The walk back to the palace was not an easy one, and being barefoot made it twice as hard. The wet rocks they climbed dug into Anahita's soles, and the branches of the bramblebriar clawed at her face and hair.

"You are a princess," Anahita hissed, narrowly escaping a deep chasm in the rocks as they climbed. "Do you not have some sort of –" She stumbled. " – transportation?"

"I do not wish to be caught hauling around some type of sea creature," Lyda replied, climbing the rocks as if she had done so a thousand times, as she may well have done.

The sea was miles below them now, and it churned like boulders. The smallest ribbons of salty wind tugged at their hair. Anahita's nails were packing with dirt and algae as they climbed, and when at last she hauled herself up onto flat land, she felt as if she had been in a ferocious fight with her own body, and lost.

Lyda dusted her jacket off primly. "Right," she said.

"Right," Anahita replied from the ground. Her lungs were burning.

The next stretch of the journey was made worse by the damage the rocks had done to Anahita's feet. Each step up the winding road felt as though she was walking not on gravel but on knives. Thousands of silver birch trees slid up into the violet sky, and the moon hung between them like a chandelier. The palace loomed.

The sounds of flutes and strings wafted on the air, thin and fragile as wafers. Silhouettes of men were unloading goods from wagons and carts.

"Lyda!" one called.

She shushed him as they approached.

"I thought you weren't coming?" he said. "The meeting down at the Siren–"

"Yes, enough about the Siren," Lyda said, nodding towards Anahita.

His eyes followed, resting eventually on the dishevelled barefoot girl in a sailor's coat. "Is she from Ahriman?"

Another man, younger, said, "Is she alright?"

Lyda made a vague hand gesture, accompanied by an irritated hum. "To be honest, I don't know how to say yes to either question." Although annoyed, her voice maintained its whispered, conspiratorial tone. "But she saw me...there." She scratched the back of her head.

The two workmen looked at Anahita, eyes wide.

"No, no," Lyda sighed. "I don't know. I highly doubt she's a spy, she's just some crazy girl in love with my stepbrother. She wants to go to the ball, and she won't mention where she saw me. She won't speak of any of it again."

"But how can we be sure?" said one.

"Exactly!" said the other. "She'll be inches from the King, the Prince, any general, admiral, whoever. If she saw you, she'll –"

"She isn't a spy," said Lyda. "She's a – I don't know the word. She's a sea...person."

"Sailor?"

"No, I know what a sailor is. Not that. More like a..." She rolled her eyes impatiently trying to summon the correct term. "Wench of the waves."

Anahita wrinkled her nose. "What?"

"Like one of those lewd fish?" guessed one of the workmen, miming breasts.

Lyda said, "That is not the important thing here. She's a fish who is in love with my stepbrother. Not a spy."

"Yes," he said, "I suppose those are quite different things."

She sighed. "Just let us in, Matthew."

Matthew sighed, hauling the final sack onto his cart, and kicking open the door that allowed goods into the palace. Not too far away, the music poured gently from the windows.

Anahita followed Lyda in.

As her bare feet trod the cold, chequered marble, Anahita strained her ears to hear the music. It was fragile and far away. She struggled for scraps. If the jagged pipe music or the fiddles of sailors had been a burlap sack, then this music was silk. The violins drifted over the cellos, rolling and plunging like waves.

"Hurry up," hissed Lyda, casting a disdainful little look at the mud tracks that Anahita's feet were leaving on the marble tiles.

They hurried up to a huge, heavy pair of wooden doors that led to a room cast from dark marble the colour of the sky at night. Hefty, opalescent pipes hung over a tub. Lyda rolled up her sleeves and turned a lever, and the pipes began to clank and shake. Steaming water poured from one, and frothing soap from another.

"Clean yourself off," she ordered. "I will find you a dress."

Anahita peered at the water. "Can I go in there?" she pointed at the bathwater.

"Yes, why not, it smells of bluebells." She shrugged.

"No, but I mean, I was once a mermaid. Might it not be one of those situations where when I come into contact with water, I re-grow my tail?"

