Mermaid adventures!

[wontturntofoam]

"The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done."

His head spins. Nausea and panic spike through Shrieky, and (not for the first time) he doesn't know where he is. Hands shove at his back, and he staggers, feet tangled in stupid, strappy sandles as he's surged forward by a crowd he doesn't remember being there. Everything around him feels awkward. Not right in some way that feels indefinable to him, everything is familiar, but all the angles are wrong...

The crowd presses him into a courtyard, and suddenly the air is filled with the sound of his own voice. Shrieky suddenly knows where he is.

This is what the drawbridge looks like when you walk across it instead of stare up from beneath it. These are the castle walls from the inside. This is his home, as the humans see it. That is him... being dragged out, with his useless, bloodied feet flapping and scraping beneath him, twisting to try and get away from the guards and shrieking and spitting and frothing at the mouth, and so full of hatred, so full of pain... That is him as the humans see him.

Shrieky watches as the king recites his crimes. He remembers the voice, but not the waver that's in it now. He doesn't remember seeing how the queen silently clung to her husband, red eyed and sallow faced. Shrieky, with his bloody feet and his raw voice and his flattened scarred gills, just keeps screaming and screaming as his head is forced down onto the block.

He knows what's coming.

Baedal.

The wondrous city. The Manticore. Rex and Wolfgang and Xas and Megan and Liisu and Benji and people for whom his life will have meaning.

So he stays silent in the crowd, as the other Shrieky's stream of rage turns to wordless, howling sobs. He waits to see himself disappear.

Waits until the thud of metal against wood punctuates a sudden of silence.

Shrieky watches his head drop from the block, and feels himself unravelling.

"There is no reason to be afraid. When the whole journey has been such a tremendous joy, why not the end?"

The first night, he sleeps under the drawbridge. In the small slope between where the drawbridge touches down on land, and where the moat encroaches on it. He's cold in a way that goes through him.

The second night, he goes into the village, and eventually manages to barter a few nights of accommodation in exchange for working as a shepherd for one of the local farmers. He takes the sheep onto the land behind the moat, and tries not to think about being eaten by wolves. Over the course of eighty years, you get to see a surprisingly high number of shepherds get eaten by wolves.

At night, before they eat, the farmer and his wife say prayers for the two drowned princes. Even though he doesn't have a soul, and there's no particular reason for Shrieky to assume that any god would listen to him, Shrieky prays too. He wants to ask them to pray for the Mermaid as well, but he can't bring himself to face the answer he knows he'll receive.

"And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!"

"Everett?"

In the marketplace, The Man Who Is Almost Everett turns, and when Shrieky catches sight of him, there's a clear moment of mutual confusion between them. The Man Who Is Almost Everett is young. Too young. Maybe in his late twenties or his early thirties. Younger than Everett had been for a long time.

Shrieky snaps his mouth shut, and stares at him in abrasive silence, waiting for The Man Who Is Not Everett to look away.

The Man Who Is Not Everett just stares back, his expression increasingly perplexed.

Shrieky is not to be outstared by someone who is not even Everett, so he continues to glare frostily at the stranger, until finally The Man Who Is Not Everett frowns, and shifts, and moves to face him directly, "Forgive me, but did you call me by my father's name?"

The assemblage of ire is suddenly under siege. Shrieky's face falls slightly, he tilts his head, and draws in his brows, scrambling to process this information quickly enough to keep from being lost in it.

He had known that Everett had sons. Everett had sat just out of reach on the edge of the moat and told him of the first one's birth. He had told Shrieky who they were named after and who their godfather's were. He had raged and sworn and flung his empty purse into the moat when he'd feared being unable to feed them.

(Shrieky had retrieved his purse, and combed the bottom of the moat for dropped coins and drowned treasures until he returned again)

He knew the stars that had overseen their births, he knew the hopes that Everett had for them. He knew the names of who they were betrothed too, and he has long, long since given up on ever meeting one of them

"Are you... Corvic? Or Garyth?"

"Garyth. You did know my father then?" The Man Who Is Not Everett, Garyth, steps a little closer, and there's an interest in his eyes, a bareness of curiosity that Shrieky recognizes, "You don't look old enough."

"We were best friends."

He regrets it almost before he's finished saying it.

"Truly?" Garyth's eyebrows raise, but his eyes are sharp and fascinated, not as incredulous as they should be, "What's your name?"

"Conway."

"He's never told me of you."

"He told me much of you." That gives Garyth a moment of pause, as if he doesn't quite know how how to answer it. Shrieky presses on, "I would like to see him again, very much."

"How old are you, exactly?"

Shrieky says nothing.

After another long, nonverbal stand-off, Garyth finally cracks, "He's dead. Gone these ten years past." There's a moment's pause, and then he adds, more gently, "I can take you to see his grave, if you'd like?"

There must have been some twinge in his expression, Shrieky knows, some flicker of shock or sadness at hearing of Everett's death, to make Garyth offer. He can't bring himself to accept it.

Without another word, he reaches up to grasp the thin leather cord around his neck, and in one quick jerk, he snaps it, pulling it away from himself. He holds out his arm to Garyth, fist curled tight around the wedding ring that the gods had brought to him on St Kelleys.

"Let me give you this."

Garyth holds out his own hand, eyes slightly narrowed. Shrieky drops the ring, and immediately twists on his heel and starts walking (staggering, limping, tripping) away as quickly as he can.

It takes Garyth a minute. He separates the ring from the cord and studies it, his posture shifting and back curving so he can look down into the hollow of his hand. He glances up from the ring, after Shrieky and his waddling, pained gate, then down again, to check once more. Just to be certain. Then he's in motion. Taking long, certain strides in pursuit of the retreating Mermaid, voice lifting to follow Shrieky, even as he loses himself in the throng of people pressing through the marketplace.

"Conway? Conway, wait! Where did you get this? Where did you get this?"