Chapter 8
Kye
You can’t swim,” she’d said, bringing this painfully embarrassing fact out into the open for the first time ever.
No, I couldn’t swim.
Yes, the entire kingdom likely knew about it. They had surely guessed it since I hadn’t stepped into the water for decades now. Or they’d learned it from the whispers that travelled with the ocean waves and the sea breeze across the entire kingdom. For the first time in history, Olathana had a king who couldn’t swim.
No one spoke about it. Not to my face, at least. No one had certainly put me on the spot like this before, forcing me to admit the biggest weakness a siren could have.
“How come no one taught you?” Maren asked casually, as if the discovery didn’t shock her at all. “I mean you live surrounded by water.”
“A siren doesn’t need to be taught how to swim, Maren,” I groaned at her ignorance as well as her persistence. “We swim before we even walk. It’s part of us, just like the song is. The moment we touch the water, we become one with it.”
“Touch? Oh...” she glanced at the coral that I was mechanically tapping with my finger. “Does it have something to do with the curse since it affected your touch?”
It had everything to do with the curse. But why did it have to be her to discover and voice it out loud? The one woman Ireally wished to impress lately ended up bearing witness to all my weaknesses, uncovering them one by one like festering sores.
“Yes. I no longer feel the water,” I confessed.
“What does that mean?” she wondered innocently.
Her limbs spread in the water like rays of a starfish, her hair floating around her head like a golden halo, her body teasing me, effortlessly seductive in its nudity. The ocean no longer recognized me, but it seemed to embrace Maren, cradling and rocking her in its swells.
“I can’t feel it,” I snapped, irritated to even be talking about it. “I can’t command water to hold me or to move me. When I’m in it...” I kicked my foot, sending a fan of spray weighed down by glass dust from the contact with my skin. “There’s always a layer of glass that separates me from it, making it nearly impossible to get through. If I fall into the ocean, I will go straight down to the bottom. And since I can survive without breathing for quite a while... Well, it’d be an excruciatingly long and torturous death.”
I couldn’t help the shudder of dread at the idea of lying deep on the bottom of the ocean in complete silence and absolute darkness as life slowly seeped out of me.
“Okay, so,” Maren’s cheerful voice thankfully yanked my mind away from that miserable image. “I can’t ‘command’ the water to do anything for me either. It took me years to learn how to swim as well as I do, but I can teach you fairly quickly how to tread water using your body’s buoyancy. I have no magic, but if you do as I say, you’ll probably be able to stay afloat too and avoid going down to the bottom of the ocean if you accidentally fall in. One less horrible death to worry about, right?” She gave me a sweet smile, teasing with that last line, but her offer was genuine. And oh so tempting.
I moved my foot in the water that felt dead and silent to me. I didn’t trust it. My magic was gone. But Maren never had anymagic to begin with. Yet she looked almost as comfortable in the ocean as I used to be in it so long ago.
“Alright,” I said tentatively. “Tell me how you’re doing it? How do you float?”
She stayed where the water was deeper. I knew it because that was the spot where I’d fallen into the ocean just before Odine pulled me out.
“I’ll show you. Come down that way.” She pointed at the shore on the other side of the coral. “There are a couple of steps underwater that you can use.”
I nodded, halting my breath as I slipped off the coral. Giving up the safety of the hard surface, I entered the treacherous water. With my feet on one of the steps that Maren had mentioned, the ocean waves rose and fell gently around my chest. Until a swell pushed against me lightly, my foot slipped on the glass step, and I almost lost my balance. Quickly raking my hands through the water, I managed to stay upright.
Oh, it was a bad idea. How was I supposed to force the water to hold me afloat if I couldn’t even make it let me stand in it?
“That’s good,” Maren encouraged, swimming a little closer while making sure to stay out of my reach. “See how you used your arms to straighten yourself? That’s how you can use them to keep you afloat or move you ahead when swimming.”
“It doesn't work as well without my fins,” I complained, rubbing the back of my forearm.
The curse had lightened my skin, blending it with the silvery lines on my arms and calves where the fins used to be. Now, even a trace of them was hard to spot.
“You had fins?” Maren gaped at me in wonder.
“All sirens have them. Except for me. Not anymore,” I explained, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
“Do sirens use fins for swimming?”
“The fins help. But we can swim without them too if we need to. I used to be able to make water hold me even if I kept completely still.”
“Well, that’s not how you swim if you have no magic. You can’t be still. See? I need to be moving all the time to stay afloat upright.”
