‘I do not want to marry the Lord Poseidon,’ I say bluntly and her nostrils flare.
‘Oh?’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t really matter what you want.’ She is inscrutable. ‘Your parents want it. My lord wants it. The oath was sworn.’
‘The oath is contingent upon my bleeding.’
‘Yes. When will that happen, out of interest? My sisters are getting impatient.’
‘Why do your sisters care?’
‘They have had to be far nicer to me than they are comfortable with these past years. They grow weary of it but will not risk losing the favour of their future queen. They have made poor Ceto’s life quite miserable.’
The sun hits the river at a strange angle, turning it to lightning in the corner of my eye.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Gods,’ Amphitrite’s laughs cracks with glee, ‘she does not speak of us then?’
‘No.’
She laughs again. ‘A case of blaming the messenger, I suppose. Each night poor little Ceto returns without declaring judgement, and each night our sisters punish her for it. Sometimes violently, always cruelly. Most nights she doesn’t come home at all.’
I am aware that the river is rushing again, I can feel it as though it rushes through my bones. She must notice because she adds, ‘Not me, of course. I am quite happy with the delay.’
‘What if the delay was indefinite? What if I never bled and was declared sick, unable to produce sons?’
My idea unfurls before her, I watch her take it. ‘You would rather die with an empty womb than become Queen of the Sea?’
She is looking at me in the way that people have often looked at me. I am too lovely to be so peculiar. It is uncanny.
‘Motherhood has never appealed to me.’
This is not wholly true. I have vague memories of a detached sort of fantasy, pieces of my mother and grandmother’s most tender moments tied together somewhere far away from the kinds of pressure that flay at that tendernessuntil it is weeping. But then, on those nights that I am not disciplined, I imagine what it would be to lie beneath the sea, to be so crushed and squeezed that, in birthing, I myself become sediment. I sit up sweating and gasping, staring out at my reliable river. Smaller than the sea but ceaseless, without the pause of tides. I imagine Ceto, sitting on its banks, out of sight but watching my window. I imagine calling out her name into the night and what it would be to feel her against me, to press her into the soft layers of my blankets. And now I know that she does not go home to rest and comfort, or even the peace of solitude. I cannot bear it. I will not stand it.
‘So? Can you do it?’
‘You will be ruined.’ She turns me this way and that in her mind, trying to find sense. ‘You will never marry, never bear children, never live up to your great name.’
‘It matters, how life is breathed into a word. Names are still made by the mouths of men.’
She rolls her eyes again. ‘I knew river folk spoke in riddles.’
‘I am offering you your crown, nymph. What more is there to discuss?’
She winds the long coil of red around her wrist as she ruminates.
‘Fine. Wait here.’
She slips into the river. I wait as instructed. It is nearing the time that I would break my fast, but restlessness distracts me from my hunger. I slip into the river and swim its width, the familiar routine loosening my anxiety and easing the consistent tightness in my abdomen.
Amphitrite emerges after I have made the return three times. I join her once more on the banks. She holds a jar out to me.
‘Take this every full moon. One sip will do. It will be enough to last a year.’
‘And then?’
