by Julia Ember
“I feel helpless,” I whispered.
“I know.” Her expression softened, and she pinched my cheek with a tentacle. But her eyes were focused behind me, staring out over the ocean. I wondered if she was thinking of her home and all the people she’d left behind to sail with me. I wasn’t the only one who knew loss. Sometimes I forgot that. Whatever connection existed between us, Ersel remained because she wanted to see the world, to find adventure beyond the Arctic sea she knew. She had come on this voyage as much to fulfill her own ambition, as to help me.
“Well?” Torstein called from the rear of the ship. “Captain? When do we sail?”
Captain. That was new. I cleared my throat, then shouted, “Ersel and I will get some sleep below deck. We’ll set sail again in the morning.”
“Very good, styrimaðr,” he said and sat down.
Ersel raised her eyebrows and mouthed. “Well done with him.”
I hid my grin behind my hand. We would sail when the sun cast shadows on the deck. I had bought myself a few hours to decide where we would go.
* * *
Below deck, we fashioned a bed out of reindeer pelts and empty grain sacks. Forseti’s Arm had a deep berth for a drekkar. The hold provided shelter from the wind and gave me somewhere to go when I needed time away from the men.
Ersel’s now human legs buckled beneath her and she collapsed onto the furs with a heavy sigh. I closed the hatch door above us, then pushed the ladder against the wall. As far as the men knew, we would sail for my home in a matter of hours. I didn’t think they would try to eavesdrop on us now, but it didn’t hurt to make spying a little more difficult.
I tossed myself onto the pelts beside Ersel. When she shifted forms, her body changed as well as her legs. As a mermaid, her skin was covered by a mosaic of aqua, lilac, and topaz scales. Now her skin was bare, pale, and subtly pink. The cold made little bumps appear across her arms. A sodden curtain of turquoise hair hung down her back.
She peered over her shoulder at me; a faint glimmer of water was still visible on her coral lips. I longed to touch her, to trace my fingers down the hollow of her back, to kiss along the soft skin of her jaw, but after what she’d said about leaving, I wasn’t sure if my touch would be welcome.
She shivered, and I scrambled to wrap a pelt around her shoulders. Ersel stored energy from the sun to keep herself warm. If she was shivering, then it had been too long since she had charged her scales. It was a long swim to shore, through water only a fraction warmer than ice.
“I found these by the docks.” She reached into her hair. Ersel often used her curls the way I used a satchel or a belt. She would wind her hair around things, then knot them to her person. She gently teased out a rusted, iron dagger and a small bone figure in the crude shape of a warrior. Depositing her treasures onto the pelt, she grinned at me. “The knife I know. But what is this?”
I picked up the game piece and turned it over in my hand. It was an axeman, used for playing Hnefatafl. The figure’s arms were comically large for his body; the piece had probably been carved by a child. “It’s for a game,” I said.
Her eyes lit up. “Could we play it?”
“We’d need the whole set and the board. This is just one of the players.” I pressed the piece against my forehead. “My brother used to carve pieces like this.”
Ersel took the figure. She stroked my cheek and collected a stray tear with her knuckle. I leaned forward to meet her kiss. Her touch melted some of the tightness in my chest. Her tongue teased my lips apart. She tasted of the brackish water that pooled in the estuary beside my town and wild heather from the meadows. When she kissed me like that, I could almost forget that we’d snapped at each other. When her giggle tickled my ear, I could almost forget the crew as well. I kissed between her breasts and down her belly. She shuddered as I nibbled the dimples on her thighs.
Sometimes, I worried that I would never be beautiful enough for her. I was skinny, with dull, cornflower hair that was constantly matted from the ocean salt. Whatever magic or trick of nature that kept a mermaid’s hair silky did not extend to human sailors. I was sunburned from the sun’s glare; my skin was freckled and flaked. She was striking with her voluptuous, full belly and hips, and her soft vermilion lips.
I didn’t kid myself. She was no more mine than the ocean. We had a shared understanding of loss and pain, a desire to make our marks on fate. For now, that was enough to bind us.
