Issue #332 • June 17, 2021

“A Flower Cannot Love the Hand,” by Aimee Ogden

“My Mirror, My Opposite,” by Y.M. Pang

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

A FLOWER CANNOT LOVE THE HAND

by Aimee Ogden

        The first thing I asked, when the mage-king gave me a mouth, was whether he had given me a soul.

        His people’s beloved king, who held back the lords of the undead when they came roving; by whose conquering hand the strongholds were fed in the long fallow winter. You can see his likeness remade in stone or woven into tapestries in the halls of the many keeps where he is celebrated: his brow heavy with jewels and wisdom, his staff and sword outstretched. It was not of stone or fine thread that he made me, in his turn, but of flowers.

        Bog rushes, first, in place of bones; and yarrow for fine white flesh. Curls of foxglove to give me a matched set of ears. Pink campion, to raise the color in my cheeks; a shock of pimpernel for a sharp red tongue; a perfect string of snowberries sewn into my jaw for teeth. A tumble of honeysuckle, that my hair would always smell as sweet as rain. And last of all he set two perfect blossoms of sheep’s-bit in the soft hollow spaces of my eyes.

        Flowers for beauty, he said later, his hands busy with wand or pen; a half-justification long after the thing was done. But many things are beautiful, and flowers are also soft and yielding, so easily bruised and torn. And flowers do not know how to run away.

        So I wandered the mage-king’s halls. I knelt in his gardens and whispered to my silent sisters the morning-glory and the ox-eye and the goldenrod. I learned how to move as a woman would move and to speak to people in place of plants. I mapped out the spaces of his keep in my new-forged heart and when the winter’s cold came, I learned to tremble and not to crumble into nothingness.

        Forgive me, Primordial God of the soil and sky, who blessed me with my first and truest shape: there was one more thing I might have learned, with more time, and that was to forgive the mage-king. To my undying shame, I think I might even have found a way to love him, had his heart been lonely, had he undone and remade a thousand blossoms only for want of gentle company. I could have loved his hands, which were ink-stained so much more often than they were covered with the blood of his wars, for all he that he declaimed the joy of battle. Mage-craft was his true nature, as the exchange of sunlight for sweetness was mine. It was only necessity that drove both of us, in our course, to bloodletting.

        But I do not forgive him, and I surely do not love him, because he devised me not on his own account but rather on behalf of another man: a bride-gift for his sister’s son. Long ago, the boy’s mother had laid a tynged on him, that he would never marry a human woman. A spiteful magic, and a stern one. Her power was not less than that of the mage-king’s, and he could never undo what she had sworn.

        So I was the fruit of the mage-king’s compromise, a halfway thing that never should have been. He made me and he taught me; he housed me in cold halls of stone. He wrapped me in linen robes and gave me to his sister’s son to wed, with my dead kindred braided into my hair. When my new husband clasped my hand beneath the bower, his fingers were black too, but with the bruises of battle—not ink. He was never a man of learning, my husband.

        I did not understand, at first, what it meant to be so given. The courtship of flowers is a modest thing: the exchange of love letters by a soft-spoken messenger, a distant dance. No one in the mage-king’s hall told me what awaited me in my husband’s bed: the tears that do not mend, seen and unseen alike; the lingering sickly-sweetness of bruised oils that refuse to wash from the bedding.

        Any man, the mage-king told me, would be proud to wed his daughter to such a man, whose hall stands so strong, whose sword has never failed in battle, whose larders overflow with his good fortune. But the mage-man is not my father. If I have any parents at all, they are as monstrous as he is, and their names are Appetite and Necessity.

* * *

        Why did he choose flowers? He should have made me from the soft pelt of the hunting-dog and the wet dark eyes of the ewe. These are creatures who strive to love their masters in all that they do. A flower cannot love the hand that tears it from the stem.

* * *

        The people of this land hail the mage-king as a hero. He is Prince Fox-fast for his sly clever nature; Lord of the Alders, who raised up the very trees against his enemies from the world-below. O wise one, o saint of the small-folk, did you never stop to wonder why a mother would shelter women from her own son’s marriage-bed?

        You swore that he was owed a wife. What am I owed, O you who shaped my lips petal-soft to smile, who clad me in skin that weeps sweet fragrance when it bruises?

        The mage-king had not told me whether I had a soul, and so I begged my husband, my maker-made match, to say in his place. He laughed, calling these wild fancies for a wild wife. He gave me a gown of blue linen and he tore it away from me, at his desire. It was not mine. I was not mine.

