I curled into a ball on my ice shelf, wrapped my tail around me, and buried my face in my fins. The glacier hummed like a great white whale; the murmur of a thousand morning whispers seeped through the cave walls. Light from the dawn illuminated the crystal ceiling, and I could see Mama’s outline like an embossed shadow resting in the crevice above me. I swallowed hard, feeling a little bit queasy. I’d expected her to wake me when she returned from the hall. If she’d needed the night to decide what to say to me about my disappearance, it probably wouldn’t be good.
Shaking with cold, I crawled from my shelf and studied my tail fins in the brighter light of our antechamber. Overnight, my topaz scales had darkened to midnight blue. My tail looked shriveled, with loose skin forming wrinkles around my flippers. Our scales had to burn blubber reserves to generate heat through the night. By the look of my tail, a northern current had swept through the glacier while I slept. If I waited much longer to visit the sun and recharge, I’d freeze before Mama had the chance to vent her anger.
As I brushed my hair and got ready, I wondered if Havamal had told anyone where he’d found me. Part of me couldn’t imagine him missing the chance to report something to the king and worm his way further into our monarch’s good graces, but another part hoped he’d meant it when he told me he still wanted to be friends.
I shoved the hairbrush aside and swam from the cave into the purple dawn sea. Sunlight seeped through the water and lit the glacier from all angles. The ice mountain glowed soft blue, and dozens of shadows moved within its semi-opaque walls. The ship had vanished, but I could see where the ice had cracked, leaving someone’s resting chamber exposed to the open sea. A curious pair of gray seals wound in and out of the broken wall. They chattered as they played in the kelp curtains and batted a broken bowl between them.
“You didn’t go back to the hall.” Havamal’s drawling voice called as he drifted from the ruined cave, scooting past the pair of seals. He was trying to hide his smile behind his hand. The metallic silver of his scales glittered, brighter than the North Star. I tried not to stare at the heaving muscles that made a coral-like comb on his pale torso.
Edging over to the broken cave, I grabbed a jagged outcrop to steady myself. “I just wanted to sleep. I figured you’d make up some excuse for me if the king asked, seeing as we used to be friends.”
His hand dropped, and a scowl replaced the grin. “Stop it, Erie. You keep saying that just to wind me up. We could still be friends. I want us to go back to the way we were.”
“You sold out,” I muttered. Honestly, sometimes I did say it to get his reaction. His anger was the only confirmation I had that he’d ever cared about me. But knowing that our friendship had been real never made me feel any better. I drifted into the shadows of the cave, feeling self-conscious about how my dim, night-starved scales and scrawny tail must look to him.
Havamal heaved a sigh so deep it was almost a growl. “No, I just learned to accept that we can’t change everything. Have you even thought about your grading next week?”
I lifted my chin and glared at him. “I’m not doing it.”
He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “You can only put it off for so long, Erie.”
The Grading was an annual ceremony. Aegir’s court mage visited the glacier and determined the fertility of each mermaid in her nineteenth year. Then the mermen fought over us, like sharks over a seal pup, vying to win the most fertile mermaids as mates.
It was a future I’d never wanted. Once, Havamal and I had dreamed about escaping together. Before King Calder took the throne from his mother, grading had not been mandatory, and mating was not expected as an immediate outcome. But the king was making new laws that challenged everything our society had stood for. No one was brave enough to stand up to him.
Mama sometimes reminisced about the days when the old queen was alive, ruling our glacier with benevolence rather than through fear. The Grading used to be part of a fall celebration, but now it was a prison sentence. Havamal had agreed with me when I ranted and dreamed of seeing the world, of finding the places where the ships came from and the sources of the warm water currents. We’d explored ancient wrecks together and collected treasures from the seabed.
He used to say, “I will follow you anywhere, as long as we can be together.”
All that had ended when he joined the King’s Guard. I still visited the old ships, but now my dreams were lonely.
“I have to go. My scales…” Giving him an abrupt nod, I pushed off the cave’s ledge and propelled myself into the open water without looking back.
I followed the water vibrations and low trills of a beluga pod I knew well. The water magnified their long-range sounds and made them easy to detect. During the long winters, finding a surfacing hole near the ice shelf wasn’t always easy. The ice shifted constantly, but the whales always knew where to find the air.
When I reached them, the beluga pod was swimming in lazy corkscrews between the shallower coastal sea bottom and their breathing hole in the ice. The matriarch glided toward me like a blubbery ghost. A deep silver scar, the result of an encounter with an ice bear, framed her eye. She bumped her nose against my open palm in greeting, and I felt guilty that I hadn’t brought them any fish from our stores. The belugas always struggled in the deepest part of winter, when the schools of fish dwindled and the pod had to stay close to their surfacing hole. I grasped the whale’s dorsal ridge, and she pulled me up toward the sun.
Something thin and sharp darted into the water.
A juvenile whale dove, keening in pain and leaving a trail of blood behind him. The other belugas ducked under the surface. The matriarch hesitated; bubbles escaped from her lips. After a long moment, another group of juveniles rose to breathe. The stick pierced the water again, narrowly missing an ivory tail.
Murmuring to their leader, the whales huddled beneath the surface. They needed air, and the creatures took turns churning the water to keep the ice from freezing over their opening. They couldn’t afford to wait long before surfacing again.
The belugas were too peaceful to fight whatever attacked them from above. They feared the white bears that prowled the ice, just waiting to drag them onto land. But I needed the sun almost as badly as they needed the air. I wasn’t about to cower beneath the water. The object looked like a harpoon of sorts, not a bear claw. If one of the younger mermen sat on the ice taunting the whales, he was about to get a piece of my mind.
Squinting at the glittery surface, I studied the harpoon. It swirled impatient ripples in the ocean surface now. It had a silvery tip, tapered and serrated like a shark tooth.