The Mermaid They Never Knew

Chapter 7: Daughters Without a Mother

The palace was never quite the same after Velara’s exile. It remained as magnificent as ever, yet something within it had changed. The light seemed colder somehow, more carefully ordered, as though every hall and corridor now reflected Queen Mother Sevil’s quiet discipline. She assumed responsibility for raising her six granddaughters with the same unwavering precision she had once devoted to governing the royal court.

The western wing, where Velara’s chambers had once overlooked the palace gardens, was transformed into a suite of classrooms. There, merfolk tutors instructed the princesses in court etiquette, the history of the kingdom, diplomacy, music, and the ancient songs every noble daughter of the sea was expected to know. Sevil decorated the halls with stained-glass panels recovered from long-forgotten galleons, and sunlight filtering through the coloured glass drifted across the young princesses’ shimmering tails in ribbons of sapphire, emerald, and ruby, giving every lesson the appearance of a waking dream.

As the sisters grew older, each was given chambers of her own, together with a small coral garden within the palace grounds, and Sevil insisted that every princess cultivate it herself.

The eldest, whose cheerful nature delighted in anything bold and brilliant, filled hers with scarlet sea anemones and crimson sponges whose soft glow brightened the gardens after sunset. The second sister, quieter and more thoughtful, preferred orderly rows of white coral carefully shaped into elegant sculptures, and called it her Garden of Silence. The third and fourth sisters, inseparable since infancy, combined their gardens into one, where twisting sea vines climbed through schools of tiny neon fish that circled them like living ornaments, never seeming to leave. The fifth princess developed an almost obsessive love of shells — rare spirals, polished conches, delicate scallops, and pearl oysters, arranged with painstaking care according to colour, size, and shape until her little garden resembled a collector’s gallery more than a place to wander.

Liren, the youngest, chose something entirely unexpected, something that made Queen Mother Sevil press her lips together in visible disapproval. Instead of asking for rare coral or exotic sea plants, Liren requested that the royal divers recover a statue from the wreck of a human ship. It was carved from white marble: the figure of a young man lay peacefully among the coral, his features astonishingly untouched by time or sea. Around him Liren planted soft pink sea anemones whose delicate tentacles wrapped themselves gently around the stone, as though the ocean itself wished to shelter a stranger who had long ago lost his way.

One afternoon Sevil paused beside the garden, studying the statue in silence.

“Why would you want a lump of stone from the human world?” Sevil asked one day, studying the statue with poorly concealed disapproval.

Liren looked up with a small smile.

“Because it’s beautiful.”

Her fingertips brushed the smooth marble.

“And because it reminds me that somewhere beyond all this…”

She glanced toward the distant shimmer far above.

“…there’s another world.”

She hesitated before asking the question that had lingered in her mind for years.

“Grandmother… tell me about humans.”

Sevil remained silent for a moment, not because she agreed with her granddaughter’s fascination, but because she had learned long ago to choose her battles carefully. Some questions could be answered later; others were best left unanswered altogether.

The princesses grew into young women of remarkable beauty, blessed with the effortless grace that seemed to belong only to pure-blooded merfolk. Their skin shimmered with a pearly glow, as though it had absorbed the light of the palace itself, and their hair floated around them in strands of gold and sea-green. When the sisters sang together in the great hall each evening, their voices filled the palace with such crystalline harmony that even the royal guards sometimes forgot their duties long enough to listen.

Each year, on the day a princess reached her fifteenth birthday, the palace celebrated one of the kingdom’s oldest traditions: the moment when a young mermaid earned the right to swim to the surface for the very first time and see the world that, until then, had existed only in stories. Sevil guarded the ceremony with almost sacred devotion. On the morning of the celebration she would place a garland of the finest pearls across the young princess’s shoulders — a symbol of royal blood — and personally accompany her to the edge of the known waters. From there, the journey had to be made alone.

The eldest returned with stories of sunsets that painted the sky in colours impossible beneath the sea — crimson, gold, and violet all at once. The second spoke of a city upon the shore, where towers rose above the water and bells echoed across the bay like distant songs. The third and fourth sisters, who reached their fifteenth year only months apart, excitedly described a great sailing ship they had watched from afar and the people upon its deck dancing to music carried by the wind. The fifth could speak of nothing except a flock of swans, whose snowy feathers she declared more beautiful than every treasure in the royal vaults.