She circled a finger over the scarred skin of my wrist. “Have you been in pain today?
I shrugged. “A little. Not too bad.”
Day to day, the pain in my residual limb fluctuated. Occasionally, stabbing pain would extend all the way to my elbow, and I would have to remove the hook entirely, to take the pressure off my wrist. Other days, like today, it was a dull, pulsing ache that I tried to ignore, but was always there, insistent and exhausting.
I took the figure of the axeman and marched it up the curve of her stomach. Her skin was still damp from the sea and as cold as the ice.
“Your skin is freezing,” I said. “When was the last time you basked in the sun?”
When I had first met Ersel, she had told me about the mechanism mermaids used to keep warm. Her scales absorbed the sun’s energy and held on to it. Together with the fat in her tail, the energy insulated her against the worst of the cold. Even in her human form, her skin was usually hot to the touch.
Ersel sighed. “When I hang off the stempost, I can absorb some sunlight. But I haven’t basked since I left home. I don’t dare do it in front of the men.” She rolled her eyes. “If my tentacles scare them so much, how would they react if I started glowing?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I brushed her hair back behind her shoulders. “They’re greedy men. They might think you were a gemstone. Then they’d kill to protect you.”
“More likely they’d hack me into pieces and try to sell my remains. Torstein would murder me on the spot if he thought I’d break into diamonds.”
“Possible. But he’s scared of me now.”
Her eyes locked on mine as we laughed together. The intensity of her stare brought a flush to my cheeks. She scooted forward. Then, slowly, she untied my cloak; her fingers whispered to the skin at my throat. She tossed the cloak to the side and slid my tunic over my head. My skin burned when she trailed her lips over my shoulder. I balled one of the reindeer pelts into a makeshift pillow and leaned back on it. The fur was coarse, and the sharp hairs pricked my skin. But when Ersel bent her head and kissed the underside of my breast, and the pelt might have been taken from the softest mink. I let out a whimper.
Ersel drew back; her head cocked to the side. She stared at my chest.
“What?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious. I drew one of the pelts up to cover my breasts.
“The compass,” she breathed. “It was spinning.”
I dropped the pelt and stared down at myself. Etched over my heart was a blue compass. Runes in a forgotten language decorated its face in place of directions. Unlike the rest of my navigator’s marks, the compass usually remained motionless. But now the long arrow spun around, and the runes danced.
Though the needle sometimes quivered, the compass had only spun a handful of times in my life. Once, when I had ridden Fjara into the hills that surrounded my town and a storm struck, felling trees across my usual path. I had been confused and scared, unsure whether to gallop for home or try to seek shelter in the mountains. I’d felt the compass spin, and my tattoos had rearranged themselves of their own volition. The decision was made for me. I’d followed my markings to a cave where I’d spent the night.
It had moved again when I was trapped on the ice shelf, after Jarl Haakon’s ship had sunk. My tattoos had mapped a way home, in accordance with my desires, but I’d had no boat to make the journey or provisions to survive it. After finding Ersel at the beluga’s surfacing hole, I had prayed she would be my salvation
. But when she disappeared into the sea again, I had worried all was lost. Then the compass spun again. For the space of a day, my tattoos had disappeared entirely. In panic, I hadn’t dared to move and so I had waited with the belugas until the mermaid came back.
None of the other marked people had had a compass as part of their tattoos’ design. Mama said Uncle Tor had a sea serpent that wound up his calf and only moved in times of danger. My grandmother had two spindly wings above her shoulder blades that beat before the snow fell, as if the gods wanted her to fly south with the birds. When I’d been born, Uncle Bjorn had said the compass marked my fate. I’d been born to sail, to navigate the world.
I lifted my arm and studied it. Commanded by the compass, a coast that I didn’t recognize had appeared on my flesh. The map showed not my island, but a continent with a forest of inky trees extending almost to the shore.
“Where is that? Do you recognize it?” Ersel asked.
