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The morning of her twentieth wedding anniversary, Ariel awoke to the raucous ringing of the bells. Not her wedding bells, no—those were a childhood dream long faded. These were the bells in the alert towers. The first time she’d heard those bells, she had stumbled out of her canopied bed like an eager student called to attention, prepared to do anything that was asked of her to help. But this morning, the morning of her wedding anniversary, after years of on-and-off threats to the kingdom, the bells just meant that her plans for the day were ruined, and worse was to come. Lying in an ungainly heap, she tried to muster up the motivation to get up and face this new day. The side of her face was creased to the pillow. The dimmest of pre-dawn light filtered uneasily through the minute space between heavy brocade curtains. Light and curtains alike hung dark with dust. Watching that unmoving thin strip of light, alarm bells ringing and the sound of it ricocheting against the walls, Ariel knew without looking that she was alone in the room. Eric likely had not yet been to bed. If he had, he would have pulled the curtains the rest of the way closed before retiring. There would have been some lingering warmth to the room.Enemy ships spotted off the coast, the pattern of the bells said. No use going back to sleep. Ariel finally lurched to her feet, swayed, got her land legs, and crossed to the curtains to pull them aside. She stepped onto the chilly balcony in her nightgown. Out here, she could hear the rhythmic push and pull of the ocean. Once a source of comfort, now those waves brought such alien concepts as enemy ships. Were those them? The sky and sea were both a hazy gray, but there were some darker smudges out in the distance that could be ships, or rocks, or sleep that needed rubbing from her eyes. Ariel leaned over the icy stone railing. In the early morning, and with the alarm bells sounding, nobody was out on the sand or even in the castle courtyard below. Just mist. Just wind. She considered going for a quick morning walk along the shore to clear her head, maybe dip her feet in the water, but it was so cold and early that Ariel couldn't imagine it would be worth it. And it wouldn’t change the ongoing fact of the bells. Should she still tell Eric what she had planned to tell him? It was no longer going to be a good day and Eric would no longer be in a good mood. That had been the extent of her master plan—good music, good food, a day to celebrate their love, a day to soften the blow. Ariel had been waiting for the right time for so long. There was never a right time to tell the love of your life that you wanted to leave him. She found Eric down in the dining room, wearing yesterday’s clothing and surrounded by yesterday’s exhausted advisors. He glanced up at her and from the fatigue in his eyes, she surmised that the enemy ships had not been a surprise, to him. He had received early word, had spent the night waiting for them, and had told her nothing. She decided right then to ignore this minor indignity. She was his partner in ruling this kingdom, and she once could have mustered up no shortage of offense. Did he not think she could help? But today, part of her was grateful that he had spared her the sleepless night. It hurt that he hadn't told her, but it also would have hurt to have known.Ariel took her seat at the table by her husband. Eric gave her a forced smile, and said, “Happy anniversary.”She returned his smile as well as she could. How sad, that their anniversary be a day of such lackluster smiles. “Is the children’s choir still coming this evening? Or the quartet?”“No,” Eric said with a sigh. “I had Grimsby cancel. I want people to stay in their homes today.” Ariel nodded. Nothing she hadn’t expected, as soon as she heard the alarm bells. Her husband would want people safe. She did too, but it was a bitter want, that it was necessary at all. She mourned for what they could have had in a perfect version of this day. Instead, there would be no singing tonight. No dancing. Various advisors and messengers entered and left, with only Eric and Ariel staying in their seats. Carlotta brought them breakfast, and then lunch, setting plates down around the stacks of sea charts and written communiques that littered the table. Ariel picked at her food like a sparrow. She was a sponge, soaking up information as it rained upon them. Information like, “the ships are from a consortium of kingdoms to our east,” and “a single messenger has come ashore to parley,” and “lookouts report heavy cannon artillery aboard.” She asked some minor clarifying questions, but otherwise, she let Eric take the lead. Some of the advisors gave her furtive looks whenever she opened her mouth, as if they thought she might lead astray their beloved king with her ensorcelling voice.One thing was clear—not one advisor seemed able to say with any certainty what the ships wanted. Apparently the ships’ messenger had been ambiguous. Was this a threat? A warning? A test? Oh, the advisors each stammered through their guesses, their expectations, and their fears, but little of it was grounded in anything solid. Eventually there was no new information forthcoming. The