Chapter 3 Ariel
Ariel
I lie in my shell-bed with the palace gone quiet around me, dawn only a pale idea above the lake.
Under my pillow is… contraband. I slip the leather folder free and ease out the little rectangle inside.
Driver’s license. Everett’s smile beams at me from the slick human plastic, all easy confidence and sunshine.
My thumb finds the curve of his mouth. Ridiculous, how something flat can feel like a heartbeat.
The storm has moved on, but it left last night behind like a shell I can’t stop pressing to my ear.
Boom, fall, splash. No time for laws or consequences.
Only one thought—save him. When I reached him, he was limp, gray, wrong.
Then color. Breath. And—stars help me—the kiss.
My fingers wander up to my lips, and the memory shivers through me like a warm current.
The surface holds a strange silence. No current cradling me. No water weight holding me in its soft hands. Just air. Thin, dry, and unfamiliar.
A trumpet blast shatters the quiet. The summons. I jolt, and the license spins out of my hand. I fumble it against my tail like a clumsy seal.
“Nope,” I whisper, snatching it back.
The folder and card vanish into my hair bun—Ariel’s Felony Updo—while I tug on a sea-silk top dyed to match my eyes. If I don’t answer the horn, I’ll suffer a week of palace confinement and lectures.
I slip into the plaza with the rest of the kingdom, throat tight. The water tastes like worry. Does everyone know? Did someone see me? Is today the day the world I love narrows to a door that locks behind me?
Whispers ripple like a school of fish.
“Someone went out in the storm… beyond the boundary…”
I edge toward the back, pretending to admire a coral carving. My nerves jangle so loudly that I don’t notice the solid body until I collide with it. Hard. My bun explodes. Red hair billows, and with it, like the world’s worst confetti, the leather folder and the little square of plastic.
I reach. Another hand reaches faster.
“Well, well,” Salina sings, triumph gleaming in her eyes. “What’s this, Ariel?”
Every gaze tips toward me. Curiosity. Confusion. Then the quick, neat click into disapproval.
Salina holds the items up like she’s speared a sea dragon. She drops them, and I rush to clutch them to my chest even though hiding is pointless. The tide is already turning against me.
“Ariel.”
Father’s voice is not a shout. It doesn’t need to be. It moves through the plaza, and the plants lean with it. He hovers above us, a storm with white brows and blue eyes—my eyes—held painfully steady.
“What is the meaning of this?” he asks, his voice dangerously quiet. Don’t lie, rides on the current of his words.
My mouth opens. Closes. Tears sting my eyes. “Father…”
“No excuses. Tell me true.” His gaze touches the folder, my face, the crowd. “Did you have contact with a human? It is bad enough to hoard their trash, but rumors have reached me of a human who was saved from drowning last night. Was it you?”
Dropping my gaze to the lakebed, I watch the little snails making their slow pilgrimages between the stones. I could lie. I could try. I don’t.
“Yes,” I whisper. Then, too fast, too desperate: “But he’s a good human—”
The water around Father fizzes with the sharp, angry bubbles that happen when his control slips. “No,” he says, and that one word hurts more than any shout. “You are a princess, but you are not above our laws.”
“The human would have died without me.” My voice trips over itself, pleading. “The rules are… they’re old, Father, and the world is—”
“How dare you?” The red flush across his cheekbones is a map of every fear he’s carried since my mother died.
“Humans destroy our weed forests, our kelp beds, the lives that share this lake with us. They poison our water with their chemicals and choke it with their junk. If they knew we existed, they would take us apart to see what we’re made of.
As it is, their carelessness is killing us all.
” As it killed your mother. He doesn’t need to say the words aloud for them to find their mark.
I can’t argue with any of it. He’s not wrong.
The plaza holds its breath. Time tightens, then snaps.
“You are banished from Starfall Lake, Ariel,” Father proclaims.
He says my name like he’s swallowed glass. His shoulders hitch once before they straighten. “If there were another road,” he says, too low for the crowd, “I would lay my body over it.”
“Appa, please,” I whisper the childhood name.
His eyes flick to mine, raw and bright; then the king swallows the father.
“You will not speak of our home. You will not approach our borders or our people. If you are seen within our realm, you will suffer the consequences.” A flinch flickers through him, but he swallows it down.
“You will go above, to the surface you defend, and live with the humans. When you breach the air, your magic will be stripped. You will be”—he hesitates, a single tear escaping before he drags it away with the back of his hand—“human. Go now. Goodbye, daughter.” His voice breaks on the last word.
Something in me breaks. I want to argue, beg, and throw myself on his mercy.
