by Julia Ember
As I scuttled onto the deck, men jumped from their benches. Fear was evident on their faces, though they looked like seasoned warriors and all carried an assortment of lethal weapons. Most of them had visible scars covering bodies lean with hard muscle. Each of them looked as war-ready as the ship. I wondered where Ragna had found this crew and what had happened to her while we’d been apart, what had left her both maimed and in power.
Tightly gripping the vial as the warriors lifted their weapons, I shifted into my human form for the first time. The nearest human, a boy who could not have been older than his teens judging by his lanky frame and acne-scarred cheeks, flushed red. A few others let out loud exclamations. Some turned away and muttered.
“Shit, lass,” said a grizzled bear of a man to my left. “These boys don’t need to be thinking about that in their bunks. None of us will get any sleep.”
Ragna let out a shriek of pure delight that silenced the rest of the crew. Freezing air kissed my scale-less body and I nearly cried out from its intensity. I lifted a slender leg and marveled at its elegant line, at the markless perfection of my new skin, not boring at all despite the lack of ink and scales. Ragna removed her heavy fur cloak and wrapped it around me. It was impossibly soft against my newborn skin and stopped the cold from blistering me.
In the water, Havamal laughed. It was a genuine laugh, deep and full. Then I heard a splash, and his head disappeared under the waves. I didn’t notice I was smiling until a gust of wind stung my exposed teeth. Dizzy giddiness made my knees weak and my head light.
“Witchery,” murmured one of the crew’s older men. “Damn witchery. I knew this placed was cursed.”
“Is she the sea goddess?” The teenager demanded.
“No thousand-year-old sea goddess looks like that, dunderwit.”
“We should push her overboard.”
“I want to push her into my bunk.”
“Can all krakens do that?”
All the men around us began speculating at once. I shrank closer to Ragna, not yet sure what to make of all these humans.
Ignoring her crew, Ragna pulled me into a small shelter that was enclosed on three sides. The wooden shack blocked some of the wind, but I couldn’t stop shivering. Even with Ragna’s fur shielding my nakedness, I felt a deeper cold than I had ever known, a chill that radiated right down to my bones. The men turned on their benches, straining to catch our words.
Her silver hook glinted in the sun. I lifted her maimed arm. She flinched and her nose curled in distaste as she tried to pull it away from me.
“What happened?” I asked, feeling both the heaviness of what she had lost and relief that I was not the only one who had changed, whose body betrayed the truth of past horrors. She had a ship now, and men who answered to her. I couldn’t help the pang of longing that ran through me. While I’d been trapped in Loki’s game, she’d forged a new future for herself.
She shrugged, raising her dark brown eyes to mine. “I got my revenge, but this was the price. I found the man who wanted to take me and I killed him.” Gesturing at my legs with a sly half-smile, she asked, “What happened? And what was with the kraken moves earlier?”
I bit my lip, wondering how much to tell her now. Eventually, I would tell her all about Loki, about what I’d done and the months I’d spent trying to fix it. Her eyes were bright, and I didn’t want sadness to dim them, not yet, so I whispered, “I got my freedom. That was the price.”
We just stared at each other, trying to imagine and understand. Then Ragna crouched and flipped open a hatch beneath our feet. “Let’s get out of the wind,” she said. Gesturing at the crew, she rolled her eyes. “And somewhere these idiots aren’t hanging on our every word.”
She stepped onto a ladder, motioning for me to follow her. I hesitated before descending into the dark behind her. My new human legs wobbled on each rung. Moving in the air without the support of the water made me feel awkward and heavy, as though an invisible weight hung from each arm and an ice block rested on my back. Once her feet were squarely on the floor, Ragna put her good hand on my waist to brace me. The strength and warmth in her fingers made me tremble.
“I can’t believe you came back,” I said, carefully stepping onto a lower rung. It was slippery with seawater and spores of a green and white plant that smelled too musky to be algae. “So much has happened. I don’t even know how many days it’s been.”
