Gormánuður
The Slaughter Month
October
A shiver of great white sharks trailed our ship as we rowed through the Trap. Their gray fins glimmered like tiny sails in the low Arctic sun—live vessels waiting to deliver us to Valhalla should we deviate from the course and fall victim to the icebergs.
On deck, another, more vicious, sort of shark waited to devour me. I could feel the hungry eyes of my crew on my back as I squinted into the distant horizon. If any of them could have navigated the narrow pass and rough seas on their own, without my magic, I’d have been sacrificed to Aegir weeks ago.
My crew’s loyalty was proving a more resilient beast than their former leader. Haakon had died with my dagger embedded in his chest, but under the thick wolf pelts we donned to keep warm, most of the crew still wore the blood-red tunics of his house. The ice shelf that had been my salvation when I had been shipwrecked was far behind us. If I fell into the water here, even the mermaid who clung to the ship’s dragonhead bow wouldn’t be able to save me.
Our alliance was tenuous, but this tumultuous stretch of ocean—dubbed the Trap by sailors the world over—had claimed thousands. My men wouldn’t take the risk of killing me here. As long as we sailed through dangerous waters, their rebellion would remain locked away, expressed only as sullen glances and curt nods.
I lifted my arm and studied my tattoos. Our route through the icebergs etched its way across my skin. The map stretched from my bicep to the raw, scarred skin of my wrist. It stopped abruptly where the silver hook began. The blue ink of the markings shifted in time with the ship’s movements. Miniscule runes detailed ancient, underwater cities and forgotten mountains, lost to the advancing sea.
A frothy wave broke over the ship’s bow, spraying us with cold water as sharp as needles. I used my remaining hand to shield my face, but Ersel laughed as water splashed her skin. While we humans shivered under our sodden animal pelts, the mermaid relished the blast of the Northern Sea. She dangled over the waves, unperturbed by the sharks circling beneath the hull. Her eight aquamarine tentacles curled around the forward stempost, and her arms splayed as she embraced the ocean’s icy kiss. Her cheeks were flushed, and her topaz eyes were bright with delight.
Shaking my head, I braced myself on the mast and turned to face the oarsmen. “Shift windward!” I barked. “There’s a berg ahead.”
Groaning, the oarsmen strained to turn the vessel into the wind. The mast creaked as the draught caught the sail. Another wave broke over the ship’s starboard side. I stifled a yelp as the cold water soaked through my boots. I pulled the fur tighter around my shoulders and covered my lips with my hand, so the crew wouldn’t see my smirk. I hadn’t seen an iceberg, but I wanted the crew to keep believing that collision could happen at any moment. Making them feel afraid was the only way I could feel at ease.
I sat beside Ersel at the bow. With a whispered spell, her tentacles receded, and she shifted into the form of a true mermaid. Her long lilac and cerulean tail dangled into the sea. She wrapped an arm around the stempost so that she could float alongside the ship. She had three forms, given to her by Loki when she had passed their test. With an incantation spoken to the talisman she wore around her neck, she could change at will: from mermaid to human to kraken. She thought the third form monstrous—an ugly reminder of what she had endured at Loki’s hands—but I had witnessed the sheer, crushing power of her tentacles. I thought them incredible.
I leaned down and brushed a kiss across her forehead. Her skin was cold against my lips and smelled of kelp, fish, and fresh sea air. I breathed her in. That scent was woven into the memories of my coastal home. It reminded me of the rocky beach, fishermen mending their nets at the docks, and the feel of the wind in my hair as I galloped my horse along the cliffs. Her eyes scanned my face. Frost clung to her long eyelashes. With a small smile, she reached up and squeezed my knee.
One of the men scoffed behind us. I rolled my eyes. The crew thought affection for the mermaid made me soft, too sentimental to captain a ship. Never mind that they’d seen me steal this ship with their own eyes. They didn’t understand the magnitude of what I owed her. Ersel had saved me from a slow death by starvation and exposure when I had been shipwrecked on the ice shelf near her home. When we’d been caught together stealing a kiss, she had sacrificed herself rather than let me die. To reach my home in Brytten, we could have skirted the Trap and avoided the harsh winds, icebergs, and waiting sharks. But I had promised Ersel that I would come back to repay my debt and to save her as she had saved me.
