Father is already out of patience. “What others?”

“The other girls,” Pip says. “Gone to see the luremaid.”

***

Pip is telling the truth. Our sister is at the fountain, watching the mermaid along with every other girl in town.

“What the devil is going on?” Father sputters when we reach the square. “Has every child abandoned their homes?”

“It would appear so,” replies Lothar, the blacksmith. He too has come to find his errant daughters. “I woke to a cold hearth and no tea.”

Father is livid. “What’s gotten into them? Something is amiss here.”

It is an odd sight, the village daughters ringing the pool like sentries, eyes fixed on the creature below.

Ulric, a fisherman whose beard is as long as his tales of fish that got away, is incensed at the sight of it. “They’ve all been bewitched, is what’s wrong here. Abandoning their duties to come gawk at this monster. It’s diabolical.”

I pluck our sister from the throng, hoping to spare her father’s punishment. It is not easy. I have to drag her away.

“Hurry home, Bryndis. Before father blows his top.”

“I don’t want to,” she says, her eyes clinging to the pool.

“Father’s temper is already on the boil. Do you want him to get his cane? Go.”

She refuses to budge until Pip takes her hand and tugs her toward the church. I do not like the look in her eyes. Bryndis is not one to disobey or shirk her duties. I don’t know what has possessed her like this.

The other girls are shooed away, their fathers and brothers shaming and scolding them for abandoning their tasks. The men remain, studying the creature that has caused all this commotion.

Sligo, the big-nosed widower, rests a boot on the lip of the fountain and spits into the water. “Maybe this is a mistake,” he says, wagging his chin at the woman below. “She’ll bring nothing but trouble, like any woman.”

Lothar scratches at something in his armpit. “Do we kill it? Or just let it go?”

I cross to the stone lip and look down. The mermaid is no longer circling the perimeter. She lurks a few inches below the surface, looking up at the men. She does not look well. Paler than before, with scales molting from her tail. The smell rising from the water is sour.

“Reverend Uriah,” says Sligo. “Are you all right?”

Father cranes forward, staring down into the water. “My eyes are troubling me. She looks just like Cordelia.” He rubs his eyes and looks again. “See? She’s the spitting image.”

What is he talking about? The mermaid looks nothing like our mother. Granted, her memory has faded a little and sometimes I cannot recall her face very well. But the being below looks nothing like the Reverend’s late wife. Is Father losing his eyesight? An unwise fate for a vicar.