“If we have a daughter, I can only pray that she is as beautiful as her mother,” my prince declared to a company of neighbouring kings one night, his hand warm around my wrist.

Daughters, I thought to myself, as he joined our mouths, his lips sticky with mulberry wine. And they wouldn’t just be beautiful, they would be clever too, and quick as a lie, and always so very, very hungry.

The first clutch comes too early.

I hide them in the jewelry boxes of a visiting countess. If the noblewoman notices her windfall, she makes announcement of it. She leaves almost as she came, slightly richer but no less unremarkable.

Months later, they’ll tell me of a haunting in a distant castle, of the salt-smell in its corridors and the figures in the spires, silks trailing from their skin like fins. Of how they sing so desolately, like birds who have never known the sky, or sirens exiled from the sea.

Everyone who is anyone knows the story of the little mermaid.

She falls in love with a drowning prince and surrenders her voice for a man who can’t even remember her name. She walks on knives for him. She aches. In some versions of the tale, her sacrifice cuts her a kind of happiness. They marry. The story ends, and what comes after can only be presumed to be happy.

In others, they do not. Instead, he falls for someone else, a woman with a voice, a woman with property and the accoutrements of a noble title, a woman with value he can measure in parchment and gold ingots. The mermaid’s sisters come for her in these versions. They give her a knife to cut herself free. In some endings, she does. In others, she does not, dissolving into a gasp of sea foam, forgotten except as an example although of what exactly, no one seems to know.

The stories aren’t entirely wrong, but they’re certainly not right.

“It’s been a year,” My prince paces the foyer like an angry tomcat. “An entire year. What’s wrong with her? What happened to the pregnancy? She—”

“Calm yourself. This isn’t about you,” replies the doctor.

I catch my smile in my teeth, unwilling to bare emotion.

“No. It’s not. It’s about the child.” My prince snaps and for an instant, I experience a frisson of what I can only imagine is love. He adores our daughters. Even though he has no knowledge of their physiognomy or their personalities, he is entirely devoted to them. “It can’t—it can’t be good for them to be inside her for so long.”

“If she was human, no,” the doctor tsks as it stores its equipment in a leather satchel. “But the ‘princess’ isn’t human, is she? I’ve checked her vitals. She’s as healthy as a mermaid can be while being kept away from—”