Fen

I felt when Zale left campus and stretched our bond thin with distance. I wasn't surprised he was going, but it was undeniably disappointing. It had been hard not to hope that he might work things out in his head overnight, and that we would be able to talk a little more about our bond and what that meant sometime today. Instead, he was gone without a word.

Usually when I was feeling down, I holed up in bed. Sometimes, if I wasn't feeling totally wretched, I would visit with my best friend, Luin. I definitely wasn't feeling social enough for that today, but laying around in the quiet with nothing to distract me from my thoughts was only making things worse.

I worried about whether Zale would ever come around.

I worried about having to go to his underwater kingdom if he did.

As it got later, I worried he wouldn't come back tonight and that I might have to spend another night with him gone.

Sometime in the afternoon, an idea occurred to me. It was just the right balance of being a distraction from my thoughts while also letting me maybe feel a little closer to Zale. I decided to try swimming.

I wasn't a very good swimmer. I could barely keep myself afloat, but that didn't matter so much since I could always teleport out of the pool if I started sinking. Even knowing that, I hesitated on the edge of the pool and was about to walk toward the shallow end, where I could stand and ease my way into the deeper parts, when the door opened. I jumped so hard that I went toppling over and fell flailingly into the pool. I opened my mouth to scream and water rushed down my throat and nose. I kicked in utter panic, but I had lost all sense of direction and found my hands scraping the bottom of the pool.

Arms wrapped around me and started tugging me upward before I could collect myself. My head was thrust up into the air and I happily sucked in a few deep breaths. By the time I had recovered some sense, I realized my hands were clutching my captor, who wasn't a hideous sea monster at all. It was that mer student, Adras.

He was still pulling me along, I realized, and he didn't stop until we were against the wall of the pool. My hands automatically grasped at the edge so I could hold myself, and I nodded my thanks at a wide-eyed Adras.

"Are you okay?" he asked, sounding breathless.

"Fine," I assured him. I coughed out some water and then pressed my forehead against the edge of the pool, focusing on trying to breathe. "Thank you."

"This is why they don't want people to swim alone," he said. "This could have been so much worse."

I should have just agreed with him, or maybe I should have explained that I could teleport and that I would have collected myself enough to do so before I could drown. Instead, what I said was probably the stupidest possible response. "But you and Zale swim alone all the time."

His brows raised and he looked at me like I was an idiot. "Yeah... but we're mer."

I looked down into the water and saw Adras' tail. It was my first time seeing one close up, and I couldn't look away. The scales glittered in the low light, and they were the color of pure gold. My people, the Seelie, tended to have metallic eye colors – my own eyes were golden in color – but irises were so small and his tail was so big. It was stunning.

Not as beautiful as Zale's, I recalled. His had been silver, with gold accents all around his body. It was much more interesting than one color ever could be.

"Mr. Martritz, are you okay?" Adras asked, and I realized I had never answered him.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry." I shook my head and forced my eyes up to meet his, which were exactly the same shade of blue as Zale's. Maybe it was a common color amongst sea-folk, but it would stand out among humans. I had never seen anyone else with such a vivid shade of aqua.

Adras nodded and swam back a little. He looked like he was about to dive into the water when his brows raised again. "Hold on... Zale?" he asked.

"Um," was my brilliant reply.

"You called him Zale."

It took me a moment to understand why Adras was putting such emphasis on Zale's name. "Sorry. Mr. Knightley, I meant."

I cleared my throat and tried to keep a straight expression so Adras wouldn't read more into this. He just looked more interested, so I tried again. "I just called him Zale since we're both teachers."

Adras looked amused now. "But no one else calls him that. Not even the teachers. He's got everyone afraid of him or something."

I knew what Adras was trying to get at, but 'afraid' wasn't the right word. It was more like, people had learned not to try to develop relationships with him because he was so closed off against them. I was the only dummy left trying, and that was only because I had a bond guiding me. Without it, I would have accepted it when he pushed me away the very first time we spoke. I wouldn't have spent nearly as much time observing him; wouldn't have seen the kindness he had for his students, or the clever way his mind worked. Wouldn't have seen how much he was hurting and felt an answering ache within my own chest. I wouldn't want him like I did now.

I went too long without responding and Adras snickered. "Don't worry," he said. "I won't tell anyone."

"Won't tell anyone what?"

"How infatuated you just looked," Adras answered, and dove under the water before I could defend myself. It was just as well, since I didn't know how to argue with the truth.

--

Zale didn't come back on Sunday, either.

