Zale

When dinner was finished, Mom asked if I wanted some tea. She never wanted tea, not unless there was something she needed to talk about with me, so of course I agreed.

Once we each held a steaming cup, I waited for her to bring up whatever it was she needed to say. Mom stared into her tea for a while before she broached the subject.

"Your father contacted me."

I had been so sure this would be like all those other times when my mother tried to talk to me about my responsibilities as her heir. She had accepted when I went to live on the surface in my early twenties. She had accepted the human man I fell in love with even though he had no political value and he was totally unsuited to living under the sea when it came time for me to accept my royal mantle. Harlow used to have a hard enough time breathing on land, and I used to spend a lot of time worrying about whether I could get him to a doctor fast enough if he needed one.

That was moot now.

But my mother, she took so many of my choices into stride even though I knew they weren't what she would have chosen for me. She had even accepted, with obvious bewilderment, when I took on a teaching position at Ashen Oak Academy, whose students came from all walks of supernatural life. I was the only mer on campus, and it was a far cry from the preparations I probably should have been doing as crown prince... but it was my one chance at pursuing the career of my heart instead of the career of my duty. Somehow, my overbearing, strict mother understood and she let me have this for now.

What she had never been able to accept was my complete disinterest in ruling, and it had been the topic of many of these late-night talks.

What had not come up before was my father, the steward of the Vidonian Empire. All she had ever told me about him was that his name was Euripides and that he left before I was born because he didn't approve of my mother giving me the magic I needed to rule when she was pregnant with me.

"What did he want?" I asked. Possibilities whirred through my mind, and I wanted to kick myself for the aching hope that he might want to meet me.

Mom grimaced. "He wanted me to ask you for a favor on his behalf. In the interest of maintaining cordial relations with Vidonia, I agreed. You're under no obligation to do anything for him, of course."

"Okay...?"

"You have a brother." Mom paused a moment to let this sink in. "He's having a hard time, and he's insisting on spending some time topside. Your father enrolled him in that school of yours and wants you to look after him."

How had Euripides – I refused to think of him as Father – known I lived topside? Or where I taught? Or that I taught at all, for that matter? I had always been under the impression that he had completely forgotten about my existence the moment he left my mother.

"What's his name? My... brother?" It felt weird to form that word. My mother had never had more children. Her pregnancy with me had almost killed her, and she had been advised never to attempt it again. But as much as Euripides had no claim to a relation to me, this... brother... of mine was innocent. I had always wished for siblings, mostly so there would be someone else who could inherit the throne. Even though my brother couldn't, I was still curious. And I still wanted to know him.

"His name is Adras. But he likes to go by Astrea," Mom said, and she pursed her lips in distaste.

"Astrea?" I repeated dumbly. "But that's..."

"A girl's name? Yes. That would be part of the hard time your father is so concerned about. Like I said, you shouldn't feel any obligation to help your father." Mom paused, and I could see what her next words would cost her even before she spoke them. "You might consider helping your brother, though."

I was too caught up in my thoughts to be careful with my tea, and I burned my tongue on a big swig of it. I spluttered and choked, but at least it was a distraction from the tsunami of thoughts swirling through my mind. "I might go to bed," I said abruptly. I needed a few good hours of staring up at the ceiling to set my mind straight again. Or, as straight as it ever got. I stood and set down my half-full cup of tea.

"Good night. And happy birthday," my mother said, standing too. She pressed a cold kiss to my cheek and we went our separate ways.

It certainly hadn't been a good birthday, I reflected, but it was at least an interesting one.

--

My brother didn't show up on campus until two weeks later, when students were just returning from winter break. I wasn't usually involved in admissions or orientations, but I had been on the lookout for Astrea and anyway, as the only other merfolk on campus, Betty was bound to call on me to help. While Ashen Oak did what it could to encourage positive interspecies relations, the administrators recognized that it would be easier to settle into a new school if you had someone of your own kind to turn to.

I was looking out my window (it was marginally more interesting than staring up at my ceiling to pass the time) when Astrea was escorted onto campus. Merfolk were easy enough to spot, if you knew what to look for and if they weren't cloaked like I was. It was my mother's one condition for supporting my job here. For security and to help maintain at least some anonymity, I wore an amulet that masked my true nature and hid the mer features I bore even in my human form. I went by a fake surname and never used my siren abilities, so as far as anyone was concerned, I was just a normal merman. Astrea needed no such protection.

He glimmered as the sun caught the scales that could be seen through his skin. There was a hint of gills on his neck, and though I couldn't see them, I knew his teeth would look a little too sharp to be human when he opened his mouth.

