by Julia Ember
“Wait!” Havamal said, reaching for my arm. “Erie, don’t be like that—”
I jerked back as if he were a poisonous jelly. “I told you not to touch me.”
Hurt flashed across his handsome face, and he pulled his arm back to his chest. How dare he side with Vigdis? I knew what was expected of me. I knew Mama was isolated, shunned even, for failing to take another mate after my father passed. Even the king’s law wouldn’t force her to mate a second time, but there was law, and then there was what everyone expected. I hated that. I hated all of them.
Without waiting for the king’s permission, I swam past the assembled merfolk and out into the ocean.
I was so angry my thoughts blurred as I swam for the ice shelf as fast as I could. I wanted to get away from all their expectations and do something wild, rebellious—something like visiting a human. My fins cramped as, refusing to stop even to catch my breath, I pushed my body to its limits. As the blind rage subsided, I found myself at the belugas’ surfacing hole. I wound in and out of their sea-cloud bodies as I pushed myself up toward the waiting ice. The matriarch let me grasp her fin. The sun was setting above the shelf, and the ice glittered purple.
Releasing the leader’s fin, I paddled to the edge of the drift and surfaced. The air above was dry and biting. The wind was sharp with fragments of broken ice, the precursor to a winter storm. Could the human survive that kind of weather? When the storms broke, sometimes even the seals sought refuge underwater. Shading my eyes, I peered out at the barren earth.
The human girl sat twenty paces from the belugas. She was wrapped in so many furs it was almost impossible to distinguish her from a wolf or an ice bear cub. Only the pink flesh around her eyes peeked out through the brown and gray clothing. Her eyelashes had frost on their tips. A single twist of white-blonde hair blew across her face and stuck to her half-frozen lips. When she noticed me, the edges of her eyes crinkled as though she were smiling, as if she had been waiting.
I hoisted myself over the lip of the ice, keeping my tail submerged in case she came at me with a weapon and I had to escape quickly. She rolled forward and crept toward me on her belly. I slid back into the water in alarm. I was fairly confident that her movement was not a natural human gait. It had to be a hunting creep, another way to lure prey as did her screaming. But why would she make herself so slow when there was no way she could blend in with the ice? Did humans strike like sea snakes?
The whales’ heads popped up alongside me. Their blubbery bodies bobbed like little icebergs as they strained to see what had caught my interest. They chattered to each other, then caught the tension in my expression and went silent.
The human stopped her slow creep. Propping her head on her arms, she unwound the strips of fur around her mouth and cheeks. I looked into her whole face for the first time. Her skin was so pale and smooth, almost translucent, that she reminded me of one of the sculptures in our ice hall. Her features were chiseled and strong. Her jaw was sharp, almost too sharp to be beautiful, but it made her look savage and wild.
She lifted her hand and waved. That was a gesture I understood.
Hesitant, I waved back. She smiled and crawled forward until she was only a few feet from me. I ducked into the water. Behind me, two of the belugas gulped seawater and spat gallons of the freezing liquid at their former attacker. When the girl flinched, the whales grinned widely, chortling and whistling to each other. Soon the entire pod had risen to the surface, chirping and spraying freezing water that caught the sunlight and formed ice rainbows.
The human jumped to her feet and scurried away from the ice lip. “No!” she shouted, as more of the whales joined in. “No! Stop it! I’m not trying to hurt you!”
My ears perked up. The human spoke the godstongue.
Three
I tapped the nearest whale on the nose, and he guiltily spat his water back into the sea. The others followed his lead and ducked their heads under the waves to hide from my stern glare. Sliding from the ocean, I looked at the girl. It was easy to control the belugas. They always followed orders from merfolk, and real disputes weren’t in their gentle nature. But I didn’t know how to read this human, who blinked rapidly and thrust out her jaw to hide her fear.
Scooting toward her on the ice, I whispered, “I understood you.”