        He had no gardens; his servants tilled vast monotonous fields in his name. I was not permitted to walk their green rows, but I could see them from the high window of his hall: a violence of rigid lines imprinted on the earth. An earthen prison for my barley-cousins and vetch-sisters and beet-brothers, not allowed to mingle one with the other, not permitted to strive above the rest for sunlight and the sweet kiss of summer rains.

        Once, when I slipped my keepers, I tore up an armspan of yellowing grain before they caught me and dragged me to the ground. As far as I could stretch, from fingertip to fingertip, and yet when I was ensconced back in the solar, I could not even see what mark I might have left, and the barley-heads nodded in sorrow and gratitude.

        And so I withered and waned in my husband’s manse. I do not believe that a human woman is meant to wilt, but who would have told me elsewise? My husband’s servants never spoke to me, nor even met my eyes, when they brought food and wine.

        But then I only ever asked them for help, for an open door, an unbarred window, an unsheathed knife. I screamed at them, I raged and gnashed my teeth—I bit, if they were heedless enough to put themselves within my reach. Perhaps they would have answered me, if I had held my voice to human timbres? If I had asked them only about their own true nature and not to restore me to my own?

* * *

        A flower has its thorns, too, and the bright-bitter berry that warns away the hind and the hart.

* * *

        How shall I shape my thoughts around him who I loved, and who, in my carelessness, I lost?

        Though he was a man, shaped of the same flesh that the Primordial God drew up from the ancient mud, I remember him only in parts. The ivy-green of his eyes, the wind-in-the-wood of his laugh, the tuneless hum that brought his yapping dogs to heel. A hunter by trade, and my fast friend for that he had never set plough to earth.

        I remember him soaked in moonlight, begging the hospitality of my husband’s halls by dead of night. I could not see his face, the moonlight was too bright—it would have pained any eyes, and most especially those of one whose face was never meant to hold them.

        My husband had gone to fight in his uncle’s war, joining the mage-king’s vassals who rallied beneath the banner of the alder-and-wand. It cost me nothing to offer up what did not belong to me. At my word, the servants let the hunter pass beneath the beams of my husband’s hall, and he ate my husband’s food and drank his wine. If he slept in my husband’s bed, too, and if he touched my husband’s wife, then that is only one more thing that had never belonged to me and so one more thing that I could give without care.

* * *

        The Primordial God raised the first man from clay and gave him the world. But he made the flowers first, yes, and all the trees and moss and good green things of the earth. Why should the elder be disinherited so? What was the sin of our first kin, that our rule should be handed over to him who came last among the children of that singular Creator?

* * *

        Perhaps my lord-and-lover treasured me merely because I was never his to treasure, and perhaps again it was something more. I do not know how to cry, so I cannot spill tears for that.

        He could not, or would not, tell me whether I had a soul. I asked him so often, while we lay sleepless in my husband’s stolen bed, with his fingers tracing the petal-patterns on my bare skin. That trickster, Hope, had knitted me up tight within her obscuring veils, and I believed these new stirrings in my heart, in my needful flesh, were the certain signs of ensoulment.

        Instead he would always turn the question back on me, laughing, asking where his own soul could be found, whether I could touch it and with what medium I would mark it when I did. Though he had traveled far and wide, he told me, he had never yet seen the map to any living thing’s soul.

        But he would search yet, he promised, with his words and his hands; as far and wide and deep as I demanded.

        For a season, he warmed my husband’s bed and supped at my husband’s table. For a season, we breathed love into one another’s warm, open mouths and ignored the simmering perfume of the servants’ hatred. A season is so long. A season would have marked a lifetime, once.

        But I wanted longer, and I told him how we could have it. I birthed the idea, I crafted the plan, and the blame should have been chained around my neck alone.

        He was a hunter first, before he was mine. All he would have to do was throw his spear true, one more time.

* * *

        A flower will never bless the garden wall that blocks out the light, but she is grateful for the bee that lands lightly and takes what is offered to make sweet things.

        The bee has its sting, too, as the flower has her thorns. Their tragedy is this: though they may pierce the flesh, their damage is as short and sweet as the honey season.

* * *

        The mage-king dragged us out of my husband’s hall and bound us with cord and with sorcery alike. His eyes were sad, as he stood over us. A waste, he said, a terrible waste. I could not see my lord-and-lover’s face, with the frost-rimed grass against my cheek, but I could see the mage-king’s sadness, and I could hate it.

