CHAPTER TEN - Meela
Laws of Fae
We left for the Atlantic in the middle of the night. Nilus diverted anyone who happened to be awake so we could sneak away without having to explain where we were going, or why. He vowed not to tell Dione he knew anything about our disappearance.
We carried our new weapons: my crossbow and Lysi’s black longblade. She’d sharpened the edge so thoroughly that I wondered if she stripped it down to molecular levels.
“We might have a problem at the Bering Strait,” she said, once we’d travelled out of hearing distance. “It’s only about sixteen leagues across, and Adaro said he stations the army there to keep the Atlantic out. But he wants to keep all of us in just as much.”
She said ‘sixteen leagues’ as if referring to the length of a bathtub, but I supposed merpeople could sense up to a league away in the right conditions. It would be easy for an army to guard the entire Strait.
“We’re going underneath, then?” I said.
“Uh, it’s also less than thirty fathoms deep.”
I didn’t like where this was going. “Don’t tell me we’re trying to force our way through.”
“We’re going over top.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Part of the Strait should be covered by ice,” said Lysi.
I squeaked. “We’ll literally be fish out of water!”
“First of all, never call a mermaid a fish unless you’re trying to insult her. Second, we’ll be fine. Nothing will be able to get us. Well, unless we encounter a ship. Or whales breaching through the ice. Or a polar bear. Or—”
I groaned. “Why did I agree to this?”
She kissed my cheek and pulled me along.
We travelled in silence, keeping our feelers out for anything strange. The sun rose. Our path was crossed by squid, cod, and the occasional whale. Chunks of ice formed overhead, small and slushy, reminding me of the shaved ice Annith’s mother made.
It pressed on the back of my mind that we would need to discuss what, exactly, we were going to ask of Medusa. Lysi would probably feel differently about how much we should share with the Atlantic Queen. But I was too relieved that we’d stopped arguing to bring it up. Lysi must have felt the same, because the sun crossed the sky and touched the horizon, and still, neither of us had mentioned a plan. We might as well have been taking a holiday, for the lack of discussion about the business we’d have to attend to once we got to the Atlantic.
The temperature dropped significantly by the time we parked on a tiny island for a few hours’ sleep. I was uncertain about stopping. Though my new body handled the cold impressively, I worried a chill would set in if we stopped moving. Maybe I was being ridiculous, but I didn’t want to ask. I tried to gauge if Lysi was afraid or worried.
She caught me staring and smiled.
I frowned. “Why is your aura so hard to read?”
“What do you mean?”
“I can read Nilus’ mood so much more easily than yours.”
“Nilus is your family.”
“But you and I are …” Heat crept into my face. “I thought there would be a special connection between us.”
“Life is not that poetic.”
I rolled over, studying the sky, searching for constellations that wouldn’t appear. I hated this lack of nightfall and wondered how anyone got a proper sleep all summer around here. I was both exhausted and wide awake.
“You’ll be able to pick up everything more easily in time, Mee. You can’t expect to be an expert at this right away. It’s all a practiced skill.”
“I guess.”
Lysi shuffled around a bit. Her face appeared in front of mine. “What do you say we practice some other skills?”
I laughed. “Smooth.”
I pulled her towards me.
We slept for three hours at most before continuing northwards, swimming between a steadily rising floor and thickening ceiling of ice. Our meals consisted of whatever clams and shrimp we found along the bottom.
When the depth grew so shallow I could see both surface and floor, Lysi stopped. Nerves twisted my gut. The army would be close, now.
“We need to climb, don’t we?” I said.
The ice had grown thick enough to support us, though it was broken and necessitated careful navigation.
Lysi reached for my hand. Without another word, we found a crack and hoisted ourselves out.
The above world was flat and empty. Beneath the moaning wind were gentle creaks of broken ice and waves glopping below.
We pulled ourselves across, balancing on the unsteady floes.
Feeling like I was navigating a minefield, I prayed that all the natural movement and groaning ice worked in our favour. Maybe our relatively small bodies wouldn’t be noticed from below.
“Let’s decide now what we’re going to tell Medusa,” said Lysi with the air of someone playing a game of distraction.
“Sure,” I said casually, as though I hadn’t been obsessing over this since we left.
“I’ll tell her how Adaro’s closing in on the Atlantic,” she said. “The locations of all his armies.”
“Make sure you tell her everything you can remember about your time serving. Attack plans, strategies. Plus we can relay everything Kori Maru had on that stone table. We know exactly where he’s been and when. That’s a lot of valuable information.”
