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ripe odor of smoke and sweat and roasted meat. Her bare feet picked up a film of invisible grime from the cool tile floors. She winced at the woman’s pace but didn’t dare to slow down. Clothes and fabrics filled the small room where they stopped, some in folded piles and some hanging on hooks. There were stubby top hats, and little funny shoes with buckles, and dark coats with tails, and white linen shirts, and breeches. Men’s clothes. The woman knelt on the floor, opening a trunk full of colors pale and bright and girlish, and she rummaged through them.
    “What brings you here, then?” she asked. “Not content singing on rocks, are you? You’re coming on land to steal the men now?”
    “I’m looking for my sister.”
    The woman held up a thin linen shift, like the one Alander used to make her wear. “Hold up your arms. Your sister? Is she a merwife? You won’t get her back.”
    “I just want to see what’s become of her.”
    “You want a human husband,” the woman said, tugging the shift over Esmerine’s body. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be a siren.”
    “How do you know?” Esmerine couldn’t hold back her irritation.
    The woman brought a stiff bodice out from the trunk. “We know all about your kind here. A few men in Sormesen have married mermaids. They come to us thinking we know what to do because we talk to the merfolk. The men are too blinded by enchantments to see they’ve married fools who hide from the fire, can’t handle the servants, and complain about every little thing.” She drew the bodice over Esmerine’s shoulders and stood behind her, tugging the laces tight.
    Esmerine gasped. “I can’t breathe.” The bodice seemed to be made of slender rods sewn into the fabric that pushed her breasts up and drew her waist into an unnatural tapered shape. She’d been fascinated by Alander’s books, with their pictures of human ladies with tiny cone-shaped torsos and frilly gowns, but she had never believed real human women could resemble the drawings.
    “If you truly couldn’t breathe, you wouldn’t be talking either,” the woman said. “This is what I mean. I don’t know why a mermaid would want to come here, when you complain merely at wearing stays.”
    “You don’t seem to like mermaids very much.” Esmerine wondered why the woman sounded so hostile. She only wanted to rent a dress and then she would be gone.
    “Why would any sensible woman like mermaids?” the woman said, incredulous. “You wreck our ships to frighten us. You run about naked with your horrid fish tails and sing all day to seduce our men.”
    “We only wreck ships that don’t pay tribute, and it’s only fair when they’re taking fish from our ocean, and I certainly don’t care to seduce your men!”
    The woman shot her a look of poison, giving the laces of the stays a hard tug. “Nor do you know when to hold your tongues.”
    Esmerine did hold her tongue as the woman trussed her from head to toe—a padded roll around her hips, a striped cloth overbodice that fitted against the stays, a pale green underskirt and carefully draped overskirt of darker green, stockings, shoes with heels that made Esmerine’s pained feet wobble, and a bonnet trimmed with black ribbon and still more lace that tied under Esmerine’s neck with a choking knot. Esmerine still felt her siren’s belt beneath her clothes, reminding her she was still a free mermaid at heart. It was hard to think that Dosia might wear these clothes forever.
    “For payment, your bracelets will do,” the woman said.
    “All of them?” Esmerine had a strong sense she was being cheated.
    “Yes, they’re nothing too fine. What is that you have there?”
    Esmerine had put down the statue of the winged figure, but now she snatched it up again. She didn’t want to sell it to this woman who hated mermaids. “Nothing.”
    The woman peered closer at it. “Ugh. One of those winged folk. One of them snatched my aunt’s hat right off her head with his