It began in Ireland, they say, and so it will end there too. It will end when the waters rise and swallow the Isle beneath their sweeping foam, when the mer come forth and pry the remaining ones from the living rock and draw them into the depths, down beneath the keening mountains and hungry valleys, wan arms wrapping round them like snakes and lulling the creatures into a sleep that is neither peaceful nor sweet. The lips of the mer will part, running like scales over fur and flesh, willing their inhuman selves to taste what they were never meant to touch.
The sons of Eire will be drawn into the depths beside their white-skinned sisters, lashed to the breasts of creatures with fey eyes and no names, bound with seaweed and cradled in their arms like long lost children. The mouths of men will open, struggle, cry and swallow only the salty sea as they plead for air. But as their own lifeblood was once denied to them, the mer will deny the sons and daughters of Eire this final request; for those of the sea have a long memory, and hearts turned cold by icy tows—if indeed, hearts they have. The mer will remember the hiss of salt on their slick scales, the burn of the sun and the quick slash of a knife on their moonpale skin, the fate that met their ancestors so long ago. And so they will embrace these children, these children of men, because those of Ireland are closer to them than the rest, and they know this from the heated flash of their pale eyes and the quick run of their blood beneath their skin. It will be almost a sort of love with which they bring them down, clasping them to their chests and watching them with slitted eyes. Into the darkest caverns of the ocean, beneath the Eire, they will bring them, where the fish are blind and no men’s inventions have yet reached, but by this time their prey will be dead and the mer have no fear. One cannot fear if one has no heart.
This is how they say it will happen, because this is something like how it had begun, and few question the folklore of the Eadoin. Their House rose from the mists and the rock and the moor, before the English brutes came with their iron and glittering tongues to steal away their land and home. But wars could, and would, rage, and still the Eadoin stood strong as princes on their foggy shores, slender and white with hair as black as coal. It is said that they are not entirely like their Irish kin; that their blood runs hotter yet, and in thinner veins. Witches, some whispered, the men and women alike, but especially the men, with their straight backs and gentle hands, smiles that whispered of things past. And it was true that their House stood taller than most, and withstood storms of men and nature that would weather any mortal family. And yes, it was truer still that their eyes were blue and cold, and stared always out to sea, as if waiting with all the patience of the earth for a savior that would never arrive. True, as well, that their frozen-white beauty was locked into a peculiar unchanging canon over the passing years—hard lines upon the bodies of both male and female, sharp cheekbones angled like the bones of Ireland herself, hips whose unpleasant juts were made lovely by the contrast of soft thin lips and thick lashes. Always the eyes remained, blue and light, too bright to be real, a statement to unchallenged purity. House Eadoin were the land’s risen angels, after all.
Eons could pass upon Ireland’s weathered face and the Eadoin still would stand, as much a part of the earth as the lakes and forests, the meadows that disappeared slowly into suburbs and cities. She has a sense of ancient youthfulness to her beckoning shores and hills, and she had long ago wrapped the Eadoin family in her arms. They were preserved, in part, due to her grace. Among the first were Aisling, and Rion; sister and brother, with hair of the blackest sea.
They rose to their castle in the northeastern shores and their family came to join them, where they practiced a solitude so deep not even the new religion could fully penetrate their fortress. Stories still flicker on some tongues; that they talked to mermaids, that they knew more magic than the forest creatures, that they were once as powerful as gods themselves. Never benevolent, no, but fair, in their way, and rarely cruel. They were sea-people—would often stand for hours looking out at the water, as if they could see things trembling beneath it.
The village folk didn’t understand. Ireland was in their bones; sweet Ireland, with her good firm earth and blissful green. But the Eadoin were evanescent, changing, waif-like as they knelt and dipped thin fingers into the water and waited for things that did not come. Perhaps they are not from this land, the villagers murmured, perhaps they are not of us at all. But they did not know that every ounce of Eadoin blood ran thin and quick; that magic flashed in those temperamental eyes and they were crazed, nearly crazed, with love of the land and the hunger for something that they would never find. Disturbed by lack of understanding, driven by their own arrogance, the Eadoin holed themselves in their fortress and learned to draw magic from the bones of the earth.
