“Should I tell you, then, Queen Luce? What your story would be, if it were a story and not a life?” Nausicaa spat the word. “Though he loves you for your magic and your beauty, for your voice and your strangeness, those are the very things he will want to take away from you. He will ask you to become again a human girl, no different from the girls he might have with far less trouble. You will resist at first, but in the end, in fear of losing him, you will try to make the change.”

Luce’s hands flew out randomly and grasped at the loose rocks of the shore, but it wasn’t enough to keep her from feeling like she was falling. How did Nausicaa know so much?

Nausicaa watched her swaying and went on relentlessly. “You will let him carry you ashore, then. And you will die. Forgive me, Luce, that I am not happy in such a future for you.”

Luce let herself fall back onto the beach and threw her arms over her face. She could feel pinpoints of electricity in the water, a breathing sharpness to the air, and there was the strong blue smell of ozone mingling with the familiar reek of salt and wet stones. The darkness moved inside her closed eyes like a private sea, trying to carry her away from everything Nausicaa was saying to her. It all sounded so true. Sooner or later, Dorian would persuade himself that Luce could change back without dying. And then he’d try to persuade her, too, and she loved him so much that she’d start to believe he was right . . .

“It is not only because I’m bored, Luce.” Nausicaa’s anger was entirely gone now. Her voice was soft and endlessly sad. “It is not only because I have great hopes of you, or because you saved a life that I can hardly find the will to value. I am not so entirely selfish. I don’t want you lost as others have been because . . .” Suddenly Nausicaa seemed to be at a loss for words. “So bright a spirit,” Nausicaa went on at last, sounding uncharacteristically hesitant. “The world cannot afford to let you go. Not when so many ills threaten it.”

Luce wasn’t in any mood to care what the world could afford. “Nausicaa?”

“Yes, Luce?”

“Is that always what happens? I mean, that the mermaid tries to change back and dies?”

“Oh.” Nausicaa sounded tired. “For a few things have not turned out this way. Only a very few, Luce. Twice I have known the mermaid to live through the suffering and stand up on human legs again. Though I can’t truly consider that the better fate. One of my earliest friends survived and went back into the human world. She told me later that it was her deepest regret.” Two, Luce thought. Out of three hundred. It wasn’t encouraging.