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everything.
But today she intended to tell someone. Her confidant would not be her only real friend, Soft
Ripple. Because Soft Ripple could be of no help to her, and Black Pearl desperately needed help.
The secret had developed a monstrous complication.
In the intervals when Black Pearl could use her tail and swim, her progress upstream was swift.
But now already she was entering yet another stretch of the stream where the water grew too
shallow for swimming. A few moments later Black Pearl was on her magically restored feet again and
walking. This time, while the change to normalcy still held, she took a moment to look down at
herself, studying fearfully the near-flatness of her woman's belly, pale and goose-bumped now with
cold.
So far the enlargement was minimal, almost undetectable. But she was more firmly convinced than
ever before that she was pregnant.
Cosmo the magician, who had made this desperate upstream journey possible for Black Pearl, was or
had been also Cosmo the man, who had made the journey necessary. The Malolo magician had been her
lover for several months before the night of many killings, the night he had disappeared. Black
Pearl was going to have to assume now that he was dead.
Far less than any ordinary woman did Black Pearl have any means of knowing with any certainty what
went on inside her own belly, down there on the borderline of magic, the region of her body where
five years ago the ancestral curse had imposed itself. Down there, where a true woman would have a
womb, what did a fishgirl have? For that matter, what organs did a real fish possess? Daughter of
fisherfolk as she was, she could recall no clear image. Her mind refused to think about it.
One fact was obvious. Mermaid bodies were not equipped, any more than the bodies of real fish
were, for anything like human pregnancy or human birth. What was going to happen to her as her
pregnancy advanced, if she did not get some effective help from somewhere, Black Pearl did not
know, could only guess. But each imagined possibility that suggested itself to her was more
horrible than the last. She could only be certain that the outcome was going to be monstrous,
unnatural, and fatal to herself and to the unborn as well.
And one more thing was very clear to her. Never before in the history of any village, Black Pearl
was quite sure, had any mermaid ever become pregnant.
For more than a month now she had been experiencing dull aching pains in her abdomen, pains that
could be relieved only by her assuming the fully human form, and which returned the instant she
again became half fish. She had been on the verge of telling Cosmo about her difficulty, though
she feared his reaction. And then, about a month ago, on the night when manor folk had slaughtered
one another across the river, he had disappeared. Terrible as it was, the only assumption she
dared make was that her magician lover was dead.
Within hours of the great slaughter, the news had spread rapidly, first in its essentials and then
in its details, among the peasants and fisherfolk along both shores. From some of these legged
people the story had diffused quickly to the mermaids. Black Pearl was soon aware that there was
no one left in the Malolo clan who might provide effective medical help. Black Pearl didn't think
there were any very capable people left in the Senones clan either, and anyway she wouldn't expect
anything better from them than being sold into slavery.
So far Black Pearl had not hinted to anyone, not even Soft Ripple and most certainly not Zoltan of
her fear that she was pregnant. Such a claim would have made no sense to either of them anyway.
Neither of them had any idea that even a temporary reversal of a mermaid's condition was now
possible.
Oh, if only it could be possible that Cosmo was not dead! Word passed along from the Malolo
household servants had said that his body was not among those arrayed in the underground vault,
where all the other dead were said to be gathered, still magically preserved. For several hours,
for a few days even, that reported absence had given Black Pearl hope, and the hope had been
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