“Eighty-seven,” she breathed. “And a half. I’d have come back sooner… but I couldn’t come alone.”
When I reached the bottom, I turned to her. It was warmer in the ship’s belly, but the air was still crisp. Our bodies pressed together, and the rough fabric of her overcoat almost made me yelp as it brushed tender new skin. Ragna’s hand moved from my waist to my hips and slid under the fur she’d given me. Her other arm slipped around my back. I let the fur fall from my shoulders and embraced the cold air.
Ragna pushed me back, then tossed her coat and sword to the side. Unable to keep my balance on my new legs, I stumbled into a pile of sacks and soft material. I barely had time to look up before she pounced on top of me.
She straddled my hips, pinning me in place like an artic fox holding its prey. Smiling with sly cunning, she raised her hooked hand to her throat. Slicing a perfect line from clavicle to navel, she sliced the tunic down the middle. I caught my first glimpse of the blue-tattooed flesh beneath. Then she peeled the ruined shirt from her form and tossed it across the floor. My jaw went slack. Even when we’d struggled to stay warm together under her makeshift boat, I had never seen so much of her.
Her skin was pale and translucent around her collarbones. The tattoos ran across her breasts and stomach; the lines on her torso were more delicate than the continents on her arms. A circular compass was etched above her heart; the inky needle quivered.
When I was in my mermaid form, my scales protected me, keeping my vital organs safe from attack. I looked at my own fragile body, then up into Ragna’s feral eyes. Despite their wildness, a sun-warm kindness lit their depths, a tenderness that seemed at odds with the scars on her arms and the sharp hook that had taken the place of her once-gentle hand.
I trusted her with this vulnerable body: maybe it was the animal’s instincts that had come with my monstrous form, but something inside me knew that I was safe. She’d saved me from the polar bear and she’d come back, unwilling to leave me to whatever fate she’d imagined that I would suffer.
She looked into my eyes. I wrapped my arms around her back and pulled her to me.
“How did you know where to find me?” I whispered against her neck.
She grinned and glanced at the dancing lines twisting across her naked body. “I can always find what I want.”
Ragna lowered her head to my neck. The edges of her teeth grazed my skin, not hard enough to break through the fragile boundary, but I felt the pressure, the controlled sharpness. She brushed her lips across mine, and I strained to kiss her. I remembered the addictive taste of her. But she just laughed, pushed me back, and grinned as she pinned me with an elbow.
Kissing and nibbling, her lips moved down my new body. A soft tangle of matted, sea-blasted hair trailed across my skin behind her kisses.
Stroking the outside of my thigh, Ragna gave me a lazy, cocky smile. I raised my eyebrow, and she propped herself up on one arm and looked right into my eyes. “I’m going to show you what your human body can do.”
As my breathing evened out, I heard Ragna’s throaty chuckle against my hip. I looked down at her, and she licked her lips, then smacked them together suggestively. I blushed and looked away. This kind of sex was not something the merfolk engaged in, but I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t been wonderful.
She watched me in the dim light, then slowly propped herself up. “Will you show me your kraken form again?”
I tensed, and the tingling happiness that had swelled inside me
vanished as my heart pounded. “Why would you want to see that? It’s awful.”
She shrugged and held up her hook. “Do you think this is awful?”
“No.” I sat up too, and took the hook in my hands. “It’s just different. You were wounded. I understand.”
“When I arrived on shore, my boat was almost in ruins. For days, I didn’t think I was going to make it.” She stroked the skin of my shoulder lazily as she spoke. “But then I washed up near a village, and an old woman helped me from the sea. She was a fisherwoman, and her husband had been killed by the men who took me.”
I rested my head against her back and listened as she told her tale.
“She helped me get fit again. Fed me with everything she had and introduced to me the town blacksmith, who helped me to make some weapons. They all saw my tattoos and they knew what I was, but that wasn’t why they helped. They wanted revenge as much as I did. Their village was in ruins. They just didn’t know what to do.”
