The Twice Lost

Catarina pivoted her head again. “Hello, generalissima. You seem to have gone out of your way for once.”

Luce suppressed an impulse to snap back at her. “Cat, things shouldn’t be like this with us! I don’t really understand why you’re so angry with me, but—”

“Angry?” Catarina raised herself slightly. Her stunning face was oddly blotchy and streaked with black dust. “Is that what I am, Lucette? Angry that you’re still so childish that you can’t see through Nausicaa and her ridiculous flattery? Is that what you think?”

It took an effort, but Luce kept her voice level. “I really didn’t come here to fight with you, Cat.” She paused, wondering if she should ask the next question, not sure she wanted to know the answer. “What do you have against Nausicaa, anyway? You said something about her and Queen Marina . . .” Queen Marina, whom Catarina had adored and followed and lost when the queen left the sea out of love for a human and died on the shore. Luce couldn’t quite believe that Nausicaa would have done anything truly wrong to Marina, though.

“Indeed.” Catarina exhaled sharply. “Indeed, just as Nausicaa is doing now with you, Lucette. She appeared out of nowhere, telling her preposterous stories of living with the first mermaids, of spending thousands of years in the sea and escaping death again and again. And Marina believed all of it, blindly enchanted with her. For three months Marina completely forgot the rest of us. She behaved like the tide chasing after the moon.”

Catarina was just jealous, then. “If that’s all that happened, you shouldn’t have made everybody think that Nausicaa did something untrustworthy! Cat, those things you said when Nausicaa came, I mean, all of that really wasn’t fair.”

Catarina glowered. “Nausicaa is untrustworthy. She abandoned Marina in the night, with no explanation, no goodbye. For so great a queen as Marina, to have her devotion discarded so callously . . . She never fully recovered her former strength of mind, Lucette. She was half-broken, remote. And it was not long afterward that Marina sought consolation by throwing herself into the arms of that human. If it hadn’t been for Nausicaa’s heartlessness . . .”

Luce flinched, thinking of how recently she’d woken up to find that Nausicaa had vanished. And then, Catarina . . . “But you left me without saying goodbye, Cat. Don’t you remember? Up in Alaska I came back to the cave and you were just gone. I don’t see why it’s so different when Nausicaa does the same thing.”

“I had no choice!” Catarina snarled. She moved to sit up, but the filthy planks above stopped her. “For Nausicaa everything is a choice. Anyone who cares for her is simply a temporary amusement, Lucette. As you will certainly discover! But I had real responsibilities. I had to do whatever I could to save our tribe from that sika Anais. The only possibility open to me was to leave you, and to trust that you would behave with honor and become their queen!” Catarina laughed bitterly. “I gave you too much credit, it seems. Queen is too trivial a title to tempt you. You require much more than that!”

For a moment Luce was distracted by anger at Catarina’s insinuations. Her tail thrashed the murky water into froth and she looked away into the dimness, fighting to compose herself. Then it hit her: “that sika”? Luce was certain she’d never heard Catarina use that word before: the word for a mermaid who’d lost her humanity not through suffering like the rest of them, but simply through her own essential coldness, her utter inability to feel or to love.

Luce had learned that Anais was a sika from Nausicaa, in fact, along with everything a sika’s nature implied. But Catarina had never even mentioned it as a possibility.

“You knew Anais was a sika?” Luce asked. Her voice came out thin and high and oddly detached from her, a rag of sound brushing through the shadows. “Did you know that all along?”

The dim glow of Catarina’s face showed the flickering shifts of her expression all too clearly: surprise, an instantaneous blink of something like alarm, then a slight self-conscious smirk. Streams of copper-shining hair obscured one of her moon gray eyes. “Well . . . I knew there was nothing to see, of course, in the indication that surrounded her. Nothing like a story to be captured with a sideways glance, as I can still observe the story of what your uncle did to you. But as for what that meant . . . I suppose I knew that Anais might be one of such mermaids as I had heard described some years before, a sika.”

“But if you knew,” Luce began, her voice still that thin strange scrap drifting on the air between them. “Cat, if you knew you should have warned everyone as soon as Anais joined us! Why didn’t you . . . we could have thrown her out of the tribe before . . .” Before so many people died, before the tribe went crazy sinking all those ships, before she killed those larval mermaids. Before she tried to murder Dana and Violet and me, Luce thought.

Catarina looked away, and all at once Luce knew exactly why she hadn’t taken action to prevent Anais from worming her way into the tribe and destroying it.

“Had you learned what a sika was from Nausicaa, Cat? And because you just didn’t want to believe Nausicaa was right about anything . . . you pretended everything was fine with Anais until most of the girls in our tribe were on her side, and it was too late?” Luce stopped talking. She felt as if all the air had been ripped from her lungs, as if her heart was seized in a vice that squeezed all the blood from it and kept it from beating.

Cat still wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Luce knew it was true. Catarina had actually allowed Anais to take over the tribe out of the spite and envy she felt toward Nausicaa. She’d willfully ignored the warnings she’d heard years before Anais was even born.

“Cat?” Luce’s voice came out jagged, accusatory. “Cat, is that what happened? You should have driven Anais away the second she showed up, and you just didn’t do it? And then you left me alone to deal with your mess?”

Catarina glanced at her for just a fraction of a second. The gray shine of her eyes stabbed through the shadows, flashed away again. “I suppose the question seems so easy to you, Lucette. You would never doubt anything Nausicaa told you, not even the most outrageous lies. After all, if you did, you would also have to doubt the sincerity of her friendship for you. But Nausicaa never told me lies too charming to question. So why would I believe a single word she said?”

Anais’s out-of-control attacks on ships had provoked the humans to the point of slaughtering their old tribe. Luce closed her eyes and saw girls’ faces veiled by water stained ruby; she saw throats gashed wide and bubbling with blood.

“You should have believed Nausicaa because she was right! She was always telling the truth! You just didn’t want to listen . . .” Luce moaned.

Anais’s actions had helped bring on the war.

“Of course you take Nausicaa’s side! I knew you would, Lucette.”

“I am not taking Nausicaa’s side, Cat!” Luce’s voice was high and sharp enough that other mermaids under the pier turned to look at them. “You’re the one who wants to make everything be about Nausicaa and how much you hate her. I’m taking the mermaids’ side.”

The silence went on so long that it seemed to flex and coil like a snake. Catarina drew herself up, her beautiful face stiff and haughty, and gazed at Luce with regal disdain. “Luce, do you dare to suggest that I am not on the mermaids’ side?” she hissed at last. “You accuse me of this, when you love humans so much that you degrade not only yourself for their sake, but you even lead your followers into the same degradation? When you would accept any humiliation from that human boy of yours if only he would pretend to care for you!”

A cold, airless rage choked Luce’s heart, clotted in her throat and eyes. There was nothing she could say in the face of such despicable cruelty, especially coming from Catarina. Between the low planks and the beach darkness waited, like some heavy, compressed substance. Something about that darkness felt to Luce like contempt made visible.

She wouldn’t answer Catarina. She would never answer her again.

“I have no place here, in this absurd army of yours. I should leave,” Catarina murmured at last.

Do you think I’ll beg you not to go? Luce thought bitterly. After what you just said?