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.
*
My trap was empty. For the third day in a row, the stick remained in place and the square basket I’d woven to net crabs stayed braced and ready. I exhaled slowly, trying to ignore the gnawing hunger tearing at me.
Since leaving the glacier a week before, I’d managed to catch only a single crab by myself. By the time I removed the creature’s shell, there wasn’t much meat left. I’d devoured it so quickly that I couldn’t remember how it tasted.
I couldn’t find the materials to fashion my own harpoon, and I’d never been trained with one. If I still had my fins, I would be able to swim fast enough to catch smaller fish without need of weapons or traps. As it was, I couldn’t catch a floating seagull. I had no desire to eat one of the birds, but in my desperation, even the stringy land-meat sounded appetizing.
On the third day, I’d made the crawl to the belugas’ surfacing pod for sun. The matriarch had recognized me and welcomed me. She’d spared my new legs no more than a glance before butting her head against the side of my hip. I’d never been more grateful for a kind touch. The whales had fed me that day, brought me a still-flopping grayling and tossed it onto the ice. But food was getting harder and harder to find as more human fishing parties came north, and I didn’t want to deprive the pod too often.
The missing scales on my back made movement agonizing. Although the wound had closed and scabbed quickly, the area tightened every time I lifted my arms, and the freezing ocean water stung the exposed skin. Sighing with disappointment and pain, I walked along the sand, back to my den in the ship’s cabin. After bashing the door open with a sideways kick of my tentacles, I wandered in and settled onto my wooden frame bed.
I’d given myself a week to tend to my physical and emotional wounds, but now I needed to make progress on the deal I’d made with the trickster.
I couldn’t force an animal to give me its voice, and in order to negotiate I had to be able to communicate. My mind wandered back to the belugas Ragna had trained to sing on command and to the whale with the terrible voice. She had been so proud of her training, and the whale hadn’t known or cared that his voice made me want to cover my ears. I might be able to communicate well enough with the belugas to make them understand what I wanted, but I couldn’t deprive the gentle creatures of even a part of their happiness, not when they accepted and fed me after my own kind had cast me out.
There was an orca pod in the area that might understand my gesturing and inquiries, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to seek it out. On one hand, I feared what the ocean killers could do to me now that I was in another form and clearly marked as an exile. Their respect for the merfolk was tenuous and subject to constant negotiation. On the other hand, I didn’t want to see an orca miserable, either.
Of all the creatures I knew, there was only one beast I knew that spoke the godstongue.
But to speak to Loki’s creature, I had to risk everything. The idea was insane, and yet, once it took hold, I knew I had to act before fear dissuaded me. I shot out of the bed and winced as my quick movement jarred the wound.
I crawled along the seabed, as close to the underside of the glacier as I dared, creeping along in the silt. I was so deep in the water, I doubted I’d be noticed. Crabs scuttled along the sand and over my tentacles. They clicked their claws as they scooped up fragments of fish carcass that had sunk from above.
Sunlight barely reached the bottom, but looking up, I could see the silver-blue reflection of the glacier. The pools of dark shadow running along the ice told me that it was sundown, or near to it. I hoped that most of the merfolk would be tucked into their ice caves, settling in to sleep after dinner.
The strip of exposed, raw skin where my scales had been throbbed. The extractor knew his work. He’d flayed a palm-sized area of my back so quickly I couldn’t register the excruciating pain until after he was finished. I imagined what it would be like to lie completely scaleless and bleeding on the ice while the sun pelted down on my blistered flesh and shuddered. I couldn’t afford to get caught.
Pushing off with my legs, I propelled myself upward. Swimming with the tentacles instead of my normal fins was exhausting. In order to move, my whole body had to contract and shut like a trap. I tried to control my breathing. All merfolk make a suctioning noise to draw air into our gills while moving, but I didn’t want any noise to alert the guards.
At the slick, smooth base of the ice mountain, my tentacles acted of their own accord. I flipped over and blood rushed to my head as water flowed up my nostrils. But my legs anchored me to the ice; suction prevented me from slipping or being carried too far by the water’s pull. For the first time, I wondered if Loki had accidentally given me a secret weapon.
But how would I climb inside without being seen, especially when full control of my limbs still evaded me? I focused all my thoughts and energy on the slim crevice that ran along the underside of the ice mountain and into the central hall. It was too narrow for whales or sharks. Anything else that might venture in could pose no harm.
The tentacles raced toward it, running along the ice, operated by some primal, fishlike part of my brain. A lone guard waited outside the crevice. My limbs reached for him before I could think and twisted his fragile body in a powerful grip. I tried to release him, but I couldn’t. My heart pounded, and primal instinct overrode my control.