“You fed me an egg with a dead duckling fetus in it and said it was a luxury food,” I said dryly. “How did you possibly think I’d take that well?”
“To be honest I probably wasn’t thinking,” Soren said.
Lydian shrugged. “It’s okay, Janneke. I don’t have a taste for raw meat either.”
An awkward silence cast over us like a raincloud. Other than Lydian, who didn’t seem to see anything wrong with the comment, the others had dark looks on their faces at the casual comment. As if he were part of our friend group and could join in the conversation, especially when it was targeted at me.
“Let’s get going,” I said, scooping the uneaten pemmican back into the bowl I got it from. With a quiet click, the lid was closed and I shoved it into my knapsack.
It was silent then, except for the noise that came with shoving things back into jars or other containers, organizing the knapsacks so they could hold more without being overbearing. Seppo and I switched knapsacks—his had been considerably lighter than mine. I frowned, slightly offended. Did he think I was too weak to hold a regular bag? I shot him a sharp look.
“You’re more important than I am in this mission. So, you should have the lighter bag in case we need to run,” he explained, rubbing the back of his neck.
“I appreciate the thought, Seppo,” I said, “but you’re just as important as I am. However, if it keeps you asleep at night, I’ll use the lighter one.”
When we finally climbed out of the den, Lydian was standing there glaring at us. I rolled my eyes, not particularly caring if we abided by his personal schedule, and asked, “So, where to next?”
Lydian pointed north. “The line goes that way. Be careful, there’s a certain stretch of ice that’s impossibly thin. I’ll point it out because otherwise we’ll all drown.”
A roll of hostility went over me. Lydian managed to say these things in the voice of trail guider—informational, conversational, pleasant—as if he were any of those things for real. I knew by now, not all monsters wore ugly skin and the most terrible creature could look beautiful, but it still made my stomach clench at the way Lydian spoke and moved; everything about him that came off as normal made it feel like bugs were crawling all over my skin. But if you knew nothing about him and just looked at him, you’d see a normal goblin. I didn’t want to see a normal goblin.
Soren’s hand found mine. “You okay?” he said. “After last night?”
“Yeah,” I said, breath creating a cloud of frost in the air. “I’m not hurt. I guess it goes to prove that it’s dangerous out here.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help more,” he spoke quietly.
I turned to fully face him and knocked him gently on the uninjured portion of his head. “You literally carved the hole I escaped from. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t have done more to help.” Gods, it hurt my heart to see Soren so resigned. Over the past hundred years I’d gotten to know Soren very well, and never once in the cacophony of behaviors and actions from him had he been like this. Silent, frustrated, in pain that wasn’t just physical. I placed my hand over his heart, letting it glow for a minute like I’d done on his face, but nothing happened.
“I don’t think you fix this type of feeling that way,” Soren said, offering a smile.
“It’ll pass, Soren. I promise it will.” The others began their trek back into the ice and mist. “Let’s go,” I said.
Soren made a few uneasy steps forward until he found his center of balance once more and then continued behind me toward the line of single-file travelers that we created. When rejoining, I noticed Rose offering his help to Soren once more, but Soren shook his head, prepared to walk alone. And he did, and though his step was a bit heavy and lumbering, he managed to keep himself on his own two feet.
“He’ll be fine,” Lydian said. “He’s stronger than his insecurities.”
I nearly jumped from the unexpected voice at my side. “No one asked you. No one wants your opinion on anything other than how to get from here to wherever we need to go. You don’t get to judge any of us or act friendly like nothing ever happened.”
“You did ask me a question though, about the stag. And I’m assuming I’m the only one who can answer it, unless someone else here has been cursed with infinite, insanity-driven knowledge that they have a smidge more control of now.” Gods, the cockiness in his voice made me want to strike him. The thing that got me was how much he sounded like Soren when he was trying to annoy me. I quickly swallowed the bile that came up with the thought of Soren and Lydian having anything to do with each other.
“So, answer me, then. Stop messing around with my emotions and stop trying to get me to go into a rage.”
“But it’s so very fun,” he complained. Lydian sighed. “It’s simple. Like my current form, you’re a liminal creature. When your body was infused with the stag’s essence, it acted like it was a foreign entity and built a wall to create a way to separate you and the stag. The more time you spend practicing, the more you connect your spirit to other things or go into other places as a liminal being, you make the wall thinner, more transparent. That’s why you can see the marks now and the outlines of some of the creatures here.”
“Until what, the wall goes away until I become wholly the stag?” That drop of fear had my heart turn colder than the ice I was trekking through. One day there would be me, a body, but not me, Janneke, inside it.
“Usually a thin film remains to keep your personality and human spirit in check. But don’t see it as the stag taking over you. See it as the stag becoming one with you. You won’t be Janneke the stag and Janneke the human, you’ll be a mix of the two. Janneke of the in-between.”
