fallen in love with me?"
He said the words carefully, trying to sound like an adult while soundmg more like a child terrified of being disappomted.
Ariel closed her eyes. When put that way, it sounded really epic, the stuff of legends—or painfully stupid. Not just the folly of youth.
"I...always wanted to go on land, to see what it was like to be human." She reached out and touched the Dry World planks of the wrecked boat, the whispery traces left by human hands on its shape, the nails made of iron forged in fires that glowed without the help of undersea lava. "I collected things that I found, that had fallen to the bottom of the sea from ships. I really... I really had quite the collection. I was fascinated with all these thmgs— some of which I still have no name for, the thmgs you people make. And then, one day, I found you.
"There was a storm, and a ship. I think most of the crew died. But I managed to save you and take you to shore. You were so.. .handsome and strange."
"Strange?" he asked in surprise.
She laughed softly. "You had two legs: silly. And no fins. Strange.''' "Right. Of course. Strange from a mermaid's perspective," he said quickly-.
"'From a mermaid's perspective...' Yes. Anyway, I'll skip the more complicated parts, about my father, and other things that happened. Suffice it to say I made a bargain with Ursula the sea witch that if I couldn't make you fall in love with me m three days, she would keep my voice forever—and me, as her prisoner."
"Three days? That seems rather short. To make someone fall in love with you, I mean."
"I'm a mermaid," Ariel reminded him. "For thousands of years you people have been falling in love with us at first sight, immediately and forever upon hearing our songs. I didn't think it would be a problem." "But you weren't a mermaid. You were a human."
"Yes, and I had no voice, which made things even harder than I imagined," she said bitterly. "But, I suppose, just as hard as Ursula hoped. I also suspect she had her hand in little mcidents that went wrong along the way." "So I was looking for the beautiful mermaid who sang me awake," Eric mused, thinking back on the time. "And all the while she was right there before me." "YES "
Ariel said it a little louder, a little more fiercely than she had meant. Her eyes blazed. Eric looked at her, surprised. "You had legs," he pointed out.
"I had the same face and hair, Eric," she said, using his name for the first time.
"But you couldn't smg. You couldn't even talk. I remembered that better than how you looked. It stayed with me. I was coming out of unconsciousness, Ariel. Please have a little pity. I had swallowed copious amounts of seawater—I was coughmg it up for the rest of the day, and lay in bed with a fever for three nights. I narrowly avoided pneumoma and there's still a little bit of a twinge m my lungs on certain days if I cough too hard."
"Oh," Ariel said, taken aback. She hadn't thought it was like that at all. From her perspective she had saved him, fought with her dad, and returned triumphantly as a human to woo him. She hadn't given a moment's thought to what had happened to him m the meantime.
Same old Ariel, she thought with a mental sigh. Impulsive—and a little thoughtless.
"Would you have stayed? A human?" he asked curiously. "If I had fallen m love with you, and you got your voice back, and could stay on land?" "I...suppose so...?"
It was a question she had thought about many times over the past few years. The answer had changed with time. Back then, she absolutely would have stayed, and lived happily ever after as the human prmcess married to her true love in the Dry World.
But now...as someone who had been Queen of the Sea...and, perhaps, had more time to think...Who knew? There were so many details to the world that she hadn't understood back then, when her vision was colored in bright primary hues and the borders between truth and fiction were defined m bold black lines. Would she have aged and died as a human? Would it have been worth it? Would she miss her friends, her family? Could she wake
up every morning and not choke on the dry air?
"...on the other hand, it's also possible my