She picked at one of the sacks beneath us and sighed. “I rested as long as I could. Then, I packed my things and I got a job at the lord’s castle. The guards are eager to help a pretty girl.” She made a face, and I gave a nervous little giggle. “When I got close enough to the lord, I killed him. He was fast though, faster than I expected.”
“He took your hand.”
She nodded. “He was fast as a crocodile with a blade. I could have chosen simply to bind the wound and let the stump heal. But I wanted to remember the fisherwoman who rescued me from the sea.”
Loki had said that they left me with my monster’s form to remind me. Perhaps they meant to remind me of their wrath and my own stupidity, but it could remind me of something else as well—of how I’d changed and eventually triumphed.
I lifted the vial and spoke against the glass. My body shifted immediately, and I closed my eyes, wincing at the sensation of my slimy flesh against Ragna’s soft back. I pulled my tentacles back and balled myself into the corner.
“Touch me with them,” she commanded.
I opened my eyes and stared at her.
“I don’t want to be afraid of any part of you,” she whispered, holding her bronze hook up to the light. “Touch me with them.”
Releasing whatever tenuous hold I had on the tentacles, I let them splay. My legs slid over her back and hips, down her thighs and across her breasts. Ragna whimpered with something like pleasure. I hated the legs a little less.
When I had touched every inch of her, I shifted back into my human form. Ragna lay back against the sacks, sighing as her eyes drifted shut. I curled myself around her and draped her fur over both of us.
Five
I was drifting in the haze between pleasure and sleep, barely aware of my surroundings or the encroaching cold nipping at my exposed human legs, when Ragna hoisted herself up. She pressed a kiss to my forehead. Squinting through half-closed eyes, I watched as she dressed. She secured her blade at her belt before making the climb back up the ladder.
I let myself pretend to sleep for a minute or two longer and drew a length of plush white fur from the sacks to wrap around my shivering body. The skin looked as though it had come from a miniature polar bear. The texture was wrong, though: spongy and thick, a cross between netting and a mermaid’s hair. I scooped a few more of the skins from the bags and fashioned a cape and tunic for myself. Then I pulled the discarded brown fur on top of it all. To the sailors on the deck, I would probably look like yet another creature from the horrors of myth, but at least I was warm.
With none of Ragna’s swift grace, I clambered to my feet and up the ladder. Her crew huddled in small groups. Some played with dice and coins while others crouched around fires built atop pyres of stone, cooking meat from animals I’d never seen. Even in my new human form, the smell of burning flesh made my stomach churn. I covered my nose with the edge of the brown fur. Ragna stood by the ship’s prow. She was talking with the largest human I had seen. She pointed across the ice field and moved her finger as if tracing a line through the perilous ice for the ship to follow.
Catching my eye, she stopped her conversation and strode to me, her boots drumming across the deck. Most of the crew watched Ragna with a mixture of terror and awe, never daring to look her in the eye. Her remaining hand never left the exposed hilt of her silver sword. She had rolled up her sleeves, and the blue ink of her magical tattoos shifted ever so slightly. The lines of the map seemed to move in time with the ship’s gentle sway, almost as if they continuously adjusted based on the changing winds and tides.
Whatever had happened to her in the months we had been apart, I had no doubt she had won this crew and ship by force, not with charm. She’d gotten her revenge. I couldn’t help a pang of sympathy for the crew, who’d found themselves entangled in the web her of vengeance. They all gave her a wide berth.
Until we talked further about what had happened after Ragna lost her hand, I couldn’t know if these people deserved their fate or not. The bear of a man at the prow turned. His bulging arms were bare under a cape of white fur. He watched Ragna without fear, but the boy nearest him cringed when the giant shifted his attention.
Ragna sidled up alongside me. She brushed a strand of my hair back behind my ear. Her touch was whisper-soft. “You could have slept as long as you wanted.”