        My husband, still marked with his wounds, stood forth as witness and called my deeds a great betrayal. A betrayal, that I reached back for the first arms that touched me in tenderness? That I sought to break the living bars of my prison?

        My husband does not understand what it means to be betrayed. It was him who betrayed the Primordial God, when he pledged his faith and fidelity before the priest-men’s altar and then broke those vows upon my body. It was the mage-king who betrayed the God’s gift of sunlight to make a wife-woman of its flesh.

        It was my lord-and-lover’s spear that betrayed me, when it broke my husband’s side but not his grasp on life.

        To betray is to break trust, confidence, love. What was there between my husband I, to be broken?

        My lover’s blood is in the river now. It will find its freedom in the sea, and I will not mourn him. A blow for a blow; my husband slew him for coveting what he did not own, and his mother’s brother, my maker, the mage-king, named it justice.

        This justice should have fallen on me alone. It was I who wished to prolong the honey season past its natural limit.

        And it is I who will live to pay the price through the long lean winter. When this justice, the justice of men, turned to me, it did not spill my blood. The mage-king chained me and bound me by all the wards and sigils of his craft. I did not scream or beg his mercy, nor my husband’s, as he tore away the woman-shape which he had given me.

        Bones sheared but did not snap. Pieces of my body sloughed away into nothingness; others hardened where they had once been soft, grew light and fragile where they had been strong. When he found me no longer fit to be a woman, he reshaped me as an owl, cursed by all the birds of the forest and hated by all the small tender things that scurry in the night. A creature of the night, with eyes that would never again open on the honest light of day.

        My punishment would be to endure all the long cold years of my life alone without the sun: my first love, my own flesh.

* * *

        What is a flower but sunlight incarnate? What becomes of her when she is banished to the dark side of day?

        But do not forget: each night, the moon holds up her mirror to the sun. A wan reflection, but a true one.

* * *

        Here is the justice of men, bent past its breaking point so that what was chained tight is free again: the woman-shape was never mine, and to lose it gives me no pain.

        I am still myself, rearranged into this bird-form. I am made buoyant by its hollow bones. I am cloaked again in petals, murky gray and brown though they are.

        I am still myself and so I am answered at last: yes, I have a soul, no matter what shape its vessel is forced into. I remember that I am sunlight made tender flesh, even as I stir soundless feathers against a starlit sky. I remember the wind in the woods, the gift of nectar, the graze of wings. Though I cannot see the sun, I fly ever closer to its resting-place, and I pray it hears me, in its dreams, when I call.

        From this new high vantage I can see that this soul is one that no one gifted me: I made it for myself. From endurance like fine linen I wove it. With shears of spite I cut it to shape. With Hope’s fragile, tricksome thread I stitched it. And in blood have I dyed it twice over.

        Perhaps the day will come when my tormentors decide that their justice has not left deep enough marks in my flesh. Let them break open this shape, too, and crush my soul-stuff into the next, and the next, and the next. I will still be what I am. I will still remember the face of the sun, and her sweet sacred name.

        And when there is nothing left of any of us but bones and muddled myth, it will be made plain that their shells were hollow ones; that it was the mage-king and his sister’s son all along to whom the Primordial God of soil and sky never troubled to fit a soul.

Copyright © 2021 Aimee Ogden

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes about sad astronauts, angry princesses, and dead gods. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, Fireside, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. With fellow BCS author Bennett North, she co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, which features fun and optimistic speculative fiction. Her first novellas, Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters and Local Star, debuted in 2021 from Tor.com and Interstellar Flight Press respectively.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

MY MIRROR, MY OPPOSITE

by Y.M. Pang

        The song begins like this: “Once there was a fishgirl who sacrificed her heart and life and voice for a prince, and her reward was a path to heaven.”

        All those stories, about fishgirls yearning for legs... Are human storytellers really so arrogant, believing we are the only enviable ones?

        Let’s clear up one thing: that night, the storm didn’t hurl me into the sea.

* * *

        Ever since I was little, my feet itched. Not from sores or mosquito bites or whatever other people’s feet itch from. Merely from existing, from being mine. It was mild enough that few people noticed. I could walk. I learned to ride, like all princes did. I could even sit still during rhetoric lessons.

