“Hurry!” Rhodomela barked.
What should be the second medication in her blend? Coralline’s fingers trembled over the urns, coming to a stop above Rapid Reviver. She looked to Rhodomela for approval, but Rhodomela’s expression was flat, her lips straight as a needle. Coralline picked up the urn. She opened Rapid Reviver and Artery Opener on Rhodomela’s counter. She snatched three pinches of Rapid Reviver, a fine, deep-green mush, and two smidgens of Artery Opener, a whitish glop. She combined them in a flask and shook the flask vigorously. She then held it before her eyes, hoping to glimpse an alteration in color, a fright of bubbles, a commingling of texture—something, anything, to indicate a reaction.
But there was nothing. The green and white remained separate, lying limply against each other. It was failed chemistry—these two medications were not meant to marry. But this blend was all she had—she could only hope it would prove effective despite indications to the contrary.
Coralline dashed to Agarum. His thick cheeks, contorted earlier, now lay pale and still, but his lips quivered: He was still alive. She cupped his head and touched the flask to his lips—but a hand hurled the flask aside.
Rhodomela’s face, before she turned away, reflected bone-deep disapproval. The master apothecary darted to her shelves and, fingers moving as fast as four-winged flying fish, collected Rib Rigidity Release and Troubled Tail Tonic. She deposited pinches of the powders, brown and crimson, in a vial, then shook the vial. When she held the vial before her face, bubbles were frothing, and the brown and crimson colors were combining to form a smooth, brilliant emerald. Rhodomela inserted a syringe through the lid, filled it, then approached Agarum with her needle.
Coralline blocked her path.
“Simple Recipes for Remedial Success states that the key ingredients of each of Rib Rigidity Release and Troubled Tail Tonic,” she said, “in other words, the pink flaps of halymenia and the brown fronds of lobophora—act as a poison when combined. I distinctly remember reading it in the textbook’s appendix.”
Rhodomela pushed Coralline aside.
“But you’ll kill him!” Coralline cried.
Rhodomela looked at Coralline defiantly as she stabbed Agarum in the heart.
His body shook violently from head to tailfin, his flab rippling like waves. Rhodomela held his face steady in one hand and then swung her arm back and slapped his face. His jowls juddered before settling into a conclusive stillness.
Coralline came to hover to the other side of the stretcher, her breath rasping out of her gills. She’d never seen a dead body before—it was terrifying—and to think that she’d played a role in Agarum’s death, first with her failure of a potion, then with her failure to prevent Rhodomela’s attack.
But as she watched, Agarum’s eyes opened. He looked at the two faces peering down at him, then sat up slowly, as though awakening from a long slumber. With his hand over his heart, he bent carefully to collect his waistcoat off the floor. He slipped his arms through the checkered fabric and clutched it closed with a hand. From his waistcoat pocket, he extracted a slipper limpet and placed the five-carapace shell in the crock on Rhodomela’s counter. He bowed his head at Coralline and Rhodomela in silent gratitude, then swam out the door, a new spring in his tail, which was darkening again to cobalt.
“How did you save him?” Coralline stammered.
“I rely on my own judgment more than anyone else’s,” Rhodomela replied coldly. “I urge you to do the same. Don’t believe everything you read in your medical textbooks.”
Coralline plopped down on the stretcher vacated by Agarum, her spine limp. What would her inability to save Agarum mean for her probationary review tomorrow? Would Rhodomela fire her? Coralline bit her lip to control her urge to cry; if Rhodomela saw her crying, she would definitely fire her.
“What’s that?” Rhodomela asked.
Coralline followed her gaze to the invitation scroll on her tray. Under the present circumstances, with her dismissal all but imminent, she could not bear the thought of inviting Rhodomela to her engagement party and wedding. But nor could she think of a graceful way to bow out of inviting her, now that Rhodomela had seen the invitation scroll. Without a word, Coralline rose and handed the ivory parchment to her.
Rhodomela’s fingers untied the golden ribbon, and her eyes scanned the parchment quickly. “You’re making a mistake,” she said, looking up. “You should not marry.”
“Why not?”
“Because love is a farce.”
It was not Rhodomela’s fault, Coralline told herself, continuing to bite her lip. It was Rhodomela’s life that had turned her bitter. Her parents had been mysteriously murdered twenty-five years ago in the middle of the night, when Rhodomela had been twenty-five herself. Rhodomela continued to mourn them to this day; since their death, no one had ever seen her attired in anything but a plain black bodice. Her only living family member was an elder sister, Osmundea, who lived in the distant village of Velvet Horn and who was also said to be a spinster.
Coralline recalled what her mother had once said about Rhodomela: “The Bitter Spinster’s pain has numbed her to all emotion.”
“I love Ecklon,” Coralline said softly. “Have you ever loved anyone?”
Rhodomela’s face whitened.
“I’m sorry,” Coralline said, a flush creeping up her neck, making the skin prickle. “It’s none of my business. You don’t have to answer—”
“Once. I loved once, long ago.”
A large, circular bronze-and-black insignia glowed on the glass door, the letters O and D intertwined over a fishhook that slashed the circle in half. Antares and Saiph sat to the other side of the glass, laughing so hard that they failed to notice him.
From the other side of the glass, Izar felt as though he were observing a private scene, a father-son moment he had no business witnessing. He knew that if either of them were to turn to see his face at this moment, they would see him staring at them with the desperate loneliness of an orphan—the orphan that he was.
His mind traveled back to the day he had met them. Suddenly, he was three years old again. The moon was glowing like a low-hanging white pear in the sky, and the wind was whipping his hair mercilessly about his cheeks. The jagged gash along the side of his jaw was bleeding a scarlet trail down his neck. He was trying to stanch the flow of his blood with his hands, but he couldn’t—there was always more, and then more still—surely, it would all trickle out of him until he was a crumpled sack of skin. Antares’s hand on his shoulder had been the only thing that had steadied him that night.
Kneeling to be close to Izar’s eye level, Antares had asked, “Do you remember anything of your life before this day, son?”
Izar had tried to remember—he’d tried so hard that tears had squirted out of his eyes—but his mind had been as empty of memories as the sky above of clouds. “Who am I?” he’d asked in a trembling voice.
“Your name is Izar,” Antares had said, speaking slowly, as though to aid Izar’s comprehension. “You’re the son of one of my fishermen. I was passing by in a trawler in the middle of the night, and I saw merpeople attacking your father’s fishing dinghy. Merpeople drowned your parents, but I managed to rescue you from their clutches.”
“Why did they drown my parents?” Izar had asked.
“Because they’re evil. They’re vicious savages.”
Izar had attempted anew to conjure images of his parents in his mind, but there’d been nothing—not a whisper, not a glimpse, not a scent of them. He had felt as though he was standing before a mirror but seeing no reflection.