I eyed him suspiciously, unsure if I should completely trust the words that came out of his mouth, but knowing I had no better option.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I turned to see Soren glaring holes into Lydian’s—and maybe my—neck. I raised an eyebrow at him, confused, trying to send across the message that this wasn’t the conversation I truly wanted to be having right now and that I’d rather keep to the end of the line with him. But he still frowned and a fang appeared slightly over his lip like a snaggletooth, his features merging to his other form from his agitation. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, knowing what was churning inside of him. He’d just have to get over it. He knew I was his and no one else’s. He knew I loved him. He knew I didn’t enjoy being three paces behind the person who caused me nightmares for the last hundred years.
Before I could say anything to him about it, though, Lydian called for a halt. We stopped, bumbling into one another and crowding up so we could hear better what our next step was.
Lydian pointed to a long strip of clear ice. The mist had abandoned the place, the wind blew around it as if it didn’t exist. It shone in an almost rainbow color of lights in its icy sheen, like what had lured me outside into danger. Even now, the magic pulled on me like it had a hook around my belly button, almost forcing me forward. I gritted my teeth and stayed in place.
“This is the gauntlet. It’s different from the ice in the other areas. It’s easy to shatter and falling on or through it is about akin to a death sentence.” Lydian turned back to look at the ice again. “Sometimes you may hear voices or urges to go under. If you do, avoid those, or else you’ll end up like Janneke almost did last night.”
Diaval frowned. “What happened to Janneke?”
“I got lured outside and almost eaten by a giant thing formed from ice and mist,” I said quickly, unwilling to let the other two men tell anyone about what happened while the feud was still strong. “I’m okay, though. Soren saved me.”
Lydian rolled his eyes as Soren’s lips twitched into a hint of a smile.
“Anyway,” Lydian said, voice overtaking ours. “We go through single file. No running. Careful steps. Judge the ice with your foot or something before you actually press your full weight on it.”
With that, he started across the gauntlet.
I watched intently as he slowly lowered a foot down, pressed some weight on it, and then when the ice didn’t crack, pressed his full weight on it. Then he did so again and again with a pace as slow as a cat’s stalk.
Rose went after him, looking uncertain about the ice shimmering at his feet as he placed his steps slowly like Lydian did. When Rose was a few feet out, Diaval came, then it was Seppo’s turn, then mine, then Soren. I looked over my shoulder at Soren, fearful of his heavy, unsteady steps and what they might do, but for the moment the ice appeared strong enough around them.
Lydian never said how long this field of ice was, but my anxiety spiked even higher with every step onto the rainbow-glimmering surface. I put a prayer out there to every deity I could think of to keep the ice steady as we walked and walked and walked.
Up above, my heart jumped into my throat when Diaval stumbled in a misstep but managed to catch herself before she’d fallen completely over. Everyone froze for a full minute, listening for the faint sound of ice cracking or making spidery webs across the top surface. Time passed with all of us as frozen tableaus in the clear, non-misty air until Lydian signed a thumbs-up that got passed all the way down to the end of the line, and we continued our deadly walk across the gauntlet.
I tried to look at each step before I placed it, but it was hard when the rainbow-shimmering ice kept twisting and turning before my eyes. Sometimes, like last night, it called out to me, telling me I’d have all the answers I ever needed if I sank into its grasp. It showed me visions of events that happened long, long ago with my family, enticing me by whispering don’t you want that in my brain, though I shook the thought out thoroughly. Images of me and Soren spending peaceful moments together for the past year came as swiftly as the visions of my family went. Don’t you want this? The peace and comfort? Don’t you want to sink back into a happier place? It could never happen. Family was gone, in a better place, and I was here. While I may not have had the time of my life since entering the Permafrost, there were times when I was wholly content among the danger that the Norns, the masters of our fate, set out for us.
But still, my heart was hungry for those images as the ones I had of my family rapidly faded away in my memory. I lifted my chin and turned my gaze to right in front of me, looking at Seppo’s back and focusing on his easy movements through the ice.
The lure, the tug that pulled from behind my belly button, disappeared, and I continued forward with less of an urge to fall into the icy prison. I scanned the field in front of me, happy to know everyone else was managing to do the same … except … Soren had stopped in his tracks and stared at the ice with his eye vacant of any emotion or thought.
“Soren!” I cried out. Our eyes met and I recoiled: his eye was dull with an unseeing gaze before looking back down at the translucent ice. He began to step forward off the path that Lydian had traced.
“Fuck,” I said to no one in particular but started to trace my steps back to where Soren stayed frozen.
The sound made everyone else turn and look at the scene. Someone screamed our names, something about too much tension on the ice. But I knew whatever the ice made him see, it would keep him trapped there forever until he eventually fell through and was embraced by the freezing water.
And I couldn’t let that happen, not to him.
I stepped forward on the treacherous ice, off the path myself. No longer was it clear and spiderweb-free but clouded, and the little fissures in the ice ran from every direction at some points. I steeled my courage and continued on, close enough that I could speak to Soren.
“Soren,” I said, “we need to follow the path.”
“Don’t need the path, my other eye is here,” he mumbled. “Don’t need the path.”
“Soren, you do need the path. It won’t give you your eye back. It won’t give us anything it tells us.”
