“Mama does fine alone.” It wasn’t a real answer, but it was the only one I was prepared to give with all of them staring at me. My mother had only taken one mate in her lifetime. My father had died right after I’d hatched. I didn’t have any memories of him.
Vigdis barked a laugh. “Fine? She’s lonely. Everyone can see it. She hardly leaves the glacier, and her scales have turned gray. Isn’t that why you still live with her? To keep her company?”
“She does seem kind of lonely sometimes,” Havamal admitted. “Do you really want that?”
The eels suddenly tasted sour. I didn’t want to be here, listening to them talk about Mama. I knew what the others in the glacier said about her. I spat into my palm and pushed back from the table. I needed to get away from Vigdis and her grating fake concern.
“Wait!” Havamal said, reaching for my arm. “Erie, don’t be like that—”
I jerked back as if he were a poisonous jelly. “I told you not to touch me.”
Hurt flashed across his handsome face, and he pulled his arm back to his chest. How dare he side with Vigdis? I knew what was expected of me. I knew Mama was isolated, shunned even, for failing to take another mate after my father passed. Even the king’s law wouldn’t force her to mate a second time, but there was law, and then there was what everyone expected. I hated that. I hated all of them.
Without waiting for the king’s permission, I swam past the assembled merfolk and out into the ocean.
I was so angry my thoughts blurred as I swam for the ice shelf as fast as I could. I wanted to get away from all their expectations and do something wild, rebellious—something like visiting a human. My fins cramped as, refusing to stop even to catch my breath, I pushed my body to its limits. As the blind rage subsided, I found myself at the belugas’ surfacing hole. I wound in and out of their sea-cloud bodies as I pushed myself up toward the waiting ice. The matriarch let me grasp her fin. The sun was setting above the shelf, and the ice glittered purple.
Releasing the leader’s fin, I paddled to the edge of the drift and surfaced. The air above was dry and biting. The wind was sharp with fragments of broken ice, the precursor to a winter storm. Could the human survive that kind of weather? When the storms broke, sometimes even the seals sought refuge underwater. Shading my eyes, I peered out at the barren earth.
The human girl sat twenty paces from the belugas. She was wrapped in so many furs it was almost impossible to distinguish her from a wolf or an ice bear cub. Only the pink flesh around her eyes peeked out through the brown and gray clothing. Her eyelashes had frost on their tips. A single twist of white-blonde hair blew across her face and stuck to her half-frozen lips. When she noticed me, the edges of her eyes crinkled as though she were smiling, as if she had been waiting.
I hoisted myself over the lip of the ice, keeping my tail submerged in case she came at me with a weapon and I had to escape quickly. She rolled forward and crept toward me on her belly. I slid back into the water in alarm. I was fairly confident that her movement was not a natural human gait. It had to be a hunting creep, another way to lure prey as did her screaming. But why would she make herself so slow when there was no way she could blend in with the ice? Did humans strike like sea snakes?
The whales’ heads popped up alongside me. Their blubbery bodies bobbed like little icebergs as they strained to see what had caught my interest. They chattered to each other, then caught the tension in my expression and went silent.
The human stopped her slow creep. Propping her head on her arms, she unwound the strips of fur around her mouth and cheeks. I looked into her whole face for the first time. Her skin was so pale and smooth, almost translucent, that she reminded me of one of the sculptures in our ice hall. Her features were chiseled and strong. Her jaw was sharp, almost too sharp to be beautiful, but it made her look savage and wild.
She lifted her hand and waved. That was a gesture I understood.
Hesitant, I waved back. She smiled and crawled forward until she was only a few feet from me. I ducked into the water. Behind me, two of the belugas gulped seawater and spat gallons of the freezing liquid at their former attacker. When the girl flinched, the whales grinned widely, chortling and whistling to each other. Soon the entire pod had risen to the surface, chirping and spraying freezing water that caught the sunlight and formed ice rainbows.
The human jumped to her feet and scurried away from the ice lip. “No!” she shouted, as more of the whales joined in. “No! Stop it! I’m not trying to hurt you!”
My ears perked up. The human spoke the godstongue.
Three
I tapped the nearest whale on the nose, and he guiltily spat his water back into the sea. The others followed his lead and ducked their heads under the waves to hide from my stern glare. Sliding from the ocean, I looked at the girl. It was easy to control the belugas. They always followed orders from merfolk, and real disputes weren’t in their gentle nature. But I didn’t know how to read this human, who blinked rapidly and thrust out her jaw to hide her fear.
Scooting toward her on the ice, I whispered, “I understood you.”
Her eyes widened as she looked me over. Then she licked her lips, which were chapped and covered with a film of sea salt, and said, “You’re not supposed to exist. Everybody says the mermaids are just stories.” Averting her stare, she toed a ridge on the ice. “When I saw you the other day, I thought I must have been imagining it. Hunger and swallowing salt water can make you do that.”
King Calder always said that we had to protect ourselves by keeping away from prying human eyes—an easy task this far north, where few ships sailed and fewer passed through unscathed. “If they knew how to find us,” the king would say, “they’d take our fish stocks, our pearls, our woven kelps… anything of value.” Humans were the crabs and sharks of the land: scavengers that feasted on carrion, took more than they needed, and destroyed the homes of other species. We had to keep our home safe from them or lose everything. At least, that was what the king said.
But how was it possible the humans weren’t aware of our existence at all? I beat my tail against the ice, kicking up a cloud of surface snow and showering the girl in fluffy white powder. The snowflakes caught in the tangles of her hair and glittered in the sun. “I’m real enough.”
She crept forward, closing the gap between us. At this distance, I could see how the furs swathed her tiny frame. She was smaller than I’d first thought and hopelessly thin, with cheeks drawn like a wrasse fish and bones pushing at the skin around her neck. Still, she had a kind of wild beauty, with intelligent, predatory eyes like an orca or kingfisher. I reached out to touch her, as I might when meeting any other creature. Not all animals spoke the godstongue, but touch, I knew, could speak to all. Even the deadliest sharks of the deep calmed when we stroked them.