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. Had 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?”