by Julia Ember
Sometime later, I heard scuffling outside the door. I moved toward it, half hoping that Havamal had come back. The ice boulder was shoved aside and, before my eyes could adjust to the new light, a pair of rough hands grabbed me by my arms. A harpoon pressed into my back.
“Get moving,” a voice hissed in my ear. I recognized it as the king’s enforcer, the bailiff who handed out judgments and punishments. Leif was a merman the size of an orca calf, with a neck so thick it blended into his jaw. His fins were blood red. We all knew and feared his voice.
Even though Havamal had said they wouldn’t mark me, I swallowed hard. “Where… where are we going?” I stammered. “Is it the trial already?”
“The king and I just want to ask you a few questions.”
If I’d had anything left in my stomach, I would have thrown up. I let the guard drag me along the hallway as the bailiff swam behind us with his weapon raised. I couldn’t help thinking that Havamal was wrong and they were going to torture me anyway.
He ushered me into the main hall. It was empty except for the king, perched on his throne with his midnight-blue tail tucked behind him. His dark eyes fixed on me, unblinking. The absence of his guards made me more nervous. What were they going to do to me that they didn’t want anyone else to see?
“I am going to keep this brief,” the king said, steepling his fingers and sitting back on his throne. “Tell the physicians how to fix Vigdis, and I may be more lenient with you at your sentencing.”
I took a deep steadying breath. Maybe I wasn’t here to be tortured? It surprised me that Calder cared about Vigdis. I didn’t know what had happened, much less how to help her.
“My guard said she was pregnant?” I said cautiously.
The king sat forward on his throne, an incredulous scowl forming on his face. “She has a monster growing inside her.”
It was the worst outcome I could imagine, and Loki had made it true.
“There isn’t a way,” I whispered. “I made the bargain with a god…”
“You made a bargain with a god to hurt a fellow mermaid?” The king tilted forward and stared at me. “Everyone is talking about it. And it makes me look bad if I can’t even get to the bottom of what happened.”
So it was about his appearance, not Vigdis, after all.
“No, for a mate, for her.” My voice was so tiny. I couldn’t look at him.
“You expect me to believe that all of this was for her benefit?”
Close to tears, I shook my head.
The king made a noise of disgust, then motioned to his bailiff. “Take her back to her cell. I’ll get the real answers out of Havamal.”
* * *
At the trial, Vigdis stood in the corner, apart from the rest of the court. Her belly bulged, covered in a network of blue-violet veins, though she’d been carrying only a week. The doctor testified that there was no egg, even though the shapeshifter had appeared in his merform while he seduced her. Her pregnancy was almost mammalian, with the creature connected directly to her womb and wrapped in a sack of tissue. Its veins had woven too tightly alongside hers—to cut it out might kill her, the midwives said.
The rest of her body had grown skeletal as the animal inside her stole her nutrients. Based on the way she looked, leaving it inside her womb might kill her too.
As I stood on the dais in front of the king, guilt threatened to strangle me. I’d done this to her. My selfishness might kill her. Even if I never expected this, I’d cajoled her into giving up her voice. She couldn’t even tell the court what had happened.
The guards had apprehended the “father” of the parasite growing inside her: a creature the king classified as a sea-swine, a shifter governed by the god of mischief. When they dragged me from the cells, I saw the creature at a distance. Its front half looked like a land animal, with cloven hooves and a hooked smile framed by sharp, ivory tusks. Its body tapered into the tail of an orca. But the most horrifying features of the creature were the unblinking eyes that covered its entire hide, letting it see from all angles, just as Vigdis’s mother had said.
The king had ordered his personal guards to watch the creature at all times. They had locked it in a deeper cell than mine. It was not subject to our laws, so they couldn’t put it on trial. And no one dared to kill a creature sent by the gods—even a creature like that, even one sent by a god like Loki.
Vigdis, silent, kept her eyes on the floor. Everyone else murmured around us.
I trembled on the stand. I’d been waiting for an hour for my chance to speak, but now that the opportunity had come, the words died. I wanted to tell the court that I didn’t have a choice. I wanted to scream that it wasn’t my fault, that Loki had twisted my words around and made a mockery of a bargain that should have brought all of us happiness. Vigdis’s fuchsia eyes bore into me, accusing and angry. The rage inside her seemed to beat against the prison of her silence.
My shaking fingers gripped the edges of the witness stand. I struggled to hover in one place. My new legs constantly reached out for things to grasp and climb. So the bailiff had improvised. He dragged a heavy anchor from one of the capsized ships into the court. Then he wrapped the chain around my waist, circled the stand with it to bind me to the ice, and left the anchor near the king’s throne. I couldn’t imagine how I must look: a monster whose legs thrashed against the bonds, reaching for members of the assembled crowd, even while tears ran down her face. Merfolk waiting with bated breath filled all the rows in the court amphitheater. Before, I’d been more or less invisible. Now I was a spectacle.
I took a deep breath. “I never meant for it to happen like this. I just didn’t want to do it… I didn’t want to pick a mate.”