I told myself he would be back in time for class on Monday, but he wasn't. I was starting to get worried that maybe I had chased him off for good, which made me worry about ever seeing him again. I could follow our bond to him, but it was too dangerous. If he was out in open water that far down into the ocean when I went to him, the water pressure would kill me. So, there was no going to him. He had to come to me.

The worry was starting to give me a stomachache by the time Monday evening rolled around, but then the tug on our bond started lessening as he made his way back toward the school. It took a couple of hours before he made it back, but just knowing he was on his way was enough. I started drifting off on my couch while I waited, and I nearly fell asleep and missed it when Zale drew closer than I expected. See, he didn't go straight to his suite when he finally reached the campus. Instead, he came to mine.

I scrambled off the couch when I realized he was coming here and watched him approach my door through the peep hole. He looked tired, I thought. There was a book clutched in his hands so hard his knuckles were white and there were bags under his eyes. He stared at my door for a long moment, looking uncharacteristically uncertain. I held my breath while I waited for him to make a decision.

Finally, Zale knocked. I opened the door immediately and he blinked in surprise. Maybe I should have pretended I wasn't waiting right on the other side of the door, I reflected. But I didn't want to play games with him.

"Hi," Zale said.

"Hi," I returned. I waited for him to give some indication of what he was doing here, but he just looked at me. "Um, did you want to come in?"

"No. Here, you should read this."

He thrust the book toward me. "'Rellian Culture and History,'" I read out loud, then looked to Zale for some kind of explanation.

"Rell is where I'm from," he said. "Just read it, okay?"

"Okay," I agreed.

Zale nodded once, then walked away. I stared after him until he was out of sight, then looked back down at the book in my hands. I shut the door and sat back on the couch to read.

It was about as dry as you might expect a history text book to be, but I stayed up long after the point where my eyes were so tired that the lines of little text started blurring together. I had no idea why Zale wanted me to read this or what he wanted me to take from it. Even if he was from this place, what did it matter that I knew its history? And what did it mean, that this was the first interaction we had since I told him he was my soul mate? Was this his way of accepting me? If it was, couldn't he just say so? And if not... well, it seemed cruel to make someone study your homeplace like this only to reject them.

I tried to absorb what I was reading. How the underwater country was founded, the long list of queens, and what they had faced during their rein. It sounded like Rell was built on a bloody foundation. For a while, I imagined that Zale was so serious and closed off because he had a war-torn childhood. Maybe he'd had to fight or train as a warrior, or maybe he had lost people important to him. But the bloodbath that seemed to happen about once per generation suddenly stopped about eighty years ago, I realized when I reached the last couple chapters of the book. Merfolk turned more toward navigating their issues through diplomacy and intricate treaties rather than fighting.

With every chapter, I tried to discern some deeper meaning within the text, some explanation for why Zale had given me the book. It wasn't until I reached the very end that I understood.

This book, this history of Rell, it had last been updated twenty-odd years ago when the current queen, Undine, had given birth to an heir and secured the throne for another generation: the first man who would rule since Rell had been established.

Zale.

I stared at the page in front of me, blinking bleary eyes and wondering what the chances were that I was deliriously tired. Or, what were the odds that Zale had given me this book to read but wasn't the Zale mentioned in the text?

Could he really be the crown prince to an entire underwater civilization? The only man to ever possess siren powers, who would have so very much to prove to everyone about a man's ability to rule?

Maybe I was jumping to conclusions, but as early morning light streamed in through the blinds, it didn't just seem possible that Zale was a prince. It seemed like the only reason he could have had for giving me this book. And if that was the case...

Well, he was already going to have a hard time once he was coronated. The book had been clear on that. There had been extra tensions between nations ever since Queen Undine had formally announced him to be her heir, and there were people who were conspiring against her, trying to build support and look for legal loopholes to remove Zale from the line of succession. How much harder would it be for him if he had me by his side? And as the queen's only child, wouldn't he need to reproduce? I was all wrong for him.

I shut the book and put it on the coffee table, but it was still too much of a presence in the room. I didn't want to think about this anymore. I wanted to get away from the creeping realization that I wasn't what Zale needed in his life and that I might, in fact, ruin it.

No wonder he had been so upset when I told him about our bond.

I shuffled off the couch and stared across the room at the time display of my microwave until the numbers made sense. It was almost eight in the morning, and I had to give a lecture in half an hour.

I groaned and staggered toward my bedroom to change into new clothes, and swayed after three steps.

Okay. So, no teaching today.

I dropped back onto the couch and pulled out my phone. After a quick call to Betty to let her know my classes would need covered today, I drifted into an uneasy sleep.