THE SEA HAG(37)

For a moment it was an open question as to which of them was caught, the fish or Dennis. Then the youth curvetted, lifting with all the strength of both arms—nearly overbalancing but not quite, while the fish flopped and slapped and flopped back on the bridge.

Dennis panted and groped for the sword with his right hand. The line had cut his palm, so he left chevrons of blood on the pink surface as he patted toward the hilt.

"Be my lover, dear one," said the fish in a human voice, a woman's voice.

Dennis squawked and jumped back, snatching away his left hand that had pinioned his catch while his right prepared to finish it. The sharp gill-rakers had cut his fingers.

"I am the Cariad, dear one," said the fish, turning so that both its eyes watched the youth in a most unfishlike way. "Be my lover, will you not?"

"By earth and heaven!" Dennis shouted in a mixture of wonder and horror. "You're a fish and no more than my dinner!"

He snatched up the sword, and as he turned with it the fish—glimmered. He didn't see the change, but instead of its tailfins slapping him, bare human legs tangled with his legs and they both went back over the side of the bridge—the youth and what had been a fish and was now a girl who clasped him.

Dennis hit the water with his mouth open to shout surprise. The pond was as cold as it was black, and no better to breathe than water of any other temperature or color. They sank in a gout of spray, Dennis and the girl. All he could think of as he went down was: It is twice as deep as you are tall, Dennis; or maybe more.

When his body's buoyancy and air trapped in his clothing bobbed Dennis to the surface, the girl—Cariad—spouted a playful jet of water from her mouth and said, "Now, dear one—won't you give me the power of a wish over you?"

"Let me go!" Dennis shouted.

He knew an instant later that he should have saved his breath instead, because Cariad grinned and ducked him again with arms that were slim and white and very strong.

She had a pixie face with high cheekbones and a wide mouth. Her eyes were round and the color of sun-struck amber, while the nipples of her breasts were the same bright coral as her lips.

Dennis' lungs were burning before Cariad let him rise the second time. When his head broke surface, he began to cough and his eyes were blind with fear of suffocation.

"Give me the power of a wish, beloved," the girl murmured in a voice as soft as her naked body pressing against him. "So that we may go up upon the firm ground again, you and I..."

"Never will I—" Dennis sputtered, uncertain whether or not he was speaking aloud until the Cariad's hands gripped his chin and forced him down again backwards, as if she had her will to slay him or spare him—

As indeed she did, slip of a girl though she looked... But Dennis' strength was nothing to hers in the water. White torture seethed in his lungs, and his eyes pulsed red with fire and death.

When the pressure released for a moment, before Cariad could speak—or he could see the sun for what might be his last glimpse—Dennis gasped, "I give you your wish! Only let me up!"

"But of course I will let you up, dear one, little heart," the girl crooned as she thrust them over to the bridge with two stokes of her slim, strong legs. "Of course I will do no harm to my lover."

Dennis reached for the lip of the bridge—low above the water when he stood atop it, but a lifetime away now. When his arm rose out of the pond, his face sank under the surface.

Help, Chester! his mind wailed. Frustrated exhaustion goaded him, but he'd learned at least not to open his mouth at such times.

Cariad gripped the youth under one armpit and splayed her free hand onto the bridge. Against the pink stoniness, Dennis could see the translucent hint of webbing at the base of her fingers. She lifted him effortlessly into the tentacles of Chester, who caught the youth when Dennis' own arms would have let him flop down for want of strength.

Girl-shaped and eel-fluid, the Cariad slipped onto the roadway beside them. Smiling, she curled her legs beneath her, knees together, and sat in a shimmer of pond water. When she tossed her head, droplets flew from the tight rings of her hair. Her tresses were of variable, brilliant colors, like the rainbow dazzle of a fish's scales or light breaking through one of the prisms of Emath Palace.

Cariad's yellow eyes were ageless, but for the rest she seemed no more than a girl as young as Dennis. Her nudity was innocent and utterly unselfconscious.

Dennis' hook was caught in her upper lip. The line trailed from it, back into the pond. As Dennis watched, she raised her hands to the injury and winced as she tried to worry the barbs free.

"Ah..." said the youth. "Can I...?"