        Once, when I was six, before a state dinner the itch grew unbearable. Nan told Father I was ill, and the dinner went ahead without me. Father ordered the whipmaster to beat me afterward. That was Father’s best quality: he never found me a whipping boy or any other sort of playmate, so I endured all the punishments myself.

        The fishgirl in the song couldn’t gaze upon what she desired until she turned fifteen, but I’d been watching the sea for as long as I could remember. I’d sit on the sand and stretch my toes into the water, while Nan gripped both my arms to keep me from going further. When I did this, the itch went away. So each night before bed I asked for a bucket of seawater. I’d soak my feet in it until it soothed me enough to make sleep possible. The servants looked at me strangely, but my request was hardly burdensome.

        Father hated the sea. A shame, really, when our palace lay so close to it. How easy it would be to paint my mother as his opposite, to say she loved the sea, that she walked down the sand with me, our hands intertwined and our sandals discarded. That she told me stories of the Sea King’s palace and his fishgirl daughters and the youngest, prettiest princess, who built a garden of sun-red flowers for the statue of a handsome boy. But in truth, the only stories I had were ones I dug out of the library myself. I never knew my mother. Official records said she took ill and died. Nan told me she’d fled, escaping Father’s clutches and returning to Sun Isle. Sometimes, after I made a particularly grave mistake, Father would lean over my whip-split body and whisper, “Do that again and I’ll kill you, like I killed your mother.” I didn’t know if I should have believed him. You never knew with Father, whether he was telling the truth or trying to scare you.

        I wasn’t a demanding child. I wanted to be excused from state dinners. I wanted to avoid the whipmaster and Father, though not in that order. And sometimes, when I stood on tiptoes and peered through my bedroom window at the water, I wanted the sea to sweep past rock and sand and reach where I stood, to drown my world in blue and carry me away on its waves.

* * *

        I learned to swim, under the supervision of Father’s guards. As my arms and legs cut through the water, I thought: finally. But also: this body is useless. Why wasn’t I able to stay beneath the waves for more than a few minutes? Why did I feel pain when I inhaled the seawater, not contentment and life?

        I dreamed of the fishgirl princesses, leaning out from the sea palace and letting fish eat from their hands.

        Once I sneaked out and swam, swam, swam until I could no longer see the shore and hadn’t the strength to swim back. I contemplated falling still and letting the sea take me, but a fisherwoman’s boat drew up beside me. She pulled me aboard and rowed me back to shore. That was my first time on a boat, and I could barely remember it because I spent the whole time curled into a ball, shivering. Back in the palace I found Nan before Father found me, and we pretended the whole thing never happened.

        When I was nine, Father finally allowed the royal captain to take me out on his ship. I felt the waves rocking beneath my itching feet, and though it didn’t ease me the same way swimming did, I grew to love it nonetheless. I could leave the palace further behind, drift out on the water until I saw nothing but blue. I became a constant fixture on the captain’s ship. Though he probably thought me a nuisance, he couldn’t kick me off.

* * *

        The night I turned sixteen. Rockets burst in the sky to celebrate my birthday. I’d sailed out on the captain’s ship, weighed down by revellers but free from Father, at least for this one night.

        Let me say it again: the storm didn’t throw me into the water.

        True, the wind and rain grew fierce. Lightning illuminated the sky like the fireworks had hours earlier, and the thunder sounded eerily like Father’s voice. Everyone had scurried belowdecks. Everyone except me, the captain, and a few of his crew.

        I made my request. “Take me to Sun Isle. You don’t have to dock. Just bring me close and I’ll swim ashore.”

        The captain wrung his hands. “We have to go back, Your Highness. The storm is picking up, and your father expects you to be back by dawn. I will take you to Sun Isle some other day.”

        “I don’t think you understand,” I said. “I am not going back. I never planned on going back when we set sail tonight. Tell Father I fell overboard during the storm. Tell him I died.”

        We stared at each other through sheets of rain. The captain was silent for a moment. Then he called to his first mate, “Turn! We’re heading back.”

        I placed a hand on the gunwale and gazed at the roiling sea. “You will not obey me?”

        “I must obey your father.”

        I nodded. “That is your answer? Then this is mine.”

        I threw myself into the sea.

* * *

        I hit the water headfirst. The sea latched onto my clothes and weighed me down like armour and crowns and scepters, all those vestments I had never wanted. I didn’t glance up at the ship. Didn’t care if the captain’s panicked eyes were peering down at me or not, and felt grateful the sea drowned out his calls. I breathed in water and choked on it, feeling my mind and vision slipping away.