As the crew looked on, I kissed Ersel’s lips.
“The texture of the water is changing,” Ersel said after we broke apart. She scooped up a palmful of ocean water and let it drip through her fingers. “We’ll see land soon.”
I glanced down at my arm and willed it to show me a wider view of our course. The pattern of the map immediately began to shift. For the last few days, I’d kept my attention on the drifting icebergs and the narrow path between them, scared that splitting my focus for even a moment could result in disaster for the ship. But the waves were settling, and ahead I only saw blue. We’d cleared the Trap at last. The icebergs were behind us, protruding from the sea like rows of jagged, broken teeth. Aegir’s fangs, the crew called them. The Trap was the sea god’s open maw, waiting to swallow the unworthy. The sea god was not known for mercy.
Ersel shifted into her human form and climbed aboard. Behind us, my boatswain cleared his throat. When we turned to him, Trygve tossed a yellow, homespun tunic at Ersel. He averted his gaze, and, under his thick brown beard, a blush crept up his neck. I rolled my eyes at him. The men were not adjusting to her. They were afraid of her kraken form and embarrassed by her naked, human legs. Ersel, in turn, didn’t understand their discomfort. The impulse to be embarrassed by one’s natural body was entirely foreign to her. She understood that we humans felt cold and needed clothes to guard against the wind, but as long as she took her mermaid form to charge her scales regularly in the sunlight, she did not feel the cold as acutely as we did. Even though she stood pink and bare in the blistering wind, her body maintained a higher temperature.
Trygve shuffled to me as Ersel tugged the garment over her head. Of all the sailors aboard, he was the only one I trusted. The boatswain had never sailed under Haakon’s colors. He was the peasant son of the fishing woman who had taken me in when I turned up on a Norveggr beach in a battered skiff with only the clothes I wore and a graveyard of fish bones at my feet. They had given me a place to sleep and regain my strength. And when I’d returned from Jarl Haakon’s hall, drenched in blood and missing a hand, Trygve had tended to my mutilated arm. Now he did his best as a mediator between our crew and me. He was as broad as a white bear, though considerably better tempered. I felt more confident with him standing behind me, even though I was more skilled in a fight.
He jerked his head toward my cradled arm, then peered over my shoulder to see the map. “Well?” he whispered. “We’re getting low on fresh water. Soon we will have to cut the rations.”
I removed my fur cloak and pushed the sleeve of my tunic all the way up to my shoulder. The tattoos had finished rearranging themselves. Where moments ago there had been sketched only waves and the outlines of bergs, now a continent wrapped around my elbow. A miniature version of the drekkar bobbed on my forearm, its course mapped with a dotted line to the land’s uneven coast. My skin prickled as the waves of ink rose and fell, as the tiny ship’s sail billowed in a magical gale.
If the wind allied with us, we could reach the southernmost tip of Brytten by nightfall. Once we landed, traveling to my town undetected would be another matter. After they had sacked my home and taken me prisoner, Haakon’s soldiers had split into three groups. One ship sailed with me on board, a prisoner, more precious to Jarl Haakon than my weight in diamonds. A second transported loot—livestock, jewels, fine furs—stolen from my people. The third group had remained to watch for others like me: born with the navigator’s marks and cursed to be hunted. My cousin was among those still held by Haakon’s men.
Even at night, I was sure that the remaining warriors would have sentries posted along the road that led to the sea. We would need to drop anchor far from shore to avoid discovery, even if that left us without a quick means of escape.
I licked my finger and held it to the air. The wind blew strongly from the east, propelling us toward our destination. I could send Trygve or Ersel ashore as a scout. I wanted to keep the rest of the crew in my sight. The promise of future gold only went so far. As much as I wanted to see my home, I couldn’t go ashore myself. I’d bought the ship with my own flesh. No one was going to take it from me.
“One of you will need to go as a scout and make a report,” I said.
“I’ll go,” a young voice piped up from the oar benches.
I glanced skyward, then slowly turned around. Steinair sat at rapt attention. The gangly youth waved his hand in the air; his oar rested across his knees. He was the youngest member of the crew and the most obviously desperate for approval, which made me trust him the least.