What I couldn't tell from this distance was whether he looked at all like me. Would we look related? The idea made my stomach twist with nerves, and my heart raced. I wanted that link to him, I realized. It would make it easier to think of him as my brother.

Just minutes after Astrea arrived on campus, my phone rang. For once, I didn't mind so much that Betty was calling. "Hello?"

"Zale! I'm so glad you answered. We have a new student here and I wondered whether you had a few minutes to show him around," Betty said, sounding – as always – too enthusiastic.

"I'm on my way," I said, and hung up. If I waited for Betty to end the call, it would still be going when I walked into her office.

When I got there, I was relieved to find that Astrea's escort had left already. It was just Betty and Astrea in the office, and Betty was obviously talking about me. "He can be a little grim, that one," she said, "but I know he'll do what he can to make you comfortable here. It must be such a transition, coming to live on land!"

Did the woman ever stop talking? I was starting to regret leaving my bed.

"Oh, here he is! Mr. Knightley, this is our new student, Adras. He's from..." Betty checked the file in front of her and finished, "Vidonia. Are you familiar with it?"

"Yes," I answered, but didn't elaborate. The less you told Betty, the better. She could latch onto anything and make a conversation out of it.

I noticed Astrea's expression when Betty introduced him as Adras. Resigned, downtrodden. Maybe depressed. The despair in that expression resonated with me. I knew it. I lived in it every single day.

And maybe it was that shared pain, but I found that I could see myself in his features, after all. There was something in the angle of his jaw, I thought. In the lack of prominent cheekbones that could make the whole face seem drawn when not smiling. And there was certainly a commonality in the eyes, which looked as tired as I knew mine did.

"Do you two need to discuss anything else?" I asked Betty once my brief examination was complete.

"No! We were just finishing up. Make sure you show him how to get to Alcott Hall. He'll be living in room 126. And he'll need to know where the cafeteria is, of course. And his class schedule is right on top of those papers there. Make sure he can find his way to his classes, would you?"

I scanned the boy's schedule and noted with a strange mix of relief and disappointment that he would be in one of the biology classes I taught this semester. It would be an excuse to see him, but it also meant he would see me as someone in a position of authority over him. That wasn't what I wanted out of this.

Betty paused to breathe and I cut in. "I've got it from here."

I started walking out of the office and Astrea followed me like a shadow: silent and unobtrusive. He still looked miserable, and I thought I knew why. "What name do you like to go by?" I asked casually. I could have been asking for a nickname, but I really wanted to give him an opening to tell me not to call him Adras.

"Adras is fine," he said, sounding quietly resigned.

I stopped and studied him. His eyes were fixed on a point over my shoulder, with his arms resting neatly at his sides. His back was straight. Though every inch of his body was positioned in exactly the way I had been taught to hold myself in the palace growing up, I could still see how upset he was. It came through in the whites of his knuckles, from how tightly he clenched his fists. It showed in the depths of his flat gaze, where he didn't seem to quite be able to mask his turmoil.

And even though I could barely feel anything anymore through the numbness of my grief, I felt for him.

I opened my mouth to tell him that I was his brother, and that I didn't care what name he chose to go by. I was stopped by the scene that played through my mind, the one where he closed himself off instead of opening up to me. The one where he couldn't trust a relation that suddenly and expectedly showed up, sent by a father he knew didn't accept him.

So instead of telling Astrea who I was and revealing that I knew he preferred not to be called Adras, I said, "It's good to meet you. And it's nice to have another mer here. You and I are the only ones," I said.

He smiled a little at that, and I wondered what appealed to him about being away from his own people. Maybe it was the same reason I liked it so much – freedom from the obligations of my station. Out here, it didn't matter if I came across as rude and impatient, or however else people thought of me. What had Betty said earlier, that I was grim? I couldn't have my people thinking poorly of me – for my mother's sake – but Betty's opinion mattered not one bit.

"I don't mind," Astrea said, and I wanted to laugh at how much of an understatement that seemed to be.

We walked around the campus, and I pointed out each building as we passed it. Astrea was attentive but didn't seem to have much to say, which suited me fine. It let us cover a lot of ground very quickly, and within half an hour, we only had two buildings left.

We reached our last destination before his dorm, the sports building. This was the first one I bothered leading him into, because I knew he'd enjoy what it held: an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Astrea's expression lit up when he saw it.

"It's saltwater," I said, and he actually smiled.

"Do they mind if students use the pool?" Astrea asked hesitantly.

