Don't get fond of psychos. It's a bad idea. -- W. R. Gingell, Between Homes

Ketevan had made two very important discoveries in the last hours. The first was that the pirates had at least one magician among them. No ship could naturally move that fast or repel cannonballs.

The second was that she was well and truly lost.

Everything had gone to hell from the minute the pirate ship attacked. It came at them so fast that they hadn't time to mount a proper defence. Cannons were fired irregularly and conflicting orders were shouted. Within minutes the pirates knew they weren't attacking a merchant ship and began returning fire. They were much better-organised than the royal navy, and oh how that galled. When she got back to Tavgirid the first thing Ketevan planned to do was organise a complete overhaul of the navy. Adding a few magicians would be a good place to start.

Assuming of course that she ever got back to Tavgirid. Because the ship had begun to sink, the captain had ordered everyone into the lifeboats, and Ketevan was now drifting at sea in a boat with four dead sailors for company.

The pirates had guns as well as cannons. When they saw the lifeboats escaping they opened fire. Three of the men in Ketevan's boat had been killed instantly. One had been shot in the stomach and died two agonising hours later. Ketevan herself had escaped with nothing more than a graze on her cheek where a bullet had flown past her.

She would have been more grateful about her miraculous survival if the future had looked optimistic. As it was she had no charts, no idea where she was, no food or water, and a set of oars so heavy and unwieldy that she could only use one at a time.

After the fourth soldier's death she'd sat in a daze for a while, barely able to comprehend everything that had just happened. At some point she pushed the four bodies overboard, acting mainly on a vague idea that if she was washed ashore somewhere it would look suspicious if she was the only person alive in the boat. Eventually she fell asleep in spite of herself. The current carried the boat into the darkness and further away from Vakaryan.

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A jolt awoke Ketevan. She stared up at the strange grey ceiling. Funny. She couldn't remember her ceiling ever being that colour before. Her bed was rocking in a very unpleasant way. If her bratty nieces were playing hide and seek under it again--

Overhead a seagull squawked. Ketevan abruptly came back to reality. She wasn't safely at home in her room, she was floating out at sea and the gods alone knew where she was. Dried blood still covered the inside of the boat.

The water lapped against the lifeboat's sides. With a jolt she realised it was moving -- not smoothly, as she would expect if it was caught in a current, but in fits and starts, and if something was dragging it and finding it harder than expected.

Ketevan sat up and looked around. The first thing she saw was a beach growing steadily nearer. It was the sort of rocky beach that would never be a popular destination for tourists, and there wasn't a single house or sign of human life, but under the circumstances it was the most welcome sight imaginable.

Oddly, there was no other boat towing hers. The tide was just starting to go out yet she was travelling against it towards the land. Ketevan looked back over her shoulder just to make sure no one had climbed on-board while she slept or the boat hadn't magically started rowing itself. Then she leant over the side to investigate.

One of the ropes that had been used to hold the boat to the ship was still attached to its bow. It disappeared under the water, but it was taut as if something was pulling it. When she squinted she could just make out a dark shape below the water. Whatever it was, in its movements it resembled nothing so much as an overgrown eel.

Ketevan's instinctive reaction was shocked horror. A monster was dragging her back to its den! Common sense took over almost at once. Why would a monster drag her towards a beach instead of further out to sea? There were no caves or cliffs here for it to hide among.

She sat back and thought things over. No matter where she was, she couldn't have drifted far in one night. She'd been heading away from Vakaryan. Therefore the land ahead of her was either Çarisar or southern Sui.

Of course there were tales of strange sea creatures in the Blood Water, but no one had ever seen any since the last merfolk disappeared centuries ago. If any of the merfolk had come back it would have been known all over the world by now. Their scales were considered the most beautiful and valuable material on the planet, and they had been hunted almost to extinction by people who wanted to harvest their scales. Even if any merfolk were still around they would want nothing to do with a human boat.

Ketevan peered over the side again. The boat was rapidly approaching the shore. The water was cloudy so she still couldn't get a clear view of the eel-like creature, but she was almost sure it had scales. She could see the light glinting off them.

A dragon, perhaps? Not a zimej from the northern mountains; they breathed fire and reportedly hated water. But the merong from the seas east of Sui were said to live in water and occasionally help people lost at sea.

The rope went slack. The boat stopped abruptly. It lay motionless for long enough to make Ketevan begin to wonder if the mysterious eel-like creature had left. She looked over the side. Black shapes moved beneath the surface. Then she realised they were only seaweed.

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A hand grabbed the boat's side. Ketevan recoiled with a yelp. It was a human's hand, but with webbing between the fingers and strangely sharp, pointed nails. The skin was dead white with hints of blue and green. Horrible ideas of drowned people returning as ghosts filled her mind. She reached for the nearest oar. Then all thoughts of ghosts disappeared, because another hand joined the first one and their owner pulled themselves up so they could see into the boat.

No living human had ever seen a mer. The only surviving evidence of their existence was in the drawings in historical documents and the jewellery made from their iridescent scales. But Ketevan had seen enough of those drawings to know what they looked like. They had gills at their neck, patches of scales on their face, upper arms, and torso frilly fins along their arms and back, and below the waist they had a long tail like a fish's.

The person staring at her over the boat's side looked as if he had stepped right out of those drawings.

Two things flashed through Ketevan's mind in an instant. One, there were still merfolk in the Blood Water. Two, one had just dragged her boat to the shore.

