The Mermaid's Daughter

Chapter Six: 'The Little Human'

CHAPTER SIX

As Coral and I arrive at school today there seems to be a buzz going about. As we pass through the crowded hallways you can feel the excited vibes radiating off the conversations around us. We walk into our first class for the day, Art, and sit down in our usual seats. The teacher tries to silence everyone but it takes him another 10 minutes of yelling to get everyone to finally quiet down. Luckily we are working on our group projects for the whole lesson so everyone is able to start talking again.

"What's everyone so excited about?" I ask Coral as we walk into the next room to get out our supplies.
"Don't you know? Out of everyone in the Kingdom I thought you would be the first one to hear about it," replies Coral, scanning the paintbrushes for one that isn't broken.

"Why? Hear about what?" I'm really anxious to know what's going on. I always hate being the one that has absolutely no idea what's happening (as you've probably already realised).

"Well, you know how King Johnathan's 17?"

"No, but that's nice to know," I always knew that King Johnathan was not much older than us but I never realised that he was only 17. I wonder where he gets taught. I've never seen him leaving to go to school, but I've never seen any private tutors come into the palace either. I pick up 2 painting palettes and start to wash off whatever the green mooshy stuff on them is.

"Anyway, if someone is crowned as King or Queen before they are 18, when they would not be married, it is the rule that they must be married before they are 20, so there is always a King and Queen ruling at the same time. If they don't get married before they are 20 then they get kicked off the throne," Coral says as she starts looking through the hundreds of bottles of paint on the wall.

"That sounds a little harsh, but why is everyone all of a sudden talking about it so much?"

"Everybody is talking about it cause it's King Johnathan's 18th birthday today! When an unmarried King or Queen turns 18 that's the time where they have to start looking for their future spouse, so everyone's really excited to know who he picks!" she adds an extremely high-pitched squeal at the end just in case I didn't already sense everyone's excitement. Great.

"Can he chose anyone he likes or does it have to be someone who's already royal?" We start walking back to our bench to continue on our project.

"It has to be someone who is part of a royal family, and is not yet a Queen, but she can be from any Kingdom he likes," she smirks at me, "Why were you asking?"

"No reason," I quickly put in as I avert my eyes down to my fingers fiddling with the bristles of my paintbrush. I know that people may think that I'm in love with him because I always talk about him as a good person. The whole Kingdom pretty much fears him. I have absolutely no idea why. Don't they see that he's nearly as scared of them as they are of him? Obviously what caused him to kill his parents had a reasonably good reason behind it because I don't think that he would be the kind of person to just do those kind of things for no reason. Our relationship is merely just as friends, but I'm sure he would probably say enemies.

I look down at our drawing on the bench. We're supposed make up some mythical creature and write a report about it like it's an actual thing. Since I have absolutely no creative juices inside of me I let Coral do all the artistic bits of the project such as: making up the creature, drawing the creature, making the clay model of the creature and naming the creature. The parts left for me are: painting the creature, painting the clay model and writing the whole report about the creature. So far all we've done is drawn the creature and named it.

I open up the bottles of paint and pour a bit of each into all the spots on the palettes. Coral hands me the paint brush and goes off to get some clay and a plastic tablecloth. Coral decided to name our mythical creature an 'Ocean Elemental'. It has the body and tail of a dog, the legs of a cat, the feet of a chicken and the head of a horse. I wouldn't say it looks very 'mythical' but I guess it would be to Mermaids. I get to work painting the face as Coral pulls up her chair next to me and starts moulding the clay. Her hands are as quick as lightning as she first moulds the body, then the feet, then the head and finally, the tail. She picks up a palette knife and carefully adds the designs to the creature before setting it on the window sill to dry.