The mermaid in the water has only a vague knowledge of the relationship between storms and shipwrecks. She keeps watching, staying far back.

Cymbeline coughs up water, sucks in air. He doesn't regain consciousness.

He flops limply onto the beach where she takes him, spits out more water, and continues to be unconscious.

The pretty boy's feet twitch when she pokes them, but he doesn't wake.

"I want some magic," Ariel announces. Her voice fills the reef. She's good with her voice.

She swims inside fearlessly. There are things in this ocean she fears, but stinging reefs and creeping witches aren't among them.

The witch is themed purple where Ariel is green. She's half-octopus, not half-fish, but still certainly a mercreature. Her hands skim over her sea-glass collection. "Now what would you like? I've got someone's charmed hands, nimble as you please... got whales' strength and sharks' ferocity and several sorts of poison and glitter for your scales - what's your fancy?"

"I want legs," Ariel says firmly. "I want to go up on the surface and walk around."

The witch starts to reach for something, but then she says, "In the interest of repeat business - the legs I have are not the best models - I took them as a curiosity, got them for a song, but I wouldn't use them. Cursed, painful."

Ariel shrugs. "And I care? How painful can they be?"

"Oh, very, it'd be like putting all your weight down on a narwhal's nose every time you took a step - you want them anyway?" inquires the witch with interest.

Ariel laughs. "Can't scare me."

"Innnteresting. Well, they are certainly available... what will you give me for them?" says the witch with a smile. Octopus tentacles rearrange themselves into what might be called a businesslike posture under her.

"I could give you a song," she snorts. "I don't know, what do you want?"

"That's just an expression, but from you, I'd take a song - so to speak," muses the witch, creeping forward a bit. "The entire voice would be ideal..."

"I like my voice," Ariel points out. But she doesn't point it out very hard.

"But my dear," says the witch, "so do I."

"Now," says the witch, "you are absolutely welcome to keep the set of legs indefinitely. However, my personal skills run more towards the encapsulation and the transference, not so much to the sticking. They have ludicrous numbers of practical magicians on land, I'm sure you won't have any trouble getting someone to attach them permanently if you like them. If you can't, they'll come off and you'll have a tail again, but I can reattach them for another try, no extra charge." She plucks the glass containing the legs off its coral shelf. "Do we have a deal, my dear?"

She only wriggles a little bit. (It tickles.)

"All done," says the witch, grinning from ear to ear, "you have fun!"

The beach where Zoyah's brother washed up isn't too far from the palace. Zoyah is poking around idly, looking for any signs of a speaking seal or a dolphin with hands or (Kerem's outlandish notion) a mermaid. So far she hasn't found much.

A woman with green hair and bluish-greenish skin pops her head up out of the water and climbs awkwardly onto the shore.

She smiles cheerfully and doesn't answer.

"I think you had better borrow my overskirt," says Zoyah. She unbuttons it - she's got three layers on under it; it's a chilly day. "Here. What happened to you? Did you almost drown like Cymbeline? He washed up here the other day, saw funny tracks in the sand, but I don't see anything weirder than you around. Speaking of which, where did you get those colors transferred from? Who did the magic on them? They're a good look on you."

"Youuuu have gills," observes Zoyah. "...Um, the skirt, you wear, it, you step into it and then button it up."

"Other way around," says Zoyah of the skirt, gesturing, "And you have to stand up, to get it on right, and you've got sand all over it, don't they have skirts where you're from?"

The stranger gives Zoyah a look, then throws up her hands.

"Do you even speak Loegrian?" asks Zoyah. "Um, wave your hand if you understand me?"

"Parlis Aquitaniais?" tries Zoyah. "Latinitas?" (She is a well-educated princess.)

Uncomprehending blankness.

Zoyah holds up her hands in a nonthreatening gesture and moves to button the skirt for the strange green person.

The strange green person watches her approach, then shrugs and allows this.