The bailiff swam closer, clutching a tablet of ice against his chest. “Can you be more specific?” he asked. “The whole glacier wants to hear—the king needs to hear—the whole thing in your own words.”
When I looked at the rows of people, I expected to see nothing but fear and hatred. Instead, I watched as an old neighbor draped her arms over Mama’s shoulder, and a former teacher of mine made eye contact with me and gave me a sad smile. A few looked angry. Most of them were sitting near a slender merwoman with coral hair like Vigdis’s. My breath shortened as panic and guilt fought to erupt. But everyone else… everyone else just looked haunted, pitying. They felt sorry for me. I swallowed. I hadn’t expected them to feel sorry for me. Maybe I hadn’t been as alone in the glacier as I’d always imagined.
The king gave his deputy a pointed look, and the bailiff cleared his throat. “Ersel?”
“I made a deal,” I whispered, looking down. Suddenly, I couldn’t say anything else. “I’m so sorry.”
The king banged his whalebone staff on the ice. His advisers, hovering on his left side, exchanged glances. “By your own confession, you’ve been found guilty as an accessory to this attack.”
“She’s a victim too!’ I heard Mama shout from somewhere in the crowd. Of course she would defend me to the end. Part of me wanted to smile, but I couldn’t. “She’s just a child…”
I closed my eyes. I expected sadness and loss to wash over me, but after a week starving in the dark, alone with my guilt, I was too numb.
The king gestured to my legs, and I thought I saw a smile ghost across his lips. Of course he would take pleasure in exiling and punishing someone who dared to want something other than his system. “Although I can see that your decision and your deal with the trickster have also resulted in punishment of you by imprisoning you in this form, the magnitude of your actions against Vigdis and the fact that they may still claim her life have left us no option. Our laws are clear about attempted murder. You are banished from the glacier and will lose five scales from your back. If you return, all your scales will be pulled from your body, and you will be left to starve on the ice shelf.”
One of the advisors whispered into the king’s ear,
and the monarch shook his head in disgust. “Did you really do all this for a human?”
Havamal had told him about Ragna, then. I should have felt more fear, but after the sentence he’d just pronounced, how much worse could it get?
Still, I had to clear my throat three times before I forced the words through chattering teeth. “No, Your Majesty. I did it for myself.”
I respected Ragna. I admired her wildness and her fierce independence, even as they made me envious. Yes, part of me wished I could have had time to see what could grow between us, but when it came down to it, my choices had been for me.
I looked at Havamal, who was hovering behind the king’s throne. He didn’t meet my gaze, but his eyes were bloodshot and rimmed in black. He looked broken. When I looked more closely, I noticed an inflamed and swollen patch of exposed red skin running across his torso where a row of scales should have been. Catching my look, he covered his stomach with his arms and gave a tiny shrug. He’d said that the king wouldn’t mark me before the trial. He’d only hinted at his own fate.
At King Calder’s direction, two bailiffs swam forward armed with bone staffs. They each seized one of my arms and spread me out like a starfish. I heard someone else screaming. The extractor approached next and brandished his shark-tooth blade.
When the ordeal was over, the bailiff dragged me, still crying, to the edge of the glacier. King Calder and the rest of our community followed in his shadow, waiting to see him push the monster from the ledge and into the endless deep. We always finished trials at night, so the water outside the glacier was black.
Without giving me time to say goodbye to anyone, the bailiff marched me down the long outcropping of ice that made up our main underwater entrance. I didn’t look behind me, but I could hear people shuffling and scraping, trying to get closer. I was sure that some of them just wanted a last look at the freak—a memory to keep for their children about what happened when you went against the king.
The bailiff jabbed his harpoon into the small of my back. The blade nicked my skin and I yelped. The merman just laughed. He probably thought an extra cut served me right.
At the edge of the platform, I raised my eyes and murmured a last prayer to Odin before I dove into the watery loneliness that awaited me.
I drifted until I touched the ocean bottom. My new legs were clumsy and hard to maneuver, but at least the seabed gave me something to follow. I made my nest inside the hull of an abandoned ship with the skeletons of the dead for company. Barnacles had claimed most of the interior, and forests of seaweed grew through the cracked floor, but the cabin at the rear remained mostly intact. It wasn’t a welcoming home, but I needed a place to hide out of the open water. Without my tail and my fins, I was slow and vulnerable. Anything could catch me as I lumbered through the water. And I doubted even the belugas would accept me as their friend now.
When I wrenched the cabin door open, a whole human life seemed to surround me: a body, a room full of trinkets, animal skins bloated with water, a table laid for a last meal with an empty plate and perfectly aligned cutlery. I threw the pieces of the skeleton outside, into his watery grave, and claimed his space for my own.
The king had allowed me to take a small bundle with me. No food. No kelp. Nothing to help me survive outside the glacier on my own. I was allowed sentimental things; I’d taken my human trinkets. Ragna’s necklace dangled around my throat, and a comb of my mother’s pearls adorned my hair. It was ironic, how well-groomed and adorned I looked now, when no one was here to see me.
