Brine and Bone Read online

  Brine and Bone

  Based on H.C. Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”

  Kate Stradling

  Copyright © 2018 by Kate Stradling

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For Cai and Camden,

  two charming princes who love

  the creatures of the deep

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Kate Stradling

  Preface

  Stop. If you’re expecting a clone of a certain redheaded underwater songstress who trades her voice for a three-day gamble to win true love, prepare for disappointment. While that famed revision provides the heroine her happily ever after, it also murders the original narrative.

  I’ve long held a fascination for “The Little Mermaid” in its first incarnation, particularly its jarring end. Sea foam? Wind spirits? What was Andersen thinking?

  But he was thinking something. (Writers typically do.) Every time I encounter a new incarnation of this story, while I might enjoy the rewrite, a buried part of me whispers, “That’s not how it really happened.”

  Is revisionist storytelling any better than revisionist history? Do we as authors serve our readers best when we shelter them from painful truths?

  Is it even possible to rewrite “The Little Mermaid” and stay faithful to its original ending without suffering the wrath of the jilted reader?

  We’re about to find out.

  For years I muddled over how to approach this tale without completely alienating my audience, only to realize that the answer has been staring me in the face.

  So I’ve put it to the test, and now you get to be the guinea pig. (Providing you didn’t shut the book after the second sentence of this preface, of course.)

  Many thanks to my beta-readers, Edith Stradling, Kristen Ellsworth, Chris Rhoton, and Rachel Collett. There may have been others. Sometimes my drafts get passed around. Thanks, also, to Claire and Cai, who listened faithfully, and to Camden, who tried.

  Finally, thanks be to God, the true source of inspiration, who revealed the surprisingly simple answer to my conundrum.

  It was all a matter of perspective, you guys.

  K.S.

  January 2018

  Prologue

  Everyone loved the crown prince of Corenden. An only child spoiled rotten by his noble parents, he somehow developed a charming personality to match his handsome face. He offered kindness to everyone he met, with a smile that could curl even the grimmest mouths upward.

  I say that everyone loved him, but I mean that everyone loved him except for me. I worshiped the ground he walked on and hated him for it.

  He belonged to us all, our future king. We knew that one day he would marry a lady of the realm or a princess from a foreign ally but he would never truly be hers. I couldn’t imagine him being anyone’s. He treated noble and peasant alike with the same respect, never gave preference to one person over another, always a peacemaker. In our younger days, when the girls of the court would fight over who could sit next to him or who could play with him, he would gently chide them. He only chided me once, and I never fought over him again.

  He never let me live it down, either.

  There were so many young ladies at court. Half of us didn’t even belong to Corenden proper. The older generation schemed, and we remained oblivious, so young when we arrived that we had no thought beyond playing with one another in the sunlit gardens and along the glittering shore. Our parents hoped the prince would develop feelings for one of us, that they might secure the royal lineage through the bonds of childhood friendship.

  He never did and, somehow, all the girls at court knew he never would. It was the way he spoke of his future wife: “Someday I’ll marry and bring her home with me, and we must all be friends together.”

  We knew she didn’t exist among us. Some of the girls swore we would have a fairy for our next queen, for surely no mortal could merit the good-natured boy.

  They still bickered and bargained, though.

  On one such occasion, they struck a sound piece of logic. “If we’re all to be friends, she won’t begrudge us your favor. Come walk with us to the sea, your Highness.”

  But he only shook his head. “I can’t come unless everyone goes. Magdalena’s stuck in her books again.”

  The sound of my name drew my brief attention. I quickly retrained my gaze upon the weathered pages, though the words danced before me now like insects in a flower garden, erratic and unintelligible.

  “Magdalena’s always stuck in her books. She won’t care if we go without her.”

  “She will care. I don’t want to upset her like I did before.”

  The remark earned him the scowl he sought from me. He returned it with his charming smile and I fought the fluttering blush that stole from my heart to my cheeks. “I don’t care if you go without me,” I said, snapping my book shut and tucking it under my arm. “I won’t be here for much longer anyway.”

  And I wasn’t. At twelve the threads of magic that had often sparked around me tightened into a knot of inborn ability. The king and queen wrote my parents, who had no choice but to remove me for proper training at the sage’s seminary further up the coast.

  Thus my time at the court of Corenden ended as abruptly as it began, and I committed its halls and its charming prince to my memories. For six years I worked and studied and matured. Stories of the court, of the prince and his shimmering entourage, flitted through the seminary as they did through every other part of the kingdom. The prince grew in height and charm, and his admirers multiplied into the thousands. When he toured the countryside with his father, his people lined the roads to catch a glimpse. When he passed through cities, they showered him with rose petals. When he sailed to visit the northern islands, they crowded the docks to bid him fond farewell.

  And when word arrived that his ship had sunk in a storm, and that the merciless waves had torn him from the lifeboat into their briny depths, the people mourned as a nation struck with monumental grief.

