Walking on a boat is even more difficult than walking on land, and Cymbeline is no great shakes at the latter to begin with. Unfortunately, neither he nor Kerem, the court magician and Cymbeline's confidante, have been able to figure out how to apply the principles of practicable magic to alleviating princely clumsiness. So Cymbeline is clinging to the railing of the boat, watching the waves, trying to avoid having to walk anywhere.
"I want some magic," Ariel announces. Her voice fills the reef. She's good with her voice.
She swims inside fearlessly. There are things in this ocean she fears, but stinging reefs and creeping witches aren't among them.
The witch is themed purple where Ariel is green. She's half-octopus, not half-fish, but still certainly a mercreature. Her hands skim over her sea-glass collection. "Now what would you like? I've got someone's charmed hands, nimble as you please... got whales' strength and sharks' ferocity and several sorts of poison and glitter for your scales - what's your fancy?"
"Now," says the witch, "you are absolutely welcome to keep the set of legs indefinitely. However, my personal skills run more towards the encapsulation and the transference, not so much to the sticking. They have ludicrous numbers of practical magicians on land, I'm sure you won't have any trouble getting someone to attach them permanently if you like them. If you can't, they'll come off and you'll have a tail again, but I can reattach them for another try, no extra charge." She plucks the glass containing the legs off its coral shelf. "Do we have a deal, my dear?"
The transfer takes about five minutes of humming concentration, and the moving shape in the glass changes, and Ariel's tail is sliced right through the middle and changed.
She makes a face, then shrugs.
Swimming with feet is hard - she misses her flukes already - but she gets the hang of it after a few false starts, and she leaves the witch's reef, and she heads for the surface.
The beach where Zoyah's brother washed up isn't too far from the palace. Zoyah is poking around idly, looking for any signs of a speaking seal or a dolphin with hands or (Kerem's outlandish notion) a mermaid. So far she hasn't found much.
A woman with green hair and bluish-greenish skin pops her head up out of the water and climbs awkwardly onto the shore.
"Uh, hi," she says, "do you want to borrow my overskirt?" She poises her hands over the buttons.