Her eyes widened as she looked me over. Then she licked her lips, which were chapped and covered with a film of sea salt, and said, “You’re not supposed to exist. Everybody says the mermaids are just stories.” Averting her stare, she toed a ridge on the ice. “When I saw you the other day, I thought I must have been imagining it. Hunger and swallowing salt water can make you do that.”
King Calder always said that we had to protect ourselves by keeping away from prying human eyes—an easy task this far north, where few ships sailed and fewer passed through unscathed. “If they knew how to find us,” the king would say, “they’d take our fish stocks, our pearls, our woven kelps… anything of value.” Humans were the crabs and sharks of the land: scavengers that feasted on carrion, took more than they needed, and destroyed the homes of other species. We had to keep our home safe from them or lose everything. At least, that was what the king said.
But how was it possible the humans weren’t aware of our existence at all? I beat my tail against the ice, kicking up a cloud of surface snow and showering the girl in fluffy white powder. The snowflakes caught in the tangles of her hair and glittered in the sun. “I’m real enough.”
She crept forward, closing the gap between us. At this distance, I could see how the furs swathed her tiny frame. She was smaller than I’d first thought and hopelessly thin, with cheeks drawn like a wrasse fish and bones pushing at the skin around her neck. Still, she had a kind of wild beauty, with intelligent, predatory eyes like an orca or kingfisher. I reached out to touch her, as I might when meeting any other creature. Not all animals spoke the godstongue, but touch, I knew, could speak to all. Even the deadliest sharks of the deep calmed when we stroked them.
The human cringed and smacked my hand away. She looked at my scaled skin as if it were poisonous; her delicate nose curled. “What are you doing?”
Sensing the change in our mood, one of the belugas whistled and splashed water over the ice. He probably outweighed this fragile land creature by a hundred stone, but, like all belugas, he was unaware of his strength. I wondered how the human girl had planned to lift one of the whales from the sea all by herself, even if she had managed to spear one. Desperate hunger was not only making her believe she saw visions, but leading her to attempt the impossible as well.
A dozen more white, bald heads popped up to peer over the edge of the ice. Their cheeks bulged with water, ready to defend me in the only way they knew how. Rubbing the back of her head and relaxing now that my hand was back at my side, the girl laughed. “I’d never seen one alive before yesterday. They’re ridiculous.”
Though my scales glowed with fresh energy and heat from the sun, a chill passed through me. How many belugas had she seen dead? These whales were my friends. I knew the humans ate them, but the thought was enough to make me sick. Last year, this pod had lost two calves to human hunters. The raiders had scooped the babies from the sea and taken them from their families with no thought for the whales’ mourning. I wondered if this girl had ever participated in hunts like those.
Her gloved hands went to a trinket at her neck, an intricately designed, heavy piece. The pendant was perfectly round, set with blue and white gemstones, and made with a shiny material I’d once been told the humans could forge only by taming the sun. With her fingers curling around it, she asked, “You must wonder why I’m here. Have you… have you ever seen a human before?”
“Before yesterday, only dead.” A weight settled in my stomach, and I looked away from her. She probably thought I was the monster now. “Not that we’ve killed them. Shipwrecks, you know. They happen around this place a few times a
year.”
Even as I said it, I knew that wasn’t the whole truth. Havamal had made sure I couldn’t rescue the sailor who had jumped from the sinking ship. And King Calder had been quick to gather his men from the hall; he’d made sure the rest of us stayed behind and couldn’t witness the humans’ deaths. It was possible that the guards had made sure the sea god claimed all of them.
“We call this place the Trap, because it catches ships like a snare in the forest catches rabbits. So many people have died here, it’s like a graveyard for sailors. But the whales here are so plentiful it can be worth the risk…” The girl shivered and pulled her head into her furs like a turtle retreating into its shell. When she spoke again, her voice was soft but laced with venom. “But I’m not sorry it snared them.”
“Them?”
The human inhaled sharply. “The men who took me. The ones who owned that ship. They destroyed my entire village.”