After the buttons are done, Zoyah says, "Okay, so, um, do you want to come to the castle with me? Kerem speaks like fifteen languages, I bet he knows one you know." She accompanies this acknowledged likely-pointless speech with a gesture and a few steps along the beach.

She studies the steps eagerly, then tries to get to her feet and follow. Her legs tangle up in the skirt and she falls on her face, then spends a short while cursing viciously in absolute silence.

Zoyah offers her a hand to help her up. "You must've got, like, really thorough sea legs if you can't even walk anymore. Or maybe you're dehydrated? I hope you didn't drink the seawater."

The stranger takes Zoyah's hand and, with its help, manages to get up on both feet. She wobbles. She takes a step. She takes another step.

Cymbeline is the first person to respond to this call. He comes out the side door and looks quizzically at his sister and the green lady.

The green lady beams and waves at him.

Cymbeline waves back. "¿Habl'Iberiola?" he tries.

She blinks uncomprehendingly.

"Okay, well..." He points at himself. "Cymbeline." He points at Zoyah. "Zoyah." He points at the green person.

The green person shrugs.

"Okay, well... do you want to come inside?" he says with a corresponding inviting gesture. "We can show you to Kerem, he's better at some fiddly stuff than I am..."

"She's worse at walking than you, Cymbeline," says Zoyah.

"That's an accomplishment." He helps the green person up and puts his arm (quite chastely) around her.

She snuggles right up, beaming again.

"Kerem!" calls Cymbeline, leading her into the palace.

"Coming!" Kerem calls back, and presently he appears within view. "Goodness gracious."

"We've tried all our languages," Cymbeline says, nodding in Zoyah's direction, "but you've got a few more?"

"Yes, of course," says Kerem, and he tries a few more languages.

The green woman just blinks at him. And leans on Cymbeline. In a way that might be described as 'overly familiar'.

"...Okay... Now I'm wondering if she's deaf. Zo', go behind her, shout suddenly?" suggests Cymbeline.

Zoyah obeys. "HEY!"

She flails and yelps. No sound emerges from her mouth.

"Not deaf," concludes Cymbeline, propping her up again from where she fell on him. "...Possibly mute. Probably mute." He sighs and starts leading her to the study, where he tries her on some pen and paper.

"Is that..." No, she can't understand him. He points at the human figures, and then at himself.

Cymbeline blinks, then nudges one of her feet with his boot.

She nods again, and smiles.

Cymbeline matches remembered sound to the way her mouth moves, and he smiles. "Well then."

"Cymbeline's got a cru-u-ush," coos Zoyah.

The green lady giggles silently.

"Kerem, if you'll go tell my parents what's going on? I'd like to see about teaching her to write Loegrian," says Cymbeline.

"Of course," agrees Kerem, and off he goes.

The green lady gazes adoringly at Cymbeline.

"In the meantime I need to call you something," says Cymbeline. He considers, then says, "As long as it's going to be temporary I suppose I needn't be terribly creative. Jade? Jade," he says decisively, pointing at her. "Okay?"

She shrugs.

"All right." And he sets about drawing little pictures and writing words next to them, which he speaks aloud so she'll recognize the terms when people say them to her. (Since she is after all not deaf.)

The green lady - 'Jade', if you must - pays attention.

After he's made enough little pictures to incorporate all of the letters of the alphabet, he teaches her the alphabet with these examples. And then he hands her the pen again.

She shrugs.

"Nothing to say?" he asks. And he shrugs and goes back to teaching her words; Zoyah has long gotten bored and left.

Nothing to say, or no idea how to say it. One of those.

He talks to her, while he's drawing the pictures, leaning on the vocabulary he's already provided but not restricting himself to it. Immersion was how he learned Iberiola.

He frowns, considering interpretations, then draws a little stylized Jade-with-legs, and a little stylized Jade-with tail, and an arrow from the one to the other. "Your legs are going to go away? How long - how many days -" He sketches the path of the sun; they've already done numbers. "One day, two days, three days -"

Jade shrugs.

