Adrift: A Little Mermaid Retelling

1: Agnes

I had a mother once. She was not a kind woman, nor soft, nor affectionate. She was not like other women at all.

I think she loved me very well in her own way. Her love for me was fierce. It was a dangerous love, and fickle, too. She could go a week without speaking a word to me, yet any cry of need would bring her flying to my side, her golden hair streaming behind her in a bright banner as she swooped down to guard me from harm.

Of course, of real danger there was little in the Reachlands where I was born—little, at least, from which she could hope to shield me. Illness was the worst danger, to which children in the colonies were ever susceptible. From that, she could not have saved me, but I was lucky. Disease never touched me.

Other than illness, there were only minor accidents. Scraped knees, a bruised chin. Each time, Mother would materialize as if out of nowhere, ready to scratch and bite and force away anything that might bring me pain. But she could not fight the stone over which I had tripped or the door I had closed on my finger. And when I would turn to her with my hurts, seeking comfort in her skirts, she would be gone.

This was the nature of my relationship with Mother; most of what I remember of her consists of such fleeting encounters, fragmented, urgent, and cold.

Now, looking back, I can at least take solace in the knowledge that she loved no one better than me.

Father had been a lord in Oranslan, but only a third son. Because his elder brother stood to inherit, Father came to settle in the colonies, seeking his fortune in the new land.

It was a brave thing to do. No one who came to the Reachlands was assured of living long, let alone of achieving any kind of success. But Father was bold, trusting that he could make a life here, and not too grand to start as a farmer. Expanding cities on the continent ate up the farmlands there, so exporting food crops was a certain way to make a living in the colonies.

Father was wise, though, and had more to start with than the others; aside from those staple crops, he planted tea and indigo. Those luxury exports set him apart from the other laborers who broke the first ground in the Reachlands. His farm became a plantation, and Father became a powerful man.

He had brought with him his first wife, Eliza, along with two small sons. Yellow-cheek fever struck them all one season before I was born; my brothers survived, but the fever killed Eliza. Some time later, Father married my mother, Margaret.

Although she never told me, I knew my mother must have come from somewhere far away. I asked her, of course, but any time I plied her for her history, she would look at me impassively, as if she preferred not to hear the question at all. I sometimes fancied that she had come from an exotic place far beyond what I could see on the map in my tutor's school books.

I, a girl child, came some years after my father and mother married. I was born into a family of wealth and power, with no small stake in the colonies. I might have been a fishwife or a washerwoman, but instead, by chance, I was a lady.

My name then was Agnes Allore.