“You said… you love me.”
“Gods help me, I do.” I laugh, and I sob, and I cry some more. “I do.”
He still looks terrible, his face bone-white and streaked with dirt and blood, but his smile is like the sun, so bright it hurts my eyes. “You love me.”
“Stop saying that as if it’s some big surprise!” I wipe at my cheeks. “My Gods, you’re alive…”
“I shifted back.” He glances down at himself, at his legs trapped inside the net. Moves his feet. “The curse. The curse has lifted.”
“How?”
“You love me,” he says again, his blue eyes on me. He reaches up and brushes his thumb over my lips. “And I love you, princess. This bond of love was the only thing that could break the curse. I couldn’t tell you the entire riddle, but if you loved me in my monstrous form, if you cried for me, if you were willing to give up everything for me… you’d save me. I never thought it would come to pass.”
“Well,” Lily says, patting her hair. “I have to say, now that the tail issue has been fixed, he’s not at all bad-looking.”
He grins at her, and though he still has to be in pain, he carefully sits up. “King Adaren of the Opal Court. A pleasure to meet you.”
“And he’s polite! Wait. A King. Did he say a King?” Lily flushes.
“This is my cousin, Lily. She’s been a great help. And that’s the healer.”
The old woman is still staring at us.
“If you help me up,” he says, reaching down to carefully disentangle his legs from the net, “I might be able to walk out of here.”
Walk.
That’s a twist I had never thought might happen today.
“Just as well,” Lily says briskly. “He definitely wouldn’t have fit inside that trunk, and… Oh Gods! He’s naked. Selina, he’s naked!”
He laughs, and I love the sound. I love everything about him.
“Good thing we brought some clothes, then,” I say, my heart so full I don’t know how it hasn’t burst inside my chest. “In the trunk. Will you bring them, Lily? And then it will be time to say goodbye.”
16
ADAR
Selina says this isn’t a dream, and judging by the pain in my tail—my legs—I’m inclined to believe her.
I have… legs again. It’s hard to believe it, after all these years stuck in the merman form. Even harder to remember how to use them—how to stand, how to walk. They are strong, since my tail was strong, but my body can’t remember how to move them properly.
Dressed in a long woolen shirt and a cloak, my legs and feet bare underneath, my arms around Selina and her cousin Lily, feeling like a newborn fowl, I take shaky steps across the cold stone floor. Selina has pulled the cloak hood over my head.
The old woman is still drawing symbols with her finger on her forehead and muttering something. I don’t think she likes me much.
The guards come toward us and stop. “Who is this?” one of them says. “I thought you only wanted to talk to the merman for this game Prince Willam mentioned.”
“We did that,” Selina says.
“Is this one of the prisoners?”
“Check your cells. He’s not. He came with us.”
I keep my head down, my face in the shadow of the hood. I doubt they’d recognize me—I doubt they even looked at my face, more intent in kicking me in the ribs and the tail, but you never know.
“I didn’t see him with you when you came down,” the guard says, scratching at his head.