by Julia Ember
The human sword made a poor tool, and I ended up stripping wood from the ship’s hull with my fingers, prying the metal bolts out one by one. The ship’s age made the wood soft, but by the time I had a small stack of wood and nails, my hands were bleeding and my muscles screamed.
A curious white shark poked his nose into the chamber, drawn by the scent of my blood. Sharks didn’t harm mermaids on purpose, and with gentle coaxing I managed to get the beast to ram the ship’s hull. The force of his impact sent shards of wood flying. I scooped them up in tired arms, praying that the wood I gathered would be enough to mend Ragna’s boat.
I swam along the sea bottom so no one would see me. Sparse weeds and strands of kelp brushed against my scales, making me itch. Once I was under the belugas’ breathing hole, I could deposit the heavy materials and call on the whales for assistance in bringing things to the surface. I knew that, as heavy as the wood seemed underwater, I would never manage to heave it over the lip of the ice.
A ring of light appeared on the dark seafloor. I looked up, watching the twisting bodies of the whales. They looked slimmer by the day. Schools of fish were becoming scarcer, as the humans got bolder and expanded their hunting grounds ever closer to the ice. And the merclan was harvesting most of the crabs and octopi from the sands. I would have to show the matriarch the silverfin that were making their home in the ship’s decaying husk. Those tuna could feed the whale pod for weeks.
After depositing the wood in the sand, I swam to the light. The matriarch greeted me, and I gestured at the wood. She nudged my arm with her great head and trilled to a group of loitering, chattering juveniles. One of the juveniles blew a cheeky ring of bubbles in her direction, but the group scattered nonetheless, swimming down to retrieve my materials. I stroked the matriarch’s snout, grateful as always for these gentle sea ghosts who helped without question.
A giant tail thrashed in the water above. My gaze jerked up. The whale’s body was outside the water, but his massive tail swirled in the sea. My heart skipped a beat. Was it possible that Ragna had lured one of the creatures to its death? Had that been her plan in watching me? To learn how to soothe the creatures well enough that her meals would come to her?
I sped for the surface, then breached with all my strength. I used the momentum from my kick to propel me into the air and up over the ice’s lip. With a painful thud, I landed on the ice and then looked for the stranded whale. A trio of belugas were lined up on the ice in front of Ragna. Their great tails beat in the water with excitement. A few of the fish I’d brought her lay in a gruesome pile at her feet, chopped into bloody pieces.
“First you!” Ragna directed, pointing to a creamy white male. She glanced at me and smiled. Her cheeks looked rosier and fuller. The beluga opened his mouth and emitted a guttural hum. She turned her attention to a speckled female. The whale’s eyes followed her fingers, and she counted a silent beat and then pointed. The speckled female’s higher voice rose to join the male’s. The sound they made together was beautiful—ethereal and resonant, echoing around the silence of the ice. Ragna tossed a piece of fish into each whale’s gaping mouth.
Pivoting to look at the last whale, a tiny male with scars from a polar bear’s brutal claws etched over his back, Ragna sighed. His black eyes danced as they followed her, but when she pointed to him, he made a screeching noise so awful I had to cover my ears. Ragna grimaced but then flashed the whale a grin. She tossed fish into his mouth and knelt to pat his back.
Guilt flooded through me. Of course she hadn’t been trying to lure them to their deaths. I’d already learned she wasn’t a monster. From the look of things, I’d brought her more than enough provisions. It warmed my heart that she was sharing with the creatures I loved.
“He can’t sing at all, bless him,” she chuckled as she tickled the whale’s chin.
I shuffled over to sit beside her. Warmth hovered in the air around her, and the soft fur on her coat brushed against my side. My skin prickled where we touched, and I became acutely aware of the molding of my body against hers. Her smile was infectious. As I listened to the whales sing, some of the stress of The Grading and my encounter with Havamal started to melt away. It was peaceful here with her, sitting on the surface, and totally removed from the world I hated below.
