Merpeople belonged to a remarkably extensive family of species. Tris had only learned that after coming to Hogwarts.
The kind most people pictured, with long, wavy blonde hair, extraordinary beauty, and a gorgeous, colorful fish tail for a lower body, were temperate-ocean mermaids. Their beautiful singing could lure lost sailors, and ordinary people called them Sirens, just as they did another kind of sea creature with a human body, bird claws, and wings, blessed with equally extraordinary beauty and singing voices.
There were also merrows and selkies. The former were cold-water merpeople from polar regions, ugly and coarse-featured but equally gifted singers. The latter were their Scottish subspecies, living mainly in chilly freshwater lakes, such as the Black Lake beside Hogwarts.
The East also had three populations of merpeople.
Two of them fit the conventional image of merpeople, possessing extraordinary beauty: the Li Merpeople of the oceans and the Li Merpeople of the great lakes. Both, however, were exceedingly rare. Eastern Alchemists had all but wiped them out in earlier years by capturing them to make elixirs.
The more common ones nowadays were the Shark-Folk, who looked much like merrows and selkies.
The Americas had once had a kind of freshwater mermaid too, similar to the eastern Li Merpeople, but they had gone extinct long ago. Now, only books offered a glimpse of them.
The creatures before Tris looked more like fish-people than mermaids. At any rate, there was certainly nothing beautiful about them.
Every one of them had a savage-looking head and bared teeth. They held crude stone weapons and watched Tris warily.
Tris could not be bothered with them either. Although some of the females were dressed very boldly, he maintained that he was a respectable man and had no intention of taking so much as a second