advisors could do no more than leave Eric and Ariel alone to parse it all out and plan the next move. Eric sat back in his chair, late afternoon sun streaming down over his closed eyelids. Sparse threads of gray in his hair turned silver in the light. Ariel remembered when his face had been smooth and carefree. Now the lines on his forehead formed deep shadowed valleys. In that quiet moment, a mislaid piece of her heart said to her, Tell him! Tell him you want to leave. You can’t wait any longer. But Ariel couldn’t bear to think of what new lines it would form on his face, to tell him so. She reached for his hand instead. “Last year, foreign ships looted three villages to the north when we wouldn’t give in to their demands,” Eric said, eyes still closed, rasping his dry thumb in slow circles over Ariel’s knuckles. “They burned the fields and harbors. Carried off all the wheat and iron they could reach, and set fire to the rest.” Ariel remembered, but to hear it again in Eric’s soft voice tripled the hurt of it. That treacherous voice said, These humans are barbarians after all. You don't have to be one of them. You don’t have to think about any of this. Tell him you want to leave. It spoke the way she still remembered her own voice—sixteen years old, youthful and bright, but with words that she never back then would have uttered. “It’s awful,” she said quietly, clasping Eric’s hand more tightly. He squeezed her hand for just a moment, then pulled away to lean more closely over the materials on the table. “Did your father’s kingdom ever face such threats?” Eric asked, paging through a short stack of maps. Ariel leaned closer, to see that they were maps of their own kingdom. They rustled like snakes through grass. “You met her,” said Ariel. “But she was a different kind of threat. Ursula was... straightforward.”Eric nodded absently, growing grim. “Was yours the only kingdom? Were there others, in other oceans?” Ariel cast her mind back to that time. “I’m sure there were, in the other oceans and seas. But I never heard anything about hostilities.”“No skirmishes? No war?”“None of that,” Ariel confirmed. She leaned her head against her hand, feeling its weight. “There were accidents, but nothing like that.”“It sounds utopian. A place too free of evil to be true. It's hard now to believe such a place exists.” Ariel silently agreed. Eric slumped deeper into his seat, some invisible weight settling upon his shoulders. “Ariel… I have to raise the navy.” A chill wrapped its hand around Ariel’s heart, sending a cold current through her body. She wanted nothing more than to get up and leave. “Are you sure? Is there no diplomatic solution?” “Maybe eventually,” Eric allowed. “But we can’t go any further to the table with our navy unprepared to back us up and protect our villages. Not again.” That’s what the maps were: population. Able-bodied people from each town and village, to draft as sailors onto ships. Ariel saw them in a new light, now: people who would fight and even die for their kingdom. Like animals, sang the shard broken off from her heart. Like animals. Ariel skipped dinner, her stomach roiling. She tried to leave the castle and walk along the sand, thinking maybe her curtailed idea from earlier might clear her head, but the stern looks of the guards dissuaded her. Nobody was allowed on the beach right now, with the enemy ships holding court further out on the waves. Windows were closed, curtains drawn, torches dimmed. She trampled through her brain for a happy solution, but found nothing. Instead of wandering like a spirit along the sand, she floated like a ghost about the castle.She thought of going back to Eric. She should be helping him right now, according to her duty as queen if nothing else. But a part of her now shied away from facing this kind of hard reality with Eric. Eric had always represented the best of humanity to her. Adventurous, welcoming, brave, kind. In the early years of their marriage, when she was still shocked by the less-than-decent parts of the human world, he had been her safe haven. The last few years of threats and skirmishes had eroded that safe haven into a skeleton of what it used to be. Even adventurous, welcoming, brave, and kind Eric was caught in the sticky tangle of human deficiency. In her worst moments, alone in her bed at two o’clock in the morning, Ariel wondered if she was also too caught in that web now to ever leave it. If she was irrevocably human, already tainted, perhaps the best thing to do was to join her husband and write compassionate letters to those poor folks being drafted. Night had crept quietly in, and habit of many years brought her feet back to Eric anyway, to the hall leading to their shared bedchambers. Shouting voices from the antechamber sailed out into the dark hall. One of them was Eric, an unusual furiousness coating his unintelligible words. The others, Ariel wasn’t sure. Perhaps advisors. She stayed her feet just before the door, hoping to eavesdrop. It was of little use. The door was solid wood and distorted all sound. Ariel thought she heard something about “children” but not enough to string together a sentence. Perhaps something about the choir? Hopefully not terrible news from the outer villages. The thought