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 were 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.