I pointed to the list of pool rules that was displayed on the wall. The first one was that no one was permitted to swim alone. The school didn't want to risk someone drowning with no one there to help. The kindling joy in Astrea's eyes was extinguished as soon as he read the sign, and I smirked.

"Of course, that rule doesn't apply to merfolk," I said. When I came to work here, I made them change the rule in the handbook to exclude my people, since we were incapable of drowning. "The sign is outdated."

Astrea smiled again. "So I can come here?"

"Yes, whenever you're not expected elsewhere," I said. "We'll probably run into each other here a lot."

It was much more pleasant to go to the ocean when I wanted to shift and swim in my natural form, but it was much quicker and easier to come here, so I did several times per week. I might come even more often if it meant running into my brother.

Astrea was staring hungrily at the water, and I remembered how it had been my first few weeks topside. It was hard to be in our human forms so much when we weren't used to it, and the need to shift and swim could be visceral.

"Want to get in?" I offered.

His eyes didn't leave the water as he nodded. I pointed to the walled-off area that had been built in for me. I couldn't very well go naked in front of my students, and shifting in and out of my mer form required being undressed and in the water. The changing area they made for me had privacy and shelves to hold my clothing, and had room to swim into the pool under one of the walls. Astrea didn't say another word; he just went in, and half a minute later, he was swimming through the pool with his glimmering golden tail.

Tails of that color were rarely found outside of Vidonia, and they always signaled Vidonian blood. Euripides must be proud that the son he acknowledged had the golden color come through so purely.

I headed into the partitioned area and shucked off my clothes, then quickly shifted, too. My own tail was the silvery color of my mother's people, but my tail fin, the small dorsal fin that ran up my spine, and the webbing between my fingers were all golden. I couldn't completely escape my father's legacy. I always used to hate the way my coloring marked me as different back home.

Now, as I swam out into the pool to join Astrea, his eyes widened when he saw my coloring before they visibly shuttered.

"You're Vidonian?" he asked once I surfaced. His tone was dispassionate, but it was obvious that he cared about my response.

"Not really," I told him. "I'm from Rell. I never knew my father, but he was Vidonian."

Astrea calmed, and I wondered what had bothered him about thinking I may have come from his empire. He gently floated through the water, letting the flow carry him where it would. I flicked my tail just enough to keep me in place. I wasn't really feeling up to exercise.

When Astrea drifted slowly by me, he sighed and came to a stop. "I was worried there wouldn't be a good place to swim," he said with a delicate shudder at the idea.

"It's no ocean, but it does the job," I said. And now that he'd brought up the subject... "Why did you come to this school? Why come topside at all?"

Astrea's brow furrowed and for the first time, something like defiance entered his posture and flashed in his eyes. "Why did you?"

I wanted to laugh; he sounded so much like I used to when I was his age. Only, I had a feeling he was usually milder, while my default setting had always been bratty. "I felt suffocated in the ocean. Family responsibilities."

It was the truth, but it felt like a lie. I was intentionally not giving him the full answer, the one I knew he would understand since it was probably similar to his own reasons.

Astrea hummed. "You sound like my older sister. She's got a lot more family responsibilities than I do, and she says they feel like a constant weight on her chest."

I wheezed and struggled to keep my composure. He had a sister? My mother only ever mentioned Astrea, and I had assumed that meant he was Euripides' only other child. Why had I assumed that? Or... maybe this sister was only a half-sibling to Astrea, and not related to me at all? I needed to know.

"Do you have any other siblings?" I asked. I didn't know whether I hoped for or dreaded him mentioning me. Did he know I existed at all?

Astrea looked uncomfortable, and I knew it must be weird to have a stranger – and your teacher, at that – prodding into your family life. Knowing it wasn't enough to make me back off. He reinforced my assumptions that he had a mild, easygoing disposition when he answered my question despite his obvious discomfort.

"It was just my sister and me growing up. There are rumors of a half-brother out there somewhere, but my father always refused to answer whenever we asked him about it," Astrea said. He didn't look particularly upset about the prospect.

This was the point in our conversation where I started really feeling the pressure to tell him who I was, but I held my tongue. I didn't know how he would take it, and if my mom was right, he needed someone to confide in. The more we talked, the more I wanted to be that person... so I bit my tongue.

Instead, I pursued my own curiosity. "Was your sister supportive of you coming?"

For the first time, I saw a real smile on Astrea's face. "Yeah. She's been pushing me to leave for years."

The smile lingered for a few more moments, then he seemed to remember who he was talking to and he shrugged and ducked back into the water. He didn't emerge again until it was time for us to leave.