A/N: I don't remember if Tamara gave her name in the movie or if it was only listed in the credits afterward. "Slight AU" in this case can be loosely translated to mean I've only seen the film once, so it's possible I've gotten a few plot details wrong.

For the purposes of this story, Tamara is between eight hundred and nine hundred years old. Syrena is significantly younger.


The coming to was painful, and he did not immediately open his eyes. The ground felt rough and sharp beneath his body, as though a thousand jagged rocks were piercing his arms and chest and the side of his face. Somewhere nearby, the sound of waves lapping against the ground called him back to the world of the living. Slowly he lifted his head, but in the darkness he could make out little.

Groaning softly, he pulled himself to his knees and ran his fingers across the gash in his neck. The wound was still soft. It stung and bled, but the quartermaster's blade had missed his artery. Deliberately or accidentally, he did not know. He had seen the quartermaster's extensive experience slitting throats firsthand, so he doubted it was the latter. But if he still lived, it could only mean God had more work for him to do. The countless twists his life had taken in the last few weeks had made Philip give up trying to fathom the mind of God. His instincts made his path clear enough, though. I have only one mission now.

He straightened and raised his head higher so he could take in more of his surroundings. Apparently they had dumped him on the edge of the forest, where the soil began to give way to the rocky shore. The soft lapping came from a tidal pool a few paces away. A girlish figure peered out of the waves, studying him with mild interest. Her body was propped halfway out of the water, and behind her a gold wisp of a fin glimmered in the moonlight.

"You are lost, missionary," she observed.

Philip stared at her through heavy eyes. Though his vision was still cloudy from unconsciousness, she was close enough that he could make out her face. Her white-blonde hair and clear turquoise eyes sent ripples through his memory. But more than anything else he recognized the way she folded her arms over the ground and cocked her head slightly to the side, curiously, as a bystander would contemplate some exotic beast in a cage, knowing himself to be perfectly safe on the other side of the bars. "You are the one who sang."

"I am," she said with a smile. "And you are still lost. Would you ask for my help?"

His rational side warned him not to trust her. He had not forgotten what had ensued after her song, when the boat had capsized and the chaotic bloodfest had started. But it was possible that while she had no reason to care for him, she might care for one of her kin. And at the moment he couldn't see any other options. "I am looking…for a mermaid. One trapped on land."

"Yes," she said sweetly. "The dark-haired one from Mallorca. She came to us a decade or so ago. So thin, and so homesick." Her lips curved into a pensive frown. "She never told us her name, though I offered to tell her mine."

"She's Syrena," Philip said automatically, his voice sounding more emphatic than he had intended. There was no reason, after all, for her to adopt the name he had given her. She used it because it was convenient, and because it served as a cover that allowed her to keep concealing her true name. But she had accepted it so easily around him, he found it hard to imagine her by anything else.

The mermaid seemed to find this highly amusing. She twisted her golden tail sinuously in the water, her eyelashes glistening with ocean drops. "You aren't very creative, missionary. But I am curious…what name would you think of for me?"

Philip let the question slide, more intrigued by what she had said a moment earlier. He remembered Syrena's adamant insistence that names were reserved for family. If this girl had offered to reveal her name, it probably signified her intent to adopt Syrena into her own family – an invitation Syrena had clearly declined. But why she would come here in the first place, and why she would stay so long, were questions he could not answer. He rubbed his fingers against his forehead, willing his drugged mind to focus. "There's a pool somewhere. Toward the center of the island."

"The pool of sorrows…" she murmured thoughtfully, glancing to the side at nothing in particular. "They are very foolish. They need only ask, and a single tear would give them centuries without a chalice or a human sacrifice."

Philip blinked in surprise. "Why is that?"

"What is given is always more powerful than what is taken." She shook her hair lightly, sending a fine spray of seadrops onto the surface of the water. "Of course, no sane mermaid would ever make such a gift. Men are rather pathetic creatures. I can't imagine wanting one around for that long. Though killing them can get a bit tiresome as well," she conceded. She gave her opinion matter-of-factly, without seeming to care if she had offended him or not. Did you only offer to help me because you were bored? Philip wondered.

Brushing the thought aside, he leaned closer, deciding if she wanted to eat him she could have done it while he was unconscious. "But you know how to get back there from here," he said more urgently.