“Who are all these people?” I asked, flinching from her. It bothered me that these people seemed so afraid. I had enough experience with tyrannical rulers to sympathize. “This crew. They’re definitely scared of you. Did they belong to the man you killed?”
She shrugged. “This ship belonged to the man I was captured for. When I killed him, I took his crew.”
“But why are they so afraid?”
“They saw me kill their old lord and captain. When I gutted him, many of them were halfway up the steps, coming to his defense.” She scowled and gestured at the teenaged boy who had seemed so awed by my nakedness. “And when we set sail, his father tried to lead a mutiny. We threw him overboard.”
My hand went to my mouth. “You killed him? You let him drown?”
“With a stone tied around his legs. We whipped his back to a pulp first.”
“That’s awful,” I spluttered. She was a murderer. No wonder the crew was on edge, too scared to look into her eyes. Killing her abductor was one thing… but anyone else? Someone she’d had power over? “You’re a killer. That poor boy…”
Ragna’s eyes hardened, and her lips pressed into a line. “And what about you?” she demanded. “What did you do to earn your human form? To become that creature I saw crawl out of the deep? That’s Loki’s work. Anyone can see it.”
After what we’d shared the night before, her words cut me. I could see by the flash of her eyes that she knew it, too.
“I had to,” I spat. “Protecting you from Havamal didn’t give me a lot of choices.”
“Oh, don’t make it about me.” Ragna clenched her jaw. “I know you saved me, but you wanted to get away from that ice mountain before you met me. And you know, I stayed? I waited there where you left me for hours, but you never came back. So, I left. I did what I had to and I still came back for you.”
Guilt felt like ice gripping my throat with a frozen hand. “I made a deal with Loki. Someone died because of me.”
Ragna raised her hook to the sun. Her eyes bore into mine, daring me. “Then don’t you dare judge me for doing what I had to.”
“I’m trying to set it right. I can’t bring her back but…”
“And I’m trying to go home!” she snarled. “I want to see if there is anything left of my people and help them if I can. And what will you do, now that you have this precious magic? Come with me? Swim south and never return? Leave your people behind?”
“No!” My hands curled into fists, and suddenly I wanted to punch her. “I’m going back to the fortress. I’m going to fix things. For everyone, not jus
t myself.”
She snorted dismissively. “Good, then maybe you’re not such a coward after all. I thought that maybe you were, because of how easily you let that merman drag you away.”
That wasn’t fair, not after the things I’d done for her on the ice shelf. My knuckles collided with her cheek. She stepped back, pressing her hand to the place where I’d struck. Behind us, several members of the crew gasped. I started to apologize, but suddenly my head snapped back, so violently it seemed my neck would break.
Cursing, Ragna shook out her fingers. My jaw burned, and pain radiated up through my teeth. We glared at each other; hostility crackled in the air. Finally, Ragna let out a slow breath. “There’s something a little monstrous in both of us. And maybe it has to be that way for us to survive.”
I spat a mouthful of blood over the ship’s edge into the ocean. She was right. We had both done terrible things in the name of freedom and survival. But monsters or not, both of us wanted to fix our broken communities. Ragna was following her heart’s navigation back to me, then to the charred ruins of her home.
My home was ruined in a different way, held hostage by a cruel false king. We would need human fire to free the princess, Loki had said, and Havamal had brought me straight to the only human who might help. Without guidance from the merfolk, the treacherous ice trap might claim Ragna’s ship as she tried to get home, despite her skill as a navigator. We all needed each other.
“Gods,” Ragna swore, but all the venom in her voice had vanished. She wiped a trail of blood from my lip. Blushing, she looked at the deck. “Your teeth are red. I shouldn’t have hit you.”
“I hit you first.” I cranked my jaw to loosen it. “I won’t do that again. I have enough enemies. I’m still exiled from the ice mountain. Plus, you punch better than me.”
The hunter’s smile appeared on Ragna’s face, and she bared her teeth. Clapping me on the back, she said, “Let’s see what we can do about that.”