burned in the back of her throat. Well, it was her bedchamber—she pushed through the door. Eric and his arguing companions whirled to face her. Two of his advisors stood vibrating in the middle of their plush carpet. One she was embarrassed not to recognize by name: an advisor younger than either she or Eric. In his agitation he’d been flapping his arms all about, like fish on a rock. The other was Hartwin, an old man who had advised Eric’s father. His posture indicated a long lifetime of maintaining decorum, but he too had a frantic edge about him. Eric’s face was pale with fury, or maybe fear, and the way he looked at Ariel as she stepped closer made something strum in her chest. The younger advisor looked between the two of them, then at Hartwin, and evidently decided that he was done. He brushed off imaginary dust from his cravat and said, “Think about it, my king.” He strode out the door, leaving Eric and Ariel alone with Hartwin. Hartwin gave Ariel a proper royal nod, which she distractedly returned with a short curtsy. Eric meanwhile was worked up, repeatedly clenching and releasing his fingers, lips pressed colorlessly flat. Each breath, he seemed able to relax some, but it was clearly trying his patience. Ariel gave him a moment, wondering if anyone would explain, and then had to ask, “What is all this about?” Hartwin coughed. Ariel waited to see what he would say, but when he said nothing, her heart clenched.She looked next to Eric. Bright spots of red appeared high on each of his cheeks, and he took another semi-calming breath before he replied, as if by rote, “Nothing of note.”Nausea swept through her at this obvious lie. Eric was excellent at ignoring things of no note—it was normally the bane of his advisors, who wished him to take a more microscopic approach to rule. She looked between Eric and Hartwin, who made no move to be any more forthcoming. “Is there news? What happened?”This time Hartwin was the one to lie. “Nothing happened.”“That’s not true,” said Ariel bitterly. She was struck anew by the deep well of bitterness she had, and how little she had of patience or understanding. “So much is happening, so many things. What was important enough to accost Eric in our bedchambers?” Ariel felt another wash of sick foreboding. Could “children” refer to recruits? “Is it about the navy?”Eric sat wearilly upon the settee and leaned his head back against the wall with a dull thunk. “No, my love.” Hartwin cleared his throat and stood to leave, but Eric waved a hand for him to stay. “Hartwin,” he said, “Tell my wife, the queen, what you just told me.” Hartwin winced. Eric turned his eyes to Ariel, head unmoving. In the evening lamplight he looked gaunt, eye sockets sunken into the dim. Suddenly her brave, lovely sailor looked old. Ariel wondered if she would grow old beside him, or leave before she could see him truly in his old age. And then she wondered if he would live that long, his kingdom besieged like this. Hypothetical hurts atop hurts. Ariel crossed the room to join him. “It is not my place,” Hartwin tried to say. The tremulousness in his voice took Ariel again by surprise. Hartwin had been a rock for all the time that she had known him. Now he would meet neither of their eyes. Emboldened by that quaver, Eric cut him off even as Ariel sat beside him on the settee. “Not your place to tell my wife what you just told me?” His hand searched out hers, and once he had it, his grip was tight and taut as the atmosphere in the room. Now Hartwin stood over them both, his expression grave. “I simply think you and Ariel should take some time to discuss. On your own.” Eric sighed from somewhere deep in his chest. “Have it your way.” Hartwin gave him a tense but polite nod, then stepped gingerly from the room. The soft click of the door rang portentously through the still air. All of this made Ariel’s heart clench harder. Eric had not yet let up the pressure on her hand. She gave it a squeeze and tried to rein in the worst dregs of her imagination. Who was dead? What had been threatened? If not for all of the secrecy and arguing, and the way Eric still struggled to turn his head to look at her, and how inadequate she felt to deal with it all, it would not have been so difficult. The lamp flickered, sending the shadows of his eyelashes darting over his cheeks like a scatter of light over the depths of the sea. “Tell me,” she said, gathering her courage. She moved their clasped hands to her lap. “Whatever it is, we’ll handle it together.” Unless you tell him your own secret, said the jagged splinter of her heart. The one you’ve been holding far closer to your chest than this. Then you would be free. Eric still would not look at her. “It’s the message from the ships.” In a restless burst of motion, he pushed himself away from the wall and off the settee, taking his hand with him. “My own advisors kept it from me! All day long, they deflected from the fact that they knew.” His words were charged with a stunned sort of betrayal. “They proposed… Ariel, it was a proposal. They had a proposal for me, specifically.” He strode to the end of the room and back, once, twice. “Eric. What proposal?” Ariel asked, when he did not seem able to go on. She wished to pick him up and shake him. Finally he stopped in his tracks and looked at her. A tempest crossed his face. “A marriage proposal. For me.”Ariel’s stomach swooped. It was something like fear and something like revulsion. Somehow, this was her misbegotten reward for harboring her own illusions of leaving him.