“I’ll go,” he repeated. His breath came in short, excited gasps. He looked around at the other oarsmen and offered me a nervous smile. “I’m small and light on my feet. I’ll never be detected. Please, styrimaðr, I need to get off this ship.”
A gloved hand cuffed Steinair’s ear. The boy yelped and cradled his face. Torstein’s oar clattered to the ship’s deck. He stood and smoothed his gray hair; his permanent scowl was in place. Torstein strode to the bow; his steps were steady despite the ship’s bucking. My hand went instinctively to my hip, where my wolf pelt concealed an axe.
Torstein spared me only a sharp glace before he addressed the men. “I will go ashore. I have the most experience and I’m good in a fight. I know how they will organize. I’ll deliver the best report. I’ll prepare the skiff now.”
I ground my teeth. Torstein had once been a mercenary stryimaðr, with his own ship. He had taken contracts from jarls across the continents and fought in more battles than he could remember. He had the scars to prove it. Most of the mercenaries I’d been able to hire in Bjornstad had been young and inexperienced. But Torstein had lost his knarr on the beaches of Denamearc, when a raid had gone badly. Unable to deliver on a contract he owed, he had been forced to sell everything to pay his crew. He didn’t believe in me as a captain, but when I’d approached him at the docks, he’d taken one look at the moving tattoos on my arms and known that I could lead him to the gold he needed to rebuild his fortune and his reputation. Naively, I’d imagined that his experience would be useful. Now I saw it for the threat it was. In his mind, I was a living map, an ignorant, untested girl playing at captain, nothing more.
Steinair’s shoulders slumped. He nodded his agreement to Torstein, and the rage inside me swelled. Had they orchestrated this? I wouldn’t put it past Torstein to demand that Steinair volunteer, just so he could show his dominance over the crew. My crew.
I gripped my sword hilt a little tighter, then stepped around Torstein. “I will decide who goes ashore and when. None of you are leaving this ship until our course is established. Ersel will go. She can slip ashore and report. Then we will not have to worry about hiding a skiff.”
Torstein grabbed my arm. In front of the whole crew, he spun me around like an errant child. He brought his face close to mine. His voice was a growl. “You put too much trust in that unnatural creature. It’s Loki-touched. You can’t trust it. Bad enough you let it on our ship. I am the most experienced on this vessel and I know what orders Haakon will have given those men.”
“It’s my vessel. You will do well to remember that.” His touch felt like a brand. I wrenched my arm away.
Shaking his head, Torstein spat on the deck. “You’ll lead us all to ruin.”
A few of the crew murmured their agreement. My cheeks burned. Behind me, Ersel sighed.
I pulled my axe free and pointed it at his chest. “I am the captain of this ship and I decide who goes. Speak out of turn again and your bloated corpse is the only thing that will see the shore.”
Laughing, Torstein drew a dagger from his belt. He looked around and nodded to the others. He sank into a fighting crouch and beckoned me toward him. “You think that because you killed an old, sick jarl while he was in his cups, that makes you a fighter? Haakon was a warrior during his prime, but he was a decade past it, and you still lost your hand to him. And without it, what’s to say you can still fight at all?”
It was mutiny, laid bare at last.
When we’d first set sail, another crewman, Steinair’s father, had risen against me and tried to take command of the ship. But Elvyrn had made the fatal mistake of dumping two casks of fresh water and dried meat into the sea before he drew his weapon to attack me. The crew might have wanted to see me dead, but they had no interest in starving to death. What Elvyrn had done was unforgiveable. I hadn’t even needed to draw my sword to defend myself. His sea-brothers had tried him and found him guilty. We’d bound his hands and feet thrown him into the sea after Trygve flayed his back open with a whip. But I had known even as I watched Elvyrn squirm and sink that it was only a matter of time before it happened again.
After that first rebellion, I’d spent many nights practicing with my axe in the hold below deck, dueling the sacks of wool that been stashed there by the drekkar’s previous captain. My balance had shifted when I lost my hand, and I couldn’t fight with two axes the way I used to, though the hook was a weapon in itself.
As Torstein’s eyes locked on mine, I prayed that practice would be enough. He was skilled and strong. He’d been fighting battles before I’d been born. If I died here on the deck, would they all join Haakon’s men on the shore? If my cousin was still alive, would Torstein become one of her captors?