They were perhaps an overly-serious folk; this didn’t change until the arrival of Lucia, a fair-haired girl to whom one of the sons of Eadoin, Sean, was betrothed. She was beautiful and kind, and lit the halls with her laugh, and did not resent her husband for never loving her. She did not expect him to. His love was tied deep, somewhere in the foundations of that castle, somewhere cold and hard where magic ran. But there was something about Lucia that sparked the family’s interest. Long had the Eadoin loved the mer. And with every movement of Lucia, every flicker of blonde hair that rippled as if she were suspended underwater, every blink of her great sea green eyes, the family became more convinced that she was the key to finding a great power. The mer hold great magic in them; untapped, raw, wilder than most, and they have the tendency to be bold and careless, but it is a great thing nonetheless, and the witches of Eadoin had never encountered one whose magic glowed from the inside. The family beseeched her to allow them to find it; compliant, she agreed, with the queerly meek attitude of the tamed mer—perhaps a part of her seeked a greater good. Perhaps she believed her sacrifice would do her people well. The mer do not have a sense of self, not in the way men do, and a glimpse into their eyes like cut glass would reveal this clearly. Yet the Eadoin were wired for efficiency, not for love, and their passions were caught in the webs of magic and stars, not in mortal cares. A part of that proud family loved her, yes, the same way they loved their wolfhounds, their caged singing birds. Not in the way they loved their brothers and sisters, in the way they loved their land. She was a dear pet, clear and innocent, and her beauty was not enough to save her.
When Lucia was nineteen Sean took her down the stone steps to the grey shore, where they stood for a long time, very still. He waded into the water, hair like smoke against his tight pale skin, and told her to come forward. Lucia did not move, her eyes fixed on something beyond his shoulder. The wind had picked up and her hair looked like snakes, living, writhing. A peculiar look was on her face, as if she was quite close to something she had never had, but that she was too afraid to claim. Sean’s hand circled her wrist and pulled her, not ungently, and she nearly tripped into the water. But that is too ungraceful of a word.
The waves seemed to moan towards her, reaching in swirling eddies towards her spindly knees, as if the sea had found again something it had loved. Lucia’s expression was not one of surprise, but Sean pressed his palm to his forehead, bothered by something, the way the water yearned for her cold skin. It meant his family was right, of course, because they were rarely wrong. But he looked pained as she knelt, apparently unbothered by the cold, smiling as she dipped her arms in the water, put her head sideways against the gentle sea as if listening for what it would say. He did not want to do it, not because he loved her, but because she was a good girl, and especially now—she looked like a simpleton, a child, smiling like that against the sea. Her eyes had taken on a glassier shine, her skin was freezing to the touch. And he could hear it. The sea was whispering to her, but he could not understand what it said. Lucia did. She was looking downward, her lips skimming the water with the shadow of a kiss. Her hair moved with the direction of the sea, not the wind, curling around her neck and pulling down her back. “I haven’t been here in so long,” she said, her voice dancing around the rough Irish syllables, and she glanced up to meet the pale gaze of her husband just as he reached down to grab her shoulders.
“Now,” Sean said, and turned her, pushed her underneath the water. Lucia’s face was tilted upward, lips slightly apart, as if she had been about to speak. She did not struggle. At first he felt a stab of guilt, remarking once more on the innocence of her features, the bland quiet facelessness of her beauty. So pure, like an animal’s. Like a mermaid’s.
Lucia’s hair fanned out underneath the water like silk, and her lips shut against the cold sea. It was her eyes. She did not struggle, for moments that stretched into minutes, yet her eyes remained unblinking and wide, staring into his without remorse or pain. She looked like a sleeping ghost, grey underneath the water, and though he held her steadily, he was afraid she would float away, become an intangible creature that fled like death. She was so still he reached for a pulse, and with an an angry cry realized she had none. Thinking his family had lied to him, he let go of her in his anger, and quicker than one would have thought she was gone beneath the waves, pulled not to the shore but out to sea. At once he dove beneath the waves, but she was gone; there was no trace of the golden hair, the white gown. Sean’s lungs fit to burst, he rose again above the water only to be met with the sound of her voice, far-off, and though he was certain Lucia could not swim, that she had been dead moments ago, that she could not possibly have reached a spot so far out to sea, she floated, shoulders above the water, a warmness to her cheeks.
“You can’t drown me,” she said, almost laughing, and once more her hair moved against the wind. He might have been seeing things, relieved beyond words that she was alive, but he thought her skin shone silver with the shedding of opalescent scales. “If you do, I’ll just slip away.”
“Lucia!” He exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to let you go.”
She did not come closer, and he was panicked for a moment, that she would slip beneath the water again and be gone to him forever. But she did not move.
“You did,” she called out to him. “You thought I was dead. You won’t need me when I am dead.”
He was tempted to tell her that he loved her, that it wasn’t true, that she should come home where she would be safe. All three promises were stuck in his throat, as all three were false. He couldn’t lie to her, because she would see through his lies. So he said the truth, instead.
“We need you,” he said. “Come back to us.”
