Patients had trickled in one after another for Coralline’s attention—a wiry merman complaining of weak gills, a shivering insomniac, a mermaid with hyperthyroidism—and it was not until the waters had started to turn dull and dark and the clinic had been about to close that Coralline had slid out the door. Her tailfin had flicked to commence her swim home, when a voice from behind had startled her. “Ready, Cora?”
She’d whirled around. Ecklon had been leaning against the wall of The Irregular Remedy, his arms crossed over his chest. She had not known then that he was a detective, but the sight of him lurking in the shadows, seeing but unseen, hovering so still that he was almost as hidden as a seahorse, had made her think she was being pursued by a detective. “I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I forgot you were waiting.”
He had regarded her without impatience, without insult—rather, with respect—and had never mentioned it again.
She smiled at him now, sitting to her left at the dining table. That very first evening they’d met, she had found his face to be a handsome study of contrasts, and she found it to be so still. His jaw was hard but softened by a vertical cleft in the chin. His hair had the varied shades of pebbled sand, but its texture was always sleek and uniform between her fingers. His mouth formed a resolute line, but his lips were tender in shape—they made her think of a poet lost in verse.
In their six months together, not once had they bickered, not once had their opinions differed. Coralline had initially assumed their lines of work to be a world apart, but she had soon gleaned that they were more similar than different. He pursued clues; she pursued cures. He kept merpeople safe; she kept merpeople well. He dealt with murderers in the form of criminals; she dealt with murderers in the form of maladies.
“I’ve spoken with your mother and father, Cora,” Ecklon pronounced, his silver-gray gaze locked on her own. “I’ve told them what I now tell you: I love you.”
That was a notable difference between them—his sense of propriety. His job was to investigate those who broke the law, and he possessed an equal reverence for societal law, in the form of tradition. Coralline, meanwhile, regularly swam out the window rather than the door, even though her mother often told her that to do so was “the hallmark of an ill-bred mermaid.” Maybe Coralline should have been elated at Ecklon’s declaration of love, but she wasn’t, for she already knew in her heart that he loved her, just as she knew she loved him. It felt strange to verbalize it for the first time in front of her parents, though, so she managed no more than to mumble, “Er, thank you.”
She then reached eagerly for her stone-sticks, pleased his “special occasion” announcement had been made, and she could finally eat her supper—
“I wish to marry you.”
Coralline’s stone-sticks clanged against her plate, and her gills fluttered wildly along the sides of her neck. She looked at her parents. Her father’s eyes shone with happiness, the lines around them spreading like sea fans. Don’t ruin the best day of your life, her mother mouthed to her. Coralline tried to pull the muscles of her face into a semblance of normality as she turned back to Ecklon. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to have noticed her reaction, for he was extracting something from his waistcoat pocket.
His hand unfurled before Coralline to reveal a shell with a pale pink center melting into smooth alabaster along the edges, like a slow summer dawn. The symbol of engagement, a rose petal tellin.
“Cora,” Ecklon began solemnly, “will you make me the happiest merman in the Atlantic by marrying me?”
Before this day, marriage had been a vague concept to Coralline, something in the distance, like the clouds in the sky. Now, she felt as though the clouds had descended suddenly upon her and struck her with lightning. Her mind churning, she considered the changes to her life that would be wrought by marriage. Her name would change, for one; she would go from Coralline Costaria to Coralline Elnath—the new name just didn’t have a ring to it. More importantly, she would no longer live in this home with her parents and little brother; she would live with Ecklon and his parents in the Mansion—the largest home in Urchin Grove. But she didn’t want to live in the Mansion.
“Cora?” said Ecklon.
His hand trembled under the tellin shell, Coralline noticed through her haze. It was that slight movement that shook her; it told her that, for the first time since she’d known him, he was nervous.
She thought back to the day last week when she’d been sick with a cold. She hadn’t told Ecklon, and she still didn’t know how he’d learned it, but he’d come knocking at her door with a bowl of buttonweed. “How did you know I was sick?” she’d asked. “I’m a detective—it’s my job to know,” he’d said. “Well, I’m a healer,” she’d countered, “and it’s my job to not make you sick.” His eyes glinting, he’d wrapped his arms around her waist. In contrast to her words, her body had melted against his, and her fingers had tangled in his hair. “I wouldn’t care if I was sick every day as long as I was with you,” he’d said, and given her a long, languorous kiss.
What was she thinking? Did she have dementia like her patient Mola? This was Ecklon, proposing to her—Ecklon, courageous and kind, Ecklon, as her mother often reminded her, the most eligible bachelor in the village of Urchin Grove. She would be fortunate to marry him. His proposal was a surprise, that was all, and she hated surprises.
“Yes,” Coralline said, raising her blue-green eyes to his. Then, more emphatically, “Yes.”
Ecklon smiled at her, then at each of her parents. They beamed back at him. Coralline found that, like a star, his smile could swing any satellite into orbit, even her mother and father, who otherwise rotated in opposite directions.
The rose petal tellin was strung on a translucent vine, and Ecklon held it out toward Coralline so he could clasp it around her neck. She turned away from him, grateful to have a moment without her face in full view. His fingers brushed her shoulder blades as they closed the clasp at the nape of her neck. The click of the clasp made her think of handcuffs, and her heart pounded in her ears. Turning back to face the table, keeping her gaze down, Coralline raised the rose petal tellin off her collarbone and ran her index finger over its surface, back and forth. The shell’s texture was smooth, its ridges gentle—as their relationship had been.
When Coralline looked back at Ecklon, she found that he had heaped dulse onto his plate, as had her mother and father. Finally, it was time to eat, but, though Coralline was hungry, she had no more appetite for the fronds she otherwise loved. She continued to examine the rose petal tellin, as if it would show her the future.
Suddenly, a tremor distilled into the living room through the window, its pressure that of a drumbeat, its vibrations throbbing through the stone of the house and pulsing through Coralline’s very marrow. A stone-stick slipped out of her father’s hand. It skittered slowly toward Coralline’s tailfin, but she did not dare retrieve it for him.
Her parents and Ecklon sat still and stiff—the standard reaction to passing ships, in order to reduce the possibility of detection—but Coralline clutched the rim of the dining table. Goosebumps climbed from her wrists to her shoulders, and her stomach clawed at itself. She longed to hide under the table, but it would look cowardly. In an effort to distract herself from her terror of the danger above, she started counting her breaths. But she’d managed to count only to five, when the grasp of her fingers started to loosen, and her head started to feel as light and bouncy as plankton. She was beginning to feel faint; it happened to her often. Her father said it was because she did not take the time to eat adequately; her mother said that fainting occasionally was fine, so long as she remained thin.