“But it’s like Dione said, isn’t it? We know where he’s been, but not where he’ll go.”
“But we still know more about Adaro’s strategies than most. We would be like the queen’s spies.”
Lysi didn’t share my enthusiasm. “We need more than that if we want her to ally with us.”
“Can’t we ask for her help in exchange for this information?”
“Mee, the Atlantic Queen is not going to strike a deal with two mermaids from the Pacific, even if we do have information about Adaro’s movements. She owes us nothing, and she definitely won’t send her armies to battle based on that.”
When she put it like that, my optimistic little fantasy sounded stupid.
I sighed. “Fair point.”
We were quiet for a few minutes while we pulled ourselves along. The waves rose and fell, sending long ripples beneath the broken sheets of ice.
“If we have to tell her we know about the serpent,” I said, “I think we should tell her what I told Dione, how I have to be the one—”
“No. We aren’t lying to the queen. If she realises, we’re done. We have to tell the truth.”
“We can’t tell the truth about the serpent—”
A shadow passed beneath us. We stopped moving at once, holding our breaths. I watched Lysi for a reaction. She stared through the ice, brow furrowed.
After a moment, she said, “Whales.”
I relaxed, but Lysi stayed tense. I wondered if she was worried the whales would mistake us for seals.
We waited until their shadows disappeared before continuing on.
Lysi was right that lying to Dione did not work in our favour, and lying to the Atlantic Queen would be risky. The best bargaining power we had was knowledge of how to control the deadliest weapon in the world—but spreading that information around was also dangerous if it ended up in the wrong hands.
“There has to be another way to go about this,” I said.
“Mee, the potential to control the serpent is the only thing that will get the queen’s attention. Why else would she get involved in a war that’s not her own?”
“But it is her war!”
“Not yet. Adaro might be preparing to strike, but he hasn’t. We’re asking Medusa to initiate the war between Atlantic and Pacific by striking first. That’s a big decision, and it had better come with a high return.”
“If she’s the queen everyone says she is, she’ll want to stop the war regardless.”
Lysi wilted. “I guess.”
“Besides,” I said, “if we tell her the truth, she’ll take what we say and go after the serpent.”
“We can make sure we get to the serpent first.”
“And what if she kills us to ensure that doesn’t happen?”
Lysi hesitated for a fraction of a second. “She won’t. Besides, even if she does end up with the serpent, I’m sure we’ll be a lot better off—”
“No. We’re not taking it out of his hands only to put it into someone else’s. We need to finish this.”
Lysi gave a deep sigh, her breath clouding in the air.
We continued in silence for a long while.
When a grey mass rose in the distance, I nodded towards it. “Land?”
“Diomede Islands. We’re going between them where the ice is thickest.”
I tried to mentally locate myself on a map. I’d taught myself geography from one of Tanuu’s high school textbooks. I remembered reading that these two islands marked the border between Russia and Alaska, and the International Date Line put one island nearly a full day ahead of the other—but I couldn’t remember anything useful, like what kind of population these islands had.
The ice thickened enough that ridges rose where the breaking floes pushed against each other. Icicles formed in Lysi’s hair. My braids solidified down my back. Thankfully, while I recognised the cold, it wasn’t uncomfortable in my new body. The goose bumps prickling up my arms seemed purely aesthetic—something I pointed out to Lysi, and which she didn’t find as exciting as I did.
We kept going, and going, and going. It seemed as though the Diomedes would never get here. I fell into a trance, eyes on the ice, one hand in front of the other. The friction against my tail stung like sandpaper. Every time I turned my head, my icicle-braids pressed heavily against my shoulders.
So when we emerged onto to a flat plain, I was startled to find we’d made it to the islands. We moved between them—Big Diomede on our left, Little Diomede on our right. We would definitely be over top of the army now, if we hadn’t passed it already.
The wind blew hard. With the pure white landscape, hollowness in my ears, and numbness beneath my skin and scales, I felt an odd sensory deprivation. I vaguely wondered why I hadn’t turned into a mermaid-shaped ice sculpture.
The ice continued to thicken until even the slow rise and fall of waves was subdued. The thickest ice was closer to Little Diomede, so we stuck to that side of the pass.
Abruptly, Lysi stopped.
Sensing her panic, I grabbed my crossbow. “What is it?”
She tilted her head, listening. The hollow wind whipped around us.
“Load your crossb—”
A crack split the air. I spun, a hiss escaping my lips.
