I was not able to bid my father a proper farewell. My mind was on other things.

We stood in the small cemetery not far behind our manor. Here they had lain to rest Eliza, Father's first wife, and five of my siblings as well. I had hardly ever given them a thought. One stillborn child had been Eliza's—a brother, I think—and there were four wretched children for whom my mother had labored before me as well.

I stared at the round stones laid at their heads without fully realizing that I was standing on the bones of my kin.

Dervin played the role of a solemn officiant, for want of anyone else. Everyone who lived at the manor gathered round, from Wylliam and his wife to the field hands. I saw Dannie there, but avoided meeting his gaze as Dervin spoke his few brief words.

Something had happened that morning. It had been fully too strange for me to comprehend, and as I stood by Cuthbert and tried to listen, the memory occupied my mind.

I had gone two days since Father's murder without washing or changing my clothes, moving in a daze of grief and confusion. That morning, dimly aware that they'd be laying my father in the ground to take his final rest, it had seemed urgent to have a bath. I must look my best to bid him farewell.

Sybill had made my clothes ready for me and brought me the soap and the towel, and Dannie, moving like a shadow, brought hot water to fill the tub. Then they left me. I undressed, and as I laid my dress aside on a chair, the locket my mother had given me fell out of the pocket.

I stared at it for a moment. I did not want it. I did not want even to touch it.

Finally, I stooped and picked it up, turning it over in my hands. There was a minuscule clasp on the side. I opened the locket, and as I did, a coiled lock of dark hair fell into my palm.

At first, I thought it was my father's hair, for his was black like mine; but, touching it, I realized it must have been clipped from an infant's head, because it was so thin and soft. I folded my fingers over the lock of my hair, tears springing unbidden to my eyes.

Had she kept it with her? Was it some token of her love for me that she had saved back a lock of my hair?

Suddenly disgusted, I strode to my night table and tossed the open locket and the hair into the drawer. I did not want to look at them. Had my mother loved me, she would never have taken my father from me. Never.

Putting the thing from my mind, I peeled off my shift and left it lying on the floor. Then I went to the tub and stepped into the bath.

My feet tingled as soon as they touched the water, and I thought at first it was the heat. I lowered myself to sit; the water was just deep enough to cover my legs. I turned my head and leaned over, letting my hair spill into the bath, and began to cup my hands to rinse the strands. But as I did, I felt the tingling that had started in my toes begin to creep up my ankles, my calves ...

My hands, now damp, had started to tingle as well. I lifted one forearm curiously to look at it, for the water should not be so hot as to make my skin prickle, and I saw that something was wrong.

An eerie shimmer rose up my arm to the elbow. It was not the shimmer of damp skin still dotted with droplets of water; rather, the gleam was reminiscent of the pearly surface of the inside of a shell, or maybe the metallic side of a fish lying yet uncooked on a plate.

I reached with my other hand to wipe at the iridescent gleam, wondering if there were something in the water that had given my skin such a sheen, and saw something worse: my fingers were webbed to the knuckle.

I cried out in alarm, holding both of my hands out to look at them, palms up. Both hands were the same. My breath began to come in panicked gasps. I turned my hands this way and that, blinking to clear my vision, but nothing changed.

In my distraction, I forgot about the tingling in my legs until it grew sharper. I lifted my foot out of the water and saw the same sheen creeping up my calf. As I tried to make sense of what was happening, I felt a sudden, bone-cracking pain in first my left foot, then in my right. I dropped my leg back into the water with a cry, grasping the sides of the tub so that I might stand, but when I tried to raise myself, my legs would not hold me and I slipped back down into the tub. Water sloshed and splattered the floor.

I tried again to stand, but now the pain was splintering and cracking all the way up the bones of my legs, and I could do nothing but curl into myself and try my best to breathe.

My breaths came in moans of fear and pain. I pressed my hands to my thighs, curling my fingers so my nails cut into my flesh. My entire body was shaking, not only with agony but also with a horrible, physical grinding sensation that shuddered along the length of my legs. I tried not to scream.

I do not know how long it took, that first time, but it seemed an eternity.

How do I describe the pain of it, the terror? The words escape me. I was changing before my own eyes into something else, something I had never seen, never heard of, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

When at last the pain began to ebb, I leaned back, shivering, against the tub. I could see through the water that I was no longer a normal girl.

Hesitantly, I tried to lift my knees, only to discover that I had no knees at all; where they should have been, there at the end of my skinny white thighs, my legs had merged into a long, sinuous tail. As I lifted the hideous appendage, dripping, out of the water, it gleamed silver in the light. The long fin at the end was transparent, and the cold winter sun shone through it upon my astonished face.

"Sybill?" I called, but I could not put any power behind my voice. It was small and hollow and terrified.

The sound of my own voice proved to me that this was real. I was living this horror. I reached out and touched the tail. Unlike the sides of the fishes I had poked and prodded in the kitchens, it was warm. When my fingers slid backward along it, the scales caught at my fingertips.

I felt my gorge rise. I needed help. It was all I could think of: I needed help.

I did not try to call again. I clutched at the side of the tub and pulled myself up. I could not stand, but I thrashed with my tail against the tub to push myself. I found the appendage surprisingly strong, and after a few desperate attempts, I managed to scramble out of the tub and fall, wet and naked, onto my bedroom floor.

Now I shivered not only with the effects of my transformation but also with the cold. I began to drag myself along the floor, pushing as best I could with the tail, which made a vile slapping sound against the floorboards as I tried to make it obey me. There is no way to describe the experience of suddenly having a new appendage in place of the serviceable legs one is used to. It did not work. I could not maneuver it. It was heavy and unwieldy and wrong.

As I crept across the floor, I began to lose any sense of reality. I looked up and saw the door where it had always been, but it seemed impossibly far away. I dropped my forehead to rest on my forearm, curled my other arm over my head, and cried.

I think I must have cried for a long time.

When the tears finally stopped, I realized that the hand I brought up to scrape my hair back from my wet cheek was a hand that I knew. I sat up and looked at myself.

I was cold. I was lying on the floorboards at the end of a damp trail leading from the washtub halfway to the door. And I was wholly a girl again.

I moved my legs. I wiggled my feet, my toes. I reached to touch them, feeling nothing but chilly skin.

For a while I could do nothing but sit there, reeling from the shock of it. But then, somehow, I convinced myself it had been a dream. My mind was not right. I had just lost my father, and my mother as well, and lost them in a way that might drive any girl a bit mad.

So I stood up. I pulled on my shift, my petticoat, my dress. I slid my feet—real, natural girl's feet—into stockings and shoes. I made an attempt to comb my hair. I was scarcely washed at all, but I decided that my father would not mind it overmuch, and I went down to attend his funeral.