Cymbeline hmmms. "Okay, so this is a temporary visit. I wish I knew what you wanted to get out of it..." He sighs and goes back to writing. Names, this time - himself, Zoyah, Kerem, Jade's temporary moniker.

"Yeah, transfers do that if you don't catch them... uh... I guess they were expensive, maybe you need to trade it back..." He gets up, finds her a jar, and offers it to her.

She gives him a deeply exasperated look, but takes the jar.

Cymbeline is going over their past notes and what words they've covered, trying to figure out how to go forward in some kind of sensible order, when Kerem returns.

"I've told the King and Queen," Kerem reports. "And, I've found a book on sign language - I don't know it, but it might be easier for her to pick up and more portable than writing?" He offers Cymbeline the book.

Cymbeline flips open the book; it has a lot of prints of diagrams of signs and their meanings. He shows it to Jade.

Jade is intrigued! She pets the book, cradling her jar in her lap.

"Is that better than learning to write, for you? I imagine drawings will still be useful, but there are advantages to this too, even though I'll have to learn it too..." He shrugs and starts doing his best to draw the concepts in the book for her, and studies the signs for himself.

"Yes. Yes you do," Cymbeline laughs, after he's deciphered the signs. "Not very well, but then neither do I and I've had more practice..."

She nods, giggles silently, and repeats this sentence several more times.

Cymbeline has a good head for vocabulary; he can go at whatever pace is comfortable for her. Eventually they've passed things like pronouns and "walk" and "sit", skipped over the sign alphabet which doesn't seem to interest her, and moved on to slightly more complicated words. Prepositions, nouns like "bird" and "fish" and various body parts, verbs that are a little trickier to draw or mime like "see" and "hear" and "want".

"Uhh..." He doesn't know how to ask 'forever', but - he can always take them off again, if she changes her mind, he supposes. "You want me to magic your legs on?" (They don't have a sign for magic covered, but it was mentioned earlier in the writing lessons.)

She nods firmly.

She laughs soundlessly and shrugs and nods.

"You want these legs? They'll - they must have -" They don't have 'hurt', either; he pinches himself in the arm - "Ow, that hurt. These legs hurt. You want these?" He's not sure where you go to buy less cursed legs, but there's probably somebody selling, people make all kinds of bizarre economic choices, he could probably even pull her tail out from under the layering and swap it for someone who wants to be a merperson just like she wanted to walk.

Jade signs I want legs again, and then shrugs.

She beams and hugs him enthusiastically.

Zoyah interrupts them when they're about a third of the way through the book, and says, "Dinnertime. But if she's going to come she should borrow a whole outfit."

"Ah. Um. Jade, want to go with Zoyah and -" They don't have 'borrow'. "Take clothes?" He pulls at his sleeve by way of illustrating 'clothes'. "Then eat?"

Jade nods.

Zoyah offers Jade her hand, since she remember how ineffectual Jade has been at walking so far.

Jade resists taking off the leather top, but is willing to layer over it. She greets the revelation of the existence of corsets with an expression of mild horror. In general, anything that's snug around the waist is an instant rejection.

Hermione tries to coax her into one until she realizes that the gills are the problem, and then she improvises as best she can in the absence of proper foundation garments, muttering to herself about strange beach women with gills. Eventually Jade has been attired in a layered dress and stockings and a spare pair of Zoyah's shoes, which are too big for her, and Minnie shows her down to the dinner table, apologizing in Zoyah's ear about being unable to talk Jade into a corset.

Cymbeline is somewhat dismayed by her lack of table manners. "Just - do what we do," he suggests the first time she uses her fork backwards.

Jade blinks at him.

He takes her fork out of her hand, turns it around, then mimes eating with his own.

She smiles. This is a more effective way to use a fork! Excellent!

He continues correcting her as the meal proceeds. His parents look at her quizzically.