"Oh good, you're not dead," the mer said brightly. He spoke Çarisarian, of all languages. If she'd been asked she would have assumed merfolk couldn't speak any human language. "Is that your blood?"

She looked at the dried blood as if she'd never seen it before. It took her a minute to remember whose it was. She shook her head.

"Good! Can you swim?"

Ketevan tried to speak and found her voice wouldn't work. She nodded mutely.

"I can't pull you any further in because the water's too shallow. Jump in and I'll help you to shore."

Don't trust it, warned a little voice at the back of her mind. It's a mer. It'll kill you as revenge for what humans did to the other mer.

Common sense shouted down that voice. Don't be ridiculous. If it wanted to kill me it could have done it long ago without going to all this trouble.

Ketevan climbed unsteadily to her feet. The mer let go of the boat and swam a little way off. For the first time she got a good look at it. Her mouth dropped open. None of the drawings did justice to how beautiful its tail was. Its scales were dark blue and its fins -- lighter blue and streaked with white and purple -- flared out like a cape. Years ago she'd seen a sort of fish called a halfmoon-tail[1]. This mer's tail looked exactly like its.

"Don't worry, the water isn't deep," the mer said.

Ketevan climbed warily over the side. She briefly panicked when she couldn't feel the seabed. She was neck-deep in the water before she finally touched it.

"I thought you said the water isn't deep," she complained without thinking. Then she could have slapped herself, because potentially offending something that could kill her was a bad idea.

"What?" the mer asked, looking confused.

It took Ketevan a minute to realise she had spoken in Vakaryanese. So it understood Çarisarian but not Vakaryanese. She filed that information away for future reference.

Seaweed brushed against her legs. Ketevan took a step forward, got tangled up in blades of kelp, and fell underwater with a yell. As she struggled against the kelp she suddenly found herself being pulled forward. She broke the surface and found herself in water that was now only waist-deep. The mer shook his head disapprovingly.

"You're very clumsy," he said.

Ketevan, secure in the knowledge he couldn't understand her, told him exactly what she thought of kelp and people who called her clumsy. He listened with interest.

When she finally ran out of things to say he said, "Are you going to stand there all day?"

It wasn't far to the beach. Ketevan stumbled out onto dry land in a way that even she had to admit was clumsy -- though only to herself. She turned, expecting to see the mer had gone back to the sea, and got yet another shock.

The mer had followed her onto the beach. But he was no longer a mer. His gills, scales and tail were gone. In their place was a perfectly normal, apparently perfectly human teenage boy. He was pale, yes, but it was a normal, human paleness without any corpse-like undertones. He tried futilely to wring the water out of his hair and shirt before giving up.

"Come on," he said. "There's bound to be a town around here somewhere. Oh," he seemed to have realised something suddenly, "you can't understand me, can you?" In stilted and very ungrammatical Classical Tinranu[2] he said, "Town near. Food there. Find way home."

"Thank you," Ketevan said in Çarisarian. The mer -- the boy? -- gave a surprised squeak. "If you don't mind my asking, who are you?"

"I'm Hariye Zi--" He broke off abruptly. Ketevan took note of that at once. "Who are you? How did you get out here anyway?"

Ketevan weighed up the pros and cons of lying and decided it could do no harm to tell the truth. "I'm Ketevan Diashamijë. My ship was attacked by pirates. I have to get to Tavgirid to report it."

"Tavigird!" Hariye sounded excited. "That's very far away. You'll have to get a ship."

Ah, so I'm in Çarisar, Ketevan thought. Curious, she asked, "Do your family live around here?"

Hariye shook his head. "They all live in Konunkaya and Güzenbeyli."

Güzenbeyli. The capital of Çarisar, more than thirty miles inland. Hardly a place for a family of merfolk. An idea began to take shape in Ketevan's mind.

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Events of the next few hours strengthened Ketevan's idea. Hariye never mentioned his mer form. He had apparently never visited the sea before. He had no clear idea of where the nearest town was, and once they found it he didn't know where the nearest port was. When she tried very carefully to ask how he was able to swim so well he shrugged and said he'd been surprised too. It looked more and more as if he honestly didn't know he was a mer, or else had only just discovered it and didn't understand the full implications of that.

Two ideas warred in Ketevan's mind. One, whoever had a fresh supply of mer scales would become one of the richest and most powerful people in the world. If she forced him into his mer form she could harvest his scales. Two, he'd saved her life. He was young and naïve and had no idea he was in danger from people who would want his scales.

As they had dinner in an inn -- thanks be to the gods, she still had some money in her pockets -- she tried to put both ideas out of her mind and focus instead on what she'd do now.

"I have to get home somehow, but I haven't enough money to buy passage on a ship. Do you know where the nearest Vakaryan embassy is?"

Hariye shook his head. "I've an idea. When we get to a city I'll walk into the mayor's office and demand he gives you a ship."

Ketevan looked up sharply. Were merfolk treated with great respect in Çarisar? If so things must have undergone a dramatic reversal over the centuries, because Çarisar had gained most of its wealth through harvesting mer scales. "Why would he listen to you?"

"Because..." Hariye looked around and lowered his voice. "I'm a prince. I know it sounds hard to believe, but I'm the Great Khan's grandson."

"...What a coincidence. I'm a princess."

"I'm serious!"

"So am I."