The juvenile whales began to push the wood I’d gathered over the ledge onto the ice. Ragna’s smile grew wider. “You managed.” She jumped to her feet and half slid on the ice to the pile. Her gloved hands felt along each piece of wood. “They’re old, but some drying in the sun should make them sturdy enough to patch the holes in the boat. Thank you.”
“Where will you go?” I asked. “You said your home was destroyed. Will there be anything left for you to go back to?”
Ragna glanced up at me, and the gleam in her brown eyes darkened. “Oh, I’m not going back there. Not yet.” Her teeth flashed, bright white against her wind-chapped lips. Were all human teeth so sharp? “I was supposed to be a gift for someone. I wouldn’t want to disappoint him by failing to arrive.” She looked out across the sea and played with the edge of her furs. “I’m a long way from home… and when I last saw it, everything was ash. We’ve been sailing for weeks, but the sailors were getting excited. They were almost back to their own homes.”
She pushed back her sleeve and stared at the moving tattoos on her arm. They shifted, arranging into a jagged landmass with bays and names sketched in miniscule script. I moved closer, squinting at the names of places I couldn’t imagine. What did a city look like on land? I imagined the chaos and noise of the ships magnified a hundredfold—all those people.
I traced the coastline that extended onto her palm. The tattoos were so strange and, as with so many things about her, I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. There was something eerily beautiful about these god’s marks. “Does it hurt you? When these change?”
Ragna shrugged. “I feel it. It’s like a prickle, but I’m used to it. And it’s worth it… to always know the way to things you desire.”
Something about the way she said that word… desire… made me blush and look down at my lap. “Why would you want to go there? They captured you. Aren’t you worried they could take you prisoner again?”
“Where else am I going to go?” She looked toward the far horizon. “I’m pretty sure my family are dead. My home is ruined. I want answers. I want to know why they attacked us so brutally. They won’t realize I survived, so it’ll be easy for me to sneak up on them.”
I understood her reaction. I wanted answers, too, whenever Mama hinted at our clan’s past. Once we had lived in caves carved into the coral reefs, in water warm enough to heat our scales so we never had to surface. I never understood why we left, or why the royalty had banned us from talking about it.
But that had happened many generations ago, before anyone alive could remember, so I had no witnesses to question. And it wasn’t as if I had the pain of fresh memory, like Ragna did now. Havamal and I used to talk about visiting the clans that were still living in the south, seeking our fortunes there. A ball of pain burst inside me. I pressed my hand to my throat, nodding to Ragna without words. I wasn’t going to think about Havamal.
“Are you all right?” she asked. Her acute brown eyes scanned my face and then moved to my throat. “You’re wearing it.” A huge smile bloomed across her face; the clouds of vengeance cleared from her expression.
I returned her grin. “We had a ceremony today. I didn’t really want to go, so I wore this as… a rebellion, I guess.”
Ragna curled her legs under her, sitting in a jumbled position. I wondered what it would be like to have such flexibility, to be able to move my body and legs into so many arrangements. “What kind of ceremony? Where do you live? How do you live? I know nothing about anything of yours.”
I smiled, thinking of the human trinkets I’d stowed away. I was equally curious about them, and wanted to ask her what the items w
ere for. “It’s a grading. They try to find out how fertile we are,” I said, picking at a rough scale on my fin. “Then all the mermen sort of swarm us, trying to decide who they should pick as a mate.”
“You don’t get to choose?”
“We can say no, I guess… but mostly we don’t. There’s a lot of pressure, and I don’t know what our king would do. We can’t… we don’t… it’s not easy for us to have children here.” I ground my teeth in frustration. “If you’re fertile, the clan says it’s your duty.”
“It sounds awful.” Ragna moved so close to me that I could feel the warmth of her breath against my back. It was nice, though it made my scales stand on end, stretching toward the heat. Then she squeezed my shoulders in a gruff, one-armed hug. “It was the same for me, back home, but when I was younger. My adoptive father was always talking about making arrangements for me. He used to say it would keep me safe. But then I learned to fight, and they forgot all that.”
