Page 6 of Tangled Sails

The sea swelled and the current pulled on my hair, weighing on my neck. I cried out, afraid I’d be sucked back into the sea. “Don’t let me go,” I begged.

He looked back over his shoulder at the length of my hair trailing down my back and into the depths. “Poseiden’s hoard, maybe you truly are a mermaid,” he muttered in astonishment.

Before I could reply, the waves heaved again and the pull on my hair was so strong that I lost my grip on the ladder. The man tried to keep a hold of me, but his grasp broke and I was swallowed by the waves once more.

As I sank into the blackness that stole my air, I wondered if perhaps the man and the sea had just been one last vivid daydream before the plummet from my tower ended my life.

It had been nice to think that someone had been willing to care for me. Perhaps that was the best I could hope for in my last moments in this world.

A strong hand circled my arm and pulled, forcing me to acknowledge that I was not quite dead and should try to keep it that way.

I kicked my legs and grabbed at the water until my head broke the surface. I latched onto his neck again, pulling close, desperate to keep my head above water. My hair was going to kill me.

“Calm down,” he insisted, his voice tight as he reached behind me. “This hair is going to drown you.”

I felt him tugging on it and wondered why he wasn’t taking me back to the ship. But all I could do was hold on to him as he kicked his legs, keeping us above water while he pulled and tugged my hair. What was he doing? My hair wasn’t any good to him unless I sang.

“Forgive me, but if you want to live…”

“I’m coming down to help,” a voice shouted from the deck above.

“Don’t!” the man said, still pulling on my hair. “You’ll only make it worse.”

“Is it a mermaid?” The shout came from a different voice above us.

The man’s eyes cut to me, a question in his gaze. What did he expect me to say? I lived in the only magic kingdom known to man, and even we knew that mermaids were nothing but a myth or a bedtime story.

He went back to his task and I finally realized what he was doing.

Sparks and fire. He’s cutting my hair. I could see some of the strands reflecting the moonlight as they floated away.

A wave of horror washed over me, an instinctual bristling. Cutting my hair was the ultimate betrayal of everything I’d been taught. All of my worth, all the good that I had ever done, had been because of my hair.

Yet, with each cut, it became easier to hold my head above the water.

So I closed my eyes and I let it happen. This was what I’d wanted. This was why I’d run away—to be free of the life my hair tethered me to.

“There,” he said and immediately grabbed my waist and swam us both back to the ship. “Shall we try again?”

I stared, slack-jawed over his shoulder as the last of my hair slipped beneath the inky surface. Gone. My hair was gone. The way my head rested on my neck felt wobbly and strange.

This time, he put me in front of him and encouraged me to climb while he caged me from behind. I discovered that my months of training to climb the tower made it fairly easy to scale the ladder now that my hair was gone, though a ladder that swung precariously from a rocking ship was certainly different from a solid stone wall, and the man kept having to pull my skirt out of my way when it would tangle around my feet.

Hand over hand, I climbed toward the railing above and the men who waited there.

So many faces peered down on us. All men. Some young, some old. Some grizzled and rough, some fresh-faced.

“Has King Tritan sent us one of his daughters, Highness?” one of the younger men yelled.

Highness? Was this man royalty, then? And the King Tritan they spoke of, perhaps he was a ruler of another land. One who regularly threw his daughters into the sea? That didn’t seem right. Then again, nothing about this was right.

Those strange thoughts swirled in my head, distracting me from the strain of pulling myself up the ladder. The man—prince?—who’d saved me stayed one rung below me the whole time, anchoring the ladder and telling me I could do it.

When we reached the top, several sets of hands took hold of me and dragged me over the railing.

As soon as my feet met the wooden planks, I collapsed onto the deck, catching myself with my hands. My chest heaved with labored breathing, and my eyes darted around, tired and confused. I was on a ship in the middle of the sea, and the tower from which I’d fallen was nowhere in sight.

I looked up, acutely aware of all the eyes staring at me in the lamplight as unease crept up my spine.