        Then something wrapped around my waist and began dragging me... up.

        I flailed against it, but I was half-drowned and weak. Had the captain ordered someone to dive in after me? Bare skin brushed against me but also hard points, like buttons but in the wrong places.

        My face broke the surface, and my body betrayed me by expelling water. Why, why? Though I couldn’t become salmon or shark, at least allow me to sink and rot, melting into the waves.

        That was my last coherent thought. I remained aware of the arms carrying me and the waves carrying us both, but it was like watching a stage play with the action happening to someone else.

* * *

        I heard gulls. Felt the sun shining on my face and the sand under my back. My eyelids seemed weighed down by anchors, but I forced my eyes open.

        Leaning over me was a girl with shining hair.

        No, let me try again: leaning over me was a girl with pearls in her hair, and those pearls shone like soft white candles in the sun. She bent closer, a necklace of braided seaweed swinging over her breasts. Where there should have been nipples on a human girl, she had two salmon-pink clams. Oysters festooned her sides, and pearls traced an ever-denser pattern down her belly. From the hips down, instead of legs, she had a shimmering fishtail.

        Her right hand rested on my shoulder where my shirt had been torn away. Her touch was familiar. I remembered the cold arm around my waist, the press of pearls and seashells I’d mistaken for buttons.

        I let my lids fall shut. I couldn’t bear to look upon the fishgirl any longer. I wanted to press myself against her and feel her fish scales scrape against my flesh. I wanted to brush my lips across her shell-pierced skin and taste the brine of the sea.

        I wanted to destroy her, to tear out chunks of her waist-length hair and see if they grew brittle as seaweed left in the sun. I wanted to dig my nails beneath those icy pearls, to rip them from her skin and see if she bled. If she did, would her blood be red?

        But I was too weak to even raise my head. So I lay on the sand, pretending to fall unconscious. Later, the fishgirl swore she didn’t know if I woke long enough to remember her. How silly. No one would ever forget a sight like her.

        I heard a splash. I opened my eyes and saw the fishgirl’s tail disappearing into the water. My insides burned with jealousy at her grace, at the ease with which she vanished. Moments later I heard the soft rustling of human footsteps. A girl bent over me, a human girl in an acolyte’s robe, so clumsy compared to the fishgirl.

        I let her call for help. I couldn’t muster up the strength to crawl to the water, and even if I did, the fishgirl would just shove me back onto land.

* * *

        It takes either a lot of courage or too little courage to commit suicide. I had a hard time rediscovering either of those extremes. So even when the acolyte brought me to the temple and nursed me back to health, even when my legs grew strong enough to run to sea again, I just allowed the priestesses tease out who I was and send messenger ships back to Father.

        The captain had told Father my story, the one about falling overboard in the storm. Father had stripped him of his post, but after hearing of my survival, Father sent the captain to fetch me. It was hard to say, whether Father wanted me alive or dead. Why give the task of retrieving me to the person who’d lost me in the first place?

        The captain didn’t bother hiding his glare as I stepped onto the deck of his still-familiar ship. He blamed me for his punishment. And he wasn’t wrong.

        “I’ll beg Father to reinstate you as royal captain,” I said. “I don’t know if he’ll listen, but maybe he will in light of the circumstances. All I ask for is this: for you to take me out to sea like before.” My mouth didn’t seem to know how to smile anymore, but I gave it my best attempt. “Don’t worry, I won’t throw myself overboard again.”

        The captain’s frown said he hardly trusted me to keep this promise, but he agreed to the deal nonetheless.

        Back at the palace, Father listened. The captain and I sailed out again, time and time again. We never spoke of that night again, but often I caught him staring at me, probably contemplating my sanity.

        Haven’t you wondered, when you heard the fishgirl’s story: Why did the prince keep sailing out even after he almost drowned? Why couldn’t he stay away from the water?

        There’s a darkly humorous version of the tale, where I throw myself in the sea over and over and the fishgirl keeps dragging me out. In a distant land to the east, they’ve written drinking songs about this, made musicals and puppet shows and storybooks told entirely in pictures.

* * *

        When I next saw the fishgirl, she wasn’t the fishgirl anymore.

        She knelt on the steps of the palace, naked and divested of her pearls and seashells. Instead of her fishtail, a pair of human legs poked out from her hips. But her face I recognized.

