The Seafarer's Kiss

by Julia Ember

  I folded the new legs as tightly as I could, smoothing the kelp over them. There was no way I could hide my new body for long, but I’d cherish these precious seconds. If the king locked me away, they might be the last ones we’d have. I cleared my throat. “What’s happening outside? Is everything okay?”

  Mama covered her mouth and shook her head. “It’s one of your year-mates… That girl with the coral fins. Vigdis? Her mother went to visit her and found a strange merman in her chambers. She said he was handsome, beautiful even … with golden starlight fins and skin the color of midnight.” Mama paused for breath. “She found them kissing, but when she arrived, they fled. She was happy for Vigdis, goodness knows the girl was miserable after the ceremony results… but when they swam away, Croa said, the merman trailed a green mist, and when she looked into it, he appeared like something else, something monstrous.”

  “Is she sure of what she saw?” I took a deep, ragged breath. “She must be under a lot of stress, too, after what the mage found out about Vigdis…”

  Mama shrugged. “Croa has a good head on her shoulders. She wouldn’t invent. She was sure.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I had to ask. “What does she think she saw?”

  “A creature with tusks like an elephant seal, with hooves for hands and a tail with a thousand eyes for scales.” Mama’s voice shook as she repeated what she’d heard.

  My hand went to my throat and a creeping burn spread up it. My stomach heaved, and I vomited into the water. The orange mush drifted past me, and Mama moved aside to let it pass into the ocean.

  Loki’s tricks and my stupidity had punished Vigdis twofold—as if losing her voice wasn’t sacrifice enough. A mate. My stomach churned. Maybe threefold. What if there was another punishment planted inside her, growing with every passing minute? The thought made me retch again. I coughed and heaved up pure bile. I was responsible for this.

  “Do you have a fever, Erie?” Mama swam beside me and stroked my hair. Her fingers began combing through the knots, as she’d done a thousand times. Misery clogged my throat. I shut my eyes as hollowness bore through me, as if a thousand sand crabs carved out their dens inside me all at once.

  “No,” I stammered. “It’s just … the news.”

  “I know, it’s sickening,” Mama said, her voice gentle. “But it’ll be okay. The King’s Guard will find her and bring in this merman for questioning, whoever he is. She’ll be safe soon. We can’t be too careful when it comes to shapeshifters … it’s haustr and all of Loki’s monsters prowl.”

  When I didn’t reply, her eyes traveled down the netted kelp blanket. “Why are you all covered up?”

  I didn’t have time to respond.

  Chest heaving, Havamal swam into the center of my cave. “Ersel?” he asked, voice thick with concern. Once upon a time, his concern would have made me blush with glee. Now it made me feel sicker. “I heard you scream? Did you see something?” His eyes darted around the enclosed cave. “Did you see that thing? The shapeshifter Vigdis followed? We’re looking for them now … Gods, I only hope her mother didn’t see what she thought she did.”

  Cold rage made me unwind the kelp from around my new legs so he could see what he’d driven me to do. Free from their bondage, the tentacles pawed at the air without me guiding them. The mouths puckered and kissed the open water, looking for something solid to attach themselves to.

  Mama went rigid and then started to shake. Havamal just stared.

  “What…?” Mama’s voice trailed off.

  All the color had drained from Havamal’s handsome face. Good. He should feel shame. But Vigdis… Havamal wasn’t responsible for what I’d done to her.

  “It’s all my fault,” I whimpered, breaking at last when I reached for Mama’s hand, and she cringed away. I yanked the kelp back over my body, but the tentacles pushed it aside. “I made the deal. It’s all my fault.”

  Three of the king’s other guards burst into the ice cave. Doubtless they had heard my screaming as well, but as soon as their eyes fell on my tentacles and beheld what I’d become, they pounced on me. My new legs flared out against my will, striking at them and seeking something to grip.

