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.