Liren listened to each story with a fascination that went far beyond ordinary curiosity. She asked questions that left even her sisters puzzled — questions that were never about what they had seen, but about what they had felt.

“Weren’t you afraid?” she asked the eldest one evening.

“A little,” her sister admitted with a smile.

“But it was the kind of fear that makes you want to keep going.”

Liren fell silent. It was never the wonders of the surface that captured her imagination most — it was the feeling that somewhere beyond the horizon waited an answer to a question she could not yet put into words.

At night, after her sisters had fallen asleep, Liren often slipped away alone to the edge of the palace gardens. There was something about that place that drew her back again and again, though she could not have explained why. She only carried the faintest impression — less a memory than a feeling — that long ago, when she had been very small, someone warm and familiar had sat beside her there and told her that the palace was only a tiny corner of a much larger world. She did not know that the voice had belonged to her mother. In truth, Velara’s name was almost never spoken within the palace walls.

Liren knew only one thing for certain: less than a year remained before her own fifteenth birthday, and waiting seemed harder for her than it had ever been for any of her sisters. What she found most difficult was not listening to their stories after they returned, but watching the palace prepare for each celebration while knowing her own day still lay somewhere in the distant future.

The year her fourth and fifth sisters came of age, that feeling became almost unbearable. She watched servants weave pearl garlands for them, watched the court gather to sing blessings as they departed for the surface, watched the entire palace celebrate — and remained behind, the only sister still waiting for her turn.

That night, after the festivities had ended and her sisters lay awake whispering excitedly about everything they had seen above the sea, Liren slipped away once more to the edge of the gardens. There, hidden from every curious eye, she wept — not because she envied them, not truly, but because of something harder to explain: a quiet ache that time itself seemed to move more slowly for her than it did for everyone else.

Queen Mother Sevil found her shortly before dawn. It was unusual for her to search for a granddaughter herself instead of sending a servant. She settled beside Liren in silence before speaking.

“What are these tears for, my child?” she asked, her voice gentler than it usually was.

“Was this not a happy evening for your sisters?”

“It was,” Liren said through her tears. “For them.”

She lowered her eyes.

“But I have another whole year to wait.”

“Another year of listening to their stories… knowing I won’t see any of it for myself.”

Sevil sighed. For just a moment, there was something in that quiet breath that resembled genuine sympathy — as much sympathy as could be expected from a woman who had spent a lifetime governing both her emotions and her kingdom with equal discipline.

“Waiting is part of growing up,” she said softly. “No one can hasten it. Not even I.”

She looked toward the dark waters beyond the gardens.

“Even your father spends much of his life waiting — waiting for the Council to decide, waiting for distant settlements to answer, waiting for disputes that seem as though they will never end.”

A faint smile touched her lips.

“The affairs of a kingdom rarely concern themselves with whether the heart is ready to be patient.”

Liren was quiet for a while. Then she asked, almost in a whisper,

“He didn’t come today.”

It wasn’t really a question. In recent years King Keilor had attended fewer and fewer family celebrations. The burdens of the crown — and the quiet melancholy that had settled over him long ago, though Liren could not know why — left him with little time for anything beyond the kingdom itself.

“He carries a weight few could imagine,” Sevil replied.

For the first time that night, there was a trace of sadness in her voice.

“A kingdom cannot afford a weak ruler. The smallest c***k in a king’s resolve is enough for others to exploit.”

She rested a gentle hand on Liren’s golden hair.

“He loves all six of you more deeply than he knows how to show.”

“Believe me.”

Liren could not fully understand her grandmother’s words. She did not know that part of the burden weighing upon Keilor’s heart was the memory of the wife he had lost through his own silence. She knew only that something in Sevil’s voice, warmer than she had ever heard before, made the ache inside her feel a little less lonely.

“The year will pass more quickly than you think,” Sevil said, smoothing a loose strand of Liren’s hair, a gesture she rarely allowed herself.

“And until then…”

A hint of amusement softened her expression.

“If the world above troubles your thoughts so much, I’ll instruct our traders to bring you more curiosities from the surface.”

She smiled faintly.

“Would that satisfy you?”

Liren nodded politely. But somewhere deep inside, in that quiet place that had always drawn her toward the darkness beyond the palace gardens, she already knew the answer: no treasure carried home by a merchant could ever replace what she truly longed to find. She simply did not yet have the words to name it.