Luce wanted to be sure Dorian had made it safely home, but there was no way she could do that with Nausicaa right beside her. For the first time in weeks Luce found herself feeling a little ashamed of her forbidden romance. Nausicaa believed that Luce was honorable, after all, worthy of deep respect; somehow it would be unbearable to disappoint her. They stopped at Luce’s dining beach and ate, both of them too tired out to talk much, and Luce was pleased to see that Nausicaa didn’t mind the two little larvae at all. Instead she crooned to them and fed them oysters and petted their hair. They warbled around her, splashing and giggling at the attention.

It wasn’t just exhaustion that kept her from talking to Nausicaa, Luce realized. She felt shy around this dark, powerful mermaid in a way that she hadn’t felt with anyone since the days when she was just a helpless human girl.

“That queen,” Nausicaa said after a while. Her tone made it clear how ridiculous she thought it was to call Anais that. “Why do they not drive her away? Anyone can see that she is sika.”

Luce was confused. “Are you saying—I mean—are you calling Anais a psycho?”

Nausicaa looked blank for a second, then cracked up laughing. It was the first time Luce had heard her sound young, although she had the face and body of an exquisite fifteen-year-old girl.

“Not psycho. How strange, I always think, that the English for ‘crazy’ is almost the same as ‘psyche,’ the Greek name for soul. Do you all believe here that to have a soul at all is to be insane? She has no soul. Sika: a cold one. You must see it when you look at her, so.” And here Nausicaa gave Luce the sidelong glance that would reveal the secret past that had changed her. Luce flinched at having Nausicaa gaze at her that way, but Nausicaa’s face remained so impassive that after a moment Luce relaxed. And then she understood what Nausicaa was trying to tell her.

The dark shimmering of the indication always hung thickly around Anais’s head. But unlike every other mermaid in the tribe, with Anais that sparkling didn’t seem to contain a story. You could gaze at her sideways until your head throbbed from the effort and not see anything more than a few hazy winks of boring, everyday events. She had the mark, it seemed, but not the deep emotional wounds that the mark implied. Luce had always wondered why that was and what it meant.

“You mean because you can’t see anything happening to her? I never understood that. Do you—I mean—you know what that’s about?”