The swine shuddered. “When there is a storm… I can’t control my mind. I become Loki’s plaything. No one is safe near me then. The worst is that during storms I become beautiful … and it’s all too easy for me to act out Loki’s viciousness when it’s concealed behind a smile.”
“What happens during storms? What were you… before?” I braced myself, almost dreading the answer.
“I was a human,” the swine said. “I fought for Loki in a war before your time, but then I turned on them to fight for Thor. The trickster captured me during one of the battles. Loki… they don’t forgive those who betray them. I was too insignificant for Thor to risk everything and save me, not when the war was over and they all wanted to forget and make peace.”
My heart pounded faster. In order to gain my freedom, I would have to get the better of Loki. But what would they do to me if I tried and failed? They had already turned me into a monster, but I still had my free will. At least, I thought I did.
The creature’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “When storms come, they remind me of my treachery. The storms are Thor’s blessing, and Loki uses them to undo me. When they come, my mind becomes Loki’s. I do only their bidding.”
“When you seduced Vigdis… you had no control?”
He shrugged. “Not very much.”
“Do you even realize what you’re doing?”
“Yes. It’s like my mind is trapped and I watch my actions through someone else’s gaze. My body moves but I’m powerless… just a passenger in my own skin. But as I said,” he hesitated, then licked his crusty lips. My stomach churned. “At the time I enjoy it, so perhaps I do not resist Loki as much as I should. And I don’t know what that says about me. Your friend was very beautiful. Romancing her … it was not the worst task the trickster has given me.”
The full weight of that horror bore down on me. I could sympathize because of the limited control I had over my tentacles. But what would it be like to commit atrocities as this creature had, to know it was your body that acted, but have no ability to stop? If I angered Loki further… if I lost to him… that fate could become mine.
I looked at the swine, and my sick feeling intensified. But if Loki made me do evil things, curse or no curse, I would at least try to resist them, even if they somehow outsmarted me again, and I lost whatever shadow of freedom I still had. No matter how long I remained chained to them, I promised myself I would always try to fight against enjoying the twisted fantasies they enacted through me or comforting myself with my own powerlessness. Perhaps this creature deserved to lose his voice because, trickster god or not, he was responsible, too.
“What is it that you want?” I asked. “To be human again?’
“Nothing so complicated as that.” The swine studied his hooves. “I want to die. I’ve been alive for more than a millennium and all but thirty years in this cursed form. I can’t kill myself. I’ve tried.”
I tugged the vial from my neck so violently the rope snapped. My fingers trembled around the little bottle. Anything, Loki had said. No caveats. For a moment, I wondered if they had expected me to choose this course all along. But I didn’t believe they were capable of mercy, not after what the sea-swine had told me—a millennium. I started to pull the cork, shaking so badly I nearly dropped the bottle.
Was I about to become a killer? Would I be a murderer, or a dispenser of long-overdue justice?
The sea-swine leaned forward and nudged my hand with his snout.
I teased the cork fully out. A white liquid flowed up from the creature’s throat like silvery bile. His voice filled the vial to the brim. I had to be careful not to let even a drop spill as I sealed the container.
A smile of triumph appeared on the swine’s face. Slowly, his form shifted. The unblinking eyes vanished, and then his massive tail split in two. As his body transformed into that of a human male, the creature began choking on the freezing water. My eyes snapped to his neck, the smooth plane of skin where his gills had been.
The swine laughed while he drowned. Thunder cracked overhead, and I imagined that Thor was laughing too. I didn’t wait for him to die. I grabbed the vial by its chain, unwilling to hang it from my neck; I didn’t want the creature’s polluted voice hovering so close to my heart. Then, pushing off the glacier’s wall with all the strength in my legs, I swam away as the creature’s life bled into the ocean.
Two
When Loki returned to collect the sea-swine’s voice, they didn’t speak a word. They arrived with no visual illusions—in a slender androgynous body, lips bound together with a thousand painful threads. Their scars were a reminder that all the gods were cruel, and that even Loki had known pain. But it wasn’t an excuse for what they had become, and none of us knew the original sin that had provoked Odin’s ire. Anger heated the ocean around them as they entered my tiny shipman’s cabin. Wordless, they snatched the new vial from the table and left, slamming the door so hard behind them that one of the rusted hinges flew off.
Their fury was enough to give me a surge of happiness that allowed me to sleep through the night for the first time since my transformation. Loki had never believed that I might be brave or stupid enough to return to the glacier, or that I would seek out the dangerous creature who had seduced Vigdis.
Well, I was through doing what the trickster expected.
But our bargain had been made more than a month ago, and I’d started to lose hope of completing their task. I couldn’t bring myself to think about stealing another mermaid’s voice. I knew I must, but I wanted that sin to have purpose. If I couldn’t obtain a human voice, I couldn’t complete the deal with Loki. And to find a human, I’d just have to wait.
A few ships had passed through the ice trap unscathed as the calm weather lured the humans’ tribes north to hunt whales and seals along the fracturing ice shelf. But the humans never docked, never stopped long enough in the icy waters to make camp or venture onto the precarious ice shelf. Most of them knew better, and, thanks to Ragna’s explanation, I knew why. It simply wasn’t worth the risk.