        I reached out, grasping her shoulder as she had once grasped mine. “What are you doing here? Why are you like this?”

        She shook her head, pointed at her throat. Opened her mouth to reveal her tongue had been cut away.

        I drew back with a gasp. What the hell happened to her? Who would...? Horror and sympathy fought with my residual anger. I shook my head. No, no. Why was I feeling sorry for her, when she ruined my best chance to join the sea?

        “Come with me,” I said. She nodded and rose to her feet. Her legs trembled slightly, but when she took her first step, she was more graceful than any human I had ever seen.

        I led her down the corridors toward my room. You could imagine the servants’ fish-eyed stares, seeing the prince leading a naked girl through the palace. I glared at them and they had the sense to stay silent.

        We reached my room and I shut the door behind us. “Where?” I said. “Where is your fishtail?”

        She pointed at her throat.

        “I know you can’t talk. Just lead me there, okay? Or... or point!”

        She shook her head and gazed at me with doleful eyes; I demanded and pleaded, and the itch in my feet grew so bad I called for a bucket of seawater. Then, only then, did she raise a hand and point toward the window, past the palace grounds, towards the sparkling sea that seemed to watch us with disdainful eyes.

        I was halfway to the door, ready to call the captain, ready to sail out, when she raised her other hand and pointed it at her own heart.

        Sighing, I wished I could drown myself in the bucket. “Fine. You can’t give me a straight answer. Or you don’t want to. I’ll figure it out, eventually.”

* * *

        I let her stay. Fishtail or not, she was my closest link to the sea. At least I could gaze upon her now, because in human form she didn’t fill me with such overwhelming jealousy.

        I still hated her. For bringing me back to shore and back to this accursed palace. I hated her because she’d had what I wanted, and she’d thrown it for some reason I couldn’t fathom.

        I ordered a page’s outfit for her and brought her riding with me. While others crashed through trees hunting hare and stag, I led the fishgirl to a secluded area and pulled out pens, parchment, a writing tablet. There, I taught her to write.

        It was slow going, for she hadn’t even heard of the concept of writing. But I was determined to unearth her story, to understand why she’d crashed into my life and unravelled my one cohesive plan.

* * *

        In spring, we climbed the mountains. It was her first time seeing snow, and she danced in delight, her steps more quick and graceful than human feet should be. When we reached the cabin at the top, my feet itched so badly I ordered a servant to empty the waterskin of seawater into a bucket—yes, I’d anticipated my feet giving me trouble.

        I kicked off my boots and plunged my feet into the water. A sigh escaped me. Then the fishgirl unlaced her boots and I gasped. I’d thought my feet disobliging, but hers were cracked and bleeding.

        She stepped toward me, wincing. Her eyes held a question, and when I offered neither welcome nor refusal, she dipped her feet into the same bucket. The water turned red.

        “Why?” I asked. “Did you really choose this for yourself?”

        She nodded.

        “What could be worth this?”

        She raised a trembling hand, and pressed it lightly over my heart. Then her eyes flicked upward—the ceiling, the sky?

        I intensified her lessons. People talked, of course. They thought I fucked her or ate her or planned to elope with her or whatever else they’re always telling tales about. In truth we never grew closer than sharing a blood-soaked bucket, than my hand wrapping around hers as I taught her the shape of letters.

* * *

        Even when she wrote well enough to tell me her story, I still couldn’t understand her.

        I love you. I love you.

        I stared at the words. “Why?” And if she loved me, why did she throw me out of her world?

        I love your land and your fireworks and your palace, and how much bigger your world seems than mine.

        “But the sea covers...” I was so dumbfounded by her words that I forgot the exact percentage. My tutors would be ashamed.

        Most of all I wish I could have your immortal soul. I want to rise to heaven, but I cannot for I have a fishgirl’s soul.

        Her story came to me in pieces, based on what she could write. She told me about her life in the Sea King’s palace, which seemed greater than any heaven I could imagine. She wrote about swimming to the surface when she turned fifteen. She saw the ship and the celebrations for my sixteenth birthday. She thought I’d fallen overboard, so she picked me up and brought me to Kelpin Isle. Many nights thereafter she’d watched me as I sailed out again. Then she begged the sea witch to give her legs, for she could not be with me as a fishgirl.

        She was my mirror and my opposite. She too desired to be what she was not. Except she pursued that desire with more determination than I’d ever done, outside of that one impulsive night.

