She'd spent two weeks, praying before submitting her body to the attention and seed of the strongest and the brightest of their males, the captured topsiders, the elegant natural born of her kind. Again and again, until she felt all of her eggs crackle with life.
It's taken her another week of travel, of pilgrimage, to go to the shallow, warm, nutrient rich water where the carrier males stayed and waited. The ones most able to nurture her babies.
And some fucking asshole had CRUSHED them. All those pretty men she needed to pump full of eggs.
The matriarch of the mermaid clans of the seventeen seas was not impressed. Neither were her elite death guards.