Yes, I'm a merfolk. Yes, I live in the mountains.
Everyone who meets me asks the same thing: aren't merfolk sea-creatures — what are you doing in a ravine on Flower-Fruit Mountain? I've stopped explaining. You land-people see mountain as mountain and sea as sea. We of the water know better: beneath this mountain runs a water-vein, thin as a hair, straight down to the floor of the East Sea. Elder Wave-Crown keeps this end of it. My people call that vein the Old Road.
I swam up the Old Road. Against the current. It took a full year.
Why? Don't laugh: I'm a truant.
Every mermaid girl of my people, at the proper age, enters the Hall of Weeping to study crying under the aunts. You heard me — study crying. The breath, the held grief, the lowered lashes, the release: a whole curriculum, stricter than silk-weaving. The aunts say a mermaid's tears are her speech, and pearls are the words that remain. Weep truly, and the pearl comes true.
The hall has one iron law: do not lightly shed the first tear. The color of every pearl in a mermaid's life is fixed by her first. Weep it over a broken shuttle, and all your pearls come out ash-grey. Weep it over something worthy, and they carry light forever. The aunts call it the opening of the pearl.
One by one my classmates opened theirs. One for a shipwreck. One for a dead mother. When my turn came they laid out the broken shuttle, the torn sail, the old coat of a departed one, and the aunts chanted the tear-drawing tones in relays — and I sat there dry-eyed, unable to produce a single drop.
Not because my heart is hard. Because a voice in me stood braced the whole time, asking: these griefs belong to other people. Why should they fix the color of my whole life?
The Hall of Weeping and I were finished with each other. I ran, up the Old Road.
The mountains are good. Mountain water leaps downhill; sea water only presses down on you. The monkeys know nothing of opening pearls — they only asked whether I could weave. I wove them a net that holds moonlight; they haul me the sweetest peaches in return. When the herb-boy was hurt, I wove him a silk band that stanches bleeding. He wears it on his wrist to this day.
But lately the news rising up the Old Road grows heavier and heavier. The tides have lost their order. Seagaze Station's fleet is gone. And the Pearl-Weeping aunt — the very one who taught me — they say her pearls now hang through every corridor of her grotto.
They also say that in her deepest chamber lies one pearl that has refused to shine for three hundred years, and she cannot remember who it was wept for.
I turn this over in the middle of the night, again and again. And turning it over, my eyes go hot.
And at the hottest moment, I finally understood that braced voice from the hall. It was never that I couldn't weep. It is that my first tear has had an owner all along. It is waiting for a grief that lands on me — something seen with my own eyes, known in my own body. Grief handed to me secondhand, it will not accept.
The herb-boy takes the high road west; we've agreed I'll swim the waterways and meet him where the Old Road opens.
If Aunt knew, she would scold me: foolish girl, what business have you in the broken tides — what if you lose your first tear somewhere on the road?
I won't lose it, Aunt.
I am carrying it on this journey on purpose. It has held itself back all these years — it must be waiting for something large.
Large enough to be worth the color of every pearl I will ever weep.
And I intend to see, with my own eyes, what that turns out to be.