        “What will happen if I don’t marry you?” I smiled Father’s smile. “What if I marry someone else?”

        My heart will break the very next morning, and I would become foam upon the sea.

        Foam! Not bones piled in the sea witch’s forest, not rotting meat in fish bellies. Instead she’d truly become part of the sea.

        Why couldn’t I have this?

        “I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “You’ve probably figured it out already. That night, you weren’t exactly saving me.”

* * *

        Father called me to his study and told me he’d betrothed me to a princess of Kelpin Isle. I would set sail in a week and marry her. Judging by the glint in his eyes, he expected me to refuse and give him an excuse to call the whipmaster. But I shrugged and said, sure, why not?

        I took the fishgirl onto the ship with me. She stared at me with baleful eyes and pressed notes in my hand saying, Why are you doing this? and Do you hate me so? and Do you wish to kill me?

        I didn’t plan on marrying any Kelpin princess. My plans consisted of getting drunk and smashing up the Kelpin king’s palace, because maybe then the loss of face would convince Father to hang me and throw my body into the sea. But I didn’t tell the fishgirl this.

        That night on the ship, something changed my plans. Everyone had fallen asleep, but my feet kept me awake no matter how I soaked them. I stepped onto the deck, where even the man at the helm slept as if he’d been placed under a spell.

        A woman rose from the water, toads on her shoulders and watersnakes crawling over her breasts. Her hair was dark as the sea in storm, framing a face neither young nor old. Before she even spoke, I recognized her as the sea witch from the fishgirl’s story.

        “Evening, prince.” She extended her tongue, allowing her toads to feed from it. “Does my appearance frighten you? Am I the most hideous thing you’ve ever seen?”

        “No,” I said. “You are of the sea, so you can only be beautiful.”

        She cackled, loud and sharp, but still the man at the helm did not wake. “You really are as addled as the fishgirl, aren’t you?”

        I couldn’t argue with that.

        “I have a proposal for you,” she said. “It’ll get you what you want, or a decent approximation of it. It’ll get the fishgirl what she wants too.”

        “I’m listening,” I said, though it sounded too merciful from the woman who’d cut off the fishgirl’s tongue.

        “The fishgirl’s sisters already came to me. They think you’ll marry the Kelpin princess, and they begged me to save their sister.”

        “But I’m not going to marry the—”

        “The first thing you must do,” the sea witch said, “is marry that princess.”

        The air grew thin and cold, like it had on the mountaintop. “But then the fishgirl would become sea foam.”

        The sea witch snorted. “Let me finish. Didn’t I say she’ll get what she wants? Though... why do you care about her anyway? There was a time when you wanted to rip her to pieces.”

        An image of the fishgirl as she’d been flashed through my mind, all festooned seashells and shimmering pearls. I shifted from foot to foot; the itch hadn’t gone away. “I don’t... care about her. I just—I mean, I don’t see the point of hurting her unnecessarily.”

        “Oh, you’ll need to hurt her. But only briefly, and she’ll return the favour.” The sea witch reached into the water and pulled out a knife. “This is my gift to you, prince.” And she told me what I must do.

* * *

        The princess of Kelpin Isle gasped when she saw me. “It’s him!” she cried. “The man I saved that day on the shore!”

        In truth, I didn’t remember her at all. I dragged out hazy memories of a temple by the sea and some girl in an acolyte’s robe. Was that her?

        I pretended to remember, pretended I’d always loved her and was looking for her this whole time. The fishgirl trembled in the corner, but she didn’t cry. When we were alone she grabbed my shoulders and shook me until I felt my brains rattling. Her notes said, Why, why, why? I’ll be doomed to become sea foam, never to rise to the heavens... For her, there was a better path. But for me, there was only one hope.

        Church bells, scented oils, and ear-splitting heralds marked my wedding day. I selected the fishgirl to hold the princess’s bridal train, my last little revenge for how she’d ruined my sixteenth birthday.

        That night, we boarded the ship. The Kelpin king asked us to stay longer, but I said Father wanted us back immediately after the wedding. Knowing Father, it was probably true.

        The princess and I stepped into our ship cabin. She pawed at me, her hand wandering dangerously close to where I’d hidden the sea witch’s knife. I feigned drunkenness, tottering around a bit before collapsing on the bed and snoring. The princess sniffed in disgust, believing me asleep, though how could anyone sleep with those booming cannons still celebrating?