"I do," she replied. Her fingers brushed the tips of the grass with casual disinterest. "But why should I trust you, missionary? Aren't you the one who carried her there?"

"That…was not what I wanted," Philip said evenly.

"And aren't you the one who pinned her down as she tried to escape?"

Philip looked at the ground. It felt more than a little unjust, to be tried and measured by someone who had spearheaded the killing of almost a dozen people in a single night. But he could not deny his role in her capture, even if it had been inadvertent. He looked back up and met her eyes directly. "Yes. I was."

Her eyebrows rose a micron. For a moment she looked impressed by his blunt answer. Then she propped her chin on her hands and smiled, and it was gone. "Syrena…It suits her. A foolish name for a foolish girl. But I like her, for all that her ideas are a bit confused and backwards." She sighed. "Waste of perfectly good grief. I would have shown her how to use it properly, but all she wanted was a safe place to remember, and to forget." With a shrug, she returned to plucking the grass.

"You realize you've chosen a flawed mermaid," she told him, glancing up.

"I'm aware," Philip replied. A half-smile passed over his face, as images of a lost box of stories and a half-eaten avocado arose unbidden.

He hesitated a moment before adding, "It's not safe here for your kind anymore." He didn't know if it was smart to forewarn a creature who regarded murder not so much a sin as a minor inconvenience. But what was smart rarely came into decisions in his line of work. And he thought perhaps Syrena would want him to. "The Spaniards came as well, and they brought their singers with them."

She laughed airily. "We know that." She flicked her tail, sending another silver shower onto the grass. "Very thoughtful of you to worry about us, missionary. But the netmakers sang for the Mallorcan merfolk four hundred years ago. They were a hopelessly gullible school. And they never disciplined themselves to swallow anything as bitter as human blood. We've known its value for centuries."

"So you do live forever," he said, half to himself. The thought saddened him. While in an intellectual way he was glad to understand something else about Syrena, this new insight was just another thing that made her more distant and unreachable. Four hundred years was a very long time to carry a memory. He wondered, if she survived the night, if she would remember him four hundred years from now. The blonde mermaid smoothed the water around her with her arms, blurring her reflection with light ripples.

"No one lives forever," she told him. "Cover your ears at dawn, if you're still alive. I might eat you if you fall into the water. I doubt I'll remember you in the morning."

A dull chill settled in his chest and made him ask, "What will happen at dawn?"

She smiled. Her smile brought back memories of icebergs and frozen windowpanes. "We will sing back, of course. It will be a beautiful battle. Sometimes it's amusing to guess which men will fall soonest. The ones who sing loudest are usually the first."

She fingered the grass again, her delightful anticipation abruptly replaced by indifference. "The pool you're looking for is to the north, just beyond the cluster of golden heliconias. They really didn't leave you very far. I think they wanted you to find your way back. The man who dropped you mentioned something about tears of joy…"

Then she didn't cry for them after all, Philip thought. If his death made no difference to her, he did not know what his resurrection would do. But he supposed tears of joy were better than the alternative. And he had no doubt if this trap failed, Blackbeard could think of several other creative ways to get what he wanted. He craned his neck in the direction of the mermaid's gaze and grimaced as the gash above his collarbone reasserted itself. "If I want to help her, do I have a choice?"

"No," she replied. He nodded. There was little else he could do, except offer a brief word of thanks, which he did as he rose unsteadily to his feet.

"Good-bye," he said.

A light splash told him she was no longer listening. He turned and began the northward march, moving through trees far older than he, yet still much younger than the thing he sought.


He did not remember much of the journey back to the pool, except that it was short. A light wind rustled through the canopy above. The yellow heliconias winked at him from their cluster on the damp soil as he passed. Philip acknowledged them and moved on. His muscles still felt heavy from laying immobile for God only knew how many hours, but his mind at least was clear. His vision had cleared as well. As he approached the pool of sorrows, the silhouettes of a dozen shriveled mermaids emerged to greet him, and yet he had no trouble picking out her.

Her eyes were closed. In the moonlight he could make out the subtle rise and fall of her chest, shallow and regular enough for slumber. He tried to approach quietly, knowing all the while they were probably being watched no matter what he did. He remembered how uncomfortable it had felt being tied to a crow's nest for three days straight, but they had tied her with her arms above her head. They must be incredibly sore right now.

