“With a stone tied around his legs. We whipped his back to a pulp first.”
“That’s awful,” I spluttered. She was a murderer. No wonder the crew was on edge, too scared to look into her eyes. Killing her abductor was one thing… but anyone else? Someone she’d had power over? “You’re a killer. That poor boy…”
Ragna’s eyes hardened, and her lips pressed into a line. “And what about you?” she demanded. “What did you do to earn your human form? To become that creature I saw crawl out of the deep? That’s Loki’s work. Anyone can see it.”
After what we’d shared the night before, her words cut me. I could see by the flash of her eyes that she knew it, too.
“I had to,” I spat. “Protecting you from Havamal didn’t give me a lot of choices.”
“Oh, don’t make it about me.” Ragna clenched her jaw. “I know you saved me, but you wanted to get away from that ice mountain before you met me. And you know, I stayed? I waited there where you left me for hours, but you never came back. So, I left. I did what I had to and I still came back for you.”
Guilt felt like ice gripping my throat with a frozen hand. “I made a deal with Loki. Someone died because of me.”
Ragna raised her hook to the sun. Her eyes bore into mine, daring me. “Then don’t you dare judge me for doing what I had to.”
“I’m trying to set it right. I can’t bring her back but…”
“And I’m trying to go home!” she snarled. “I want to see if there is anything left of my people and help them if I can. And what will you do, now that you have this precious magic? Come with me? Swim south and never return? Leave your people behind?”
“No!” My hands curled into fists, and suddenly I wanted to punch her. “I’m going back to the fortress. I’m going to fix things. For everyone, not just myself.”
She snorted dismissively. “Good, then maybe you’re not such a coward after all. I thought that maybe you were, because of how easily you let that merman drag you away.”
That wasn’t fair, not after the things I’d done for her on the ice shelf. My knuckles collided with her cheek. She stepped back, pressing her hand to the place where I’d struck. Behind us, several members of the crew gasped. I started to apologize, but suddenly my head snapped back, so violently it seemed my neck would break.
Cursing, Ragna shook out her fingers. My jaw burned, and pain radiated up through my teeth. We glared at each other; hostility crackled in the air. Finally, Ragna let out a slow breath. “There’s something a little monstrous in both of us. And maybe it has to be that way for us to survive.”
I spat a mouthful of blood over the ship’s edge into the ocean. She was right. We had both done terrible things in the name of freedom and survival. But monsters or not, both of us wanted to fix our broken communities. Ragna was following her heart’s navigation back to me, then to the charred ruins of her home.
My home was ruined in a different way, held hostage by a cruel false king. We would need human fire to free the princess, Loki had said, and Havamal had brought me straight to the only human who might help. Without guidance from the merfolk, the treacherous ice trap might claim Ragna’s ship as she tried to get home, despite her skill as a navigator. We all needed each other.
“Gods,” Ragna swore, but all the venom in her voice had vanished. She wiped a trail of blood from my lip. Blushing, she looked at the deck. “Your teeth are red. I shouldn’t have hit you.”
“I hit you first.” I cranked my jaw to loosen it. “I won’t do that again. I have enough enemies. I’m still exiled from the ice mountain. Plus, you punch better than me.”
The hunter’s smile appeared on Ragna’s face, and she bared her teeth. Clapping me on the back, she said, “Let’s see what we can do about that.”
I gave her a bloody smile.
When I climbed over the bow late that evening and scuttled down the side of the ship, Havamal waited for me. He grimaced at the sight of my tentacles, but said nothing when I folded my arms over my chest and chose to remain in the monster’s form after I’d descended. If he and I were going to be friends again, I wanted him to get used to me as I was, not as he imagined I should be.
“She has what we need,” I said, hovering in the water beside him. “A black substance that burns hundreds of times hotter than our scales.”
As we broke our fast with strange human food, I’d told Ragna about the princess and the king’s prison. In front of her entire crew, she’d wheeled out a keg filled with a thick black liquid that smelled of decay. While I watched, a hesitant archer had coated an arrow with the tar and loosed it onto the ice shelf. Despite the water and cold, the arrow had burned until the ice melted beneath it and the point fell into the sea. Even against ice thickened and reinforced over years, her fire would work.
Havamal nodded. “I went back to the glacier and I told everyone who is with us to get ready.” He pulled a woven satchel over his shoulder and drew out a block of ice, wrapped with precision in flattened kelp leaves. He pressed it into my hand. “Rala carved this. It shows the north point, and he’s indicated where he saw the king go.”
I unwrapped the leaves and pulled out a crude statue the size of my hand. Rala had carved it in the rough shape of the point and etched a faint circle around the left corner of the berg. I turned it over in my hands and stared. I’d been so afraid to live even a part of my life locked in the glacier’s heart; what would years of total solitude have done to Inkeri? If we managed to free her, would she be fit to rule?
“You’re not sure, are you?” Havamal asked. He scrutinized my face, analyzing my hesitation. He squeezed my shoulder. “We have support. Truly, Erie, when you left after your trial… it was like a catalyst. Things in the glacier haven’t been stable since. Even the king is nervous. He senses something isn’t right, even though he doesn’t understand what it is.”
“The fire will work. But…” My voice trailed off. “What if we free her, and she can’t lead?”
Havamal shrugged. “There are others who could help her, but we have to do this. We have to expose him and show everyone that he is a liar.”
“So what?” Panic rose inside me, and for a heartbeat I wondered if I should have done what I planned all along, and simply swum away after I gained my freedom from the trickster. Deposing the king left us with a responsibility. “We just… get rid of him and hope for the best? That’s the plan? These are people’s lives!”
Strong arms wrapped around my back, and Havamal crushed me against his chest. My tentacles flailed in protest, but I clamped down on their instincts and forced them to be still. It was pleasant to trust him again, even if I would never depend on him in quite the same way I had when we were young. I’d learned that I was stronger than that.