"Jade, no, really - don't -" says Cymbeline, dropping his face onto his hand.

Jade puts her bowl down triumphantly, having cleaned it of every available drop of pudding.

Cymbeline is still completely exasperated, trying to think of some way to explain what's going on.

Zoyah is not so hindered. "You can't do that," she tells Jade, "and if you do you can't eat with us."

Jade makes her 'I don't understand' face.

Jade looks around; it's not obvious to her where Cymbeline went or what's going to happen now.

The king, queen, princess, and other members of the household who eat at their table - Kerem, a few other court persons - sit around talking for a bit longer, and eventually disperse. Servants take the dishes away; Jade's is the only one that has been licked.

Presently Cymbeline returns with the book of signs in his hand. "Jade?"

She looks up at the sound of her name and smiles at the book.

Jade gives him a suspicious/quizzical look.

"My father doesn't like it," he summarizes, since he's at a complete loss for how to define 'manners' in terms of anything he can draw or mime.

Understanding dawns. She nods.

That's better. Cymbeline smiles, and goes back to where they were in their more linear approach through the book.

The book is fun! And she's picking up an understanding of Loegrian very fast. The 'I don't understand' face is getting rarer and rarer.

She nods and signs 'thank you' and kisses him on the cheek, bouncing a little on her toes. (Her coordination is improving already.)

He's slightly bemused at all the excess affection but presently unable to ask about it in any useful way, so he just shows her how to douse the candles - the servants prepared this room for her in advance - and then how to re-light them with the available matches.

Cymbeline grabs her hand. "That will hurt," he says.

Jade extracts her hand, signs I want, and pokes the flame again.

He takes her hand again. "You could catch fire -" No, she doesn't know the words. Uuuum. He's been watching her walk apparently comfortably on cursed legs all day, but those don't spread, and he doesn't have the vocabulary for a proper fire safety lecture. "It could hurt other people," he tries. "If the fire goes anywhere but the candle," (he covered these words when he was showing her how to douse and light it) "it can - get big, grow - fire eats things."

She signs Eat?, disbelievingly.

He looks around for something to burn, then picks up the discarded match he used to light the candle in his demonstration. He shook it out before, but he relights it, then sets it on the candle tray before the flame can reach his fingers. It obligingly burns into a little line of black ash. "Not really eat. Burn. Fire burns things."

"Small candle fire can't burn this," he says, tapping the tray. "That's why it's under the candle. But fire can burn clothes, wood, paper, people, - most things. If it gets big, it can burn more things."

Jade nods again.

"So - fire stays on the candle, and not other places. Okay?"

Nod nod.

He smiles. "Okay. Good. Sleep well."

She nods, and smiles, and hugs him.

Cymbeline is up around dawn, and when he finds her room vacated he tries the study next. "Good morning. You can read in the dark?" he inquires.

Jade signs Dark? and looks around quizzically.

"The sun goes down, it's dark, we sleep, the sun comes up, it's light, we can see," says Cymbeline.

"With no sun and no fire, you can see?"

She nods. She gestures vaguely in the direction of the ocean; she signs water.

"So you live deep enough -" He grabs the drawing paper, draws a deep scoop of ocean, illustrates shallow, deep, deeper, shallower - "So deep that there's no sunlight, so you can see in the dark."

Jade nods again.

"Interesting. What have you been reading in the dark?"

She holds up the sign book.

"Reviewing stuff from yesterday. Good, it accomplishes nothing if I don't know the signs you use... All right." He sits down next to her, and on they go.

She smiles and kisses his cheek.

"Why do you do that?" he asks lightly.

I like you.

Fair enough; any more detailed report will probably have to wait until they have more vocabulary between them. He shrugs, moves on. They're going to run out of signs from this book soon, although review will of course be available, and then she can learn to fingerspell and read Loegrian to fill in other words. Or maybe Kerem will find another book of signs, though Cymbeline's not even sure why they had this one.

