The mermaid queen

‎The sea off the Coral Vale was the color of melted glass that morning, so calm it seemed to be holding its breath. Princess Emily Aquason broke the surface first, laughing, her dark hair fanning out around her like ink dropped in water. Behind her, Kessa — her closest friend since they were guppies together in the royal nursery — shot up in a spray of foam, shrieking with delight. ‎"You cheated," Kessa said, flicking water at her. "You always cheat." ‎"I didn't cheat," Emily said primly, though the smile tugging at her mouth said otherwise. "I simply swim faster than you." ‎It was a game they had played a hundred times before: race from the sunken arch to the old shipwreck, no magic, no help from the current spirits, first one to touch the ship's broken bell wins. Emily always won. She was, after all, the daughter of Queen Eva, and it was whispered — though never in front of her mother — that some of the queen's strength had passed down into her blood. ‎Today, though, they had gone farther than usual. The shipwreck lay at the edge of the Vale, right where the reef gave way to open water, where the sunlight above thinned into a pale, wavering gold and the world grew quiet in a way that made the hair on Emily's arms rise, even underwater. ‎"We should go back," Kessa said, glancing upward. "Your mother said not past the arch." ‎"My mother says a lot of things." Emily grinned, already turning toward the shipwreck's broken hull, where something glinted faintly in the sand — a coin, maybe, or a shard of glass. She was eighteen, old enough, she'd decided, to make her own rules about how far past an arch counted as too far. ‎She didn't hear the boat until its shadow was already falling over her. ‎It was strange, she would think later, how ordinary it looked from below — just a dark shape gliding across the light, the kind of shape schools of fish made when they passed overhead. Then came the net. ‎It hit the water without warning, weighted at the corners, dropping through the golden haze like a curtain being drawn. Emily had time to shout Kessa's name — one syllable, swallowed by bubbles — before the net closed around her, and then hands, human hands in thick rubber gloves, were hauling the net upward, and the whole world tilted sideways. ‎She fought. She had been taught to fight, the way every child of the Vale was taught, twisting and clawing and driving her tail against the mesh with all the force she could manage. It didn't matter. The net was reinforced with something that dulled her magic, some cold iron thread woven through the rope that made her limbs feel heavy and far away, as if they belonged to someone else. ‎Above the water, voices. Men's voices, rough with excitement, calling to each other in a language she didn't know but understood well enough from the tone — the tone of people who had caught something valuable and could hardly believe their luck. ‎"Careful, careful — don't let it thrash, it'll break the winch—" ‎"Look at her. Look at that tail. She's real, she's actually real—" ‎Emily broke the surface gasping, her gills flaring uselessly against open air, and for one terrible, disorienting moment she saw the boat properly: a rust-streaked hull, men in yellow oilskins crowding the rail, and beyond them, impossibly, the pale disc of the sun, closer and brighter than she had ever seen it from below. It should have been beautiful. It felt like drowning in reverse. ‎"Kessa!" she screamed, and this time the word came out whole, raw, tearing at her throat. Below the boat's shadow she caught one last glimpse of her friend — frozen at the edge of the wreck, too far to help, face white with horror — and then the net swung upward and Kessa vanished, swallowed by the glare of the surface. ‎They dropped her into something — a tank, she realized dimly, glass-walled and far too small, water sloshing cold and metallic-tasting around her as the boat's engine coughed to life beneath her. Through the distorted glass she could see the men moving about the deck, and one of them, older than the rest, crouched down to peer in at her with an expression she couldn't read. Curiosity. Greed. Something almost like pity, quickly buried. ‎"She'll fetch a fortune," he said to no one in particular. "The Callahans have been wanting something like this for their collection for years." ‎Emily pressed her palm to the glass. On the other side, warped by the water, her own reflection stared back at her — a princess of the Coral Vale, daughter of Queen Eva of the deep clans, granddaughter of a line that stretched back to the first tides. None of that meant anything here. Here she was cargo. ‎She thought of her mother, and the thought nearly broke her more than the net had. Eva would be furious. Eva would come. Emily clung to that the way she clung to the last bubble of air trapped beneath the tank's lid — a small, stubborn thing to hold onto in the dark. ‎The boat's engine roared louder, and the shoreline of the only home she had ever known slid away behind her, swallowed by glare and distance, until there was nothing left to see but open water and the wake of a boat carrying her somewhere she had no name for yet. ‎Somewhere beneath the waves she'd left behind, Kessa was already swimming — faster than she had ever swum in her life — toward the palace, toward the queen, screaming a name that would soon turn a mother's whole world to fury ‎