        The racket finally died down after midnight. The princess fell asleep, though not before muttering about idiot men who washed up ashore half-drowned and couldn’t finish on their wedding nights. I lay in the dark and waited. Just when I wondered if I should seek out the fishgirl instead of always letting it be the other way around, the door creaked.

        I opened my eyes. The fishgirl stood in the doorway, hands behind her back. She jumped when she saw me awake.

        “It’s okay,” I whispered, disentangling myself from the princess. “I have one too.” I pulled out the sea witch’s knife.

        The fishgirl’s inky eyes only grew wider. I stepped outside, shut the door behind us, and led her up to the deck. Like the night when I met the sea witch, everyone was asleep. The sky blushed a faint pink. It wasn’t long until dawn.

        “You want to rise to the heavens, don’t you?” I said.

        The fishgirl blinked. Then nodded.

        “As you’ve probably figured out by now, I want to be part of the sea. I want to be what you were.” I stared out at the darkness of the sea, then back at her. “The storm didn’t hurl me into the water that night. I jumped.”

        She leaned her forearms against the gunwale, examining the knife. She must’ve known we couldn’t love each other, not when we understood the other so little. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t help each other.

        “Before the sun rises, cut my left palm with your knife,” I said. “I’ll cut your right palm with mine. When dawn comes, we’ll leap into the sea hand in hand, and we’ll both have what we want. Trust me, okay?”

        She stared at me like I’d told her to chew off her own arm. I amended, “I admit, I haven’t given you much reason to trust me. But do you see any other way at this point?”

        After a moment, she nodded. She extended her hand, inviting me to make the first cut, and didn’t flinch when her skin broke and blood flowed. The knife was startlingly cold when she cut me in return. The pain was a faint nip at first, then grew to a blaze. But we’d both endured worse: me from Father’s beatings, her from her every tread on land.

        “You never really wanted me, did you?” I said. “You wanted an immortal soul.”

        She dipped a finger onto her bleeding palm, as if she wished to write a reply in blood. But then she stopped and looked at me. Her eyes held the only answer I needed.

        “It’s okay,” I said. “Immortal souls are valuable. Far more valuable than I am.”

        I stared at my own palm. “Perhaps I should apologize. I’m making you wait longer this way. I guess I could’ve married you, but... what’s in it for me that way?”

        I didn’t know if her gaze held understanding or accusation, but when dawn broke she reached for me. Hand in hand, we leapt into the sea.

* * *

        Why did the little fishgirl rise to the sky? Is it because of her good heart, her sacrifice? Ha. No, it’s because I took her place.

        Our blood mingled that morning. She gave me her curse and I gave her mine. I fell into the water and became sea foam, while she floated into the air. After three hundred years of good deeds, she will earn her place in heaven.

        I lie in a sea of endless blue. Sometimes the sun warms my face and sometimes the waves pull me below. I’m carried by water and wind, but there’s a kind of freedom in having no choices at all.

        Sometimes the fishgirl passes by, her airy body brushing against me. I’ve long forgiven her for bringing me back to land that night. I don’t know if she’s forgiven me for condemning her to three hundred years of toil. Our conversations are often childish, all “Why couldn’t you marry me?” and “I didn’t love you” and “Why not?” and “Because you carelessly discarded the one thing I desired.” Sometimes she asks about her sisters and father and aging grandmother, and I tell her about their lives in the sea palace. In return I ask about her journeys, the cool breezes she carries and plants she coaxes to life. And I hope she finds good children who’ll earn their parents’ love, not children like me who will only extend her trial.

* * *

        The musical begins like this: “Once there was a prince who gave up his immortal soul for a fishtail...”

Copyright © 2021 Y.M. Pang

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Y.M. Pang is a writer, occasional poet, sporadic editor, and full-time alien who has carved a home in Ontario, Canada. She spent her childhood pacing around her grandfather’s bedroom, telling him stories of magic, swords, and bears. Her fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and other venues. She is a submissions editor and non-fiction contributor at Speculative North Magazine, dabbles in photography during spare moments, and often contemplates the merits of hermitism. Despite this, you can find her online at www.ympang.com or on Twitter as @YMPangWriter.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Rabbit House,” by Avant Choi

Avant Choi is a concept artist and illustrator based in South Korea, working in the gaming industry. View more of his artwork at his gallery on Art Station.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2021 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.