I pushed myself up with a groan and walked to the chest on the other side of the hold. I kicked it open. Maps tumbled across the floor. I’d stolen them from one of Haakon’s other ships. Ersel unrolled the first map. It was a sketch of Bjornstad, the city at the center of Haakon’s earldom. I tossed it across the hold. I never planned to return to Haakon’s territory. Many of Haakon’s sworn thegns wanted to see me tried and executed. In their minds, what I had done to their jarl was not justice, delivered on behalf of my home, but murder.
Ersel unfolded the next map. I knelt beside her and squinted at it. The map depicted the world as I had learned it, stretching far beyond the island of Brytten to the distant, warm coast of the southern continent and north to the wasteland of Groenland.
I laid my arm beside the map. Ersel glanced at the two images and shrugged. “It’s hard to tell,” she said. “I believe your markings are an accurate likeness, but Haakon’s scribe has not copied this well. The coasts on the map are too smooth. The sea does not carve like this.”
The map was well-labelled, with cities and rivers all named in a minuscule, perfect hand. But the coasts were smooth and unrealistic. The scribe must not have been a seafarer, who would have known that the precision of the shore’s rendering mattered more than the territories’ names. My tattoos showed only runes, the gods’ writing, so we couldn’t match the scribe’s labels.
I traced my finger along the continent across the North Sea from Brytten. The forest was dense in the land where the compass wanted us to travel. I knew enough of the southern lands to know that their trees grew more sparsely, in tight clusters around rare, fresh water. Our destination had to be in the North.
“There,” Ersel said and triumphantly tapped the map. “Look at the shape of the cove.”
I followed the line of her finger. There was a natural harbor in the rough shape of a half-moon. Ersel pointed to an estuary. Even with the scribe’s imprecise illustrations, the basic shape was unmistakable. A small note beside the fjord read “Skjordal.”
I exhaled sharply. I’d never visited Skjordal, but I knew that my birth-father’s mother had been born there. My father wasn’t godsborn. His kin were farmers on the continent. My grandmother had travelled to Brytten in a rickety fishing boat, after a long winter had killed her family’s spring crops. Her decision had been to leave or starve. When she’d arrived in our town, she’d set up a business weaving cloth in the Skjordan style. I’d never met any of my father’s kin, but if the compass was urging me toward them, I hoped I could find help there.
“You know it?” Ersel asked.
“My grandmother was born there,” I said. “But I’ve never visited. I know nothing of my kin who live there now. For all I know, they could all be dead.”
“The compass…” Ersel’s fingers travelled to the talisman she wore on a chain around her neck. “Do you trust it? It follows its own will. You don’t control it.”
“It’s protected me so far.”
“Doesn’t it make you nervous? Not knowing?”
I shrugged. “It’s different. It might be a god’s power, but I was born with this. The magic is in my blood. It’s part of me.”
It was easy to think of Ersel’s shifting forms as gifts now that she could freely change among them. Her kraken’s limbs were powerful and awe-inspiring; the only weapon capable of cowing my rebellious crew into submission. But for over a month, Ersel had been trapped in her kraken form, unable to shift. If not for her quick wit, and her mother’s willingness to sacrifice herself, she would still be Loki’s thrall.
Ersel smoothed a crease in the map’s vellum, then carefully rolled it up. “The crew are not going to like it. We’ve sailed all this way. They won’t want to turn around.”
“Then they can swim to shore and take their chances with the sharks,” I growled. Whatever Trygve said, I was through harboring would-be mutineers.
“You need a crew. I don’t know the first thing about this ship or how to row it,” Ersel whispered. “You can’t fight all of them.”
I couldn’t take all of them on in a direct fight. Even if I still had both hands, there were nearly twenty men under my command, and any one of them might deal the killing blow. If I started a fight, they would shred me into ribbons and join Haakon’s men ashore. We were out of the Trap, and they no longer needed me to navigate them to safety. But I had other weapons at my disposal, and it was time I used them.
A sly smile spread over my face. I winked at her. “I can if you’re willing to help me.”
