“I’m sure you also miss Ecklon, dear.”
Ecklon had departed for Hog’s Bristle immediately after Pericarp had left the Costaria home. There, he was working furiously to learn the identity of Tang Tarpon’s murderer. Once Ecklon had an identity and a motive, Coralline’s name would be cleared of the murder charge. But detective cases often took months to solve; Ecklon had very little time left—only two days remained to their wedding.
Trochid glanced once more at Coralline’s crumpled condition, then rose and left abruptly, closing the door behind him. Coralline heard her father and mother speaking in hushed voices in the living room, and she knew they were talking about her, but she breathed a sigh of relief—finally, she was alone. Solitude was its own form of companionship, the only kind she wanted.
Her stomach growled. Coralline glanced perfunctorily at the covered bowl on her bedside table. She did not need to remove its lid to know that it contained the bland sea lettuce ulva. Every day, for breakfast, lunch, and supper, her mother gave her no more than ulva, so that she would become so slim by her wedding day that she would be “almost as transparent as a lobed comb jellyfish.” Even if her mother had given her not ulva but the fragrant fronds of undaria, Coralline would have rejected them—although remnants of hunger persisted, her appetite had vanished since her return. Her sustenance now was not food but her secret, Izar—every thought of him seemed a morsel just for her. She slipped her hand under her pillow and extracted the card with his picture. She tried to imagine his life—what he was doing at this very moment—but she couldn’t. It was like trying to imagine life on another planet; land was a foreign expanse to her.
She relived her moments with him. She’d done it so often in the last days that she’d begun to envision them with alternate endings. When she thought of the time she’d first seen him, hovering unconscious midway between the surface and the seabed, as though he were both human and merman—and she’d traced her finger over his scar, the line of the scar was gently curved in her memory, not sharp. When she thought of their night at Honeymooners Hotel in Rainbow Wrack, she imagined him sleeping not on the floor but next to her in bed. When she thought of their swims between settlements, she pictured herself and him swimming not at a distance of arm’s length but hand in hand.
Every word he’d spoken to her, every glance he’d fixed on her, seemed imbued with a brilliant light, as though the sun were shining directly upon it. She often felt as though he were continuing to watch her even now, an omniscient god in the ceiling, his gaze caressing her shoulders like a blanket. But his gaze was most likely caressing someone else at this very moment. One day, standing on his stodgy legs, he would marry a human, like himself, and he would recall Coralline occasionally, if at all. The thought made Coralline want to die.
She thought of the curse Mintaka had pronounced to her: You will die soon after the light dies. In the cavern, Coralline had been dismayed by the curse, but now, she wanted to die.
She found it strange that she’d spent her life terrified of death. Death was, in its simplest form, non-existence, and the fact was that she no longer wanted to exist. As an apothecary, she’d considered early deaths tragic; now, she considered it a worse fate to linger on late. There was a time for everyone, and that time had, for her, come the moment she’d discovered Izar’s Ocean Dominion card and realized he’d betrayed her. Since then, she was just lingering, unsettled as a ghost, like a planet confused about her orbit.
Suddenly, the luciferin orbs extinguished, their white-blue glow vanishing.
Coralline blinked—perhaps her mind was so muddled that she’d shut her eyes and confused internal darkness for external. But she blinked again, and again, and again—the darkness remained, just as dense as that of the deep sea. You will die soon after the light dies, Mintaka had said. The light had just died, which meant Coralline would soon die. Thank you, Mintaka, thank you! she whispered. She laughed for the first time since she’d returned home, and listened curiously to the ring of her laughter. She cherished the feel of water as it fluttered gently in and out of her gills, and she pressed her hand to her heart—her heart that would soon be still. Mintaka’s curse was a blessing.
In a flash, the luciferin orbs sparked back to life, glowing as brightly as before. Coralline needed to talk to Pavonis; she needed to tell him she would die. Pavonis had tried to beckon her to her window often, even claiming his snout needed scratching, but she’d said she was too tired to move. He’d attempted all manners of humor to draw a laugh out of her: “The yellow spots on my back aren’t contagious.” “I know you’re better than the lump you’re pretending to be.” “Getting enough sleep over there?” Coralline hadn’t laughed at his words, but she’d smiled every time, if only to be polite.
Returning Izar’s card carefully under her pillow, Coralline turned her head to the window, a black oval broken intermittently by sparks of bioluminescence. Sitting up, she started extricating herself from the folds of the blanket. The process was like that of a snake moulting, for the fabric seemed to have become a second skin—she felt as much a part of the bed as the mattress. Dragging her tail over the side of the bed, she climbed out, almost crippled by the effort.
She looked down at herself. Her flesh was as soft and limp as the pillows upon which she lay all day. Her skin was tender all over, like a young, unmoving snail’s. Her chemise was held up only by its straps, and she could discern the outline of each rib under the ivory fabric—she was fast disappearing inside herself. If someone were to press a hand into her, it would go straight through, as through empty space. Shifting to the window, she sagged against the windowsill, no longer having the strength to hover.
“Took you long enough,” drawled a voice.
“Oh, Pavonis!” Coralline said, extending a hand into the darkness. His snout arrived neatly under her fingers.
“I missed you,” he said.
He truly must have, for he would otherwise have derided such words as sentimental. “I missed you, too,” Coralline said.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Me, too. You start.”
“Now that we’ve returned to Urchin Grove from the Elixir Expedition, I see that all the while I was trying to escape this horrible village, I was actually trying to escape my horrible self.”
“You’re not horrible, Pavonis!”
“But I am. And you’ll think so, too, once you know the truth about Mako: He was killed by humans, yes, but he was also killed by me.”
Coralline gasped.
“Soon after Mako and I left Urchin Grove for our North-to-South Expedition, an Ocean Dominion ship came upon us. The men ensnared Mako in a net. Instead of staying to try to free him, to try to distract the ship, I swam away as fast as I could, not looking back once at my best friend, who was crying out for me. My only friend in the world apart from you, and I left him to die a torturous death.”
Coralline wished it were not dark, she wished she could look him in the eye, so that he could see she meant the words she said: “It’s not your fault you were afraid, Pavonis. It’s natural to be afraid. Forgive yourself.”
He sighed; she did not hear it as much as feel it in the lilt of water. “Even if I forgive myself for Mako,” he said, “I’ll never forgive myself for you. I rescued you from a human fishnet when you were a baby, but I failed to rescue you from the human in our own midst during our elixir quest.”
“I made my own mistakes, as far as the human in question is concerned.”