by Julia Ember
I lifted my chin and glared at him. “I’m not doing it.”
He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “You can only put it off for so long, Erie.”
The Grading was an annual ceremony. Aegir’s court mage visited the glacier and determined the fertility of each mermaid in her nineteenth year. Then the mermen fought over us, like sharks over a seal pup, vying to win the most fertile mermaids as mates.
It was a future I’d never wanted. Once, Havamal and I had dreamed about escaping together. Before King Calder took the throne from his mother, grading had not been mandatory, and mating was not expected as an immediate outcome. But the king was making new laws that challenged everything our society had stood for. No one was brave enough to stand up to him.
Mama sometimes reminisced about the days when the old queen was alive, ruling our glacier with benevolence rather than through fear. The Grading used to be part of a fall celebration, but now it was a prison sentence. Havamal had agreed with me when I ranted and dreamed of seeing the world, of finding the places where the ships came from and the sources of the warm water currents. We’d explored ancient wrecks together and collected treasures from the seabed.
He used to say, “I will follow you anywhere, as long as we can be together.”
All that had ended when he joined the King’s Guard. I still visited the old ships, but now my dreams were lonely.
“I have to go. My scales…” Giving him an abrupt nod, I pushed off the cave’s ledge and propelled myself into the open water without looking back.
I followed the water vibrations and low trills of a beluga pod I knew well. The water magnified their long-range sounds and made them easy to detect. During the long winters, finding a surfacing hole near the ice shelf wasn’t always easy. The ice shifted constantly, but the whales always knew where to find the air.
When I reached them, the beluga pod was swimming in lazy corkscrews between the shallower coastal sea bottom and their breathing hole in the ice. The matriarch glided toward me like a blubbery ghost. A deep silver scar, the result of an encounter with an ice bear, framed her eye. She bumped her nose against my open palm in greeting, and I felt guilty that I hadn’t brought them any fish from our stores. The belugas always struggled in the deepest part of winter, when the schools of fish dwindled and the pod had to stay close to their surfacing hole. I grasped the whale’s dorsal ridge, and she pulled me up toward the sun.
Something thin and sharp darted into the water.
A juvenile whale dove, keening in pain and leaving a trail of blood behind him. The other belugas ducked under the surface. The matriarch hesitated; bubbles escaped from her lips. After a long moment, another group of juveniles rose to breathe. The stick pierced the water again, narrowly missing an ivory tail.
Murmuring to their leader, the whales huddled beneath the surface. They needed air, and the creatures took turns churning the water to keep the ice from freezing over their opening. They couldn’t afford to wait long before surfacing again.
The belugas were too peaceful to fight whatever attacked them from above. They feared the white bears that prowled the ice, just waiting to drag them onto land. But I needed the sun almost as badly as they needed the air. I wasn’t about to cower beneath the water. The object looked like a harpoon of sorts, not a bear claw. If one of the younger mermen sat on the ice taunting the whales, he was about to get a piece of my mind.
Squinting at the glittery surface, I studied the harpoon. It swirled impatient ripples in the ocean surface now. It had a silvery tip, tapered and serrated like a shark tooth.
My stomach dropped. Our spears had blades made from ice or mother-of-pearl. Only one creature made objects like this one. I recognized the blade from one of the items in my collection of human treasures. Had one of the sailors survived the shipwreck? It seemed unlikely that a fragile human could survive the cold water long enough to swim to the ice shelf without help, and yet… Maybe one of the merboys had taken the harpoon from the ship after it sank. That explanation seemed far more likely.
I swam under the turquoise blue of the shelf and hid just under the surface. Peering through the distorting ripples of ocean water, I studied the creature. Its face was half covered by a thick black mask of fur and frost. Its eyes moved constantly, but the water blurred the movements and I couldn’t tell where its gaze rested.
