The human cringed and smacked my hand away. She looked at my scaled skin as if it were poisonous; her delicate nose curled. “What are you doing?”
Sensing the change in our mood, one of the belugas whistled and splashed water over the ice. He probably outweighed this fragile land creature by a hundred stone, but, like all belugas, he was unaware of his strength. I wondered how the human girl had planned to lift one of the whales from the sea all by herself, even if she had managed to spear one. Desperate hunger was not only making her believe she saw visions, but leading her to attempt the impossible as well.
A dozen more white, bald heads popped up to peer over the edge of the ice. Their cheeks bulged with water, ready to defend me in the only way they knew how. Rubbing the back of her head and relaxing now that my hand was back at my side, the girl laughed. “I’d never seen one alive before yesterday. They’re ridiculous.”
Though my scales glowed with fresh energy and heat from the sun, a chill passed through me. How many belugas had she seen dead? These whales were my friends. I knew the humans ate them, but the thought was enough to make me sick. Last year, this pod had lost two calves to human hunters. The raiders had scooped the babies from the sea and taken them from their families with no thought for the whales’ mourning. I wondered if this girl had ever participated in hunts like those.
Her gloved hands went to a trinket at her neck, an intricately designed, heavy piece. The pendant was perfectly round, set with blue and white gemstones, and made with a shiny material I’d once been told the humans could forge only by taming the sun. With her fingers curling around it, she asked, “You must wonder why I’m here. Have you… have you ever seen a human before?”
“Before yesterday, only dead.” A weight settled in my stomach, and I looked away from her. She probably thought I was the monster now. “Not that we’ve killed them. Shipwrecks, you know. They happen around this place a few times a year.”
Even as I said it, I knew that wasn’t the whole truth. Havamal had made sure I couldn’t rescue the sailor who had jumped from the sinking ship. And King Calder had been quick to gather his men from the hall; he’d made sure the rest of us stayed behind and couldn’t witness the humans’ deaths. It was possible that the guards had made sure the sea god claimed all of them.
“We call this place the Trap, because it catches ships like a snare in the forest catches rabbits. So many people have died here, it’s like a graveyard for sailors. But the whales here are so plentiful it can be worth the risk…” The girl shivered and pulled her head into her furs like a turtle retreating into its shell. When she spoke again, her voice was soft but laced with venom. “But I’m not sorry it snared them.”
“Them?”
The human inhaled sharply. “The men who took me. The ones who owned that ship. They destroyed my entire village.”
I stared at her. She was a survivor of more than one close call, it seemed. But why would the humans destroy their own settlements? I’d heard of merclans installing new rulers in settlements after a war or bringing in soldiers to restore control, but never causing destruction on that scale.
“Those sailors were privateers,” she said. “Mercenaries, not whalers. Hired to loot us. I don’t know what happened when they set fire to the town. They took me back to the ship, and I’ve been their prisoner since.”
I thought of the drowning men, sinking like stones in the freezing water. I didn’t know what a “privateer” was, but I understood kidnapping well enough. It was an atrocity. Learning what they had been made their deaths easier to bear.
“Why?” I asked, unsure. “What did they want with you?”
Her expression clouded and she slowly rolled up her left sleeve. I stared. The pale flesh of her arm was covered in intricate blue designs, showing the outlines of land and water. As I watched, one of the inked continents shifted, drifting like a boat across her skin. A line of red appeared. It ran from her wrist up to her forearm, where it disappeared under the fur still covering her bicep.
I reached out to touch it, to assure myself that what I was seeing was real. But she tugged her sleeve down and brought her knees up to her skinny chest.
“What is that?” I whispered. “Your tattoos… they moved.”
“The navigator’s marks,” she said, biting her lip. “In the old days, the god Heimdallr used to visit our village. They say he fell for a girl with wild red hair and they had a child together. Ever since, every generation or two, someone is born with tattoos like these. They show you whatever you need to find.”
I sucked in a deep breath. For sailors trying to navigate our treacherous waters, I could only imagine how valuable magic like that would be. The gods only bestowed their magic gifts on a few. The legendary Heimdallr, servant of Thor and god of foresight, hadn’t been seen on Midgard for centuries.
“Is that why they took you?” I asked.
“They kept me in a cellar most of the time,” she spat out. “Said I was a present for someone important in their home country. That’s probably the only thing that stopped them from hurting me… knowing that I was a gift. Some of them were making me dance on the deck when the ship hit the iceberg. Everyone was panicking and the captain was shouting orders. They were all too busy trying to save the ship to notice me… So I gathered what supplies I could from the things on the deck, took the only lifeboat they had, and jumped.”
I didn’t know enough about ships to understand everything she told me. But I understood that she had condemned the men on the wooden titan to death when she took their only working craft. Death was the punishment for kidnappers under the sea, and, though I could still hear the sailors’ underwater screams, I supposed they had gotten what they deserved. Aegir would see them to the afterlife.
Back shaking, she made a choked sound into her arms. “I was trained to fight. All my life. It didn’t matter. They took me anyway.”
This time, when I reached out to pat her shoulder, she didn’t flinch. “I’m Ersel,” I whispered.
She blinked back tears. Then, tugging her glove off with her teeth, she thrust out her hand. Her fingers looked as frail and brittle as dying coral. I grasped them warily and then marveled at the heat of her palm. “I’m Ragna,” she said.
She pulled a little flask from her pocket and unscrewed the silver cap. The scent of fish grease drifted out. I wrinkled my nose when she pressed the bottle to her mouth and drank greedily. When she noticed my expression, Ragna shrugged. “The oil is the only food I managed to save. When it runs out, I’ll starve or die of thirst, assuming I don’t freeze to death first.”
I covered the healthy rolls of blubber on my stomach with my arm, suddenly ashamed of how plump I must seem to her when she faced death by starvation.