  “Stop it!” Havamal protested weakly, but he didn’t move to stop them. His hand had found Mama’s, and he clung to her. I hated him all the more, even if he was defending me. How dare he touch my mother after what he’d done? “She needs help. Don’t hurt her.”

  A blue-tailed guard shook his head. “Look at her. It’s obvious she’s part of whatever has happened here today. Maybe she’s in league with whatever beast stole the coral girl.”

  My tentacles splayed, catching the guard across the face so hard he staggered.

  “Don’t resist them, Ersel,” Mama wept. “You’ll make it look worse. You can explain it to the king. You were here the whole time; how could you have kidnapped that girl? It’ll all be a misunderstanding. As soon as they find Vigdis, everything will be all right.” She had retreated into the corner of the room and folded in on herself. For the first time in my life, she looked small.

  “I’m not trying to!” I protested but my new body had a mind of its own. I felt like a toy, limp and controllable, caught in Loki’s unpredictable hands.

  One of the waiting guards ran at me and circled my legs in his powerful arms. I broke his grasp as if it were nothing, with a miniscule flex. Growling, the guard pulled a sharpened rock from his side satchel. He slashed it through the air, cutting into one of my tentacles. Even though the new legs didn’t feel as though they belonged to me, the pain made me yelp. My legs stilled.

  Working together, the guards dragged me down the hall, past the food stores, and down through the locked and enclosed brooding chambers. My lungs constricted, and I gasped for air even though my gills functioned as well as ever, just as I’d stipulated in the bargain. After everything I’d done, I was being dragged to a prison darker than the one I’d sought to avoid. Somewhere off in Asgard, Loki would laugh at the irony.

  We swam farther and deeper into the heart of the glacier. The light from above dwindled, and the world became an abyss of cold black. Finally, we stopped. The guard holding my legs released me. The others flung me into a room I could not see. Then they pulled something heavy across the entrance and sealed me in the deep.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long I lay pressed against the back wall of the tiny cell. In the dark, time passed erratically. The slick coldness of the wall chilled me to the core in minutes, but I needed something solid against me. When they first threw me in the cave, I’d scrambled with my arms and tentacles outstretched. I couldn’t hear or see anything, and the panic had made my bowels release.

  Under most circumstances, the court wouldn’t be allowed to keep me in a place like this when I hadn’t begun my trial or questioning, but I supposed the sight of my uncontrolled new legs made them frightened enough to forgo the rules. Furthermore, until Vigdis was found, everyone would be on edge. Shapeshifters were rooted in our legends, and no one doubted their existence, but we all knew they were capricious creatures, compelled by the trickster’s whim and every bit as volatile as the god themself.

  By the time one of my tentacles slapped against the far back wall, I was hyperventilating and close to fainting. Shivering, I nuzzled against the wall, trying to imagine that this was all a dream and soon the daylight would wake me on my resting shelf.

  Then, I just lay there, letting my guilt pick away at pieces of my soul, like worms inside a corpse. I’d been so selfish. So blind.

  Slowly, I lost track of time. They would have found Vigdis by now, I was sure of it, but no one came to tell me of her fate. My imagination took over, and I thought about all the things the shifter might have done to her. Sometimes our warriors told harrowing stories about the human bodies they found in the deep. They had been mutilated by their own kind before being silenced by the waves. H
ad Vigdis suffered a fate so brutal that no one dared speak of it to me? If she was all right, then surely someone would come … surely someone would release me, despite my appearance.

  Hours or days later, someone knocked.

  Then a gruff voice shouted, “You’re going to trial. The girl …” His voice broke in a shudder. “The girl is pregnant.”

  Everything inside me went numb, but I managed to croak. “What day is it? How long have I been here?”

  The male voice just laughed, and I was left in the dark to rot.

  Pregnant. The word rang in my ears again and again. I tried not to think about Vigdis. Would she be happy or terrified? What grew inside her? What had become of the shifter who seduced her and whose discovery condemned me to this cell, deep in the ice?