“They want me to divorce you, and marry their most eligible princess,” Eric went on, his voice rough with dread. “I told my advisors that it was off the table, but they want me to accept.” He aimed a distraught look at her. “My advisors said, since we have no children and I have no heir, it would be the right thing to do for the kingdom.”No children. It was true, Ariel reflected distantly. The royal doctors thought it was due to her mermaid origins. A shame, they had said. Of course it couldn't just be left at that. It was only logical for his advisors to point it out: two birds with one stone. Ice water seemed to run down her neck. “And if you don’t marry their princess?” “Bloodshed,” said Eric. “Not now, not immediately, but down the line, unless we have an alliance, it’s clear that they will not leave us be. You don’t send four heavily armed ships with this message otherwise.”A thick silence held the room for a few minutes, and then Ariel heard herself say the unmentionable: “Maybe the advisors are right.”Eric’s wide eyes snapped to her, frenzy draining away and leaving something limping and injured in its place. He did not move. Pull it off like an old bandage, snarled her heart. Tell him tell him tell him. Ariel tried to tamp it down but in this moment it was too buoyant to be drowned. “You can’t mean that,” Eric said, voice low. A flood of misery enveloped her. This was what she could not stand about the human world. The hurt, the harm, the broken-heartedness. She was a soft heart in a hard world. Could merpeople experience a broken heart? Of course they could. But down under the waters, everything was transitory. Nothing could pierce your soul and stay there, an ever-open wound. And here she was, doing as humans do and cutting both herself and the love of her life down to the quick. “Eric, you have no heir. I’ve known a long time that it might come to this.” “Ariel, no.” Eric came up swiftly to stand at her feet, and then there he knelt, in a parody of a proposal. “No,” he said again. “I love you. None of the rest of it matters.” “Of course it matters.” Now Ariel could not meet his eyes. The words were acidic in her mouth. “What else does it mean to be a human, except doing your duty even when it hurts?”Eric was still for a moment. His hand hovered over her shoulder, as if unsure whether to touch her or not. Then, voice soft, he said, “I didn’t realize it hurt you so much, to be human.” Ariel nodded woodenly. She could not let the feelings take hold or else she wouldn't be able to speak. “It didn't, at first. There was so much music and dancing and joy. Remember our wedding? Remember our first anniversary ball? But eventually we had to turn over the rock, and there was the underside of humanity. The poverty, the hate, the violence. Nothing we ever did created anything more than a brief respite. I’ve been a human now longer than I was a mermaid and I’ll never get used to the pain of it.” Eric had listened with an air of desperation that belied his calm response. “That doesn’t mean you have to leave. That doesn’t mean I want to abandon you and marry this other woman. Wouldn’t that hurt even worse?”A silent sob wracked her body. “So you’ll let people die, six months from now when they attack, just so I can stay with you? You’ll leave this kingdom without an heir, and in forty years expose the whole kingdom to the infighting that would cause?”Eric’s hand alighted on her shoulder. “I believe those are problems we can solve another way.” “I’ve lost that faith,” said Ariel. “The human world is full of problems people tried and failed to solve.” She tried to smile wryly at her own observation through her burgeoning tears, the way a real human would, but she was so tense that her face could only twitch. Eric's face was as grave as she had ever seen it. “And I’m not equipped to solve them at all. You didn’t even tell me about the ships until the bells had rung this morning.” She kept all affront out of her voice, but every word deepened the pit between them. Her entire body had gone numb. She had to force the last few words from her mouth: “I think the best solution for me and for the kingdom is that I go back to my father’s kingdom, and let you start over.”Eric’s grave face crumpled. You barbarian, the voice in her heart accused. How dare the human world turn you into this. What was he thinking? Would he argue? Would he agree? Ariel feared either one. Such was life here: either one would hurt. His hand tightened on her shoulder, then loosened as he got up to sit next to her. He brought his mouth close to her ear, as if he were delivering a secret. Then he drew away, as if the secret had flown off. “Come with me,” he said abruptly, only the mildest tremor in his voice. “Let’s walk on the beach.”