Taking a deep breath to steady myself, I poked my head above the waves. My hair, gone limp and heavy with the air weighing it down, instantly flopped across my face. I pushed it aside and looked at the human through a parted curtain of wet blue locks. Its rippled form came into focus, and, even under the animal furs, I could make out a tapered waist and curves. A female. She stared back at me; her brown eyes widened. Her crystal breath came fast behind her mask. Then, she screamed.
I froze in the water. The high-pitched sound chilled me worse than the cold sea. The human’s gaze drifted skyward, as if she prayed to Odin. Her scream grew louder and louder. I laid a hand on the edge of the ice, ready to hoist myself out and try to calm her, but her harpoon whizzed past my ear. I shrank back. The human still howled, but her eyes had taken on a predatory focus.
I grabbed the weapon by the shaft. The tip of the spear grazed my palm, making a shallow cut. I ignored the pain. Easing back into the water, I stopped kicking my fins to stay afloat. My body sank deeper, and I kept my grip on the weapon.
With nothing to grab, the human couldn’t steady herself on the slick ice. She let the harpoon go, and I dropped it into the ocean; I hissed as salt water lapped against the wound on my palm. As the weapon sank, the relieved whales rose. Each of them gently brushed my hip as they took a breath, thanking me in their soft, dignified language of touch.
The belugas’ leader swam under me and nudged me up over the ice’s lip. The sudden weight of my body as the whale pushed me into the air made me groan with exhaustion. The human girl scurried backward. Even though her feet slipped clumsily on the ice, she put distance between us as fast as she could.
I wanted to study her, but glorious sunlight coated my scales. I tilted my head back as the heat seeped into me, making me drunk and dizzy with pleasure. The human watched me silently from twenty feet away. My body gleamed from my head to the tips of my fins; each of my scales glistened like gemstones. I should have been concerned about the human, but the blast of heat inside me blocked fear. As soon as I ate, all would be well again.
When my scales reached their absorption capacity, the fog in my mind started to clear. Usually, I might crawl inland and look for foxes to watch. But today, I didn’t dare stray too far from the water. If the human was brave enough to hunt a whale, I didn’t want to leave myself too vulnerable. I lay back on the ice and kept my eyes trained on the girl.
I’d never seen a female among the drowned bodies that littered the northern seafloor. How had she survived the shipwreck? She looked so small and fragile compared to the sailor I’d tried to save. How had she made it back to the surface and through the cold water when he could not?
She continued to scoot backward across the ice. My gaze followed her to a makeshift cave of splintered wood and wet furs. She must have saved some things from the ship, which might explain her survival. Crawling inside the shelter, the human braced another harpoon across her knees and squared her shoulders as if daring me to come closer. But the hostility in her posture didn’t quite hide the look of wonder in her wide brown eyes.
Two
My fascination with humans was all Havamal’s fault. Our mothers had shared a brooding chamber, and then drawn adjoining caves from the selection when we were old enough to leave the glacier’s heart. As children, at dawn on the mornings we didn’t have lessons, Havamal would swim into the cave Mama and I lived in, excited and whirling like a tiny silver cyclone. He and I were inseparable: friends and coconspirators, rebels and outcasts from the other kids. Together, we combed the seabed looking for crabs t
o torment or oysters still concealing their pearls. We laughed the days away, throwing rocks at the seabirds and hitching rides on the backs of patient whales.
Once, Havamal crept into our cave at night. Covering my mouth with his hand, he shook me awake. He clutched a pair of struggling, deep-sea jellyfish by the tentacles, and was using them as a light. I didn’t even question where he’d found them. Motioning me to follow, he swam through the ice halls and into the ocean. I still remember the chill of fear that coursed through me. The night brought out creatures that weren’t our allies, and no one would realize we were gone until morning.
When I hesitated on the ledge leading out into the sea, he rounded on me. “You’re not scared, are you?” He grinned, and the gap in his front teeth was made prominent by the eerie light of the jellyfish’s glow. We were nine, and he was still losing his baby teeth—something I teased him about mercilessly. “Come on Erie, don’t be a baby.”