Raising his eyes higher, he scanned the knot fastening her to the tree with a mixture of relief and dismay. It was secure enough to hold her, but it was also simple. A highwayman's hitch, the quartermaster had called it, because the gentlest tug on the proper string would cause it to come undone. In this case, the proper string was safely beyond her reach, but perfectly within his. He had a feeling the moment he touched it the game would be up.

Cautiously, he circled around the side of the giant cedar trunk where they had left her hanging. In spite of everything, there was a rightness about being next to her, of the kind he had previously felt only in seminary or in the quietest moments of prayer. He touched her wrist, and she stirred. He lowered his voice to a volume he thought only she would hear, so that anyone else would have thought his moving lips a trick of the light. "Syrena."

Blinking, she turned and studied his face, her eyes somewhat foggy with sleep. "You…came back," she murmured groggily. "I didn't hear you out there. I should have heard you..." She shook her head, clearly disoriented by the dulling of her sharpest sense. Philip decided to file this mystery into the category of things to figure out later.

"You were asleep," he said. She frowned, but halfheartedly. At the moment she looked more exhausted than confused. Philip eyed the ropes anxiously. This was a trap, but there was a small, almost insignificant window in which either one of them could act. They had exactly the amount of time it would take for her to cry, or for Blackbeard to decide she was not going to cry and he needed to try something else. Lowering his head, he spoke into her ear as softly as he could. "I can untie these, but you need to go the moment I do. Promise me you'll go."

She closed her eyes and nodded. "We should go south," she said. "Far south."

Unintentionally, he felt himself smile. "Why south?" he asked curiously.

"There's snow there. It never snowed at home. And…I would like to know what a penguin looks like."

Four hundred years and you never saw a penguin? A part of him almost laughed, the part of him that did not find this game excruciatingly painful. He could not, would not, forget that she had said we. With a conscious effort, he turned away from her and moved to the side of the tree. As expected, he had barely touched the unburdened end of the rope before it slipped away, dumping her harmlessly into the water. "Go, Syrena," he said, as quietly as he dared.

But she lingered a moment, staring up at him from the pool with her irresistible hazel eyes. "Philip," she said, now wide awake as the saltwater lapped against her shoulders. "Why did you come back?"

He would think afterwards that there were a number of things he should have said then. I'll explain later, or Just go, would have been perfectly acceptable answers. But he had been raised to be honest, so the truth was something that came automatically to him, by default. "Because you are different," he said.

A genuine smile crossed her face, and for a moment she looked truly radiant. At the corner of her eye something glistened, a drop of seawater precariously poised to race down her cheek. And then, just as quickly, the game ended. Strong hands seized him from behind while four more hands pulled her from the water. In the chaos that followed Philip remembered only two things with clarity. The first was how her face clouded over with disillusionment, until it was a mirror of what it had been the morning before, when she had stared at him through the glass aquarium. The second was that the knot binding her to the tree was now a constrictor hitch, the kind that was nearly impossible to undo.

With nothing else to lose, he fought back. His elbow collided with someone's nose. Something cracked, and for a moment his arms were free, but before he could do anything else useful with them the quartermaster pinned them to his sides in a suffocating embrace.

"Come away," he hissed roughly into Philip's ear. Philip resisted, but the quartermaster's bearlike arms only squeezed more tightly, until Philip thought his ribs would crack, or his lungs burst from lack of oxygen. "Come away, son." The fatherly tone in the quartermaster's voice startled Philip into relaxing, and in that brief instant of hesitation he reflexively left off his struggle.

"Thank God," the quartermaster said. A blow to his stomach sent Philip sprawling to his knees. Stunned, he felt someone loop a rope around his wrists and haul him back to his feet. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard the slightly echoed shuffling of two dozen boots on the grass, and the clanking of a dozen swords in their steel sheaths.

A part of him wished they would all surround him then, so he would not have to turn and see the disgust reflected in her eyes. At the same time he wanted to memorize her face, regardless of its expression, simply because it was hers. But when he looked back, she was not staring at him any longer. The last glimpse he caught of her, she had craned her neck towards the canopy, as though she thought if she stretched far enough, she could see in the water above the sky a reflection of home.