I don’t. I lift my chin and do the unforgivable.
“Then make it mercy, not treason,” I blurt out, hands open, palms stinging with the current. “Bind my magic for a season. Chain me to the reef for a moon. Let me prove I didn’t endanger us. Let me show you he means no harm.”
A murmur ripples through the plaza. Salina’s hiss is a blade behind me. Father’s gaze doesn’t leave my face.
“If there were a way to keep you and keep them out,” he says, voice raw under the iron, “I would tear the lake in two.”
“Appa,” I whisper. “Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll stay below the vents. I’ll—”
“You will leave,” he says, but the words wobble. His hand lifts one helpless inch from his side as if some old habit wants to tuck a curl behind my ear, like when I was little and brave only because he was there. He forces it down.
“Let me say goodbye to Grandmother,” I try, a last, desperate barb of hope.
He closes his eyes. For a heartbeat, the world stills. Even the kelp forgets to sway. “Go,” he says hoarsely. “Before I cannot make you.”
Grandmother drifts to the edge of the circle, grief folded into the lines of her mouth. Our eyes catch. Swim, hers say. While there is still a daughter to save.
I swallow salt that has nothing to do with the lake. “I love you,” I tell him, because if I don’t say it now, it will rot inside me and turn to something bitter.
His breath shivers. He does not turn.
Around us, the crowd performs the ritual of pretending not to hear a family break. One by one, backs present themselves in armor made of obedience.
I force my body to move. Every inch tastes like refusal. I pass beneath him, close enough that my shoulder brushes the hem of his mantle. He doesn’t flinch, but the fabric trembles, and that is worse.
“Princess,” Salina calls brightly, too brightly. “Shall I escort you to the boundary?”
“No,” Father says, and the no is sharp enough to cut. He doesn’t look at me when he adds, softer, “She knows the way.”
Of course I do. The way out is the same as the way in. I was born in that corridor of light and cold. The lake remembers.
I don’t look back. If I do, I’ll beg again. Colors smear; stone and frond and familiar archways blur into the tunnel’s pale dawn. The water changes as I climb, becoming warmer and thinner, threaded with the taste of rain. My gills flutter wrong, like frightened birds.
At the mouth of the corridor, I pause where the light webs over the rock, one palm flat to the stone that held my childhood. “Appa,” I breathe into the rock, into the old bones of our home, as if stone carries messages up as well as down. “Keep them safe.”
The current brushes my cheek like a goodbye.
I push through.
Up, up, up, through coin-bright shafts, through the hush between heartbeats, until the surface scalds my face with air and I sob on instinct, already breaking in two.
Shore. Mud. Reeds rattling with the wind.
Pain detonates in my tail, hot and white, as it shears along a line that didn’t exist a breath ago.
I scream. The sound is wrong in the open air, thin and ripped.
Bones bud and branch where there were none.
Muscles unspool as skin drags over new angles.
My tail splits into two pale limbs and collapse under me like newborn deer.
I have joints in places where there shouldn’t be joints. My sea-silk top clings wetly to curves I apparently still get to keep. My toes—toes—wiggle. I stare. Then I giggle, because apparently my brain has decided we live here now, in the uncanny valley between agony and hysterical awe.
The giggle breaks, and I sob. It comes in a heaving wave that knocks me flat on the muddy shore. Everything is wrong. The air is too light. The ground is too insistent. The lake is behind me, and I’m not allowed to return.
“Miss? Miss, can you hear me?” a voice booms from above—a man’s, warm and wary. Boots thud in the mud. “You look like you’ve taken a dunk. Are you hurt?”
I flinch, throwing up a hand—stay back—and only then realize what’s in it. The leather folder. The card with Everett’s human smile. I forgot to ditch them. Of course I did.
The older man has white hair, a magnificent mustache, and a uniform that says marine police. His eyes drop to the license, and his mouth tightens like he recognizes the name. “I see. Did he hurt you?”
I try to answer, but what comes out is a raw little croak. My voice is a fish flopping on deck: not helpful, faintly tragic. Panic spikes—banished and mute? The universe is going for the full drama today.
“It’s all right,” he says, softening. Then, because I’m a brand-new foal with ideas above my station, he scoops me up like I weigh nothing and turns toward the waiting boat.
He holds me carefully, like he’s carried daughters. I clutch the folder to my chest like a talisman and try very hard not to call this a kidnapping. Technically, it’s a rescue. Technically, I asked for none of it.
Next time you break every law you’ve ever known for one forbidden kiss… don’t steal the man’s identification.