"You had a tail?" gasped Lyda, who was imagining something like a cat's.

"Yes."

"But where?"

"Instead of my legs."

"Did you have one tail per leg? Could you walk on your tails?" She shook her head. "I'm getting distracted. You just wash –" She heaved the lever, and the water stopped. "I'll get you something to wear."

Lyda disappeared and the bath frothed contentedly, as if it knew it had done a good job.

Anahita checked that the door was indeed closed before she discarded her coat. She did a little jig to test the limitations of her legs. They were certainly pliable. She bent her knees and leapt up like a frog, and then she kicked her feet to the sides. She kept on his way until gravity decided that it should put a stop to all this, and threw Anahita into the bath.

To her surprise, she did not transmute into a fish. Instead, the experience was quite pleasant. The bath had all the comfort of the sea but with a much more pleasant smell. Anahita dipped her head below the water. The way the sound moved down here was a warmth to her; slow, dull, muted. The colours swirled into abstract shapes, and her hair bloomed, unbound by gravity.

A door opened.

"Oh, great, she's dead," came Lyda's voice, somehow disparaging even through the heavy casing of water.

Anahita broke the surface, emerging with a crown and beard made of soap suds. "No I'm not," she protested.

Lyda gave a somewhat disappointed shrug. "Alright. In that case you can put this on." She waved a mountain of fabric.

"What is it?" she asked, swimming to the rim of the tub.

"Clothes. Please start wearing them."

Anahita squinted at the foam-like piles of sea-green chiffon. "It's pretty."

"And necessary." She placed it on the floor without much care. "I will be waiting in the room opposite this one. Put this on and come straight there. If you stray, I will turn you back into a fish and serve you as an appetiser."

"You don't know how to!"

"I am a very determined person." With that she left.

Anahita climbed out of the tub (after several unsuccessful attempts) and dried herself off. She picked the dress up off the floor and she stared at it as if they were about to duel. So it had a hole for the neck. She had a neck. It had two arms. She had two of those. Right.

She took a breath and dove in, immediately turning herself into a knot of limbs and silk. She thrashed. This felt like drowning all over again. Clouds of chiffon floated up at her sides as she battled the dress, tripping and falling as if fighting a beast. She wrenched the neck of the dress over her wet hair and finally it slid more or less into place. She sighed. Why was everything the humans did so difficult and elaborate? She was beginning to question Lyda's assertion about the necessity of clothes. They seemed little more than inconvenient.

Picking herself up, Anahita slipped out of the bathroom and into the room opposite.

An entirely different Lyda looked up from her table. Her black hair was pinned back, austere yet elegant, and her dress was the same colour as the sky outside the window. She wore long silk gloves to match, and a necklace of Cragen pearls. She looked, in that dress, like a slice of moon behind clouds, cold and pale.

"Your hair is wet," she said.

There was no pause in Lyda. She immediately had pearls in her fingers, and she swooped over to Anahita like a falcon.

"Stand still," she ordered, looping and pinning coils of Anahita's black hair up with her pearls. After some time, she stepped back to regard her work. "That...will do."

"You look lovely," Anahita said.

"You look passable," Lyda returned, and she meant it. "Now, when you go to the ball, do not speak to anybody except my stepbrother and me. Do not mention seeing me at the Siren or I will have you cooked into a large pie and eaten."

"Horrible."

"Yes. Try not to pile your plate with food, eat your oysters like this –" She mimed it. "Do not act suspicious, do not draw attention to yourself, and do not attempt dancing. Understood?" Before Anahita could reply, she continued, "Do not attempt to fire a pistol, do not dance with a married man unless he is older than fifty years of age, do not suggest gambling nor wickedness, and do not ride a horse."

"What?"

"One must account for any possibilities."

"Alright."

"So are you ready?"

Anahita reached up to touch the pearls in her hair. "I think I am."

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[A/N hi everyone! Please drop a comment to let me know you're actually reading this! This story has far lower engagement than my others, so I'm unsure whether to continue posting it or to focus on something else? Please let me know what you prefer to see! Thanks so much x]