The hunter’s smile was back. She wasn’t monstrous, as we had been led to believe humans were, but there was something dangerous about her nonetheless. Courage that ran so deep I could almost feel it coursed through her. What would it have been like, to survive on a ship alone? To be taken from your home as a gift to a foreign leader? To jump from the deck of a sinking titan, with no certainty that you’d survive?
If I were half as brave as she was, I would dive into the ocean right now and swim away without another thought. I’d make my own destiny.
“I want to fight, but I don’t know how,” I whispered. My stomach clenched with ghost pain from the mage’s hands.
The nearest whale pushed his nose into Ragna’s hand. She looked thoughtful as she reached inside his opened mouth to scratch the back of his tongue. “Sometimes you won’t have a plan,” she said fiercely. “Sometimes you’ll jump before you have time to think, and it’ll work out okay. I can’t afford to be afraid anymore, even though I feel fear pulling at me. I’m never going to be a prisoner again. Not anyone’s. Not even inside my own mind.”
I crept back to the glacier late that evening, after the sun had disappeared behind the gray mountains at the edge of the ice shelf. I’d spent the rest of the evening watching Ragna as she worked on her boat with those deft, nimble human fingers. But I’d known that I couldn’t stay the night. Too many people would look for me now that I was valuable.
As I entered my cave, the sounds of the feast penetrated through the walls: laughter, the clink of cups, squeals and shouts. I wondered if Havamal had gone back to the feast or to his room to lick his wounds alone. The king would expect him to choose someone. I was sure that even now the other guards were plotting to set him up with someone. In his position, how long would he delay before he chose another mermaid?
Pushing aside the kelp curtain, I swam into the enclosed closet. I pulled out the aged wooden chest that I kept to store the human things I collected. It was the only human object Mama had ever given me. She’d dragged it back from one of the wrecks herself, to cheer me up when Havamal joined the King’s Guard and stopped coming every day to see me.
I unfastened Ragna’s necklace and put it back in the chest. Tonight of all nights, when my refusal to pick a mate spat in the king’s face, I could scarcely afford to get caught wearing a human pendant. Wearing it before had been reckless, maybe stupidly so. Yet the rough metal against my skin made me feel like a well-traveled shell, something swept along the seabed until it reached our desolate corner of the ocean—a reminder that somewhere beyond the reaches of the ice, there was more.
“You’re back.” Mama’s voice came from the other side of the curtain and made me jump. “Finally. When you didn’t show up at the feast, I started to get worried. All the other girls were talking about you.”
“I bet they were,” I muttered. Hastily, I threw everything back into the chest before sweeping the curtain aside. Even though Mama knew about the treasures I kept and had given me the chest, she still looked pained when she caught me examining them. “I didn’t feel like going to the feast. I went for a swim.”
She nodded and curled her fins under her to sit on my bed. I took a seat beside her, and she placed a delicate coral comb in my lap. “Havamal brought that round about an hour ago. Said he made it himself.”
Wrinkling my nose, I resisted the urge to throw the comb through the cave’s mouth into the open sea. Each point had been delicately carved and shaped, with no sharp edges to catch or pull my hair. Along the top, Havamal had engraved tiny human boats, bobbing on a jagged line of waves. He must have spent days making this. I swallowed hard. It was perfect, and that made it all the more awful.
“You were probably right to get away,” Mama continued. She plucked the comb from my fingers and slipped it into my hair. “Six girls didn’t pass this year. There were fights among the boys.”
My breath caught. Havamal had mentioned Vigdis, but who were the others? Six. Every year for the past decade, fewer and fewer girls had passed the mage’s test. Some whispered that the next would be our last generation unless we moved. I crossed my arms over my stomach. If it came to it, would the king force me?
“Havamal came after me today,” I whispered. The comb seemed to burn against my scalp. “He followed me to that wreck we used to go to as kids. You know, the one just past the estuary.”
Mama nodded. “He told me what happened there.”