A couple of lengths away, a spear jutted up from the ice. A head followed with red eyes and ice-encrusted hair.
Before I could process this, the merman raised his arm.
“Down!” said Lysi.
We flattened, rolling out of the way as the spear flew towards us.
Without considering, without choosing to act, I sat up and let loose a bolt.
It grazed the merman’s ear, catching a lock of hair. I cursed. I’d forgotten to compensate for the weight of the ironwood.
Another crack rang beside us. Lysi ducked in time to avoid a flying dagger.
The first merman shouted, voice rough. “It’s them! Don’t let them get—”
I fired. My bolt hit him in the chest. Blood splattered over the snow, shockingly red. He sank out of sight.
His words echoed. It’s them. Was the army instructed to watch for the two of us?
I spun to the second merman and found him already pinned beneath Lysi, her blade pressed to his throat.
A dark shape appeared in my peripheral. Someone had erupted from behind an ice mound. I flattened out as something soared over my head.
Three figures raced towards us, roaring.
Humans.
At the same moment, more mermen pulled themselves up through cracks in the ice.
I turned my crossbow, not knowing whether to aim at humans or mermen.
There was a squelch and the overpowering smell of blood. I whirled to Lysi, heart wrenching. The merman beneath Lysi went limp as the longblade drew across his throat.
In my moment’s hesitation, the nearest human threw something—and it hit my stomach.
Lysi screamed. I gasped, falling onto my back. In the next second, Lysi was bending over me.
“Meela!”
I clutched my stomach, panicking. “Did it go through me?”
Lysi yanked my hand away. She examined my stomach, wide-eyed.
“Oh, it’s okay! It was stone, not iron. You’re fine.”
I looked down. Not even a mark.
I had no time to feel embarrassed in the chaos erupting around us. At least a dozen mermen had pulled themselves from the water. But with the humans advancing, all focus turned to them.
The nearest human fell back, blood spurting over the snow through a gash in his sleeve. The other two drew closer. I couldn’t tell if they were men or women behind their parkas and covered faces. They hurled dagger after dagger at the mermen.
Lysi and I backed away, ducking to avoid the flying weapons. Blood stained the snow from the falling humans and filled my nostrils. Screams and roars echoed off the ice.
Before anyone could notice, Lysi and I pulled ourselves behind the ice bank. We found a pile of man-made weapons—none of them iron—plus three backpacks and pairs of snowshoes. We retreated further away from the scuffle as fast as we could.
I was surprised at my agility above the surface. Though I’d seen mermaids move on land and experienced how shockingly fast they were, I’d somehow expected to feel slow and helpless.
I prepared for more mermen to pursue us and burst through the ice on all sides. But we kept going, scraping across the surface towards isolation.
“Those poor people,” I whispered.
If the Diomede people hadn’t known to use iron against merpeople, that meant they must have been new to this war. Like the Aleuts, they probably hadn’t had problems with merpeople until now. Adaro had been too busy focusing on Eriana Kwai to attack them.
Now, everyone was in danger.
Either Lysi didn’t hear me, or she didn’t know what to say, because she remained silent. I wondered if she was considering the merman’s words—“It’s them.” We were being hunted; it was no question.
The noise of the scuffle disappeared into the wind. Minutes passed, and then an hour. Nobody followed.
My skin tingled as it dried in the cold air, and every part of me craved returning to the saltwater. We’d been above the surface for so long.
After at least two more hours, the wind dried my skin so thoroughly that the tingle was replaced by a growing burn.
What happened if a mermaid stayed out of water for too long?
“Lysi,” I whispered. “My skin.”
“I know. Hold on a bit longer.” Her voice was high, broken.
“How much?”
“Less than a quarter-tide. I want to make sure we’re past the army.”
I groaned. What was that, three hours? I couldn’t make it that long. My arms were ready to fall off, the muscles searing, and my whole body felt like it had been roasting in the sun for days.
I decided I’d take a quick dip at the next break, regardless of what Lysi said.
But the next break didn’t come. The ice had become too thick.
The sun crawled across the sky. The landscape became a tundra. The bright white snow and icy mounds hurt my eyes. I longed for the dark, blue-green depths.
“Lysi?” My raspy voice barely made it past my tongue.
“Next break in the ice,” she whispered.
Panic clouded my thoughts. Would we die up here? Would my body shrivel up and be left to scavengers? What a lame way to go, after everything I’d been through.
“Can we break a hole?” I begged.