  And I shut myself in my bedroom and sobbed until exhaustion dragged me to sleep.

  Chapter 1

  Thick fog enshrouded the shore. It diffused the dawn sunlight into somber gray and deadened the roar of the receding tide to a murmur. The thready wind shifted it against a gaggle of robed young women, who drew their flowing garb closer in the clammy chill.

  “Magdalena! Magdalena, you’re going the wrong way!”

  A hissing voice quickly silenced the shrill first. “Shh. Leave her be to wander.”

  “But, Master Demsley said—”

  “Master Demsley will understand. It’s a miracle we got her out of bed this morning.”

  “But—”

  “Worry about yourself, Renae. Magdalena will be fine.”

  Magdalena shut her ears to the conversation and trekked further from the group. The pair of voices and the shadowed silhouettes to whom they belonged moved deeper into the clouded mist, until she could hear nothing of them. The fog around her cut her off from everything except this patch of sandy eart
h on which she stood, as though nothing else existed in the world.

  Would that that were true.

  Her head ached. Her brown hair, pulled tight into a braided bun, made the throbbing worse. She rubbed at one temple, her gritty eyes fixed on the beach as she trudged across its misted length. The group had come in search of ingredients most readily found when the tide went out, and she knew she ought to help with the gathering.

  She ought to, but she wouldn’t. Master Demsley had only wanted her out of her room. He had told her himself that no one would blame her if she chose to vacate the seminary for a few days or more.

  By now all the girls would know what a stupid fool she was. They all mourned, stricken when the news came with the evening courier. Magdalena, however, had taken it as a mortal blow.

  “I don’t understand. She was never even interested to watch when he passed through the village.”

  “She knew him, you dummy. They were friends when they were children.”

  The whispered voices had plagued her all night, her magical senses aflame in the hours of her grief. The pain of her schoolmates—shallow, superficial pain though it was—worked her into deeper despair, like sandpaper rubbed against a torn and angry wound.

  Yes, she had known him ages ago, in a part of her life that seemed more like a dream than reality. Here on the misty shore she could pretend that memory didn’t exist.

  Pretend, but never really believe. Her heart ached more than her head.

  The cliffs loomed to her left, monstrous shadows. She skirted closer to them as the sand gave way to pebbles and the shore narrowed. The clammy rocks provided her something to lean on as she progressed. The beach would widen again further up, in a small cove, an isolated spot where she could wallow in her misery. At the narrowest point of the passage, the gray sea churned foam against her boots, licking the soles, inviting her into its cloudy depths.

  Magdalena scowled and moved on. Just because the crown prince had met his death in the ocean didn’t mean she was duty-bound to follow. She resented him for the morbid desire even flitting through her mind.

  Yet another resentment to add to her growing list.

  By the time she passed the rocky strip, the fog had thinned. The sheltered cove stretched before her, the vegetation at its edges mere dollops of green within the mist. Debris littered the sand in dark, hunched shapes, as though the sea had attempted a sluggish assault upon the land. Seaweed and driftwood cluttered her path. The waves here, smaller, lapped gently against the slick sand. Magdalena paused to breathe the salt-heavy air. She closed her eyes and drank in the solitude of the remote beach.

  Plash, plash, plash.

  She matched her breath to the rhythm of the shore until—

  A chitter and a sploosh jarred her senses. Her eyes flew open and her hand moved to the knife at her waist—a knife meant for cutting potion ingredients, but a weapon nonetheless. The fog, still dissipating, concealed the source of the animalistic noise. Magdalena swiveled, her spine crawling with apprehension, but nothing more than driftwood occupied the shore with her. The creature—whatever it was—had moved to the ocean rather than the shrubbery further inland.

  When no additional sounds followed, she eased herself from her defensive stance. Still her breath caught in her throat with every inhale. Her skin prickled a warning: something was watching her. The waves rolled across the small cove from a distance still obscured. She reached out not with her physical senses, but with her magical ones.

  In reply, exhaustion seeped into her bones.

  She clapped that avenue shut as she staggered to one side, her head reeling with images of roiling waves and a bright, beating sun. A knot tightened her windpipe. Again she searched the cove, desperate to find the source of this errant, destructive empathy. She stumbled in the sand, catching herself before she could fall. Her vision danced in triplicate but resolved as she focused on a large, slumped piece of driftwood further up the shore.

  Not driftwood.

  Human.

  The word pulsed through her brain. Adrenaline spiked in her blood, and she pushed forward into a run, kicking up sand as she closed the distance. If she could sense such feelings, the castaway wasn’t dead.

  Perhaps it was—

  If only—

  She tamped down hope as she skidded to her knees beside the sodden figure, but it bubbled up her throat again with a sob.

  The dark hair plastered against a stubbly jaw could not hide the familiarity of a face she had tried for ages to banish from her mind.