“Why should I trust you?” he said in the same half-coherent tone. “Friends with traitors, I’m worthless, get rid of me, but instead, you rub it in, oh look at this new friend I found,” he growled, “as if you forgot what he’s done.”
Okay, that was it. No more being nice. For Soren to be dealing with emotional issues due to his lack of an eye, that was one thing. For him to be blaming me in any way for Lydian being here, to claim that I’d forgotten what he had done to my body, that was something else entirely.
I grabbed him by the arm, and with sharp reflexes, he threw my grip off and pushed me onto the icy floor. The horror in his eye returned from the dullness as I fell and hit the ice with a hard crack, and the little spiderweb lines of already-broken ice cracked quicker and louder. Before he even had a chance to lunge for me, I fell into a cold so intense that my limbs were like twigs about to snap. Colder than even the river we had to cross to get into Niflheim, cold enough that my blood froze in my body with so much pain that I screamed out, cold water forced into my lungs as I screamed again and tried to take in a breath of air. Cold so bad that unconsciousness, death even, would be a better replacement from what I was feeling right now.
No sounds came beneath the surface, and I opened my eyes, still barely able to move through the cold. I stared in shock and began to sink, then something gentle embraced my waist. A woman, smiling? No, not a woman—or well, not a human woman. Her scaly fingers stroked my cheeks as she slipped around me, her grasp ever changing so I couldn’t move. Her touches were kind and tender, like tending to a new baby.
She made an echoing sound across the ocean and more and more of her kind, the margygur, came. So much like the tales of the sirens and mermaids who came up from the coasts told, but also so much different; the human eye couldn’t appreciate their beauty, the human skin couldn’t completely process their touch, and I could barely process it now as they swam and spoke around me.
I struggled to get out of her grasp before I was crowded by them, but I couldn’t break free. She had me where she wanted and finally released my wrist from her clawed grip. Little beads of blood floated away in the water.
The surface was getting farther and farther away from me, but every time I tried to push up, the margygur pulled me back down and whispered to one another, stroking my face and belly and waist, my sides and my legs, the outline of my lips. Their burbling talk came through as words.
Beautiful child.
Neglected child. No more.
Pain-filled child. No more.
Confused child. No more.
No more. No more. No more blame. No more pain. No more confusion.
We take it all away. No more stone sinking on your chest.
Beautiful child. We feed you bits of seaweed and the flesh of the great big fish that traps those two-legged, mouth breathers who stay on its back too long. You become happy. Memories and pain gone. Become our water sister, you will. Happy, you will be.
My eyes grew tired as I listened to their silky, song-like voices, and my body weakened until they lifted me up into their scale-patched arms, murmuring sweet things inside my ears. Staring up, the patch of broken ice had disappeared, and no longer led me back to the surface.
All I had to do was sink down and down, and let them weave seaweed into my hair and feast on the flesh of the great big fish, and wait as they wrapped my legs together with an unbreakable cloth until they could feed me the mixture that would make me like them.
No pain. No pain with the cloth. No pain to transform. All your pain seeps into the ocean and is eaten by the one who no more eats his tail. A hand brushed over my temple. Close eyes, land sister, be with us, forever.
My eyes shut.
19
LIFE BOAT
SOMETHING WAS WHISPERING to me. Not the silky voices of the merfolk pulling me down, but something warmer, came from inside me.
Wake up, the voice said. Wake up and swim. This is not your destiny.
My eyes shot back open as I was being bound in seaweed and decorated by mud from the sea floor. I struggled, unable to grab any of my weapons before another feeling of calm flooded me.
; You can do this. You defy space, you defy time, you are liminal.
I focused on the axe off my right hip and somehow the seaweed binding that area fell away, as if it were never there at all. I took the axe and hacked at the stem of the plant keeping me in place, and it fell back into the muddy water of the ground of the lake.
My lungs ached painfully, but with how long I’d been down here, they should’ve shut down at least when I was bound, and yet when I breathed in, I breathed air, not water.
Your body will make the plane of existence to keep you alive. Until then, swim! This is not how the great stag ends.
I ignored the aching feeling and breathed in and out as normally as I could with the salt stinging my sinuses and the taste of it in the back of my throat. The mermaids were already crying out as I started to make the swim back to the top of the ocean, and once again their soothing melodies began. But this time they morphed into mutated cries.
Drown her.
Bind her!
She is ours!
Pretty child cannot escape her fate!
Well, whatever my fate was; two different entities disagreed.
I kicked up to the surface, finally finding the light that indicated the hole I fell through—I hoped. And with waning strength, I swam hard to the hole, noticing the mermaids stayed back and out of the light that was pouring from it.
Soren was out of my reach to truly contact, though I could feel his blistering pain, and I couldn’t send out a mental message to anyone else, so I prayed they hadn’t gone too far from where I’d fallen as I broke through the surface that already started to thinly ice over and gasped in the freezing air.
Someone rushed for me and pulled me up and out of the water completely, but it wasn’t Soren. Diaval was staring at me with light in her dark eyes, then embracing me with all she could. “Thank the gods. I don’t know what happened to you, but thank the gods it did.”
Goblin King Page 19