“No. We’ll attract attention if we start smashing the ice. Don’t worry, it shouldn’t be much longer.”
But her voice sounded weak, scratchy, like my skin felt.
“You’ve been saying that for ages.”
I’d reached a point at which I did not care about attracting attention when a dark shape moved below us. My heart jumped. This meant the ice had thinned enough to see through. It was a seal, and it was making a beeline. Was it heading for an air pocket?
I followed, digging my nails into the ice to pull myself faster.
Yes, there was something ahead, tall, thin, and spiralling. It poked through an opening in the ice. Then several more poked up beside it.
I stopped.
Yep, you’re dying, I thought. Now you’re hallucinating unicorns.
“What’s wrong?” said Lysi.
I squinted ahead, not wanting to voice what was happening in my brain.
“Oh, that’s nothing to be scared of,” she said. “They’re narwhals.”
I looked at her sharply. “So they’re real?”
She cracked a smile. “Yes.”
“And they’re breaching?”
“Told you we’d make it.”
She’d barely finished the sentence when I took off, clambering towards my unicorn saviours with every last bit of energy.
“Mee, wait!”
I ignored her. My skin seared. I needed to get back into the water.
“Meela!”
Whatever she had to say could wait. She had just told me narwhals were nothing to be afraid of.
Below, the dark shape of the seal was still racing towards the hole.
The narwhals must have felt me coming because they submerged. All of the horns disappeared so abruptly that I wondered if Lysi and I had shared the same hallucination.
I was a few lengths from the hole when fingers clamped around my tail. I shrieked in surprise—and a bit of pain—and rounded on Lysi.
The pressure built in my eyes as they filled with blood. “What’s the matter with—?”
The ice vibrated. I whirled. Something heavy, four-legged, bounded towards us.
A puff of air sounded as the seal poked its nose up.
In a blink, a polar bear pounced on the hole and its head disappeared beneath the ice.
Red bloomed across the surface. The bear withdrew its head, jaws clamped around the seal’s neck. It lifted the limp seal from the water and dragged it across the ice, leaving a streak of blood across the snow. The red was blinding against the stark white surface.
Lysi grabbed my jaw and turned me to face her. Her eyes were red, her teeth bared. “You need to wait, Meela! How many times do I have to tell you to use your brain before you do something stupid?”
I pulled away. “Would you stop smothering me? It’s not like it would’ve killed me. Only iron can—”
“You can still be killed by a predator!”
I opened and closed my mouth. Oh.
“Fine,” I said stubbornly. “But I still wish you’d back off a little.”
“Don’t listen to me, then. It’s not like I know what it’s like to be a mermaid.”
The polar bear continued to back up, dragging the seal away from the hole. Behind it, two cubs gambolled out from a snowy mound. They were new, no bigger than raccoons and clumsy on their paws.
My anger melted.
“Aww!”
Lysi gave me an exasperated look.
The cubs pounced on each other, bringing to mind a young Nilus and me, while the mother watched us between gory bites. Her white legs, chest, and snout became soaked in blood. I wondered how she would ever wash it off.
Lysi led us in a wide, careful arc to the hole. The bear’s eyes followed us, but she showed no interest in pursuing two bony, blubber-less mermaids.
At long last, we reached the opening and plunged into the waves. I groaned at the blissful feeling of the water against my dry skin, like rubbing oil on chapped hands.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
“It’s okay,” said Lysi, calmer now. “But you need to have patience around here, all right?”
I pursed my lips, knowing she was right. At the same time, I hoped she wasn’t going to get mad at me for every mistake I made.
“Well, we made it up the Bering Strait,” she said, more defeat than victory in her voice. “Now we just have the Arctic Circle to cross.”
I looked around. Sheets of ice and deep icebergs formed a maze in front of us.
“That was terrible! And we have to do that again coming home.”
“At least then it’ll be with the help of Medusa’s army,” said Lysi.
I hoped that was true.
The narwhals, who had submerged in a hurry at the polar bear’s arrival, went back to breaching. There were ten adults and two babies, all black and white with long, lumpy bodies. I watched them with interest, trying to figure out how they didn’t all stab each other with their horns. Then I wondered why only some had horns, and decided those must have been the males. I tried to feel the difference in their auras.
“They’re gentle,” said Lysi. “Not like orcas.”
We watched them pass us as they headed northwards.
My excitement from what felt like a lifetime ago flooded back. “Can we swim with them?”
