Shaking your head, you remind yourself that you're really a man in the shape of a frogman in the shape of a mermaid. If you're already thinking of yourself as a mermaid, you won't have long before you forget your mission.
You decide to find this queen. Maybe you can accomplish your mission by spying on her. Assuming her palace or throne room won't be too hard to miss, you decide to wander about until you find it.
You're interrupted by a firm grip clamping onto your upper arm. Turning, you see another mermaid, but this one looks more dangerous than any you saw before. She's wearing some sort of light, scale-like armor that covers her from shoulders to partway down her tail, and her other hand holds a trident. With her gray eyes, she looks much less friendly than the other mermaids you met.
"Come with me," is all she says. Without waiting for your response, she drags you through the village into what you were looking for all along: a throne room.
"Bow before the Queen!" your captor commands. You're not sure what a bowing mermaid is supposed to look like, but you feel the tips of her trident behind you and incline your head.
The Queen herself has dark hair and a blue tail. Seeing her beautiful face and the shape of her body, which is hardly concealed by the semi-transparent robes she wears, you wish you were a man again, or at least a merman. Not for the first time, you think you made the wrong choice when you met Clia.
She swims toward you and says, "So, did you really think a spy could wander around our city that easily? 'Down near the sandbank,' indeed. We patrol the waters for a hundred miles in every direction, and we know exactly where the other mermaid cities are." You don't say anything, but you realize Iria must have reported you right away after swimming off.
"The only question is, what are you really, and how do you have that shape?" She grabs the hand you used to pick up the starfish back in the frogmen's swamp. Then you feel a pulling sensation, and your arm turns slightly green. The Queen smiles. "So you're really a frog, which means you rejected one of us. And then you found a starfish and became one of us. Don't you think that's a little ironic? You could have accepted in the first place, become a merman, and been welcomed here. Or do you just prefer being a mermaid?"