray he clutched close to his shoulder. “Oval sea grape, bell sea, beaded cushion, and parasol.” The color of each wine he mentioned was a darker green than the previous, in reflection of its greater strength. “Which would you like?”
Sepia picked off a bright-green decanter of oval sea grape wine, Abalone chose a medium-green bell sea wine, and Coralline’s fingers snatched up dark-green parasol wine. She tilted the decanter at her lips; if Ecklon decided to leave her for Rosette, she would need all the bolstering she could get. The sweet, pungent wine stung her throat, leaving a lingering relish.
“Coralline!” Abalone reprimanded. “Mermaids don’t drink parasol wine. And please stop swigging!”
“Yes, Mother.” Coralline took a smaller sip, trying to be daintier.
She looked at the Elnath Mansion, in whose shadow the three of them hovered. Other houses in Urchin Grove were low, rounded, single-story homes, shaped as half-bubbles or sea-biscuits, walls turning smoothly into ceiling; the Elnath home, in contrast, was a wide rectangle looming three stories over the seabed. The walls of other homes were ordinary shale—usually variations of gray but otherwise dull brown, rust, or gray-green; the Elnath Mansion was a stark black shale, the most rare and expensive of the fine-grained laminated sedimentary rocks. In keeping with the hard angles of the structure, the windows were rectangular rather than the usual oval shape, and they had ornate golden borders that looked like portrait frames. Coralline tried to imagine herself looking out at the world from within those frames, but she couldn’t imagine it. She quivered, wishing she could scratch her itchy, sequin-covered back against the wall of the Mansion.
“Coralline has triumphed over Rosette as winner of the marriage mart,” Abalone told Sepia. “She will soon become princess of this palace!”
Coralline cringed. Last year, Sepia’s daughter Telia, as fuchsia-tailed and voluminous as her mother, had married a wiry, low-level legal clerk who worked at the law firm of Ecklon’s father, Erizo Elnath. The law firm, Rights and Justice, started by Ecklon’s great-great-grandfather, was what had made the Elnaths the wealthiest family in the village. In the same way that Erizo’s station was above that of Sepia’s son-in-law, Coralline knew her mother viewed her own station as being above Sepia’s, now that Coralline would soon be Erizo’s daughter-in-law.
“Well, no matter the princess,” Sepia rejoined smoothly, “Epaulette will always be queen of her Mansion—an iron-fisted one.”
Coralline could not help but silently agree.
“My stomach is rumbling for a morsel,” Sepia said, rubbing the expansive area.
“Epaulette really should have hired more waiters,” Abalone said. “We had to wait an era for wine, now we must pine unto infinite for a bite—”
Sepia’s lips parted at the sight of two mermaids who’d just come to hover behind Abalone.
One of them had a silver tail, and her bodice dangled with long, confetti-like crimson-and-white tendrils that resembled the fins of a red lionfish. An elaborate matching headdress of quills crowned her silver bun. It was Ecklon’s mother, Epaulette. The mermaid who accompanied her was also flamboyantly red, but more naturally so, in the form of both her hair and her scales. It was Violacea, Epaulette’s best friend and Rosette’s mother.
Coralline hoped they hadn’t overheard her mother’s complaint; if they had, she hoped they would be polite enough to not mention it.
“I’ll send a waiter to you shortly with plenty of devil’s tongue,” Epaulette said.
Abalone’s amber-gold eyes lowered, and her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. No fault lay with the service, Coralline knew—the truth was that her mother felt inferior in her new environment and wished to conceal it with a ploy of superiority in the form of a complaint.
“We’ve been admiring your garden,” Sepia gushed.
“I’m sure you have,” Epaulette said, but her gaze remained on Abalone.
“Everything seems to grow here,” Sepia continued enthusiastically.
“Everything except coralline algae.”
Coralline felt her face reddening. She sipped her parasol wine; the liquor seeped through her veins like hot steam. Epaulette frowned at the decanter. Her silver-gray eyes then swept over the orange-and-purple sequins swathing Coralline from neck to hip. “What terrible tailorship,” she remarked.