Excerpt: What the Tide Told Me

With both of them gone to the land, the Elders would begin pressuring my granddame once again to allow a Rusalka to walk beneath the sky; "It is too great a risk to our Folk to have the Rusalka name die because of what happened to your daughter, Ondina!" Melusine Nereida's daughter had practically screamed this at my granddame the last time Ondina had refused before the Council of Elders to allow me an opportunity to go to the earth and find a mate to father my children. Raidne Nereida was not the only one to believe this; her mother Melusine, the leader of Mharaheim's Folk, had backed her daughter's assertions and reminded my granddame that I was coming upon my majority soon, and that if I reached my majority while above the waves I would be given the choice to never return, to linger on the surface, even if I didn't find a lover. But my granddame had been unmoved, unwilling to see her only grandchild become another Arila, another Zennor, afraid to see the mother's mistakes repeated by the daughter.
My mother, Zennor, has been taken by the sharks for all the years I have been alive. It is said by my granddame that she was betrayed by a man as treacherous as the sky gods of old, whose evil eventually led Father Ocean to offer us refuge beneath the waves. Melusine claims that she was a foolish child who skywalked too early, and nearly brought ruin upon all of us. My cousin Ianiera, who is a priestess of the Prophetess and Goddess Calypso Syrenka, says that Zennor was always prone to swim too close to sharks, too fascinated by danger, and too eager to dance on knives, and that it is not my fault that I was sired by a man who would not follow my mother to the sea, that in hundreds of years only three men have followed our women to the sea of their own will, and that not even all of those unions end happily. My cousin Ianiera is a dear woman, and is the only one to have said in so many words that it is not my fault that Zennor was taken by sharks and could not care for me. She has never once speculated whether or not Zennor chose the sharks over the child of a human, one of the few who has kept her peace on a matter that the Elders cannot seem to forget. Even my granddame, much as she loves me, still holds a part of me responsible for the sharks that have plagued Zennor, believes that if I were not here to remind Zennor of the man she gave first her heart and then her hatred to that the Rusalka name would not be sullied by the memory of the one weak daughter who gave herself to over to the sharks.