“Stop.” He massages fingertips into his temples.

The doctor stops.

“I don’t want to hear any more of your nonsense. She is not returning to the sea. She won’t—she won’t be a monster. She’s human and she is mine.”

“Yours,” the doctor repeats. It sniffs, disdainful. “And you’re worried about her pregnancy.”

My prince snarls. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“If you can’t figure out the answer to that, Your Highness, it’s not your knowledge to have.”

Something is wrong with the second clutch.

The eggs are smaller than they should be, clouded not crystalline clear. Their inhabitants sit motionless: tiny, barely more than a tendril of meat. As I arrange them on the sheets, my sisters in attendance, I weep. This should not have happened. They had deserved better.

As the sun bleeds from the horizon, brass and gold, molten, I devour the remains of my stillborn daughters. They are bitter. They reek of tragedy. The future will be better, I assure the rest of them, hoping against hope that the flesh of their sisters would be insurance against an uncertain tomorrow.

Everybody has a theory about where mermaids come from:

Sea foam. Goddesses, pale as milk. An act of spontaneous genesis, precipitated by a circumstance of oceanic currents. The semen of sailors dripped into the mouths of tuna. There are a hundred thousand million suppositions.

Only mermaids, who no one ever asks, are ever right.

It was time.

I squeeze my prince’s arm and he startles, his free hand already groping for the sword he keeps on the bed. A curse loops itself around his voice, as he migrates from sleep to awareness. I hold his wrist throughout. Wait. Slowly, his panic transmutes into concern, into dawning excitement as his eyes settle on the hand I have rested on my belly.

I mouth the words at him, hoping he understands. It’s time.

And he does.

Gore spumes from between my legs. There is blood, blood, more blood than I had thought imaginable, brackish and thick. I scream, soundless. Unseen by my prince or his subjects, my sisters cluster around the bed, crooning reassurances, even as they slip, one after another, into newborn bodies.

The last of my daughters do not arrive in silence, contained in their eggs, delicate, vulnerable. They come shrieking instead, full of teeth and rage, full of power.

I stroke my fingers over the tatters of my prince’s face and he gurgles, somehow still impossibly live, his throat bulging with daughters.

The room drips crimson.

My children look up as I slip from the bed, their eyes shining black, their mouths razored and round. If this were the ocean, they’d be floating in the tangles of kelp, in their father’s hair, darting between his teeth, safe, safe from the world.

But they’re here instead, and we, like everything else in the world, will make the best of what we have.