To my surprise, she considered. “I guess they’d help camouflage us. But if they get aggressive or if anything feels off, we’re jetting out of there, all right?”
“Deal.”
The pod watched us curiously as we approached, but showed no signs of annoyance. We swam alongside them, and soon they seemed content to ignore us.
Icebergs rolled and cracked, melting in the sun and drifting with the tides. It dawned on me that I was unable to sense what waited in the distance. The ice interfered with the currents.
I would have been nervous about being unable to sense oncoming threats, but the surrounding pod gave me a sense of security.
“Why can I be killed by a predator but not a human?” I said. “And why can I kill a merman now with wood and stone, but I needed iron to do it when I was a human? Are humans just weak?”
“No. Well, I don’t know. It’s one of those laws of nature.”
I considered this, but found the answer too vague. “But look at the force of a wooden crossbow compared to—”
“You’re thinking of numbers and calculations,” said Lysi. “It’s more like, why do fish lay eggs but we have live young? Why do salmon only live a few years but turtles get to live to be a hundred?”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“It’s the way nature is. You’re talking about an ancient law of fae.”
“Law of fae?”
“We learn about them in school. This one says fae can kill other fae, but humans can only kill us with iron.”
I’d never considered that before. The idea gave me inspiration. “Is a giant serpent considered fae?”
Lysi’s mouth twisted in a smile. “Why? Do you know of a second one that we can use to kill this one?”
“Not quite, but maybe there’s some other law that can help us here.”
Lysi’s brow furrowed in thought. “Maybe.”
The Arctic was vaster than I imagined. It was hard to track where we were and how long we’d been travelling, since nightfall never came. Our pod followed a jagged gap in the ice coverage to ensure easy breaching, which served Lysi and me well.
Part of me wished I could pretend to be a narwhal for the rest of my life. Their auras were so friendly and carefree that they lightened my mood.
It saddened me to think pods like this were at risk because of us. If people kept trying to take out mermaids in one swoop, everything nearby would be affected. Mothers, babies, all of the ocean’s creatures would pay for this war that had nothing to do with them. It was blood that could never be washed off. I would do everything in my power to protect them.
Congratulating myself on distinguishing our new friends’ auras, I spent an afternoon coming up with names for all of them. I decided on plants from my mother’s garden.
I caught Lysi smiling at me and raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“I like it when you’re like this.”
I glanced around. “A narwhal?”
She laughed. The sound brought a smile to my lips.
“Your aura,” she said. “There’s something about it these last few days. It’s more familiar than it’s been in a while.”
I didn’t quite know what she meant, but her smile stripped away the need to respond.
The icebergs became so deep that I had to strain to sense their bottoms. I didn’t know whether to feel smothered by their size or awed by their resemblance to enormous ice castles. The currents had chiselled them into incredible shapes, their bottoms all pillars, caverns, spikes, and pockets. I grazed my fingers over the smooth, cold surfaces as we drifted past. The ice was like glass, and filled with bubbles.
“Why does everything look so green?” I said, admiring the glow on my skin.
“It’s the algae in the ice. See?”
Lysi ran a finger along it, peeling off a layer.
I hardly believed how much wildlife was here. I’d expected the Arctic to be sparse, like an underwater desert. But all around us, the narwhals snapped at cod fish, and in the distance, a high-pitched chorus of squeaking, chirping, and whistling bounced off the glaciers. If we weren’t underwater I would have thought it was a flock of songbirds.
“What is that?” I said.
“Belugas.” Lysi snatched a cod in each hand and offered me one.
I whirled around to look. I’d never seen a beluga. The noise grew louder, and I caught a glimpse of their blindingly white bodies passing some distance away.
Grinning, I took the cod from Lysi. If the Pacific was my favourite place in the world, then the Arctic was my second favourite.
I couldn’t tell how much time passed, and whether it was day or night, but the time came when our pod veered too far north. Right after I’d taught Lysi all their names, too.
With sadness, Lysi and I broke away.
“Bye, Parsley!” I called as the last tail disappeared into the blue.
Lysi shook her head and kept swimming.
The world fell into deep silence but for the groaning ice, as melancholy as the wind had been when we’d crossed the Bering Strait.
The pod had been a comfort through the barren landscape, but now we had to make our own way to the Atlantic. Would Medusa listen to us? What if the Atlantic Kingdom had already been taken over by Adaro, and we didn’t know it? Thinking about all the things that could go wrong once we got there churned my stomach.
I took Lysi’s hand, deciding that as long as we had each other, we would be all right.