Face-Slapping11 min read
I Fell into a Thousand-Year Cold Pond and Swallowed a Fire Pearl
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I spat a string of bubbles and bit down on something hard and cold.
"Ugh," I muttered, my tail flicking. "Who made food this miserable?"
The crystal shard tasted like frozen stone, but it kept me alive. I was a fish—bright red, scales like embers—and there was a black mark on my left shoulder that looked like a half-winged butterfly. I had fallen from a circus swing, remember? One minute I was flying above the tents, the next I was sinking into a pond that felt like the inside of a freezer.
"Prince! Watch the Fire Cloud Pearl!" someone shouted above the water.
People. Voices. Movement. My heart—if a fish has a heart like a human—leapt. I swam the fastest I could toward the noise.
Something hit the water and floated like a piece of coal. I ate it before thinking. It burned in my mouth like a coal ember. Then another body fell; I bit again and tasted iron, flesh, pain.
He did not surface.
"No!" I wanted to scream, but I was a fish. I bumped against him with my head, tried to push his heavy, pale body up. He gasped and then his skin was blue-green. His attendants shouted; someone shouted "Prince!" again and grief filled the air.
"I saw a fish," someone said.
"Save the prince!" someone else cried.
I pushed with everything I had. The thing inside me burned like fire and then, as if someone switched the world, my fins lengthened, my side fins became arms, and I burst out of the water as a woman.
I caught him. I pushed and rolled and shoved until he lay on the shore like a broken doll. He looked like a young lord: wide sleeves, a crown of jade, an expression that could cut.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, seizing my wrist so hard I thought my bones would snap. His hand was encased in black iron—cold as a trap.
"Saving your life," I said. "Or trying to. You fell in, didn't you?"
"You are a barbarian," he said. "Let go."
"I saved you," I answered, breathless. "Do you know how many people would watch a woman save a prince and faint from the effort? I am not even fainting." I tried to pull free.
He clenched harder. "You are insolent."
"Try being dragged out of cold water naked and you tell me what insolence is," I muttered. Then I punched him, stupid and sharp, low and fast.
He screamed and doubled over. "Help the prince!" came another voice. Soldiers arrived. He covered his belly and hissed. When I slipped back into the water, my body shrank and curled; I was a fish again. I watched the shore: the prince, his men, a cluster of distracted faces.
"Fish!" someone said. "Catch it."
They threw a hook and a bit of cake. I ate—because fish are fish—and they hauled me up. I bit a guard's face with my tail; he yelped and set me down in a skin of water with corners tied shut.
"Bring it to the pavilion," the man with the iron hand ordered. "Keep it safe."
I swam in my small prison, every day learning more. The prince's name was Alec Montgomery, a title and a man both sharp as flint. He had risked his life for a jewel called the Fire Cloud Pearl, he had lunged for it, and then it had slipped—into my mouth.
"Fire Cloud Pearl?" I muttered to myself. "Sounds like supper."
Alec brought me into his main hall and left me in a glass jar. Men argued about whether I was a demon fish. An old scholar—thin, with a wild beard—came close and said, "This fish is strange. It swallowed the pearl, yet it still burns. Only the Soul-Binders of the Purple Lattice know how to extract such power."
I watched and listened. I had been alone forever in a pond that bit like frost, and now I was under silk roofs. I tasted wood and ink. I was a fish and a thief and a refugee all at once.
"She spat water in my face," I said to the jar, because someone was listening.
"She?" Alec said, over the rim. "What is your name?"
I spit another bubble. "Jessica."
"Fish-Jessica," he corrected with the bluntness of a man unused to nonsense. "You look familiar."
I pretended not to be. Pretending is easy when you have scales.
"You must not die. The pearl is important," a young attendant, Nico Beasley, said one night. He was pale as milk, with a flower at his temple. He brought me food.
"Fine," I thought. "If I must be a prize, I'm a prize with taste."
One day a paint-brush boy—cold, indifferent—was brought to paint me. His name was Adrian Goto. He spilled ink, then, with an impatient movement that made me twitch, he dipped me into ink and slapped me onto paper. The ink smudged the room and my scales and everything. He took me up and dropped me back in.
"You will be recorded," he said, and then left like the wind. He added red liquid to his ink; I shivered. After he left, an older scholar named Andreas Romero told Alec, "The painting will help the Purple Lattice see her true nature. We must call them."
"Don't kill the fish," I wanted to shout. "I already ate two things that are supposed to kill me!"
"You'll be kept safe," Alec said, and then he walked away. The truth was, he could never fully be sure he wasn't cursed by me, or that I wasn't the greatest trick of all.
Days later, the pond emptied of other fish. I hid under mud and bones. People dragged nets. Men fell into the pond and were saved by a red flash of scale more than once. They said a red fish protected them. I coughed mud and felt pride that my small body could help.
When a disturbingly arrogant boy—Declan Cantu, the second prince—stumbled into my path, he was loud and childish, but he had a curious mind. "Do you believe in demons?" he asked me once while I wore a servant's dress he had insisted should fit me.
