Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 102166 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 511(@200wpm)___ 409(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102166 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 511(@200wpm)___ 409(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
“It cannot.”
“Why?”
“It will be too late by then. There is an election going on in the surface world this fall. Your betrothed has promised to create legislation that will make the ocean safe from land pollution. As such, this marriage must take place in ninety days. Before the upcoming election.”
“Ninety days? Mother, please, I beg you, choose someone else.”
“That is not an option. It must be someone who can represent all merfolk. As a princess, that is you. Tomorrow, you will go on land, and you will meet your groom. I won’t hear any more arguments about it.”
Iris had to try one last time. “You’re really sending me to live on land. With a stranger. For … for politics?”
Tatiana simply raised one elegant hand.
That was the end of it.
And maybe Iris had known, deep down, that her protests were pointless.
But that didn’t stop her heart from plummeting like a shipwreck.
She knew her mother could be unbending when her mind was made up. She would not be swayed by the emotions coursing through her middle daughter right then. And Iris would rather not cry in front of her mother.
She swam off, rushing through the halls, out the doors, past her beloved kelp gardens, and through the gates.
She didn’t stop.
Not at the spiraling reef towers where she and her sisters used to play tag. Not at the swirling sandbar where the dolphins came to dance. Not even when she swam past a current singer whose haunting melody faltered mid-note as Iris rushed past with tears clinging to her lashes.
She just kept going.
The pressure in her chest built with every stroke, like her ribs were tightening around her heart. Her tail flicked harder, faster, until the water around her blurred. She passed a jelly lantern, its tendrils pulsing with light.
She didn’t look back.
When she finally slowed, her breath caught on a sob.
She curled up by an old coral graveyard. The dead reef felt like her soul: bleached, picked over, and completely out of its element. Its wasted potential, the evidence of the harm the humans had inflicted upon her people, called to her as she folded forward, burying her face in her hands.
How could her mother ask this of her? To leave not only her home, but her homeland, the only thing she had ever known and loved, the people she had been committed to serving. Albeit a couple of minutes late. She wasn’t perfect. But she cared.
The fish found her soon enough, as they always did.
A sleepy trumpet fish twined gently around her wrist. A pair of pygmy seahorses nestled in the crook of her arm like living jewelry. Even a spiny lionfish hovered, not close enough to sting, but near enough to lend its quiet, comforting presence.
They brushed against her skin, teasing through her hairlike strips of seagrass, offering comfort she hadn’t asked for but desperately needed.
She hadn’t summoned them. But heartbreak, in her, always echoed through the currents. And so the fish came, determined to comfort her through it. It was a strange phenomenon that didn’t happen for either of her sisters. Iris always felt a little guilty, feeling like her emotions removed their free will. It felt like a cruel sort of irony that they would gain theirs just as she was losing her own.
There had to be a way out of this.
She could try speaking to her mother again. Maybe if she caught her in her private chambers, not on the throne, she might be able to appeal to her mother, not the queen.
It was a long shot, and Iris had little faith in her mother bending.
But if she couldn’t get her mother to call off the contract, and she was unable to do it herself, that did leave her with one other option.
She could get her prospective husband to call it off.
The more she thought about it, the more genius it seemed.
The fish, satisfied with a job well done, swam back to their lives as Iris straightened.
It could just work.
She would have to be careful.
If it got back to Tatiana that she’d been deliberately difficult or hostile, she would be in a world of trouble. If, however, she simply made herself undesirable to her new fiancé by being … aggressively mermaidian—insisting on absurd rituals, making up wildly exaggerated mermaid customs that they must follow, mentioning impractically extravagant living accommodations—she might just be able to get this human to rethink his desire to marry one of her kind.
She was going to make this Finn Westrock guy regret the day he asked for a marriage contract with a mermaid.
Operation: Horrify the Human was officially underway.
2
Finn
“Remind me why I’m doing this again?” Finn asked.
He moved in front of the massive mirror leaned up against the wall in his office to smooth a hand down his suit.
It was blue.
It was always blue.