She dipped beneath the waves, and too soon, too quickly, she was beside him, breaking the water without a ripple. The water clung to her skin and glittered like stones. Her nails, for some reason, looked hard and brittle as seashells. Lucia blinked her large and watery eyes, met his solid glance. She put a hand on his shoulder and her touch was like ice, but it was the single sweetest motion out of a thousand loving actions. Sean looked away, back towards the castle of the Eadoin, pained by her meekness. His family at least had always taken pleasure in breaking things. The pity of Lucia was that she offered herself without restraint, without a trace of dignity. There was no plead for human goodness in her eyes, for she knew not to believe in the inherent integrity of people.
“You are so thin,” he said finally, glancing back to her. “Have you been eating?”
She wavered like a mist off of the sea, but he was no longer afraid that she would run. He did not think his hands were quite as quick as a mer’s, yet there was a steadiness in her gaze, not the dumb trust of an animal but something else entirely. She wouldn’t flee, not now.
“I sit at your elbow every evening,” she said. “If you looked to your left, you would know.”
His hand slipped around Lucia’s forearm, squeezed it so tightly she could feel the bones grinding together underneath her skin. “Forgive me. I’ve had other matters on my mind.” Her arm was so limp in his grasp that he dropped it. It fell like a dead thing to her side.
“Yes,” Lucia responded, expressionless, as if she hadn’t noticed the crushing strength of his grip. “You and your family both.” She’d never counted herself as one of them; she knew better. Even then her husband’s eyes were not on her, but out to sea, on the hem of her gown, on the edge of the rocks—he disliked meeting her glance, as if the flicker of humanity within was a constant reminder of his family’s unjust tendency to steal such precious things away. She studied Sean, the sharp jaw, tired eyes, the hollows beneath his angled cheekbones. In comparison Lucia was very small. Soft.
“Why do you do this?” He said suddenly, as if something had finally broken inside of his mind. “Why are you so willing to let us use you so?”
Lucia’s lips formed a small ‘o’, as if from surprise; her brow crinkled slightly, and her expression was one of calm and quiet, an echo of the sea wrapped so lovingly around her ankles. “For one so determined to claim us, you don’t know very much about my people,” she said. She had never spoken of her water-blood before, because the Eadoin were a family very much tied to land and wind—they did not concern themselves overly-much with those who lay outside their circle. The village within whose borders they lived, they paid their due respects to; the Eadoin had their magics, their queerly wonderful way of curing desperate ills and droughts with little more than a murmured word. The villagers rarely saw them, but on occasion one or two of them would ride into the village borders on their grey horses, dressed in their black cloaks to shield them against the cold. Their men rode slightly hunched, not proud like princes, but curved, as if they despaired against the wind. As if they were a hundred years old and their spines were grievened by time. But they walked swiftly and their words were fair, and their touch gentle. The Eadoin did not break their promises. In return the village kept them in food and privacy, and the wealthy family, in turn, kept to themselves. It was how it always had been, for as long as any of the living Eadoin could remember.
“We know what lays within you,” he replied. “Our magic comes from the earth. I can feel yours somewhere—somewhere, in here…” Sean put a finger to the pulse of her heart, felt the thin hot blood with his mortal touch. He closed his eyes for a moment and a shock ran through Lucia’s small frame, starting at the soles of her feet and ending somewhere near the bottom of her neck.
“What did you do?” She said, letting fear for the first time enter her voice. She stepped away, and a deep red flush colored the area where he had touched her.
“You see? We’re not so different.” But Lucia couldn’t read him; there was the maddening smile of the Eadoin on Sean’s features now, aging him beyond his youth. She knew the look fair well. He was far away, locked somewhere tight within his irrepressible audacity, but she could not be angered with him. Perhaps that was Lucia’s greatest fault, that she blamed all his flaws on the upbringing of his family. This was not true. He was his father’s son; a descendent of Aisling, the first, sister of Rion, and whatever winds had carried them to those shores still called to him. Even now, faced with the delicate-boned mer, he watched her so dispassionately that they looked more like strangers than husband and wife. An Eadoin would be an Eadoin, whether brought up underneath the shelter of their Irish fortress or not. Lucia could never reconcile with this, the summation of her life wasted on a man whose goal was not to live but to slave underneath his family. It was not the lack of love that incensed her so; she had never expected him to love her. No, it was the fact that he would not cling to life like he should, but instead looked to it as a forceful master. He took no joy in living.
“Why play with your magic when it brings others pain, and you no happiness?” she asked, in a tone so quiet he knew she was afraid he’d strike her. Pity stayed his hand.
“It is not man’s lot to love this world,” Sean said witheringly, turning back to the rocks where the grey steps waited.
“Is it your lot to be miserable, then?”
He did not deem to answer, finding the question childish, but left her standing in the water as he climbed the steps to the fortress. Lucia stood there for a long time, and then followed him, stepping lightly for one who knew she would soon meet death, and so far away from her sea.