"Only when I'm hungry," I told him, and he laughed.
He told me something terrible: "Adrian adds blood to his ink. I broke a picture once and a black smoke came out. The world is not tidy."
"You're twelve," I said. "Go learn to be less dramatic."
But he took me into a book room and tore a painting anyway. A bird, a mocking thing, crawled out of the torn paper and made a blood-wet sound. The bird became mean, red-eyed, and the two of us were nearly trapped in a room full of imagined blood before Alec came and tore the bird apart with nothing but a grip. He burned a seal and the bird shrank and escaped howling. The bird later returned—black-winged and bitter—and spoke like a villain: "Return the Fish, or else."
"Return her," the bird croaked to Alec one cold night. "The pearl will kill her if removed. Let me lock her elsewhere."
Alec's face didn't twist into hatred; it hardened. "You will not touch what I say I keep," he told the bird.
From then I watched Alec differently. He was steady, a man who hid fire under ice. He fed me though he spoke little. He had an iron glove on his left hand that made men flinch. It carried a charm and a history.
"Will the pearl kill me?" I asked one night when the bird's words lingered like smoke in my mind.
Alec looked at me. "Maybe," he said finally. "Maybe the pearl ties itself to blood. Or maybe beasts speak lies. You hear so many lies here that the truth is sore."
"Tell me what you want," I said, which is the easiest trick: make people tell you what they want.
He had a way of sitting like a wall. "I want the pearl," he said plainly.
"And what will you do when you get it back?"
Alec's jaw clenched. "Decide."
We argued like thieves about whose appetite was real. I told him I would not be cut open. He said the pearl was more valuable than a single life. He would not be the type to bargain with threats. He told me he would take me back if I promised peace.
I promised. I lied.
A month crawled by. I ate the new food in his rooms. I learned the layout. I almost escaped once and Alec found me and scolded me with a single look. That look had a bruise to it. I changed my mind; I needed something besides escaping—some friend, some root to cling to.
Then they came—people with cloaks and knives. They were the ones who had fought Alec by the cold pond the night I fell. Their leader swaggered as if the whole world was owed to him. He thought he remembered losing a pearl. He was a generous liar.
"Hand over the pearl," he said when they burst into Alec's yard.
Alec stood. "You waste my time."
The leader laughed. "We want what you took. Give the fish and the pearl."
I was smuggled in the glass jar behind a curtain. The leader saw me and smiled like a gambler seeing a royal flush.
"That's the fish," he said. "Bring it out. We'll take it."
Alec's men stepped forward. "You cannot bring war here."
"Then we will make it civil. And then we will make it public."
Public? The word hissed in the air like a blade. They wanted proof for every thief's greed to be shown: the pearl, the fish, the bait. They wanted an audience.
Alec did not move. He set the jar down. "If you seek my pearl, you will not leave in pieces."
The leader shrugged. "We shall see."
The courtyard filled with onlookers: servants, guards, neighbors from the hills. They smelled like watchfires and curiosity. I watched from the jar as the men laughed and reached.
"Open it," the leader demanded.
Instead Alec tossed the jar aside. "Show them to me," he said, voice like a bell.
The leader's men produced a chain and a crude box. They pried the jar open and plucked me out like a rotten prize. The leader reached toward my belly with a gloved hand that smelled of copper.
"No!" I tried to scream. My voice was a thin bubble. I thrashed, but they tied me to a board and set me up for something like a show.
"You think I'm a treasure?" Alec said, watching like a judge. "Fine. I'll let the town see it's not a simple prize."
The leader grinned and turned to the crowd. "Behold! The fish that ate the Fire Cloud Pearl!"
Someone in the crowd laughed. Someone took a candle out. The leader signaled for a blade and for a boastful display.
Then Alec spoke.
"Hold," he said. His voice cut like the cold pond. "If you claim the right to the pearl, you claim the right to decide this fish's life. Is that what you want?"
The leader's grin froze. He liked the idea of a crowd. So did Alec.
"Do it," the leader said to his men. "Let us cut and see."
People took out their phones—no, not phones, but their hands, their voices, their jeers. A servant in the back gasped. Someone started to clap, half in excitement, half in fear.
I felt like the world was a cage of sound. The men moved. A blade flashed.
A sharp scream stopped everything. The leader had drawn back—not of mercy, but of surprise—and Alec's hand had struck like lightning. His iron-gloved fist snapped out and caught the leader's wrist before the blade could fall. The crowd gasped in unison.
"What's this?" someone said.
"This is justice," Alec said. "You wanted spectacle? Here is the spectacle of truth."
He didn't kill the leader. He did worse for a man who'd thought himself untouchable. He had the leader dragged to the center of the courtyard and called the town magistrate. Alec spoke to the people, slow and precise.
"You think him a thief? He stole from me out of greed. He stole a pearl that warms nothing but his madness," Alec said. "You wanted a show. You shall have one, but not of my hand alone. The people here will judge him."