I tried to rest on the watery bed, to clear my head of memories and the pain of my missing scales. But my new legs had other ideas. As I laid my head back, they explored: touching, sucking, grasping everything in the cabin. The noise they made and the constant sensation of uncontrolled movement kept me awake. A human sword leaned against the bedframe. I grabbed it, held it to my breast, and pondered driving it into my heart. Then I positioned it over one of the tentacles, imagining what it would be like to hack them off, one by one. But I didn’t have the courage, and some hope remained. Maybe I could make this right. Maybe there was still something I could do.
Until then, I’d never sleep.
Part 2: Princess of Ice
The old poets sing of Love and Honesty
as sisters standing arm in arm.
But Love has two sisters and her arm locks
also in Deception’s cold embrace.
ICE TABLET C76
“In the midst of this spot stood a house,
built with the bones of shipwrecked human beings.
There sat the sea witch, allowing a toad to eat from
her mouth, just as people sometimes feed
a canary with a piece of sugar.”
—Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid
One
Hours later, a faint green light pulsed under the door. I wanted to curl up into a tight ball and ignore it. I wanted to pretend I was hallucinating, but one of the tentacles reached out and grasped the cabin’s door handle, pulling it open.
Loki swam in. They were wearing their signature horned helmet, but their body had transformed into the form of a human woman. Blonde hair floated around their shoulders, and a white top clung to their slender, muscular form. Dark brown eyes flecked with gold stared at me, rich and deep. If not for the helmet and the cruelty in their beautiful smile, I wouldn’t have recognized them.
I wished I could control my new legs well enough to strangle Loki. I didn’t know if it was possible to strangle a god, but I longed to try. My tentacles flailed uselessly, and Loki laughed.
“You lied to me,” I spat.
“Now, now, little Ersel,” they chided, removing their helmet and placing it on the rotting table. The voice that passed through their lips was female: high, patronizing, and instantly grating. It was a voice I recognized immediately as the one that had belonged to Vigdis. “I never lied. You just weren’t very specific about the things you wanted.”
“Right. You’ve been watching me, you chose me, you offered me legs, and you thought I wanted these?” I sat up and glared at them, focusing all my energy on their left cheek. A tentacle splayed forth and clapped them across the side of the head—not hard, but a victory of control nonetheless.
Loki stumbled backward; their mocking grin slipped.
“And Vigdis?” I demanded. “You sent that creature to her. She wanted a mate. She wanted children to love. She gave you her voice in exchange. You knew what she wanted, and instead you gave her a monster.”
“She liked him well enough at first.” Loki rubbed the back of their head. “I gave you what you asked for. Learn to be more specific.”
My mouth gaped, opening and closing like a salmon. “Learn? I learned never to trust you again. I learned that I can’t have what I want because it gets other people hurt. Get out and leave me alone.”
They threw up their hands and spun around the room. “Shall I leave you to all of this? Have you decided to make this your palace?”
“What choice do I have?”
Their eyes gleamed with green light. “There’s always a choice. Let me make you another proposition. I just wanted to up the stakes a little, before… make it all seem more worth your while. Maybe now you’ll have learned to be more specific about what you ask for. Go on.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “No.”
“I’m your only way out of this. You’re banished. You can’t even see your mother again. You’re a cursed animal, living in a ship full of human bones. You can change that, but I’m the only one who can help you.” Loki caught one of my tentacles when I tried to hit them again and stroked the slimy topside. “Do you want to be this forever?”
Their words made my stomach clench. I hated them for what they’d done to me and to Vigdis. I hated myself for letting it happen. But they weren’t lying. No one else could help me fix this.
They were my tormenter and my salvation. Worse, they knew it.
“What is the deal?” I asked.
A sly smile came over their face. “Three voices this time. One human, one beast, one mer.”
“One beast? How am I supposed to convince an animal to give me its voice? I can’t take it by force… I won’t. They have to agree, don’t they? For the magic to work?”
Loki snapped their fingers. “That’s your problem. You have to bring me three voices, and those are the types I need. You can grant them anything in return.”
“For what? Why do you need them all? Surely you must have thousands in your collection by now, enough to match your limitless forms.”
They shrugged, eyes narrowing. “You don’t need to know my reasons. Do we have a deal or don’t we?”
My mind traveled back to Ragna and the last day we spent together. Was all this worth it? Just to escape? To have the land to explore? I’d only known Ragna for a short time, but I’d learned that her life was nowhere close to perfect.
I imagined her pursing her lips and rowing toward the open ocean until her muscles cramped. She would paddle to her revenge with all the strength she had. She’d make it; the lust for freedom would push her little boat as if a team of whales dragged her through the sea. I wanted that freedom, and I wanted my revenge, but was making another deal with this monster worth it?
I sighed and pressed a kiss to the pendant at my throat.
“Before I bring you the third voice, you must give me what I want. Any tricks, any lies, anything less than what I desire, and the whole deal is off. The voices return to their owners.”
Loki raised an eyebrow. “See, you’re learning after all.”
The sincerity in their gaze told me they believed it, but I wasn’t sure I agreed with them. As they vanished in a green cyclone, I prayed to Odin to give me the wisdom to beat the trickster at their own game.