She picked up a heavy basket and held it out to me. “Havamal helped me get this. It’s not much, but there are some of your favorites. I know I shouldn’t defend him. I don’t think he would want me to defend him either, but he’s been helpful to me. He’s looked after me when he could.”
I pushed the lid back, and my mouth watered. The basket overflowed with seahorse jerky, sweetened kelp, and shark fin. I lifted one of the seahorses to my lips and tore off its succulent head with my teeth. Havamal remembered. The thought both pleased and hurt me. I might never forgive him, but it was nice to know our friendship had had once been real.
Mama took a seat on the edge of the table and watched me with a half-smile as I devoured the food.
“I’m here to make a deal.”
My eyes widened and the food dropped from my hands as I processed what she was saying. “No. No you can’t. You can’t be serious.”
“Are you telling your mother what to do now, Ersel?” She tried to smile, tried to wink, but all I could see in her eyes was exhaustion.
“Loki is a monster.”
She nodded. “I know that. I can see what they’ve done to you, and I was there at Vigdis’s delivery…”
I held my breath waiting for her to continue, but she didn’t. My imagination began to conjure the baby’s appearance: a monstrosity, with Vigdis’s coral fins, tusks protruding from its mouth, and hundreds of unblinking eyes covering its torso—sad, haunted eyes, all of them like Vigdis’s own eyes had looked during my trial.
“It died,” Mama said at last. I breathed a sigh of relief, and Mama pressed her lips together before saying, “So did she. It really scared a lot of merfolk… and they’re scared not just of Loki, but of King Calder as well. Of his plans for our girls. Havamal’s been speaking with some… it’s amazing how many girls feel trapped, but would never admit it.”
Self-disgust welled in me. I’d done all this for a chance at my freedom; I’d thought myself alone in my hatred for our system. My selfishness, my belief that I was somehow different and all alone, had gotten Vigdis killed. It may have been Loki who had sent the beast that killed her, but her blood was on my hands, too. How many other mermaids were like me, silently going through the motions, cursing their fate and limited options, before finally succumbing to something they believed was inevitable? Maybe if I survived this deal with Loki, I could do something to help them. I squashed the thought almost as quickly as it arose. There was nothing I could possibly do against the king.
Mama’s sharp eyes scanned the room until they fell on the last remaining vial. One of my tentacles darted out to stop her, but she slapped the end of it and picked the little bottle up, rotating it in her hand. “How many do you have left to collect?”
“Just one more,” I whispered.
“One more and you’re free?”
“I hope to be.”
Mama looked up to the ceiling. “I pray to Loki. I want to make a deal.”
Tears fell down my cheeks as fast as rain in a storm. The water around us warmed with my emotions. “Stop, Mama. Stop! You can’t; they’ll destroy you.”
Mama set her mouth in a firm line. “I’ve had two months to think about this.”
“Whatever you want, they’ll distort it. They’ll make it ugly and nothing like you expect. They just want to cause misery.” I begged her.
When at first no one came, I dared to hope that her invocation wouldn’t work. Maybe Loki simply wasn’t interested in my mother; maybe they sensed in her a moral fiber they couldn’t corrupt. Mama was the child of the Spring Rains, after all, the daughter of Ran and Frigga. Maybe they simply didn’t want to tangle with the other gods.
But then electric green sludge began seeping from the ceiling, moving against the water as if it were simply air. It poured into the room and filled it with bright green light.
Loki materialized; a frozen grin stretched across their face. They appeared as such a perfect replica of the king that I had to resist the urge to fall to the floor. The shift was perfect, down to every wrinkle around King Calder’s eyes and the exact glint of his scales, though a pale green haze lingered in the water around his outline.
Cloud-gray eyes flashing with mischief, Loki clutched a bone trident and brandished it with glee. “What a sentimental addition to my collection of curiosities. A mother-daughter pair! I should have expected something like this. Some sort of silly sacrifice. What’s it to be? I let her go? I keep you instead? That kind of usual parental nonsense?”
Before Mama could speak, I cut in desperately. I couldn’t let them twist her words. I couldn’t. “She is my last voice. Her deal is with me.”
“You can’t lie to me. I invented it.” Loki’s hands balled into fists. “She invoked me. She’ll make her bargain with me, and then you and I can see about settling our last voice.”
“To bear witness.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Our deal comes first. And if you go back on it, the other gods will put things to rights. I know the legends.”
They snickered. The green haze swirled around the god, and in a blink their form shifted into the lithe warrior I had seen at our first meeting. “Am I like the legends you know? Haven’t I surprised you enough yet? What makes you think your precious legends know anything about the way the gods work?”
Their question made me hesitate. I wanted to snatch the vial from Mama’s hands. I wanted her to swim away as fast as she could to a place where I might never see her again, a place where even Loki could never find her.
But a small, selfish part of me, at war with everything else, wanted her to save me.
Mama uncorked the bottle. Our eyes met, and I saw the trust in her gaze as well as the plea for me to trust her. She was putting her fate in my hands, trusting that we could save each other.
Loki smiled. “And what do you want in return?”
Mama’s fingers hesitated; the vial was just inches from her lips. “You can grant anything?”
The god chuckled. “I’ve changed the outcomes of battles, brought lovers back from the dead. I’m a god. So yes, mortal, anything your mind can conceive.”
“I want my child to be happy,” she said. “Truly happy, not in a forced state or something mind-controlled. I want you to give her the things that will make her happiest in the world.”
My hand went to my mouth.
“That’s too abstract,” Loki said, shaking their horned head. “You have to ask for something real. Something I can understand. Happiness isn’t a thing I can just give. It’s not an outcome. It’s a condition of every moment.”
“Then you’ll have to grant her something in every one of them.” Mama braced her hands on her wide hips. “Perhaps it will do you good to think of another’s happiness in every second of your life.”
Loki and I stared. I’d never had so much admiration for her.