  The crown prince of Corenden, claimed by the merciless ocean two nights ago, had washed ashore. He was not dead.

  Yet.

  Magdalena’s years of training engaged. “Your Highness,” she said, turning him to lie on his back. “Your Highness, can you hear me?”

  She leaned close to listen to his shallow breath. Her magical senses probed for the nature of his injuries.

  Sunburn. Dehydration. Bruises. Remnants of saltwater in the lungs and a lump half the size of her fist on the back of his head.

  Phantom pain burst upon her skull, coupled with images of a tossing ocean and crashing debris. As the lifeboat lowered into the water that night, a piece of the ship had struck his head, pitching him into the deep. She caught her breath and tempered the vision, her gaze huge upon the prince.

  It was a miracle he had not sunk to the bottom of the ocean and stayed there.

  She fumbled with the medical bag she always carried—the bag that healing magicians, by law, had to keep with them—grateful that she had thought to slip it over her head before leaving her room an hour ago.

  The Prince was alive.

  The Prince was alive.

  Her hands shook. She extracted a vial of smelling salts and almost dropped it when she unstopped the lid. She waved it toward his nose, heard the sharp inhale and—

  That spine-chilling chitter sounded from the waves.

  Her attention snapped to the rippling ocean, where the fog thinned to reveal sullen, iron-gray waters.

  Bulbous eyes stared back at her, set into a slick, silvery head. Her brain struggled to match this image to a familiar beast. A seal, perhaps? Pale in color, or rendered so by the fog around it?

  Magdalena peered at the creature. It remained motionless, frozen in place, unaffected by the waves that steadily trundled around it. The marbled eyes did not blink. Her own watered and blurred. The longer she looked, the stranger the creature appeared. The silver of its head seemed to bleed into the water around it, like weeds clinging upon a reef.

  It eased up from the ocean an inch, revealing a sloped bridge of bone devoid of nostrils. Magdalena’s pulse galloped in her throat. Another two inches revealed full lips and the jumbled, pointed cross-bite of a deep-sea creature—those elusive monsters that fishermen sometimes snared and brought home to frighten “landlubbers.”

  The sharp teeth parted, as though the silvery creature would speak.

  A groan much nearer invoked a shriek from the startled girl. The salts dropped from her limp grasp, and she focused on her patient again.

  The prince’s eyelids fluttered. She moved to place a soothing hand upon his brow. “Your Highness?”

  A splash drew her glance oceanward once more. The creature with the marbled eyes had vanished into the brine.

  The prince groaned again, his voice like a frog. With the mystery observer gone—for now—Magdalena gave him her undivided attention.

  “Don’t try to talk. Don’t move. You need water and medical care.”

  His gray eyes—the color of the sea—focused on her face. She fought a self-conscious blush and rummaged around in her bag for the small flask she always carried with her. Suddenly she didn’t know how to speak with this man.

  She had spent all of last night mourning his death, as though they had been the most intimate of friends.

  He probably couldn’t pick her face out of a crowd. Why should he remember a girl who left his court when they were both still children?


  And yet, “Magdalena.” Her name left his lips on a whisper. Her gaze snapped to his face and her heart leapt in joyous response.

  She smothered it. “Your Highness, you mustn’t talk, and you mustn’t try to move.”

  His gray eyes remained intent. “Where are we? Elysium?”

  She dismissed the romantic imagery. “We’re in a cove up the coast from the sage’s seminary. You washed ashore here. Your ship sank in a storm the night before last. Do you remember?”

  He nodded. His studious gaze unnerved her.

  She averted her eyes. “I have some water here, but it’s not much. I’ll leave it with you and go for help.”

  Lightning-quick he caught her wrist, his grip surprisingly strong. “Don’t leave me, Malena.”

  The pet name, one that only her parents used, caused her heart to stutter in her chest. She jerked her hand from his weakening grasp. He only grimaced and shifted his shoulders against the sand.

  “You mustn’t try to move, your Highness.” His request that she remain made her second-guess her proper course of action. She set the flask beside him and stripped the cloak from her shoulders, bunching it to prop beneath his head. He groaned as she elevated him those few inches, but the first swig of water brought immediate relief.

  Silence spread across the foggy cove. She looked again to the ocean, anxious for signs of that mysterious creature. The fog shifted against the waves, but nothing emerged from its depths. She offered the prince another sip, her ears ever alert for approaching sounds. Her group was miles away by now, or she would have yelled for help.

  When half the flask was gone, her patient blinked, and his gaze grew more alert. Magdalena returned to rummaging through her bag. At the bottom, half bruised from the jostling of a dozen packets and vials, was a plum someone had handed her for breakfast when she had left the seminary doors. She’d had no appetite, thankfully. In a deft movement she cut a narrow slice and wedged it between her patient’s dry, parted lips.