I wrapped my fingers around the glacier’s outer wall and shook my head. Beyond the little ring of light given off by the jellies, I could see nothing in the abyss beyond. The open blackness terrified me, but I didn’t want Havamal to tease.
Realizing I was actually afraid, Havamal softened. He reached over his shoulder for the blunted practice harpoon he always carried with him. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing out there. My dad says narwhals are myths meant to keep us in bed.”
He took my hand. His fingers were still sticky with fish oil from the salmon we’d had for dinner, but I trusted him, then, and had faith in his toy weapon and his promises. So when he guided me into the black, I followed him through the deep.
Havamal led us through the sea, somehow knowing where to go despite the darkness. “I heard my dad talking about it,” he said, keeping his voice low even though we were alone, where only the sea crabs could hear us. “It sank a few days ago, but he was telling my mum about it. He said it was near the shark bay.”
“What is?” I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of visiting the shark bay at night. The great whites who lived there were tame enough during the day, but what if they couldn’t see us clearly? What if the jellyfish made us smell strange? What if they thought we were whale calves? Or worse, seal pups?
Still, I followed; my trust in him and my curiosity were stronger than fear.
Abruptly, he let go of my hand and pointed downward, dangling the jellyfish so that their light fanned out beneath our fins.
A large wooden beam emerged from the deep, growing upward toward the light like a giant stalk of brown kelp. But instead of protruding from the sand, the mast grew out of a structure, a platform littered with objects that glimmered in shades I’d never seen.
Leaving Havamal behind, I swam down inside the structure. My eyes darted over everything as fast as a zebra fish. A wheel caught my eye. I raced toward it, wrapped my fingers around the spokes, and twisted. The ship groaned and shifted in the sand.
“It’s brilliant, right?” Havamal asked as he swam up behind me. He bit his lip to hide his toothless smile, but I could see the glimmer of mischief in his eyes.
“It’s amazing,” I whispered.
Red with an emotion I couldn’t read, his face hovered an inch from mine. Then he brushed a kiss across my forehead. “You’re amazing.”
Before I could react, he tweaked the end of my nose and swam away, laughing. He beckoned me toward the ship’s broken-down interior. “Try and catch me, scaredy! Let’s see what’s inside!”
* * *
I slipped into the great hall for the midday meal without passing Mama in the labyrinth. That was a relief, since I hadn’t seen her since I fled the hall the night before. She usually ate alone during the day, and preferred to weave her nets while the light was strongest.
After collecting my meal of chopped eel with a garnish of powdered crustacean shell—the cooks were going all out after the chaos of yesterday—I sat on a bench, near a group of merfolk my own age but few places away from them, hoping to avoid interaction; the last thing I wanted was for the conversational focus to shift to my dramatic exit from the hall. I just wanted to eat quickly and go check on the human girl.
But almost as soon as I lifted the first morsel of eel to my lips, Vigdis leaned across the table toward me. “Ersel,” she said, too loudly. “We’ve just been talking about you.”
I cringed and looked at the ceiling, praying to the carvings of the gods for help. The fissure made by the ship’s impact ran across Frigga’s forehead and through Aegir’s sea serpent eyes, but the portrait of Loki remained untouched. I took that as a sign and prayed to the trickster. Loki specialized in lies, and I didn’t plan to tell any of the other merfolk the truth about the human I’d seen.
Vigdis speared a sea urchin with her ice pick. When she spoke, her voice was layered with false sympathy. “Were you sick last night? You left so fast and looked so pale! I know it was frightening, but with The Grading coming up, I do hope you’re not unwell.”
With Vigdis, everything was about The Grading. Competition flowed through her veins like blood. She got worse the closer it came, and all her friends seemed to have taken on the obsession as well.
“I just needed to lie down,” I said. “My stomach felt queasy.”
Flipping her coral hair over one shoulder, she popped the urchin into her mouth and rolled it around with her tongue to crack the shell. “If you don’t start taking better care of yourself, your follicle count will be nonexistent. After lunch, why don’t you come bask in the sun with us?”
