World of Aluvia 2 by Amy Bearce Page B

permission first.”
    He glared at his sister, who glared right back.
    Phoebe looked back and forth between them, eyebrows arched high. “That was four years ago. They’re still holding that against you?”
    Tristan said, “It doesn’t matter―”
    “It does,” Phoebe interrupted. “You never told me you got in trouble for helping me.”
    Sighing he said, “Our people value cooperation above all things, you know this, along with respect for our elders and tradition.”
    Phoebe nodded. “So?”
    “So, by aiding in the conflict against Bentwood, I not only violated our peaceful way of living, I didn’t ask the elders before involving the merfolk.”
    “But because of your actions, Bentwood was eventually destroyed. Don’t they appreciate that? Without you, they’d be in slavery still.”
    The two merfolk were silent for a moment. Then Tristan said, “Not everyone sees things in this light.”
    “Then they’re fools,” Phoebe snapped.
    A horrible thought occurred to her. She whispered, “Did they hurt you?”
    “They punished me―but not physically. They told me to stop seeing you. They told both of us to avoid you, four years ago. They couldn’t stop the little seawees from coming to your singing but said we were old enough to know better. Obviously, we ignored them, though it has been harder and harder to sneak away to visit.”
    “Tristan! You’ve been sneaking? What about honoring your elders and all that?” She could hardly believe it. He was always so cautious about following the rules. She must mean
something
to him for him to risk such behavior!
    He looked uncomfortable. She could tell this was more important than he was letting on. “They were being unreasonable, and our friendship hurts nothing. But when we told them of the skeleton, it came out that we’ve still been in contact with you. They were… displeased. And with humans breaking the treaty so often these days, it has only added water to the flood. They wanted to reduce your influence in my life from the very beginning.”
    Horrified, she stared at him with her mouth open.
    He closed it with a light finger under her jaw. “Obviously, they’ve failed.”
    Bright pink stained her cheeks, she knew from the burn, that tattletale blush, the bane of redheads. She wanted to say something, but no words would come. Absolutely nothing. Great.
    Mina nudged her shoulder. “We both chose you, Phoebe.
We’d
be the fools if we didn’t. You’re our best friend. Never forget it. No matter what they say when we get to the village.”
    And with those words, Phoebe felt she could conquer anything. Her friends loved her. She mattered. They’d never leave her. And no one could take that away from them.

    The waters were darker on the far edge of the shallows, but a glow along the ocean floor was clear on the horizon, growing larger and larger.
The village.
A sudden flurry of nerves shouldered aside her moment of exhilaration, and she gripped Tristan’s hand tighter as he pulled ahead of her. He smiled at her over his shoulder as they came around a bend, and waved his free hand at the cliff that dropped below them.
    “Welcome to Morgance,” he said, with a wry twist of his lips. “It’s not what it used to be, but it’s home.”
    She understood his tone as she gazed down at the village, which grew almost organically from the cliff’s wall, like wild mushrooms popping up among the forest floor. The village was smaller than she had imagined. Village seemed to be the wrong word, actually. It was more like a sketchy version of a tiny port city: crowded, basic, falling apart.
    The trio swam lower along the cliff face, and Phoebe was surprised to see merfolk-sized holes in the rock, clearly dwelling places. They were like the many dwellings in taller buildings of the ports, but no building on land ever reached so high. Nets of lantern fish hung along the craggy wall, where the living, glowing fish provided a low illumination matched by the soft glow