Stroking the outside of my thigh, Ragna gave me a lazy, cocky smile. I raised my eyebrow, and she propped herself up on one arm and looked right into my eyes. “I’m going to show you what your human body can do.”
As my breathing evened out, I heard Ragna’s throaty chuckle against my hip. I looked down at her, and she licked her lips, then smacked them together suggestively. I blushed and looked away. This kind of sex was not something the merfolk engaged in, but I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t been wonderful.
She watched me in the dim light, then slowly propped herself up. “Will you show me your kraken form again?”
I tensed, and the tingling happiness that had swelled inside me vanished as my heart pounded. “Why would you want to see that? It’s awful.”
She shrugged and held up her hook. “Do you think this is awful?”
“No.” I sat up too, and took the hook in my hands. “It’s just different. You were wounded. I understand.”
“When I arrived on shore, my boat was almost in ruins. For days, I didn’t think I was going to make it.” She stroked the skin of my shoulder lazily as she spoke. “But then I washed up near a village, and an old woman helped me from the sea. She was a fisherwoman, and her husband had been killed by the men who took me.”
I rested my head against her back and listened as she told her tale.
“She helped me get fit again. Fed me with everything she had and introduced to me the town blacksmith, who helped me to make some weapons. They all saw my tattoos and they knew what I was, but that wasn’t why they helped. They wanted revenge as much as I did. Their village was in ruins. They just didn’t know what to do.”
She picked at one of the sacks beneath us and sighed. “I rested as long as I could. Then, I packed my things and I got a job at the lord’s castle. The guards are eager to help a pretty girl.” She made a face, and I gave a nervous little giggle. “When I got close enough to the lord, I killed him. He was fast though, faster than I expected.”
“He took your hand.”
She nodded. “He was fast as a crocodile with a blade. I could have chosen simply to bind the wound and let the stump heal. But I wanted to remember the fisherwoman who rescued me from the sea.”
Loki had said that they left me with my monster’s form to remind me. Perhaps they meant to remind me of their wrath and my own stupidity, but it could remind me of something else as well—of how I’d changed and eventually triumphed.
I lifted the vial and spoke against the glass. My body shifted immediately, and I closed my eyes, wincing at the sensation of my slimy flesh against Ragna’s soft back. I pulled my tentacles back and balled myself into the corner.
“Touch me with them,” she commanded.
I opened my eyes and stared at her.
“I don’t want to be afraid of any part of you,” she whispered, holding her bronze hook up to the light. “Touch me with them.”
Releasing whatever tenuous hold I had on the tentacles, I let them splay. My legs slid over her back and hips, down her thighs and across her breasts. Ragna whimpered with something like pleasure. I hated the legs a little less.
When I had touched every inch of her, I shifted back into my human form. Ragna lay back against the sacks, sighing as her eyes drifted shut. I curled myself around her and draped her fur over both of us.
Five
I was drifting in the haze between pleasure and sleep, barely aware of my surroundings or the encroaching cold nipping at my exposed human legs, when Ragna hoisted herself up. She pressed a kiss to my forehead. Squinting through half-closed eyes, I watched as she dressed. She secured her blade at her belt before making the climb back up the ladder.
I let myself pretend to sleep for a minute or two longer and drew a length of plush white fur from the sacks to wrap around my shivering body. The skin looked as though it had come from a miniature polar bear. The texture was wrong, though: spongy and thick, a cross between netting and a mermaid’s hair. I scooped a few more of the skins from the bags and fashioned a cape and tunic for myself. Then I pulled the discarded brown fur on top of it all. To the sailors on the deck, I would probably look like yet another creature from the horrors of myth, but at least I was warm.
With none of Ragna’s swift grace, I clambered to my feet and up the ladder. Her crew huddled in small groups. Some played with dice and coins while others crouched around fires built atop pyres of stone, cooking meat from animals I’d never seen. Even in my new human form, the smell of burning flesh made my stomach churn. I covered my nose with the edge of the brown fur. Ragna stood by the ship’s prow. She was talking with the largest human I had seen. She pointed across the ice field and moved her finger as if tracing a line through the perilous ice for the ship to follow.
Catching my eye, she stopped her conversation and strode to me, her boots drumming across the deck. Most of the crew watched Ragna with a mixture of terror and awe, never daring to look her in the eye. Her remaining hand never left the exposed hilt of her silver sword. She had rolled up her sleeves, and the blue ink of her magical tattoos shifted ever so slightly. The lines of the map seemed to move in time with the ship’s gentle sway, almost as if they continuously adjusted based on the changing winds and tides.
Whatever had happened to her in the months we had been apart, I had no doubt she had won this crew and ship by force, not with charm. She’d gotten her revenge. I couldn’t help a pang of sympathy for the crew, who’d found themselves entangled in the web her of vengeance. They all gave her a wide berth.
Until we talked further about what had happened after Ragna lost her hand, I couldn’t know if these people deserved their fate or not. The bear of a man at the prow turned. His bulging arms were bare under a cape of white fur. He watched Ragna without fear, but the boy nearest him cringed when the giant shifted his attention.
Ragna sidled up alongside me. She brushed a strand of my hair back behind my ear. Her touch was whisper-soft. “You could have slept as long as you wanted.”
“Who are all these people?” I asked, flinching from her. It bothered me that these people seemed so afraid. I had enough experience with tyrannical rulers to sympathize. “This crew. They’re definitely scared of you. Did they belong to the man you killed?”
She shrugged. “This ship belonged to the man I was captured for. When I killed him, I took his crew.”
“But why are they so afraid?”
“They saw me kill their old lord and captain. When I gutted him, many of them were halfway up the steps, coming to his defense.” She scowled and gestured at the teenaged boy who had seemed so awed by my nakedness. “And when we set sail, his father tried to lead a mutiny. We threw him overboard.”
My hand went to my mouth. “You killed him? You let him drown?”