He’d told my mother? That seemed like a betrayal, too. Havamal had known Mama all his life, but the things we’d said to each other in the ship should have stayed private.
“I don’t know what to do.” My voice wobbled, and boiling tears made me wince as they burned my cheeks. “Have you ever wished you could leave? Have you ever wished there was somewhere else we could go?”
She shrugged and picked up a stray piece of netting from my floor. “My job as weaver isn’t unbearable. But there’s pressure on you I never had to face. In my year, only one failed. It was hard when your father died, but now I’m old enough that no one considers me as a possible mate.”
“Will the king… will he make me?” I asked. The fear of being forced felt like a thousand shark teeth closing on my heart. But with six failures… Mama had wanted me to talk to the mage about going to the sea god’s court. I’d feared that would be swapping one bad situation for another, but maybe I should have done it. After all, I didn’t know life at Aegir’s court would be miserable.
Mama pulled me closer. Her jaw stiffened. “Not while I’m living.”
I leaned my head against her shoulder, but, even as her words reassured me, a knot twisted in my stomach. If I were anything like Ragna, I’d stand up to the king instead of fantasizing about the day I could make my escape. I’d fight him, rather than rely on my mother’s protection.
Sitting up again, I tugged Havamal’s comb from my hair and studied it. The rows of boats taunted me. Once upon a time, I’d thought Havamal would carve out my future as easily as he’d etched his flawless design into the coral. Maybe that was why I resented him so much now. Day by day, he built a future for himself in a place that would turn me into a prisoner. I needed to do something to ensure my own future instead of relying on everyone else to build a life for me. Don’t be afraid to jump, Ragna had said, and she was right. I just wished I knew where to leap.
Six
In the morning, I awoke to silence in the glacier. The usual hum of people starting the day was absent. Doubtless, everyone was still sleeping after yesterday’s feast and the drinking that always followed. Swinging my fins carefully off my shelf, I moved like a ghost to the wooden chest. I knew that drinking sometimes made people extra sensitive to noise, and life was easier when everyone ignored me.
I opened the chest and took out the two objects that fascinated me most: an oblong bone, hollowed and decorated with silver, and a metal ring far too big for my bicep, open at one side and pierced with holes. No matter how often I looked at th
ese objects, I could never understand what a human would use them for. My heart sped up with glee; my fingers danced over the silver engravings. Today, I would finally find answers and with them, some insight into other worlds.
For my last birthday, Mama had made me a satchel with weaving so tight that even water couldn’t pass between the strands of kelp. I stuffed the human objects inside, concealing the gleaming silver from view. Then I swam into the crisp morning sea. The water near the surface was fresh and soft from the falling rain. With less of the harsh salt that dried my fins, the rainwater was a gentle caress. I spread my arms, trying to feel the water on as many parts of my body as I could.
During a storm, the seals always hid in their snow lairs, so the birds swam brazenly around the edges of the glacier. Just overhead, I could see the undersides of seabirds, floating like tiny ships bobbing on the waves. The birds’ spindly legs propelled them as they looked for fish drawn to the surface by the splashing of the raindrops.
Chuckling to myself, I blew a stream of air upward. The seagulls flapped their wings, fighting with each other to attack the ripple that broke the surface.
Most of the belugas were sleeping when I reached their surfacing point. The whales lolled from side to side near the surface, drifting as the motion of the sea pushed them. I slipped between them as carefully as I could, trying not to brush against them. One of the juveniles nuzzled me sleepily as I passed him, and I stopped to rub his chin. With a twinge of sadness, I realized that if I left, with or without Havamal, I’d miss these whales more than any of the merfolk in the glacier—except Mama.
I hoisted myself over the lip of the ice. The winds were strong today and ice dust blew into my eyes. Squinting into the horizon, I saw that Ragna had begun work on her sea craft. A small boat was upside down with the hull facing the sky. Nothing remained of her makeshift shelter and, for a gut-wrenching moment, I wondered if the rain had washed her into the sea.