  Hunger gnawed at me as the days passed, but not knowing threatened to crush me whole. What had the creature done to her? Beyond the tentacles that grasped and sucked at the walls, how deep did my own monstrosity run?

  I pressed myself tighter against the wall. It was so cold that the blood seemed to stop in my veins. And after days hidden from the sun’s eye, I could barely summon a kernel of energy to heat my scales. I was alone and frozen and trapped in a curse of my own making.

  A whisper pierced the silence. I lifted my head, straining to catch the sound and wondering if I’d imagined it. Then I heard someone shuffle and sit down.

  “Ersel?” Havamal called from somewhere in the neverending darkness. His voice sounded hoarse and exhausted. “Please. Please, I’m sorry. I just want to talk.”

  Part of me wanted to ignore him or scream for him to leave, but I was so desperate for a friendly voice to break the murderous silence that I crawled along the floor on my belly toward the sound. Then, one of my legs brushed against the front wall, and I slid against the door. It was built from thousands of clamshells and mortared with a paste made from sand and the sticky jelly that fish secreted around their eggs.

  For a second, I wondered if my new legs could break through it. But my crime was real, even if I hadn’t intended it. If I didn’t attend my trial, no one would ever know the truth, and my guilt would continue to eat away at me forever.

  “Erie?” Havamal whispered, softer this time. I could smell him under the door; his scent was brackish: rainwater and salt and fresh-caught salmon. A second later, a purple light flashed. Havamal had brought a jellyfish to guide his way, just as he’d done when we were children.

  The light illuminated the tiny crack at the bottom of the door. I lay against it, bathing in the glorious light, trying to soak it all up. I was just so cold. “I’m here,” I said.

  “I…” He hesitated, and the light flickered, as if he were cupping the jelly in his hands. “I never should have said I would force you. I wouldn’t have. As soon as I left your room and started to cool down, I hated myself for saying it. I was just so angry when I saw you with that human girl. All I could think was that I wanted to get you away from her, but now everything is ruined. I screwed everything up.”

  I just listened to him in silence, holding my breath. Even so, I felt a little of the anger flow from me, to be replaced by sadness. If I’d known he wouldn’t make me choose him, then everything might be different. Years ago, I would have dismissed the idea of Havamal forcing me to become his mate without a second thought. It would have seemed too cruel, too ludicrous, to accept from my best friend.

  But the fact that I’d believed him, as well as the fact that he’d said it at all, showed just how much our friendship had decayed. I barely knew the person he’d become.

  “Would you have drowned her?” I asked. My voice sounded creaky from disuse. “If I hadn’t come with you?”

  Havamal sighed. The door rocked ever so slightly as he sagged against it. “Yes.”

  Rage flared up again before I could stop it. “So you feel bad for making me think you would force me to be your mate, but you don’t feel bad that you would have killed someone?”

  “She’s a human,” Havamal said, and I heard the pain in his voice. “They’re our enemies. They’re savage. If she’s been living in this place, then she may have mapped it out. Figured out a way to navigate through the ice. It’s not safe to let her return to her people.”

  “But you let her go when I came with you.”

  “I want you more than I want to be safe,” he whispered. “It took me until that moment, when I had to make a choice, to figure that out. If we still could, I’d leave with you right now. I’d go anywhere you wanted.”

  I closed my eyes as a bolt of pain coursed through me. The dream of escaping together was shattered now, and I realized I didn’t want to go back to it.

  If I lived through my trial, I would try to forgive him, but he wasn’t the being I wanted alongside me. He wasn’t the one I trusted to protect me, whose wild spirit made my dreams expand with new possibilities. Before Ragna, I’d never thought about life on land. Now I realized the world was vast and the ocean didn’t have to limit me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and I felt warmth pool under the door.

  “I forgive you.” It wasn’t true, not yet, but I felt compelled to say it because I might never get another chance. I had little doubt that the king would execute me after the trial.