They condemned him to humiliation: the leader was taken to a raised platform right in front of the main gate. The crowd pressed in tight. There were apprentices and bakers and riders and watchmen; some filmed with small mirrors they held, some pointed, some spat.
The leader strutted at first. Then Alec lifted a cloth and revealed, not a pearl, but the leader's own shirts—stolen garments wrapped in a stained scarf. Alec spoke the leader's crimes. The crowd listened; at first, a few jeers rose in the air. The leader's arrogance slid into confusion.
"You're a coward," Alec said. "You will be shamed."
They bound him to a post. Alec ordered the town crier to sound his horn. People gathered from alleys, from kitchens, from horse stables. The leader tried to use bluster.
"What are you doing?" he barked. "You cannot—"
A voice in the crowd hissed, then laughed. Someone started a chant. The leader's confidence turned to surprise.
"Why do you not free me?" he demanded.
A woman in the crowd, who had lost goods to his thieves, spat. "You stole my cooking pan. You stole my son's coin. You took my pride."
Another man stepped forward, holding a broken box. "We have names. We have things you took. You will return them in full."
The leader's face began to tremble. Sweat pricked his brow. He tried to deny. "I took nothing," he stammered. "This is slander."
The crowd's murmur turned sharp. A boy held up a belt, its buckle broken. "My father's belt, you sold it," the boy cried. People clapped and booed, and someone struck the leader's shoulders with hisses of complaint.
The leader's bravado crumbled into noise. "No! I didn't—" He twisted, trying to wriggle. "They lie! They lie!"
More people came forward. A woman produced a ring—her marriage ring that had vanished last month. A shopkeeper displayed a ledger with dates of goods that had been taken by men like him. Each time, the leader's face lost another layer.
Then the turns came: someone took the leader's scarf and wrapped it about his head. "You will be paraded," they said, and hands pushed him forward. They painted ugly symbols on his cheeks with coal. They made him repeat apologies into a cracked bowl until he could barely form words.
"Beg," one voice said coldly. "Beg for forgiveness."
He fell to his knees, the image of earlier swagger now a small, pleading thing. "Please," he stammered. "Please forgive me. I will return—"
"Return what?" someone asked.
"You will stand in the square for three days, and you will return every item. You will give your earnings to those you wronged," Alec announced. "You will be shamed and then you will be made to repair."
The crowd roared approval. When Alec had spoken, the leader's smirk cracked into hysterical denial, then into pleading, then into weeping. He begged, he cursed, he tried to bargain. "No, this isn't fair—" he wailed.
People in the crowd recorded him—scribes wrote his name; mothers asked for apologies. A child threw a rotten apple that hit his shoulder. Someone laughed and a dozen others echoed it. Others snapped charcoal drawings of his posture. He had wanted spectacle and had been given ruin.
This was punishment in public, honest and humiliating. He went from chief to scapegoat. The man who had tried to take my life, or at least my pearl, had lost his pride with the help of everyone he had preyed upon. When he begged for mercy, he begged at a gate full of witnesses who once were his prey. They would not be fooled.
When everything ended, Alec looked at me. His left hand, the iron glove that many avoided, rested on his knee. "You are not to be harmed," he said quietly, as if reminding both of us of a promise he'd made to himself more than to me. "And the pearl will be dealt with by those who know."
I watched the leader slink away, head low, the noise of the crowd buzzing like flies. I thought of the bird's words, of Adrian's ink, and of the Fire Cloud Pearl burning inside me like a secret.
"Can you speak?" Alec asked me later, when the torches burned low and the jars sat ready for more perfume.
"Sometimes," I answered. "Mostly my mouth makes bubbles."
He looked at me for a long time, then quietly smiled as if the thought amused and surprised him both. "You called me a barbarian once."
"I did?" I asked.
"You did. To my face."
"Fine," I said. "You were rude about the clothes."
He pretended not to hear, then placed a tiny bowl of real food beside my jar.
"Eat," he said. "No one else will hand-feed you unless I ask."
I fed. It tasted like safety, like the first warm thing after a winter of ice.
The days after the punishment were quieter. The crowd had shown its teeth and the leader had crawled. It felt like the prince had drawn a line: there were rules here, and he would make others follow them.
But the Fire Cloud Pearl still burned in me. The bird's warning—"You will die if you take it out"—haunted the silence. I could not tell if the bird was a liar or a prophet.
"You can tell me," Alec said one night while I slept and his silhouette was a black blade of thought. "If the pearl is inside you, then no matter what they say, I will ask the Purple Lattice to come. I will not let thieves decide a life."
I dreamed then that I was half fish, half woman, and Alec's hand rested on my shoulder like a promise. I did not know whether the promise warmed or froze me. I only knew that I had swallowed heat and now lived under a cold rule of someone who claimed both.
"Promise me one thing," I muttered in the morning. "If you break your word, I will chew on your glove."
He almost smiled. "Chew if you must. I keep my word."
So I stayed, lifted my face to his, and learned, day by day, how a king of ice warms when he chooses to.
The End
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