I stared at her. She was a survivor of more than one close call, it seemed. But why would the humans destroy their own settlements? I’d heard of merclans installing new rulers in settlements after a war or bringing in soldiers to restore control, but never causing destruction on that scale.
“Those sailors were privateers,” she said. “Mercenaries, not whalers. Hired to loot us. I don’t know what happened when they set fire to the town. They took me back to the ship, and I’ve been their prisoner since.”
I thought of the drowning men, sinking like stones in the freezing water. I didn’t know what a “privateer” was, but I understood kidnapping well enough. It was an atrocity. Learning what they had been made their deaths easier to bear.
“Why?” I asked, unsure. “What did they want with you?”
Her expression clouded and she slowly rolled up her left sleeve. I stared. The pale flesh of her arm was covered in intricate blue designs, showing the outlines of land and water. As I watched, one of the inked continents shifted, drifting like a boat across her skin. A line of red appeared. It ran from her wrist up to her forearm, where it disappeared under the fur still covering her bicep.
I reached out to touch it, to assure myself that what I was seeing was real. But she tugged her sleeve down and brought her knees up to her skinny chest.
“What is that?” I whispered. “Your tattoos… they moved.”
“The navigator’s marks,” she said, biting her lip. “In the old days, the god Heimdallr used to visit our village. They say he fell for a girl with wild red hair and they had a child together. Ever since, every generation or two, someone is born with tattoos like these. They show you whatever you need to find.”
I sucked in a deep breath. For sailors trying to navigate our treacherous waters, I could only imagine how valuable magic like that would be. The gods only bestowed their magic gifts on a few. The legendary Heimdallr, servant of Thor and god of foresight, hadn’t been seen on Midgard for centuries.
“Is that why they took you?” I asked.
“They kept me in a cellar most of the time,” she spat out. “Said I was a present for someone important in their home country. That’s probably the only thing that stopped them from hurting me… knowing that I was a gift. Some of them were making me dance on the deck when the ship hit the iceberg. Everyone was panicking and the captain was shouting orders. They were all too busy trying to save the ship to notice me… So I gathered what supplies I could from the things on the deck, took the only lifeboat they had, and jumped.”
I didn’t know enough about ships to understand everything she told me. But I understood that she had condemned the men on the wooden titan to death when she took their only working craft. Death was the punishment for kidnappers under the sea, and, though I could still hear the sailors’ underwater screams, I supposed they had gotten what they deserved. Aegir would see them to the afterlife.
Back shaking, she made a choked sound into her arms. “I was trained to fight. All my life. It didn’t matter. They took me anyway.”
This time, when I reached out to pat her shoulder, she didn’t flinch. “I’m Ersel,” I whispered.
She blinked back tears. Then, tugging her glove off with her teeth, she thrust out her hand. Her fingers looked as frail and brittle as dying coral. I grasped them warily and then marveled at the heat of her palm. “I’m Ragna,” she said.
She pulled a little flask from her pocket and unscrewed the silver cap. The scent of fish grease drifted out. I wrinkled my nose when she pressed the bottle to her mouth and drank greedily. When she noticed my expression, Ragna shrugged. “The oil is the only food I managed to save. When it runs out, I’ll starve or die of thirst, assuming I don’t freeze to death first.”
I covered the healthy rolls of blubber on my stomach with my arm, suddenly ashamed of how plump I must seem to her when she faced death by starvation.
Without thinking, I blurted, “I’ll bring you something.”
In the glacier, every family had access to our central food store. Rations were split equally from the hunts, and in recent years we hadn’t struggled to find food. Since it was just the two of us, Mama and I never touched our reserves, so I knew there would be more than enough to spare. King Calder would have my scales if he caught me feeding a human, but I’d been sneaking food to the belugas for months. And the way Ragna grinned at me now—fragile and strong at the same time, like nothing I’d ever seen—was worth it. Her smile reminded me of a starfish.
Ragna pulled the ornament from her neck and thrust it at me. “Take this. I have nothing else to trade for your help.”