  We sat without talking until Havamal said, “They’re going to question me before your trial. They’ll ask you some preliminary questions, but…” He cleared his throat. “Even the king wouldn’t dare put you on trial already marked.”

  “Marked?”

  “You know, with scars or missing scales. It wouldn’t sit well. People would say the result was faked.”

  I sucked in a deep breath. “But they’ll do it to you?”

  “King Calder knows we were close. He knows how much I wanted you.” He cleared his throat, and I could almost hear the pain and shame in his words. “He’ll use me to find out what happened. As far as I know.”

  “Will you tell them?”

  “They’ll get the answers they want to hear. Even if they’re not the truth. One way or another,” he muttered softly. Something brushed against my back, and I looked down to find one of his fingers wedged under the heavy door. It wasn’t a lover’s touch. Just a link between us in the abyss, proving that he was there. “No matter what they have to do. When I first started working for the king, I thought it would be an honor. The other guards are my brothers. I’m proud to fight and train with them. But the king… the king is crueler than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  I squeezed his finger. “If I have to leave…” I couldn’t say die, even though it seemed inevitable. “Promise me you’ll take care of my Mama?”

  “Like she was my own.” Then he pulled his hand back and the jellyfish’s light dwindled as he swam away.

  Ten

  Once, Vigdis and a group of her friends had cornered me after our lessons with the historian who kept the clan’s records. I could still hear the squealing pitch of her voice, teasing me about the dullness of my scales, my skinny arms, and the way I wore my hair down and wild. At eleven, all I’d ever wanted to do was explore with Havamal. I wasn’t like the other girls I knew. Most of the time, I didn’t care how I looked when there were exciting things to do. But still, the screech of Vigdis’s laughter and the way the other girls spat out more insults in agreement had sent me fleeing from the glacier to the safety of one of our secret wrecks.

  When I’d reached the ancient ship, I went straight for the captain’s abandoned cabin. Slamming the door behind me, I sank to the moldering floor. Grateful for the privacy the open archways of the glacier didn’t provide, I braced my back against the door. I don’t know how long I cried there, bringing my fists up to my mouth to stifle the noise, before I heard someone flop down on the other side of the door.

  I never wondered who it was. I knew it was Havamal by the way he stayed silent, just being there with me as my friend while I sobbed
out my misery. Finally, when I choked back the last of my tears, he pushed against the door. I scooted along the rotting floor to make a space for him to come inside.

  He approached me like a scared animal, moving slowly with one hand raised. Then he lowered himself to the floor beside me and wrapped his scrawny arm around my shoulders. At the time, his small arm felt impossibly strong and unendingly reliable. I laid my head on his chest and let the steady rise and fall of his breathing comfort me. He brought a little of his inner heat to the surface of his scales, warming me gently, even though he didn’t have any spare fat and doing it must have cost him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he whispered into the dim light. “What they say doesn’t matter.”

  “Why? Because they’re stupid?” I joked, pawing at my eyes. “It’s not just them. All the adults think it, too. I’ve heard what some of them say to Mama.”

  “But I don’t think it,” he said, and flashed me that gap-toothed smile I loved so much. At the time, his words were the only thing that mattered. “And we’re going to escape, right? Just you and me. So let them say what they want.”

  I nuzzled under his chin while he held me. Together, we stayed like that until we fell asleep, leaving only after morning came.

  Now I leaned my head back against the ice wall in the dungeon. These memories sometimes seemed like a dream, now—or a nightmare, given the amount of bittersweet pain they brought with them. Even if Havamal apologized every day until our dying breaths, there was no going back to the way things had been. Back then my trust in him had been absolute. When we were kids, I couldn’t see anything in him but the good.

  I wondered what the boy Havamal had been would think of me now. He’d always seen the best in me, too. How would he have reacted, knowing what I’d done to Vigdis? Knowing what a selfish person I’d become? I could almost look into the young, hopeful face of his past and see the disappointment flickering in his bright eyes.