I caught Ersel’s worried expression. In her kraken form, it would have been easy for her to grab Torstein and wring the life from him, as if he were no more than a washing rag. Her tentacles extended more than ten feet when she stretched them. They were made of pure, sinewy muscle. I swallowed, then shook my head at her. The crew would never respect me if I couldn’t fight, and, even if I survived today, I’d still be in danger. I needed to prove myself to them now and be done with it.
“Come on, girl,” Torstein said with a laugh. “I won’t bloody you too much. We’ll keep you alive for the map. You can serve our mead.”
The men clustered around us, enclosing us in a ring of bodies. I danced sideways as Torstein lunged at me. Despite his experience, I was much faster on my feet. But the crew weren’t giving me room to maneuver. My war-axe had a long handle; I risked hitting one of them if I swung too wide. They were forcing us to fight at close distance, which would favor Torstein’s weapon and his brute strength. Maybe they had planned it this way all along.
“Move back!” I shouted.
None of the men took even a step, but then, two long, aquamarine tentacles shot forth and swept them aside like toys. Ersel winked at me and drew her tentacles against her body. I grinned as the self-indulgent smirk slipped from Torstein’s face. We circled each other. I slashed my axe through open air. Torstein pivoted, and his outstretched dagger grazed my thigh.
The cut was shallow but salty ocean spray made it burn. Snarling, I lunged for Torstein again. He jumped back, but his foot caught on a discarded oar. He stumbled, and I was on him, pressing the sharp edge of the axe to the back of his neck.
“Kneel!” I screamed, my voice hoarse and wild.
It was within my rights as stryimaðr to execute him. Our law dictated that at sea, I had absolute rule over them, though I wasn’t exactly sure how that law applied to stolen ships.
As he sank to his knees, I weighed the merits of killing him against the risks of keeping him alive. Unlike Elvyrn, Torstein was popular. Many of the crew looked to him for instruction and approval. As long as he drew breath, he would endanger my position. But would they all consider him a martyr if I killed him? What stories would they tell of him? Would he be remembered as a valiant warrior who had stood up to a tyrant captain and had lost his life fighting after an unnatural creature intervened?
He needed to be humbled. I needed him to beg. The crew had to see weakness in him before I delivered him to the gods. Torstein looked up at me from his knees. His expression was heavy with resignation, but that was not the same as fear. Keeping my axe poised over his neck, I crouched beside him. Brandishing my hook in front of his eyes, I asked, “Do you know how sharks feed?”
Torstein’s throat bobbed.
“They come in groups. We call them shivers for the fear they inspire. They tear at their prey one piece at a time. One bite, then another. They taste you. By the end, there’s so little left of your body that even the guards at Valhalla couldn’t put you together.”
Beneath my axe, I felt him tremble. Glee surged through me. As a girl, practicing my fighting stances and thrusts on the beach, I had dreamed of moments like this, when battle would thrum through my veins and my enemies would kneel in surrender.
“If you ever again utter so much as one syllable without my leave, I’ll put my hook through your eye socket and dangle you from the stern. We will let the sharks eat you from the feet up.” I smacked his back with the handle of my axe. “Get up and go back to your oar.”
Face ablaze, Torstein stumbled to his bench. I straightened and looked at the rest of the crew. They huddled together. None of them met my gaze now.
“That goes for the rest of you too! If I hear any inklings of mutiny again, you die. You think I can’t replace you?” I pushed my sleeves back again, letting them look at the maps on my arms. “Others would feel lucky to have such an opportunity.”
The crew shuffled meekly to their benches.
“If you follow me, I can lead you to wealth none of you have ever imagined. You will be kings in the streets of Norveggr, with ring-hoards to make Odin himself jealous. If not…” I shrugged, trying to look nonchalant, though my chest was so tight I could hardly breathe. “The sharks wait.”
When the crew had picked up their oars again, Trygve came to my side. “Was that necessary?” he whispered. “Threatening them all with ugly deaths?”
I looked past him to the dark blue sea and the hazy island that grew on the horizon. Fear and promise, in equal balance, that was the only way I was going to survive. To lead this crew, I had to promise them the world and dangle their nightmares from the tip of my silver hook.