“We’re confined to the castle.” She wiped at her face with her sweaty palms. “We also happen to be the king and queen,” Eric said, with a touch of irony. “We may have some sway.”It was darker than usual down on the beach, the torches high up on the sand all unlit. The moon was a mere crescent, sharp at the edges. The guards had not let them through until Eric made up a story about his mer-wife requiring a dip in the ocean for her health, and who were they to argue with that? But Ariel watched the faint glimmers of slender moonlight on the cresting sea foam and felt only sadness. As a human, the ocean at night would be frigid and unpleasant. It would dry her skin, coarsen her hair, sting her eyes. Eric stood at her side, barely visible in the mist. It would have been impossible for the ships out there to see them. “Do you love me?” Eric asked. Ariel could tell that he’d been holding on to that question, saving it, building up to it. “Yes,” said Ariel honestly. “So much it hurts. And I love this kingdom too. I wish we could go back to when it didn’t hurt.” “I’m sorry,” Eric said, and in the pause after his words Ariel could hear all the things he was sorry for: the empty bed, the distracted nights, the things he had kept from her, the things he could not control. The future his world was forcing upon her. The breaking of the surf against the land filled the rest of the silence. “I’m sorry, too,” said Ariel. “Whatever’s next, I hope you know that.” Eric nodded seriously. He reached for her hand, and she took it, because it was true. She still loved him. “Do you want to go for a swim after all?” Eric asked, stepping a pace closer. “The guards might be suspicious if we both come back dry.” “I can barely swim anymore,” Ariel admitted, unable to look him in the eye. What an embarrassing thing to say. What an embarrassing thing to be true. She shivered and wished she could go back to the time when swimming was easy, too. “It doesn’t feel right. The water is too strong.” Eric looked at her for a long few seconds. The moonlight leached him of color and deepened his shadow. “Do you want to go for a swim anyway?” he finally asked. Ariel opened her mouth to say no, again, and then the hopeful look on Eric’s face registered. It was a bittersweet hope, the kind that was ready to be disappointed. So disappoint him, said her wayward inner voice. If he cared for you, he would not torture you with reminders of who and what you used to be. The cruelty of those words, in the sweet tones of her younger self and unbidden to her mind, were a sudden shock. Disappoint him? Pile hurt atop hurt? A fitting parting gesture to her human husband and the human world, but not something Ariel could stomach, when the alternative was such a small thing to offer.“Why not?” she asked, and was rewarded with the deepest expression of gratefulness she had ever seen on Eric’s face. They shed their outer layers and descended into the foam in their underclothes. The water hit them like a wet slap, stinging and then numb, and Ariel shrieked as the waves lapped up higher and higher on their bodies. Sand abraded the bottom of her feet. Wading in deeper, Eric scooped her up as if to protect her from the waves, but the reprieve was short-lived—the tide was coming in, and soon the water was deep enough that no inch of them could stay dry. Ariel found herself treading water, shivering strenuously, petticoats tangling around her legs. Her eyes ran with tears but her body pulsed with a strange exhilaration. Eric swam toward her in a few strong strokes and circled her playfully, laughing above the dark sound of the ocean. Ariel laughed in response, an instinct more natural than breathing. Eric swam up right in front of her, revealed that he could still stand at these depths, and wrapped her in his arms. He spun her again and again in a watery waltz. Even soaked to the bone, gasping for air, exquisitely aware of the fragility of her human body against the thundering power of the waves, Ariel was suffused with a warmth that had eluded her for a very long time. Eric’s arms around her were so tight they hurt, but it was the good kind of pain. A torture, the voice had said. How could this be a torture, to remember how easily she once swam? How easily she once loved?Even if she left, she could never go back to the way she used to be. Her heart would stay heavy. Nothing would be undone. Never again would she feel that innocent and unassailable joy of her youth. It hurt to know that that refuge was gone, but for the first time, dancing with Eric in the ocean on their anniversary, she wondered if there might be a different kind of joy ahead if she fought for it, if she endured the pain, if she stayed. The guards hid their smiles when they returned to the castle dripping. They went back to their rooms together, Eric’s hand hot in hers. No advisors accosted them, but someone, perhaps Carlotta, had filled a warm bath for them in the bedchamber. The bubbles shone an iridescent greeting. Ariel found herself warmed by that simple kindness almost more than by the water. When they were washed, dried, and ready to sleep, Eric pulled the curtains closed against the midnight chill and blew out the lamps. The room was dark and cozy, and Ariel had almost forgotten about the ships waiting out on the water for a reply. Then Eric joined her in bed and Ariel resolved to put them out of her mind for the rest of the night. She and Eric would face that decision, in the morning, together.