The waves rock her gently, her eyes up at the sliver of moon, and then she rolls over, face down in the water. The sailfin on her dorsal lies limp. She is dead. My foolish rescue has come too late. I wade back onto the shore and sit on the pebbles. I don’t know why I want to cry. It is just a fish.

My thoughts turn to Agnet. They always do, but there is a clarity here that startles me. I think back to the gap I had seen in the mermaid’s teeth. How, in that brief moment, the mermaid had so eerily resembled Agnet that it had left me shaken. I remember now all the countless rescue plans I had made in the past. All daydreams and empty wishes.

My father had been the one to break the news of Agnet’s nuptials to Gunther the Brave. Father knew I was fond of Agnet, although he did not know the extent of our secret liaisons. To his credit, he tried to be as gentle as he could with the bad news. I did not cry in front of him. I waited until I got to the fishing hut before letting it all blubber out.

Every night after that, I would dream up plans to rescue Agnet from her brutish husband. I would steal her away in the night and we would sail off in his boat. Or I would murder him in his sleep and take Agnet away. I would get him drunk and push him overboard. Poison his soup. Cast a spell so that a whale would swallow him whole. None of these fantasies involved besting Gunther in a fight. The man was a giant. He would have snapped me like a clamshell.

Of course, all these scenarios remained fantasies. I am no hero from a saga, rescuing a princess. I can do nothing, and Agnet is doomed to live out her days as a fisherman’s wife.

So.

Maybe this is why I have foolishly attempted to save the mermaid. Agnet is lost, but maybe I could rescue this princess with the seaweed locks? Yet even this I cannot do as the creature is dead and I have failed. Her body sways in the shallows as the waves roll in and drain out again.

The tears come fast and easy now, me blubbering until my nose runs as bad as Pip’s. When I finally dry my eyes, the carcass on the beach is gone.

10

10

PIP IS AGITATED the next morning, clattering his bowl of gruel without tasting a drop and prattling on about a bad dream he’d had. I stoke the morning fire back to life and tell him to pipe down. I am in no mood for his nonsense. I can’t stop seeing the image of the mermaid rolling lifelessly in the surf. Bryndis indulges Pip, as she often does, by asking about his dream.