* * *
I paced the length of the ship as the crew knelt before me. On either side of the drekkar’s deck, four, long, powerful tentacles held the ship captive. The scene was like something out of a myth; a story Mama might have told me as a little girl to frighten me away from the sea. The warship groaned under the pressure of Ersel’s grip, and the men quivered at my feet. Their eyes were bright with more hatred than I’d ever seen in them, but delight bubbled inside me. It wasn’t right. I was their leader; the crew’s fear should not make me giddy. But my captors were at the bottom of the ocean, their bones being picked by the fish, and I couldn’t continue to punish them.
Trygve had taken the skiff. He floated a few meters from the drekkar. If this went badly, I would jump overboard, and we would float to safety aboard the skiff. We were still close enough to shore to make it, if towed by a mermaid. Losing Forseti’s Arm would be a blow. If I consigned these men to death at sea, I’d be starting over. But if I couldn’t guarantee their loyalty, the ship was lost anyway.
“If any of you move before I give you leave, Ersel will crush this ship to pieces.” I pointed to the skiff. “You will toss all your weapons there. All swords, axes, daggers, bits of rope, all of it. You’ll get them back when we reach the shore.”
“Why are you doing this?” Steinair asked. His voice was husky with barely restrained tears. “We’ve almost landed. We said we would sail with you.”
I bit my lip as doubt gnawed at me. Maybe I should have given them the chance to go with me willingly, to prove themselves. Two of the older sailors stood by the rail; their hands were braced on their axes. I shook my head. This was the way it had to be.
“Our plan has changed. We will be sailing for the continent to bring on reinforcements before we storm the town,” I said.
Steinair started to protest again, so I held up my hook to silence him. “If this ship goes down, all of you will die.”
“Sail back the way we came?” Torstein demanded. He rose from his knees. I drew my axe and angled it at his throat. “We already sailed with you through the Trap and across the sea. If we can’t take the town, you owe us an explanation.”
“I owe you nothing.” One of Ersel’s tentacles inched farther onto the deck and the ship moaned. I tapped Torstein’s back with the axe’s handle. “I gave you an opportunity to sail under my command or disperse and find other jarls to serve. With me, you know what you stand to gain. I did not forc
e you aboard my ship, but now that you sail upon it, you will listen to me.”
“We haven’t seen any gold yet,” Torstein grumbled.
I rolled up my sleeve and brandished my tattoos for him to see. “My magic doesn’t come free. You have to earn your right to riches, and that means following me where I ask without questions.”
The men exchanged looks. Then, bowing his head, Torstein crawled to the edge of the deck and tossed his sword into the small boat. The others followed his lead. One by one, they deposited their weapons in a pile at Trygve’s feet. Ersel’s grip on the hull relaxed and her tentacles slipped back into the sea.
Six
Gormánuður
The Slaughter Month
October
Thunder boomed overhead, and lightning struck the water mere meters from the ship’s bow. The fragile peace I’d struck with my crew had not extended to the sea. As we turned the ship for the continent, the ocean fought us. Hail crashed onto the deck like stones hurled from the sky. Thick clouds blocked the moon and stars. The waves tossed Forseti’s Arm up in the air, then threw her down again like a child’s toy. Each time we crested one of the titanic swells, I wondered if the water would crash over the deck and break the ship into pieces.
Ersel had once told me how she’d spent her childhood exploring wrecks and gathering human trinkets. I didn’t want to imagine my ship at the bottom of the ocean with curious mermaids swimming over our skeletons. But as the water started to pool on the deck, it was hard to think of anything else.
I knelt beside the stempost and held onto it with all my strength. The men clung to their benches and prayed. Ersel sat inside the skiff, which we had dragged onto the deck when the clouds began obscuring the sky. She wrapped four tentacles around the warship’s mast to anchor herself, and the other four around the hull of the skiff. Even with the storm threatening to drown us all, someone needed to guard the weapons. I knew too well that desperation made people brave. Unlike the rest of us, Ersel was the picture of calm. Her expression was almost apathetic as she gazed out over the gigantic waves. Drowning wasn’t something she had to fear.