I held the chain to the sun, studying the threads of metal. “You don’t have to trade anything…”
“Look, I don’t take charity,” Ragna said, sniffing back the last of her tears. “Turn around. I’ll fasten it on for you.”
“I can’t. We’re not supposed to collect human things.” I scooted back from her so fast I nearly dropped the necklace. Not that the rule had ever stopped me, but if I returned to the glacier wearing a human trinket like a collar around my neck, someone was bound to notice.
Her brow furrowed. “Why not?”
My eyes darted to the edge of the ice shelf. Thinking about the consequences of being caught made me feel paranoid. What if someone had followed me? Most of the glacier’s inhabitants knew about the human things I collected. They insisted it was a phase I’d grow out of, like Havamal had, but if they found me talking to a real, live human? None of them would overlook that. I imagined one of the king’s red-tailed guards hauling Ragna from the ice and pulling her under the sea.
“I need to get back,” I said, sliding toward the water. I glided on the ice like a seal, flat on my stomach.
“Wait,” she called, scrambling to her feet. “Wood. I need wood too.”
I scowled. How did she expect me to get a land-growing thing to her?
When I said nothing, she reddened and rushed on. “Take it from the ship. Just pieces of the deck, or anything. I’ll dry it out in the sun. My boat mostly broke when I dropped into the sea. I only just managed to make it to the shelf. I need to mend my boat to get off this ice, otherwise I might as well have drowned in the wreck.”
Ripping pieces from the wooden giant wouldn’t be subtle. The ship had drifted to the bottom almost directly under our fortress. If anyone saw me, I wouldn’t be able to bring her food, not even a lone fish. But sunken ships littered our sea beds, some so old not even the midwife could remember a time before the floating graveyard claimed its permanent space on the ocean floor. I’d spent years scouring the hulls with Havamal for treasure. I knew nothing about wood or its durability, but if she could use materials from ships that long buried… even that presented a risk.
“Please,” she insisted, touching me of her own accord. “You came back. You were curious enough to come back, so you must care at least a little. I don’t want to die here.”
I knew what it was like to be trapped,
to feel stranded and alone.
I closed my fingers around the metal chain, hiding it in my palm. “I’ll see what I can do.”
We kept our spare food sealed behind layers of thin ice in a communal vault at the heart of the ice mountain. Two burly mermen guarded the entrance, but gaining access was easy—they couldn’t stop me from taking our share. Their purpose was to keep our stores safe from wandering seals or a shark that had followed the scent of blood, not to keep the merfolk out. The guards allowed me to pass without pausing in their conversation. They didn’t notice the oversized woven satchel that I carried tucked under my arm.
The inside of the vault was modeled on a coral comb, with chambers and passages dug in thick ice. A thinner layer of ice covered the opening to each cavern, protecting the food inside from creatures such as crabs that could slip through the glacier unnoticed. I swam to our comb and began beating my tail as hard as I could to fan a cyclone of water toward the fragile barrier.
The current broke the ice, and I swam inside and rested my basket on a carved-out ledge. The scents of fish, spices, and sticky, frozen blood mixed to form a perfume in the water. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I inhaled deeply as I filled the basket to the brim with trout, shark, eel, and a bit of seaweed. Then I closed the top and fastened the attached ropes, tying the food securely inside.
I hoped that humans could eat all the things I’d packed. What if they couldn’t digest shark? What if kelp made them sick? I knew that the humans occasionally hunted the white bears that roamed the ice, but I’d never heard of them eating a fish, much less an eel or a shark. There wasn’t time to analyze that now that I was already a thief. I ducked my head and swept past the guards.
“Where are you going with that?” Vigdis’s high-pitched voice asked behind me. “That’s a lot of food. More than I pick up for my whole family when I visit them. And it’s only your mother and you.”
“Ellea in the cave next to us isn’t well,” I lied, and turned to face Vigdis. Her hands were on her full hips, and she narrowed her eyes when I spoke. “She has three small boys, so I’m picking up some things for all of them.”
