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A welcome crust of ice has formed around the estuary overnight. It dissuades the smaller vessels from haunting the embankments, freeing us to venture closer to the shores where human flotsam settles and my mother and I can sift through it unseen. Among the scattered broken glass, rotting bulkheads, and iron sheaths, she discovers a treasure grown rare in the many moons since steamships soured the waters: the emptied dwelling of an eastern oyster.

“It is a splendid shell,” I hum when she delivers her gift to my ladled hands. “What new delight are you planning for it?”

“A carving of the moon over the reef that delighted you so as a merling,” she answers with sea spray in her eyes as she stretches brazenly out over a mossy rock. “The one in the Tailfin Sea.”

The sun has yet to douse behind the human-made mountains they call the City, but I know better than to remind her what risks baring her tail to daylight above the surface may inflict upon her welfare. Her skin and scales conceal her better than mine do me, she would argue. I inherited her tidal hues—blue and green and pearl—but lack the flecks of age that mimic the rocks along the estuary’s shores. Even her hair, a subtle brown compared to my reef-tone red, more closely imitates the indigenous kelp.

She also knows no fear of the humans who abide less than a league from the small island where she hunts for shells, abandoned though it may be.

“The Tailfin Sea,” I repeat. “What turns your thoughts to so distant a place?”

“It lives in my thoughts, not as a place, but as the time when last I saw your spirit untroubled,” she sings softly to my mind. “Would you not like a remembrance of peaceful nights under the moon until we may again journey to warmer deeps?”

Though her question drops anchor on my heart, her intentions are blameless. We once were voyagers, my mother more traveled than any mer in the harmony, until our migrations ceased in a billow of smoke, and I was... altered.

I return the shell to her palm. “I would like it, Mother, but when can you expect me to return to the Tailfin Sea?” I ask. “Without our kin, our songs are sunk in a thunder of engines and propellers fit to wake the giant oarfish. Neptune Himself would turn His fins on this estuary were we not here to Keep it.”

Her face dims as the stars do when the human city lights its night-lamps. She slides off the rock to rejoin me in the water and, bringing her hand to my cheek, wades deeper into the trench of things I will not sing about.

“Keep the estuary? Or keep humans from drowning in it?”

I give no answer, for she is my mother and has charted my mind as thoroughly as she has charted the Atlantic.

Her smile restored, she unwinds a rope of seaweed from her braided tresses, ties it around the hinge of the oyster’s shell, and swims a circle around me to fasten it behind my neck. It settles lightly over my heart.

“You have not carved it yet,” I protest as she turns me by my shoulders to face her.

Mother’s fingers dance over the braids that frame my face, admiring once more the cowrie shells she has woven into my hair, each engraved by her skilled hand. “Perhaps you might carve it yourself one day. For Neptune would never turn His fins on the estuary. Nor would the Currents abandon to silence the souls who dwell—or die—in it. Do you believe me?”

Her voice is as soft and melodious as a rolling wave, the better to assure me my soul is included in her appraisal. Though the water’s chill is no matter to merskin, I feel her gaze glowing with the warmth of the Tailfin Sea she longs to see again if only I could bear to leave the estuary with her.

I decide I must. Someday. For her. “I believe you.”

“I am glad of it. Though the Currents’ call may sound distant at times, you are a Son of Neptune and my beloved starfish.” She touches her forehead to mine. “Keep this shell, that you might never forget it.”