That was the thing with Vigdis: She saw me as competition, but still wanted everyone to believe she cared. A few of her friends traded looks, then nodded toward me, sycophantically echoing their leader’s sentiments.
“I don’t think I’ll do The Grading,” I stammered. This was why I still chose to stay with Mama. I never knew what to say to defend myself when they all ganged up on me, no matter how pathetic I found them. I couldn’t imagine choosing any of them to share my cave.
Vigdis’s eyebrows shot up. The sickly sweet tone dropped from her voice, replaced by genuine shock. “How do you expect to find a mate?”
“I’m not sure I want one at all,” I said, staring down into my bowl as my cheeks burned. I wasn’t sure why I was embarrassed when the choice should have been mine. But I knew that every other nineteen-year-old mermaid would take the test given by Aegir’s shadow mage, though, since every older mermaid was bound to silence, none of us knew what went on once the chamber was sealed and the mage began her work.
I wasn’t sure the king would let me refuse, but I clung to the hope that I could put it off for just a little while longer, until I could plan my escape. I hated the entire spectacle. Most of us paired off after the ceremony. Our scores were the only things the mermen ever learned from Aegir’s mage. The score was the only thing about us that mattered to them, as if everything else that made us who we were meant nothing.
If I found a mate, my days of freedom were over. Everyone would expect me to sit on the eggs until they hatched, day in, day out, waiting for my mate to return with the food he hunted and warm me with his scales. The king’s new laws dictated it. He enforced them as the birthrate in our glacier started to fall. He said it was to protect us and make sure that any viable eggs survived into childhood.
But I wasn’t ready for confinement, and I definitely wasn’t ready for the responsibility that came afterward. I’d heard the horror stories of cruel mermen who kept their mates locked below the ice, where they hatched brood after brood while their bodies withered and their minds broke. I didn’t know if all the stories were true, but some girls from years before mine had gone below and I’d never seen them again. People said King Calder was deaf to appeals.
When she recovered herself enough, Vigdis’s pixie features smoothed into a grimace of concern. “I know you must be worried. Everyone can see that you’re looking a bit… off. I’m sure someone
will ask you, but not if you don’t come to the ceremony at all.”
“I’m not worried!” I burst out. I hated that they all thought I was afraid of failing, when in reality I was much more afraid of success. “I just don’t know if I want to have a mate.”
“Why not?” Havamal asked softly, sliding down the bench toward us. I almost groaned out loud. I hadn’t noticed when he joined us.
“Because she’s a silly child who would rather spend her time making pets of the whales than starting a life for herself,” Vigdis said, keeping her tone singsong sweet despite the venom in her words. She turned away from me and stroked Havamal’s muscular arm; her fingers traced circles over the band of silver scales that wound up his bicep.
I swallowed a morsel of bitterness. It annoyed me that Havamal had grown up to be so good-looking… so irksomely muscular and well-proportioned. The other mermaids fawned over him and hung on his every word. If there was any justice under the sea, he would have remained gap-toothed and gangly for the rest of his life.
Havamal shrugged her off. He focused his hunter’s stare on me. “Why, Ersel?”
“Mama does fine alone.” It wasn’t a real answer, but it was the only one I was prepared to give with all of them staring at me. My mother had only taken one mate in her lifetime. My father had died right after I’d hatched. I didn’t have any memories of him.
Vigdis barked a laugh. “Fine? She’s lonely. Everyone can see it. She hardly leaves the glacier, and her scales have turned gray. Isn’t that why you still live with her? To keep her company?”
“She does seem kind of lonely sometimes,” Havamal admitted. “Do you really want that?”
The eels suddenly tasted sour. I didn’t want to be here, listening to them talk about Mama. I knew what the others in the glacier said about her. I spat into my palm and pushed back from the table. I needed to get away from Vigdis and her grating fake concern.
