Like the art she liked, Ascella’s personality was abstract, artificial, and Izar had created an artificial version of himself for her, with his pressed suits and polished shoes, with their extravagant dinners at Yacht. It was not Ascella’s fault but his own—artifice had marked his intentions from the beginning with her. He had sought a future with her in order to escape his past as a scarred orphan raised in a storage closet. That was what he’d most loved about her, he saw now—the idea of escaping his past through a future with her.
A strand of hair strayed over Coralline’s cheek. He twirled it around his finger—it was as soft and plush as a silk thread.
17
The Doom of Desmarestia
Coralline’s eyes opened leisurely. She turned around in bed to glance at the settee—Izar was not there. She sat up and looked about; from a snatch of indigo, she saw that his long form was sprawled on the mauve rug. She breathed a sigh of relief. Somehow, it brought her a sense of safety to see him there, in the room with her. Slipping off her blanket, she crept out of bed. She swept past him to a window and peered out over the town center of Rainbow Wrack.
Places have their own character just like people, she had read somewhere once but failed to understand before now. Her home village of Urchin Grove was, if she considered it objectively, a yawn inducer, as Pavonis often suggested. Purple Claw, the first settlement they’d visited on the Elixir Expedition, had appeared to have a similarly slow pace of life. Hog’s Bristle, meanwhile, could be considered a gangster town, with all its loiterers. Rainbow Wrack, in contrast, was picturesque and pretty, with homes and hotels built in pastel shades of shale. Coralline smiled to see an elderly couple swim past her window, hand in hand. She and Ecklon would be like that one day.
Coralline swam out the window. Pavonis had told her he’d come find her somewhere in the town center sometime in the morning. (Yesterday evening, he’d unceremoniously dumped Altair and Nacre in a coral reef, then had left to explore the town.) Coralline hoped Pavonis would collect her late in the morning, for the last two days had been exhausting, and all she wanted was to luxuriate in the relaxed looseness of an aimless morning.
She looked at shops with a wanderer’s carefree curiosity. Personalized Parchments, a tiny stationery store. Lobata, a casual restaurant. Devil’s Apron, a dessert bistro. Pyropia, a clinic named after the gauzy algae used for bandage.
Coralline turned away from Pyropia, but not before tears sparked in her eyes. She’d wanted to start her own clinic one day, Coralline’s Cures; the dream now felt a delusion. Swimming away from Pyropia, she entered a colorful public garden alongside a row of small homes. But even among the bright columns of algae, she found she could not sheathe herself from her profession—what she most missed about The Irregular Remedy was its remedial garden.
In the public garden, she saw a patch of coralline algae splattering a rock, its branches congealing and separating like networks of capillaries. The sight of her namesake algae made her inordinately happy—it was something familiar in an unfamiliar world—and she found herself staring at it as she never had before, even though it carpeted the rocks in the reef garden outside her own home in Urchin Grove. Coralline algae was parchment-thin, she noticed now, but coated with a fine, articulated armor. Like everyone else, she’d always considered coralline algae fragile, but now she thought it looked resilient. Similarly, everyone had always considered her fragile, but perhaps she wasn’t—perhaps she was resilient but hadn’t had the opportunity to show it before the elixir quest.
She hadn’t snipped algae for a few days, and it felt as unnatural as not having eaten for a few days. A longing to snip made itself felt as a pressing ache in her tail. Most clinics cultivated their own remedial gardens, but healing algae did not have to come exclusively from a remedial garden. It could grow anywhere. She looked about the public garden and noticed the thick, coarse, hair-like strands of green rope. She was badge-less, disbarred, unable to use any medications she prepared for anyone other than herself—but that did not mean she could not prepare them. It would be like preparing supper despite being unable to serve it—most would consider it pointless—but it would still offer her a measure of gratification and happiness. Who was she to deny herself?
Racing back to Honeymooners Hotel, Coralline darted into her room through the window. Izar was sitting on the settee, dark circles underlining his eyes, as though he’d hardly slept. He flashed her a smile, but she’d already picked up her apothecary arsenal and was out the window again.
Swimming back to the garden, Coralline placed her apothecary arsenal neatly on a rock, being careful to not scratch its pearlescent case. She started her medicinal preparations by snipping the vesicles of horned wrack, in order to refill her jar of horned wrack salve. Next, she cut iridescent cartilage, admiring its brilliant-blue hue so fervently that she almost cut her fingers. Then, she sheared the straggly golden-brown strands of sea oak, followed by the olive-brown fronds of dabberlocks.
Pulling out her blue-shale mortar and pestle, she ground all the algae she’d collected in separate batches, then stuffed them neatly in individual vials. She’d forgotten to bring her pen to the garden, so she would label the vials later, she decided. She rose to hover horizontally again over the garden, seeking her next suspect, when she spotted desmarestia algae.
Coralline had snipped desmarestia just once in her life, upon mistaking its olive-brown fronds for dabberlocks. She’d learned her error only when people had gathered around her and screamed, “Who are you trying to poison? Whoever it is, remember that the Doom of Desmarestia will settle upon you!”
Desmarestia was a poisonous algae, an acid kelp that killed its consumer in a matter of minutes. Its telltale symptom was writhing. Everyone was so afraid of it that, since time immemorial, it was a source of superstition: The Doom of Desmarestia was said to settle on those who dared swim over the acid kelp, leading them to grow as bitter as its fronds over time. Had she been in Urchin Grove, Coralline would have skirted the bush; now, she considered it. At the moment, she possessed just one weapon against the world, a dagger; desmarestia could serve as a second weapon. The more weapons she possessed, the stronger she would be during her elixir quest.
Her hands rising and falling as fast as the heads of garden eels, she snipped some fronds of desmarestia, reveling in their rough, forbidden texture.
As they swam southward to Blue Bottle, Izar admired Coralline in profile. Her scales were shimmering like newly minted coins, and her hair was swishing down her back like a mare’s tail. She wore a pale-pink corset with ruffles for shoulder sleeves and a dozen tiny cream shells for buttons—it made him think of a scone.
“Do you know what the world needs?” she said, turning to look at him.
“What?”
“Corsets with pockets.”
“Hmm. How did you think of that?”
“Waistcoats always have pockets, but corsets don’t. It’s disadvantageous to mermaids.”
“What would you put in your pocket, if you had one?”
“A dagger.”
Izar didn’t know what to say.
Coralline turned to Pavonis, on her left, and said, “Can we please swim closer to the seabed?”
“Just because we didn’t encounter any constables after leaving Hog’s Bristle yesterday,” the whale shark said, “doesn’t mean we won’t encounter any today. You’re safer up here.”