Part of Your World (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,33

m the sand, like she was stepping mto holes and pulling her feet out of sucking, grabby mud.

But soon she was m the blessedly quiet cove where the wind was still and the noises of humans and their activities far off and easily forgotten. She sank down onto the sand like she would have as a mermaid: tail folded under her, leaning to the side a little, one hip up, the other down. The instinct to flip her fin impatiently went nowhere; the thought traveled down her spme and stopped where her legs split.

She opened her tightly cupped hands and looked at what lay in her palm.

The nautilus shell was exquisite, brown and white and perfectly striped. The math that lay like a dazzling creation spell over all who lived in the sea showed clearly in the spiral, each cell as great as the sum of the two previous sections. Everything in the ocean was a thing of beauty and numbers, even m death.

Mermaids could live for a long time: but their bodies became foam that dissipated into nothing when they died. The poor little mollusk who lived in this shell had a very short life, but his shell could last for centuries.

Ariel sighed and brushed her fmgers over it, feeling strangely melancholy despite the triumph she literally held m her hands. Years of being mute could be swept away m a second. Years of frustration, years of silent crying, years of anger. And then what?

If she destroyed it, what would it change?

Ursula would immediately know she was back. That she had been in the castle, practically under the sea witch's nose.

And then what would happen to Ariel's search for her father? This was more complicated than a simple diversion; this could set everything back and make her whole task harder. Queen Ariel held the nautilus and considered thoughtfully. But the little mermaid didn't think. She acted.

Before she realized fully what she was doing Ariel had smashed the nautilus on a sharply faceted rock.

It didn't break like a normal shell. It shattered like a human vessel. Shards flew in all directions equally, unhampered by gravity or luck. Ariel pitched forward.

She choked, no longer breathing the air of the Dry World. Her arms flailed up like a puppet's. Her torso whipped back and forth, pummeled by unseen forces. Something flew into her mouth, up her nose, and suffused her entire body with a heat that threatened to burn. It rushed mto her lungs and expanded, expelling whatever breath she had left, pushmg blood to her extremities, pushing everything out that wasn't it, leaving room for nothing

Ariel collapsed. It was over.

It was like the thing, whatever it was, had been absorbed by her body and had now dissipated into her blood and flesh.

She took a breath. Her heart started beating again.

She hadn't been aware it had stopped.

She coughed. A few grains of sand came out.

And then she sang.

His hands were raised, trying to draw more out of the violins with his left while holding back the percussion with his right. He fumbled.

It was like a pile of books had fallen from a high shelf onto his head, and, having broken his skull, somehow managed to directly impart their contents into his brain.

It was like a sibling had snuck up behind him, and, thinking he was prepared—expectmg him to get out of the way—whacked him with a wooden baton. The crack on the pate was twice as painful as it should have been, the simple blow compounded by shock that a sister would strike so hard. Feelings and pain were utterly mixed.

It was like he were suddenly afflicted by a grievous, mortal fit of the body: as if his heart or kidney or some other important organ had seized up and failed.

He experienced the wonder of taking a first breath after the terrible pain receded with a clearheaded, deep relief that presaged either death or recovery.

Eric blinked at the orchestra and smgers before him. Instruments faltered. A hundred pairs of eyes looked back at him expectantly.

He saw, as if for the first time, the plain yet comely smile of the second soprano, the brown mole on the likeable brow of the basso profundo, the L-shaped smudge on the copper timpani. A veil had been drawn away. He was Prince Eric, and he was conducting a practice session for an opera.

Not sailing a pleasure ship or playing his recorder to himself, or, more appropriately, running this part of his parents' kingdom, which was his