On a crisp, bright autumn day, Atema’s father disowned her.

“Today you are not my daughter,” he intoned from his throne, a great coral skeleton carved with grand swirls resembling waves curling outwards from the seat like a sun. The citizens bore witness from the sides of the hall, in rough stone stands. Atema sat in the middle of a square platform in the middle of the room, which she had only ever seen used for ceremonies and duels. Her father’s face was solemn and sorrowful, his red beard still well-trimmed, his hair brushed and flowing down his back.

“Today this is not your home.” Atema craned her head up. Glistening stalactites hung from the ceiling, masking corners of shadow from the sun, which shone in from an opening behind the throne. The jagged black cave-stone dug into her bare knees. Her forearms were bound behind her, and those stung too.

A home, Atema thought dully. The big pale eyes of the mermaids were leveled haughtily at her from across the room. She let her face relax, mimicking the expression of a fighter she’d seen once in Dykstrum, the nearest trading post to the forest hut she and her mother had once lived in.

One market day, while her mother haggled with the fruit seller, she’d slipped out of her mother’s sight and vanished into the crowd, racing through the aisles as children do until she finally reached the pits, snuck under the stands, and squeezed herself through the boards to emerge in the front row. The fighter had been Marley the Indestructible, a man with a body like a tree stump who carried a gnarled oaken cudgel with a tip of studded iron. His opponent, Sank of Kinnens, had struck him badly and now he limped about the sawdust pit with blood trickling down his leg as the taller, narrower man feinted and darted his blade forward. With a limp and a shorter weapon, Marley couldn’t retaliate against Sank’s light cuts and jabs, so he could do nothing but accumulated more and more small wounds. As blood leaked from all over his body, his eyes lost their fire and his face fell slack like he was dead already. Then he rushed forward, as if he had no injuries at all, and slammed his cudgel clean against his opponent’s head. Sank of Kinnens flopped to the ground, and Marley just kept hitting him with the same flat look in his eyes. Atema’s mother had found her just after Sank fell to the ground and marched her out of the arena with two firm hands on the sides of her shoulders, but Atema had snuck a look back and seen Marley kneeling over his enemy’s prone body, head bowed, hands clasped on his cudgel, the head of which dug into the ground between them. His skin was soaked in red, as if he was a dried-up fountain sending its last drops down in trickles and drops.

The next market day after that, she’d heard that his limp had become permanent and that he couldn’t fight anymore, but he wasn’t dead, and that was all Atema needed now. Her eyes half-lidded, she slid her gaze around the room, angling her chin up as she stared into another audience member’s eyes. How many of these had she known every year she’d been here? How many had she eaten with, laughed with, sat with on the warm rocks above the water?

Yet none of them would speak for her now. Always an outsider, even after a quarter of her life in this place, even though she was the daughter of the king.

“Today these are not your people,” said her father. Yes, thought Atema. Today, these are not my people. Yesterday, these were not my people. These are not your people either, my father, my king. Why do you choose them over your own daughters?

Later, when her father was helping her pack her things and reassuring her that none of the things he’d said had been really true and that if he hadn’t said them then things would have been worse for their family (rather than worse for him), Atema only smiled and nodded. She was still thinking about Marley the Indestructible. The last few months of living in this palace with all these merfolk had dislodged that memory and sent it floating to the surface of her mind, and now the red flash of Marley’s kneeling figure was always somewhere just below her conscious thought, revealing itself only when she had greatest need of it. Her very own patron saint, alone human among all the river-tailed icons and webbing-crowned stone heads that filled the mermaids’ coastal temples (and likely those beneath the surface as well).

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“You’ll take care of her, won’t you?” said her father, referring to the mermaid, whose name neither of them could pronounce. Atema smiled and nodded. Of course she would. That was the only thing she could do, now.

She did not pack the turquoise silk dress her father had bought for her and she so adored, nor the conch shell earrings that glimmered many colors and held an enchantment to always remain cool to the touch. Instead, she dug into the deepest reaches of her closet and brought out the clothes she had brought into her father’s palace from the human lands—the sturdy, plain clothes of an almost-middle class peasant. She ran her hands over the rough fabric and shook out the dust, breathing in the faint smell of sweat that had lasted all the years since she had come here. Her father leaned against the dooorframe, his broad frame accentuated by sharp-edged clothing and a cape.

“I’ll miss you,” Atema said. That part was true. She looked up, searching.

“I’ll miss you too,” her father said, his ruddy face and curly trim beard smiling benevolently down at her.

Oh, father, thought Atema. Oh, dear father, where are you? You have become so false that you no longer see your own falsehood. You have found the limits of your love for us, dressed them in your finest robes and jewels, and told yourself they were not your kin. Now you have no kin at all. You sit in your coral throne with your back to the land, the great multitude of humanity, seeking always to become something you have no right to become. Now we, the children of reality, must bear the weight of your dreams.

“Goodbye,” she said, quietly shutting her suitcase and slipping the latches closed. “I have to go to my sister now.”

Suddenly her father’s face drooped into a frown.

“You’ll come back one day, won’t you?” he said. He looked at Atema with the eyes of a child. “You won’t be gone forever, will you?” Atema would not have been able to hold back at that, had she not been a disciple of Marley the Invincible for these few months (and even years, if she was honest. Ever since she had come here, really). But she was, and her face remained in her placid, gentle smile.

“Perhaps,” she said. Then she picked her suitcase off of her bed, refused an offer from her father to carry it for her, and strode past him to the mermaid’s sanctuary.

The mermaid’s sanctuary was part of the cave system that Atema’s father’s palace under the cliffs was built on top of. This particular cave was round and as big as Atema’s childhood home, filling halfway with water, with a hole in the bottom connecting to underwater caves that led to the sea. There was a hole at the top through which sun or moonlight poured through, but tonight was a cloudy night, and although Atema carried a lantern, she couldn’t see the mermaid beneath the surface. That didn’t matter.

“It’s time,” she said. Then she walked away again. She climbed up flights of carved stone stairs, squeezed through narrow hallways with her suitcase above her head, and climbed up the grand spiral staircase leading up to the surface. She emerged on a grassy cliff, from which she could hear the tides but only see the briefest starlit glimmers of the water. It was a warm, balmy night, and the wind swept the grass to one side and blew into Atema’s face as she turned away from the sea and walked down the dirt road. Not too long down the road, she reached a bridge over a small river and sat down on a stone next to the bank. She listened to the water lapping against the ground and the stalks of reeds brushing together. Eventually, the mermaid came swimming up the river, and upon seeing her, Atema got up and continued walking up it, into the human lands.