At least by the time she starts properly learning to read Loegrian, she's going to understand it pretty well. She's hardly ever giving him the look today.

She shrugs.

"Okay," he says, because he's not sure what else she'd do, and off he goes to learn the finer points of Iberiola, and poke at magic with Kerem, and help Zoyah through her protocol lessons, which he finished a year ago but which she struggles with. "I'll be back later."

Jade waves cheerfully and goes back to her book of signs.

Cymbeline returns, with lunch for both of them, at noon. "Having fun?" he asks.

She giggles soundlessly.

I have brothers and sisters.

"How many?" He produces the page of numbers in case she needs it.

She looks at the numbers and shrugs helplessly, moving her finger down the column past ten, past a hundred, then trailing it off the page.

Cymbeline looks at her skeptically, and introduces several new orders of magnitude.

"Do sea people - merfolk - have children differently?" he wonders. Something with eggs that could confuse the issue, he supposes...

Different?

"There's me, there's Zoyah, one at a time, no others," says Cymbeline. "Same mother, same father, I am three years older than her. Are you more like - fish? Or something?" This seems like a rude question, but he doesn't know how to couch it delicately.

"Just my mother."

"Oh. How old is he? How old are you?" asks Cymbeline.

"Maybe that's a merfolk thing?" he suggests. "Zoyah is eighteen."

Zoyah looks like ten.

"You look twenty or twenty-one to me," Cymbeline says. "If you were a human."

I am not a human.

"Yes," he says, "I know. So merfolk grow differently than humans. How did your father get to be so very old? Do all merfolk get that old?"

"...So you're a princess," says Cymbeline. "Like Zoyah."

She shrugs; she nods.

What?

"...Ah. Politics," shrugs Cymbeline. He hasn't actually taught her this word yet. He's not sure how to sum it up.

He taught her the word in reference to things like favorite foods, so he doesn't think he's overstating the case to say, "Yes."

She grins at him. Rather as though he is a favourite food.

I want to be up here.

"Why's that?"

She considers this, then says, I don't like my father.

"Oh," he muses. "That sounds unpleasant." Pause. "Well. Not sounds."

Jade laughs her silent laugh.

"You had such a pretty voice and you traded it for cursed legs," he sighs.

Pretty? she signs, smiiiiiling.

"And charmed. I was asleep," (he has not covered the fine points of "unconsciousness") "and I still heard you."

She nods. Magic voice.

"Charmed voice, for cursed legs. Bad trade," opines Cymbeline.

I want legs.

"I wanted a particular horse -" He sketches a horse - "once, but the man who had it wanted too much gold for it, so I didn't buy it. - Buying is trading gold for a thing instead of trading a thing for a thing."

"I guess they would be hard to find," agrees Cymbeline. "But your voice? You couldn't give the magician something else?"

She shrugs.

"I have a charm too," he says conversationally, shrugging and veering away from the subject of just how much of a cheat the witch was.

What is it?

He taps his head. "Charmed mind." Hmm, how to explain 'mind'... Maybe she'll get it by the gesture alone.

What does it do?

"If I can remember something, I remember it right..." He contemplates how to demonstrate "remember", grabs a sheet of paper, writes a sequence of digits on it, hands it to her so he can't see it, recites them aloud - "I remember those numbers. I don't have to look at them to say them. I won't say them backwards or miss one or put in one that isn't there. And," he continues, "if someone tries to do magic to my mind instead of to my body, it doesn't work well, and I can think faster than a lot of people."

Jade grins at him. Good, she says happily.

"I like it," he agrees.

I like you.

"That's good," he laughs. "What else do you like?"

I like your feet.

He peers down at his booted feet. "Really. My feet."

Jade nods, beaming.

"Well, they aren't cursed, they are good in that way."

They are pretty.

"They're just feet."

Pretty feet.

He laughs. "If you say so."

She giggles silently and nods.